feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Lord Jim/section_2_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 3
feat_summary_id: chapter 3
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapter-3", "summary": "The stillness of the night and the serenity of the stars seemed to shed an assurance of everlasting security, and the Patna, moving smoothly and routinely across the Arabian Sea, seemed to be a perfect part of a safe universe. On deck, Jim paced during his night watch. As usual, he was dreaming, his imagination lulled by romantic visions of courageous deeds and bold action. He had a full and wonderful sense of self-confidence. Minutes before he was relieved, he saw the pig-like outline of the skipper come up on deck; he was repulsed by the man's disgustingly naked belly, glistening and obscene with greasy sweat. The second engineer also came up, and he began to argue drunkenly with the skipper. Then suddenly, everything changed. The gesturing engineer, descending below the deck, lurched violently and pitched head-down, cursing loudly. Jim and the skipper staggered forward. Distant thunder rumbled, then there was silence. The ship quivered, then regained its slow, peaceful progress.", "analysis": "This chapter devotes itself to presenting a repulsive picture of Jim's captain and fellow officers. The captain, the chief engineer, and the second engineer are all described in derogatory terms in order to foreshadow their despicable, disreputable, horrible immoral actions -- that is, the desertion of the 800 Moslem pilgrims to certain death. For example, the immoral nature of the captain is first expressed in his physical description -- \"There was something obscene in . . . his naked flesh . . .  odious and fleshly figure . . . fixed itself in his memory as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurked in the world we love.\" In addition to the captain's obesity is the drunkenness of the second engineer. Against these people, Jim and his romantic purity and ideals stand in sharp relief. And yet in the crucial moment, as we later learn, Jim \"Jumps\" along with these immoral derelicts. Later in the novel, and especially at the end of Chapter 3, note Conrad's technique of impressionistically suggesting that \"something\" has happened. Conrad, however, will not reveal fully \"the jump\" until quite later. In fact, the reader should try to determine at what point in this novel it becomes perfectly clear that Jim did indeed \"Jump\" and abandon the Patna and the Moslem pilgrims."}
text: A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with
  the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance
  of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the
  west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the
  Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended
  its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller
  turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme
  of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of
  water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within
  their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting
  in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that,
  left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the
  passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last
  into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the
  moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.
  
  Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded
  safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like
  the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother's
  face. Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men
  and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron
  shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept
  on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in all the dark
  corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled rags, with their
  heads resting on small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent
  forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the
  decrepit with the lusty--all equal before sleep, death's brother.
  
  A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the ship, passed
  steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks, swept over
  the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-lamps were hung
  short here and there under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles
  of light thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibration
  of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyelids, a dark hand
  with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn covering, a head bent
  back, a naked foot, a throat bared and stretched as if offering itself
  to the knife. The well-to-do had made for their families shelters with
  heavy boxes and dusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with all they
  had on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men slept,
  with drawn-up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with their hands over
  their ears and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his
  shoulders up and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a
  boy who slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly
  extended; a woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece
  of white sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each arm; the
  Arab's belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken
  outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of
  vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a
  deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an old sword
  leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The
  patent log on the taffrail periodically rang a single tinkling stroke
  for every mile traversed on an errand of faith. Above the mass of
  sleepers a faint and patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a
  troubled dream; and short metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in the
  depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel, the violent slam of a
  furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious
  things below had their breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high
  hull of the steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare
  masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the
  inaccessible serenity of the sky.
  
  Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to
  his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming
  about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the
  unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only
  shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from
  the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in
  the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each
  side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval
  of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black
  fingers alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes,
  appeared in the illumined part; the links of wheel-chains ground heavily
  in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the compass, would
  glance around the unattainable horizon, would stretch himself till his
  joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very excess
  of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the invincible aspect of the
  peace, he felt he cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end
  of his days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged
  out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
  steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea
  presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to
  a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of
  the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the
  ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross, and
  the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course
  of the ship--the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
  salvation, the reward of eternal life--while the pencil with its sharp
  end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked ship's
  spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,'
  thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high
  peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of
  valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary
  achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its
  hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness,
  they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away
  with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded
  confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so
  pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes
  ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of
  the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black
  line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.
  
  The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
  ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch
  was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to
  part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his
  thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor
  running through every limb as though all the blood in his body had
  turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and
  with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake,
  the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung
  his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was
  something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
  glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his
  sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead,
  resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the
  fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge
  of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but
  the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a
  revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation
  of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
  hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the
  sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the
  air that fills our lungs.
  
  The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
  itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond
  the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented
  glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
  the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The
  ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the
  senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through
  the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and
  calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations. 'Hot is no name
  for it down below,' said a voice.
  
  Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved
  breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly unaware
  of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a
  devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon
  that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt;
  the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with
  damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his
  complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the
  use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see. The poor
  devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could
  very well do the rest too; by gosh they--'Shut up!' growled the German
  stolidly. 'Oh yes! Shut up--and when anything goes wrong you fly to
  us, don't you?' went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he
  expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned, because
  these last three days he had passed through a fine course of training
  for the place where the bad boys go when they die--b'gosh, he
  had--besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below.
  The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap rattled and
  banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so; and what made
  him risk his life every night and day that God made amongst the refuse
  of a breaking-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more
  than _he_ could tell. He must have been born reckless, b'gosh.
  He . . . 'Where did you get drink?' inquired the German, very savage; but
  motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a
  man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went on smiling at the retreating
  horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was
  contemplating his own superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with
  amiable scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadowy
  figure with flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain. You're far too mean,
  b'gosh. You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of
  schnapps. That's what you Germans call economy. Penny wise, pound
  foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a four-finger
  nip about ten o'clock--'only one, s'elp me!'--good old chief; but as to
  getting the old fraud out of his bunk--a five-ton crane couldn't do
  it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly like a little
  child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow. From the thick
  throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which the
  sound of the word schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious
  feather in a faint stir of air. He and the chief engineer had been
  cronies for a good few years--serving the same jovial, crafty, old
  Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings of red silk plaited into
  the venerable grey hairs of his pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the
  Patna's home-port was that these two in the way of brazen peculation
  'had done together pretty well everything you can think of.' Outwardly
  they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy
  curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the
  head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
  indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
  somewhere--in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably
  did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause
  of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
  out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
  worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
  of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
  of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
  was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
  stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
  clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
  around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
  tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
  with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
  from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
  his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
  principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
  with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
  had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
  Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
  faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could
  get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a
  gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of heroic
  adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . .
  His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued
  gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
  too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The
  quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but
  they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was
  different. . . . Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life
  was easy and he was too sure of himself--too sure of himself to . . .
  The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
  was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.
  
  The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the consideration
  of his finances and of his courage.
  
  'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to know by
  this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a sparrow drunk,
  b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my life; the stuff ain't
  made yet that would make _me_ drunk. I could drink liquid fire against
  your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as a cucumber. If I
  thought I was drunk I would jump overboard--do away with myself, b'gosh.
  I would! Straight! And I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect
  me to take the air on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that vermin
  down there? Likely--ain't it! And I am not afraid of anything you can
  do.'
  
  The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a little
  without a word.
  
  'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with the enthusiasm
  of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of doing all the bloomin' work
  in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing for you that there
  are some of us about the world that aren't afraid of their lives, or
  where would you be--you and this old thing here with her plates like
  brown paper--brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very fine for you--you
  get a power of pieces out of her one way and another; but what about
  me--what do I get? A measly hundred and fifty dollars a month and
  find yourself. I wish to ask you respectfully--respectfully, mind--who
  wouldn't chuck a dratted job like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it
  ain't! Only I am one of them fearless fellows . . .'
  
  He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in
  the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in
  prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the better
  emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he
  had been clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!' as he tumbled; an instant
  of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the skipper staggered
  forward by common accord, and catching themselves up, stood very stiff
  and still gazing, amazed, at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they
  looked upwards at the stars.
  
  What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the
  earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and
  suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably
  insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
  destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed
  again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled
  accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of thunder
  infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration,
  passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the thunder had
  growled deep down in the water. The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel
  glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
  on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few
  inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become
  pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the
  smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise
  of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a
  narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 3
target: The stillness of the night and the serenity of the stars seemed to shed an assurance of everlasting security, and the Patna, moving smoothly and routinely across the Arabian Sea, seemed to be a perfect part of a safe universe. On deck, Jim paced during his night watch. As usual, he was dreaming, his imagination lulled by romantic visions of courageous deeds and bold action. He had a full and wonderful sense of self-confidence. Minutes before he was relieved, he saw the pig-like outline of the skipper come up on deck; he was repulsed by the man's disgustingly naked belly, glistening and obscene with greasy sweat. The second engineer also came up, and he began to argue drunkenly with the skipper. Then suddenly, everything changed. The gesturing engineer, descending below the deck, lurched violently and pitched head-down, cursing loudly. Jim and the skipper staggered forward. Distant thunder rumbled, then there was silence. The ship quivered, then regained its slow, peaceful progress.
feat_summary_analysis: This chapter devotes itself to presenting a repulsive picture of Jim's captain and fellow officers. The captain, the chief engineer, and the second engineer are all described in derogatory terms in order to foreshadow their despicable, disreputable, horrible immoral actions -- that is, the desertion of the 800 Moslem pilgrims to certain death. For example, the immoral nature of the captain is first expressed in his physical description -- "There was something obscene in . . . his naked flesh . . .  odious and fleshly figure . . . fixed itself in his memory as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurked in the world we love." In addition to the captain's obesity is the drunkenness of the second engineer. Against these people, Jim and his romantic purity and ideals stand in sharp relief. And yet in the crucial moment, as we later learn, Jim "Jumps" along with these immoral derelicts. Later in the novel, and especially at the end of Chapter 3, note Conrad's technique of impressionistically suggesting that "something" has happened. Conrad, however, will not reveal fully "the jump" until quite later. In fact, the reader should try to determine at what point in this novel it becomes perfectly clear that Jim did indeed "Jump" and abandon the Patna and the Moslem pilgrims.