Lord Jim

Marlow and Jim are eating dinner at Marlow’s hotel. Jim eats a lot and talks more after having wine. They talk about how difficult Jim’s situation is, and Jim says he couldn’t just clear out of town the way the Patna’s skipper did. Jim speaks admirably of his father, the parson, worrying that he has already seen Jim’s story in the local news. Like Brierly, Jim doesn’t think much of how the court’s being run. Jim apologizes again about thinking Marlow called him a “cur.”

Jim begins to tell his story to see if Marlow really does think he’s a cur. He says that he and four others, including the skipper of the Patna and two engineers, were out floating at sea in a boat when a steamer came across them. The skipper told his men to be quiet, and if the crew of the steamer found anything strange about the four castaways, they didn’t act on it.

Jim was on the steamer for 10 days before it reached shore and before he heard the conclusion of the Patna affair. Hearing the news made him sulky and antisocial. As it turns out, the bulkhead on the Patna didn’t give out, meaning the ship apparently didn’t sink. At their dinner, Jim laments to Marlow about the opportunity that he missed back then. He looks at Marlow in pain, regretting what he could have had but didn’t.

At dinner, Marlow doesn’t want to indulge Jim by showing too much pity, but Jim keeps going. He swears to Marlow that when he was inspecting the Patna, he really felt like it was destined to sink. He recalls how he and the skipper struggled after first discovering the damage to the Patna, turning off the engines. The pilgrims hear the noise but don’t know what’s happening. There are enough rescue boats to save some of the pilgrims, but Jim believes the ship will sink at any moment, and so there’s no time.

Jim swears to Marlow that on the Patna he wasn’t afraid of death—he just truly believed that there was no time for boats to save the pilgrims. Marlow notes, however, that if Jim wasn’t afraid of death, he seemed to definitely be afraid of emergency.