A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with
a lady there who did not like the book. I regretted
that, of course, but what surprised me was the ground
of her dislike. ‘You know,’ she said,
’it is all so morbid.’
The pronouncement gave me food for an hour’s
anxious thought. Finally I arrived at the conclusion
that, making due allowances for the subject itself
being rather foreign to women’s normal sensibilities,
the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder
whether she was European at all? In any case,
no Latin temperament would have perceived anything
morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour.
Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right,
or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps,
my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I
can safely assure my readers that he is not the product
of coldly perverted thinking. He’s not
a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning,
in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead,
I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under
a cloud—perfectly silent. Which is
as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy
of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his
meaning. He was ‘one of us’.
J.C.
1917.
LORD JIM
CHAPTER 1
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully
built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight
stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed
from-under stare which made you think of a charging
bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner
displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had
nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity,
and it was directed apparently as much at himself as
at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled
in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the
various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s
water-clerk he was very popular.
A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything
under the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract
and demonstrate it practically. His work consists
in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting
her captain cheerily, forcing upon him a card—the
business card of the ship-chandler—and
on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but
without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which
is full of things that are eaten and drunk on board
ship; where you can get everything to make her seaworthy
and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her cable
to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern;
and where her commander is received like a brother
by a ship-chandler he has never seen before.
There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars,
writing implements, a copy of harbour regulations,
and a warmth of welcome that melts the salt of a three
months’ passage out of a seaman’s heart.
