Lord Jim: Chapters 6–12

Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them there was purely psychological -- the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions.

Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.

'Of course the recollection of my last conversation with Brierly is tinged with the knowledge of his end that followed so close upon it.

"Why are we tormenting that young chap?" he asked.

I perceived he was incapable of pronouncing a word from the excess of his humiliation.

I looked at him curiously and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes.

From the way he narrated that part I was at liberty to infer he was partly stunned by the discovery he had made -- the discovery about himself -- and no doubt was at work trying to explain it away to the only man who was capable of appreciating all its tremendous magnitude.

'He was silent again with a still, far-away look of fierce yearning after that missed distinction, with his nostrils for an instant dilated, sniffing the intoxicating breath of that wasted opportunity.

I can see him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by the knowledge of an imminent death.

His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped -- all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of.

The light of the lamp he carried in his right hand fell upon an upturned dark face whose eyes entreated him together with the voice.

It appears that in their flurry they had contrived in some mysterious way to get the sliding bolt of the foremost boat-chock jammed tight, and forthwith had gone out of the remnants of their minds over the deadly nature of that accident.

Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation.

Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be -- as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life.

Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and, suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid.

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal -- a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour.

The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life.

He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve.

They were exasperated with him for being a half-hearted shirker: he focussed on them his hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a signal revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in his way.

Indeed this affair, I may notice in passing, had an extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues.