APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/books/lord_jim/CHAP40_45

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                      CHAPTER 40


'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplo-
macy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking
the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine
such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold
of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the
necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as
the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He,
Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Every-
thing was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would
share. The idea of there being a fort -- all ready to his hand -- a real
fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let
him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions.
Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would
work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a
shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder
he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already
seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Mean-
time Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first -- and for a
second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat
from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on
that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had
received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him.

'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of
course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There
was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before
me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an
undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude
towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his
will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could
induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself
proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless fero-
city which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure
ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate posi-
tion in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of
all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already
settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in
an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive
that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to
play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it
strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his
pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at
it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine.
The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as
a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert.
Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with
small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish,
with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small,
strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the
shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the
inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming
back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed him-
self quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the
creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of
the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him,
and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a
sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came
forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood
what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile
uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leath-
ery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on
one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped
branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The
man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step
forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands
and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle,
the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that
"this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his
friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly
under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty
space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man
sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what
we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death
into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to
one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not
one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar
belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out
of his head."

'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe
the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred
to one ..strike terror ..terror, terror, I tell you..." His
own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing
the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared
at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth
in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after
that fit. There are sights one never forgets.

'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties
as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown
ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an
oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed,
and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at
him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men.
It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that
time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing
his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris
warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had
had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its
strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-deal-
ing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces div-
ided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in
the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in
town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to
retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the
Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammu-
nition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks
in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the
palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take
sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed,
and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of
orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the
edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to
collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were
already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of
the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the
Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang,
almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen
silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty
hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept
his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly.
Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued
his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in
the flying rumours.

'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been
left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and
then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan
and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon
the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed
along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their
glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled
walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in
the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles
and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying
flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom
at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of
successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at
the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for
a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the
air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a
multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an
immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me,
while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that
notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling
came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall.
Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have
tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river
and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have
succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another
moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but
he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the
lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the
houses. They were two hundred to one -- he thought, while his men,
huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the
last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's
diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily.

'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been
left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon
Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook
off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d -- d
to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going
to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk
and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the
boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and
a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the
man. "Look out, look out -- I am hit," and instantly all the rifles
went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little
volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs
stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated
up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sad-
ness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then
a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words
somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown.
"What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear?
Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated,
and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear."
Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald,
and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, pro-
claimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan
and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be
no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled;
a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the
Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The
wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up!
take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on
the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the
boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding
the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it
were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the
creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there
happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank.

'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a
relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot
had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had
been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke
on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had
stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by nume, was
then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who
know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual
pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark.
Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left und
found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's
man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his
shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he
pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into
the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave
himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished
the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his
speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With
the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and after-
wards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that
night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die.

'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers
go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground
with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade
below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud,
now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he
shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard
muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never
for a moment did he cease.

' "What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the
Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go
down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting.
"There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise
is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter,
cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded mun in an extraordinarily
clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water.
Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly.
"Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing."

'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain,
and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the
palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable
side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder
far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius,
who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout
rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and
others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights
began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted
by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur.
"He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?"
Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are
they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted
Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no
more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him,
because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is
one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius
declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it
were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will
come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall
see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you
shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid -- not afraid of
anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone.
Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He
will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well -- that "mean
little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he
pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man
with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten
everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them
afterwards -- get what you like -- go away when you like. Ha! ha!
ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness;
and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up
by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst
the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in
rags.'


                      CHAPTER 41


'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with
a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and
then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between
the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all
white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All
Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless
eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white
figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see
naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms
pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests
that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest.
He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the
desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance -- for some other
grave -- struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure pre-
sented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all
the power of the land, was examining his position through binocu-
lars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms
outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and
fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone.
Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disap-
pearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached
the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on
his side.

'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps
on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his
life -- the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust,
the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across
the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other
before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been
expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first
sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This
was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this --
and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows,
grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face -- he cursed in
his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his
untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him!
He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything
for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side -- possession,
security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He
was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least
afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's
clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipe-
clayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to
belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life contemned
and flouted.

' "Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice.
"My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown.
What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he
had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know,"
said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made
you?"

' "The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the
opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separ-
ated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite
poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind -- "The
fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be
questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a
dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a
whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn
on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was
nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free
will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us
talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said.
I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven
to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a
moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I
told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends
of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat
so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life,
though. My fellows were -- well -- what they were -- men like himself,
anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's
name and have it out. 'God d -- n it,' said I, while he stood there as
still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day
with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet.
Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and
starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all
your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with
them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it
you've found here that is so d -- d precious? Hey? You don't want
us to come down here perhaps  -- do you? You are two hundred to
one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise
you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk
about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's
that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next
to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring
them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half
your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!' "

'He was terrible -- relating this to me -- this tortured skeleton of
a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a
miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look
at me with malignant triumph.

' "That's what I told him -- I knew what to say," he began again,
feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a
fiery utterance of his scorn. " 'We aren't going into the forest to
wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another
for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead . Oh no! . . . '
'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you
deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your
mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal
duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came
here for food. D'ye hear? -- food to fill our bellies. And what did
you come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't
ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go
back whence we came....' 'I would fight with you now,' says he,
pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and
welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as
another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy.
There are my men in the same boat -- and, by God, I am not the
sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d -- d lurch,' I said.
He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had
done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed
about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I
asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want
to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've
lived -- and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those
people that should have wings so as to go about without touching
the dirty earth. Well -- it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here
because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a
prison. That scares me, and you may know it -- if it's any good to
you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where
you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this
is mine -- the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly,
or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ."

'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so
assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death
waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose
from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is
impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied
to me now -- and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with
our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence
to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise
of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he
had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom
of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all -- men, women, savages,
traders, ruffians, missionaries -- and Jim -- "that beefy-faced
beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this
almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under
his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive
agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to
the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more,
Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end,
hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark
dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown,
ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melane-
sia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion
to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard
to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way
of life." . . . "Bag Gentleman Brown for Glory" - as a leery-eyed
loafer expressed it once -- "just to let them see up above what a
Western Pacific trading skipper looks like." And this was the man,
too, who had run off with a dying woman, and had shed tears over
her body. "Carried on like a big baby," his then mate was never
tired of telling, "and where the fun came in may I be kicked to
death by diseased Kanakas if I know. Why, gents! she was too far
gone when he brought her aboard to know him; she just lay there
on her back in his bunk staring at the beam with awful shining
eyes -- and then she died. Dam' bad sort of fever, I guess...." I
remembered all these stories while, wiping his matted lump of a
beard with a livid hand, he was telling me from his noisome couch
how he got round, got in, got home, on that confounded, immacu-
late, don't-you-touch-me sort of fellow. He admitted that he
couldn't be scared, but there was a way, "as broad as a turnpike,
to get in and shake his twopenny soul around and inside out and
upside down -- by God!" '


                          CHAPTER 42


'I don't dlink he could do more than perhaps look upon that
straight path. He seemed to have been puzzled by what he saw, for
he interrupted himself in his narrative more than once to exclaim,
"He nearly slipped from me there. I could not make him out. Who
was he?" And after glaring at me wildly he would go on, jubilating
and sneering. To me the conversation of these two across the creek
appears now as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on
with her cold-eyed knowledge of the end. No, he didn't turn Jim's
soul inside out, but I am much mistaken if the spirit so utterly out
of his reach had not been made to taste to the full the bitterness of
that contest. These were the emissaries with whom the world he
had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat -- white men from
"out there" where he did not think himself good enough to live.
This was all that came to him -- a menace, a shock, a danger to his
work. I suppose it is this sad, half-resentful, half-resigned feeling,
piercing through the few words Jim said now and then, that puzzled
Brown so much in the reading of his character. Some great men
owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they
destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for
their work; and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a
satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his
victims. He admitted to me that Jim wasn't of the sort that can be
got over by truckling, and accordingly he took care to show himself
as a man confronting without dismay ill-luck, censure, and disaster.
The smuggling of a few guns was no great crime, he pointed out.
As to coming to Patusan, who had the right to say he hadn't come
to beg? The infernal people here let loose at him from both banks
without staying to ask questions. He made the point brazenly, for,
in truth, Dain Waris's energetic action had prevented the greatest
calamities; because Brown told me distinctly that, perceiving the
size of the place, he had resolved instandy in his mind that as soon
as he had gained a footing he would set fire right and left, and begin
by shooting down everything living in sight, in order to cow and
terrify the population. The disproportion of forces was so great that
this was the only way giving him the slightest chance of attaining
his ends -- he agued in a fit of coughing. But he didn't tell Jim this.
As to the hardships and starvation they had gone through, these
had been very real; it was enough to look at his band. He made, at
the sound of a shrill whistle, all his men appear standing in a row
on the logs in full view, so that Jim could see them. For the killing
of the man, it had been done -- well, it had -- but was not this war,
bloody war -- in a corner? and the fellow had been killed cleanly,
shot through the chest, not like that poor devil of his lying now in
the creek. They had to listen to him dying for six hours, with his
entrails torn with slugs. At any rate this was a life for a life....
And all this was said with the weariness, with the recklessness of a
man spurred on and on by ill-luck till he cares not where he runs.
When he asked Jim, with a sort of brusque despairing frankness,
whether he himself -- straight now -- didn't understand that when
"it came to saving one's life in the dark, one didn't care who else
went -- three, thirty, three hundred people" -- it was as if a demon
had been whispering advice in his ear. "I made him wince," boasted
Brown to me. "He very soon left off coming the righteous over me.
He just stood there with nothing to say, and looking as black as
thunder -- not at me -- on the ground." He asked Jim whether he
had nothing fishy in his life to remember that he was so damnedly
hard upon a man trying to get out of a deadly hole by the first means
that came to hand -- and so on, and so on. And there ran through
the rough talk a vein of subtle reference to their common blood,
an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of
common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their
minds and of their hearts.

'At last Brown threw himself down full length and watched Jim
out of the corners of his eyes. Jim on his side of the creek stood
thinking and switching his leg. The houses in view were silent, as
if a pestilence had swept them clean of every breath of life; but
many invisible eyes were turned, from within, upon the two men
with the creek between them, a stranded white boat, and the body
of the third man half sunk in the mud. On the river canoes were
moving again, for Patusan was recovering its belief in the stability
of earthly institutions since the return of the white lord. The right
bank, the platforms of the houses, the rafts moored along the
shores, even the roofs of bathing-huts, were covered with people
that, far away out of earshot and almost out of sight, were straining
their eyes towards the knoll beyond the Rajah's stockade. Within
the wide irregular ring of forests, broken in two places by the sheen
of the river, there was a silence. "Will you promise to leave the
coast?" Jim asked. Brown lifted and let fall his hand, giving every-
thing up as it were -- accepting the inevitable. "And surrender your
arms?" Jim went on. Brown sat up and glared across. "Surrender
our arms! Not till you come to take them out of our stiff hands.
You think I am gone crazy with funk? Oh no! That and the rags I
stand in is all I have got in the world, besides a few more breech-
loaders on board; and I expect to sell the lot in Madagascar, if I
ever get so far -- begging my way from ship to ship."

'Jim said nothing to this. At last, throwing away the switch he
held in his hand, he said, as if speaking to himself, "I don't know
whether I have the power." . . . "You don't know! And you wanted
me just now to give up my arms! That's good, too," cried Brown;
"Suppose they say one thing to you, and do the other thing to me.'
He calmed down markedly. "I dare say you have the power, or
what's the meaning of all this talk?" he continued. "What did you
come down here for? To pass the time of day?"

' "Very well," said Jim, lifting his head suddenly after a long
silence. "You shall have a clear road or else a clear fight.' He turned
on his heel and walked away.

'Brown got up at once, but he did not go up the hill till he had
seen Jim disappear between the first houses. He never set his eyes
on him again. On his way back he met Cornelius slouching down
with his head between his shoulders. He stopped before Brown.
"Why didn't you kill him?" he demanded in a sour, discontented
voice. "Because I could do better than that," Brown said with an
amused smile. "Never! never!" protested Cornelius with energy.
"Couldn't. I have lived here for many years." Brown looked up at
him curiously. There were many sides to the life of that place in
arms against him; things he would never find out. Cornelius slunk
past dejectedly in the direction of the river. He was now leaving his
new friends; he accepted the disappointing course of events with a
sulky obstinacy which seemed to draw more together his little yel-
low old face; and as he went down he glanced askant here and there,
never giving up his fixed idea.

'Henceforth events move fast without a check, flowing from the
very hearts of men like a stream from a dark source, and we see Jim
amongst them, mostly through Tamb' Itam's eyes. The girl's eyes
had watched him too, but her life is too much entwined with his:
there is her passion, her wonder, her anger, and, above all, her fear
and her unforgiving love. Of the faithful servant, uncomprehending
as the rest of them, it is the fidelity alone that comes into play; a
fidelity and a belief in his lord so strong that even amazement is
subdued to a sort of saddened acceptance of a mysterious failure.
He has eyes only for one figure, and through all the mazes of bewil-
derment he preserves his air of guardianship, of obedience, of care.

'His master came back from his talk with the white men, walking
slowly towards the stockade in the street. Everybody was rejoiced
to see him return, for while he was away every man had been afraid
not only of him being killed, but also of what would come after.
Jim went into one of the houses, where old Doramin had retired,
and remained alone for a long time with the head of the Bugis
settlers. No doubt he discussed the course to follow with him then,
but no man was present at the conversation. Only Tamb' Itam,
keeping as close to the door as he could, heard his master say, "Yes.
I shall let all the people know that such is my wish; but I spoke to
you, O Doramin, before all the others, and alone; for you know my
heart as well as I know yours and its greatest desire. And you know
well also that I have no thought but for the people's good." Then
his master, lifting the sheeting in the doorway, went out, and he,
Tamb' Itam, had a glimpse of old Doramin within, sitting in the
chair with his hands on his knees, and looking between his feet.
Afterwards he followed his master to the fort, where all the principal
Bugis and Patusan inhabitants had been summoned for a talk.
Tamb' Itam himself hoped there would be some fighting. "What
was it but the taking of another hill?" he exclaimed regretfully.
However, in the town many hoped that the rapacious strangers
would be induced, by the sight of so many brave men making ready
to fight, to go away. It would be a good thing if they went away.
Since Jim's arrival had been made known before daylight by the
gun fired from the fort and the beating of the big drum there, the
fear that had hung over Patusan had broken and subsided like a
wave on a rock, leaving the seething foam of excitement, curiosity,
and endless speculation. Half of the population had been ousted
out of their homes for purposes of defence, and were living in the
street on the left side of the river, crowding round the fort, and in
momentary expectation of seeing their abandoned dwellings on the
threatened bank burst into flames. The general anxiety was to see
the matter settled quickly. Food, through Jewel's care, had been
served out to the refugees. Nobody knew what their white man
would do. Some remarked that it was worse than in Sherif Ali's
war. Then many people did not care; now everybody had something
to lose. The movements of canoes passing to and fro between the
two parts of the town were watched with interest. A couple of Bugis
war-boats lay anchored in the middle of the stream to protect the
river, and a thread of smoke stood at the bow of each; the men in
them were cooking their midday rice when Jim, after his interviews
with Brown and Doramin, crossed the river and entered by the
water-gate of his fort. The people inside crowded round him, so that
he could hardly make his way to the house. They had not seen
him before, because on his arrival during the night he had only
exchanged a few words with the girl, who had come down to the
landing-stage for the purpose, and had then gone on at once to join
the chiefs und the fighting men on the other bank. People shouted
greetings after him. One old woman raised a laugh by pushing her
way to the front madly and enjoining him in a scolding voice to see
to it that her two sons, who were with Doramin, did not come to
harm at the hands of the robbers. Several of the bystanders tried to
pull her away, but she struggled and cried, "Let me go. What is
this, O Muslims? This laughter is unseemly. Are they not cruel,
bloodthirsty robbers bent on ki]ling?" "Let her be," said Jim, and
as a silence fell suddenly, he said slowly, "Everybody shall be safe."
He entered the house before the great sigh, and the loud murmurs
of satisfaction, had died out.

'There's no doubt his mind was made up that Brown should have
his way clear back to the sea. His fate, revolted, was forcing his
hand. He had for the first time to affirm his will in the face of
outspoken opposition. "There was much talk, and at first my master
was silent," Tamb' Itam said. "Darkness came, and then I lit the
candles on the long table. The chiefs sat on each side, and the lady
remained by my master's right hand."

'When he began to speak, the unaccustomed difficulty seemed
only to fix his resolve more immovably. The white men were now
waiting for his answer on the hill. Their chief had spoken to him in
the language of his own people, making clear many things difficult
to explain in any other speech. They were erring men whom suffer-
ing had made blind to right and wrong. It is true that lives had been
lost already, but why lose more? He declared to his hearers, the
assembled heads of the people, that their welfare was his welfare,
their losses his losses, their mourning his mourning. He looked
round at the grave listening faces and told them to remember that
they had fought and worked side by side. They knew his cour-
age . . . Here a murmur interrupted him . . . And that he had
never deceived them. For many years they had dwelt together. He
loved the land and the people living in it with a very great love. He
was ready to answer with his life for any harm that should come to
them if the white men with beards were allowed to retire. They
were evil-doers, but their destiny had been evil too. Had he ever
advised them ill? Had his words ever brought suffering to the
people? he asked. He believed that it would be best to let these
whites and their followers go with their lives. It would be a small
gift. "I whom you have tried and found always true ask you to
let them go." He turned to Doramin. The old nakhoda made no
movement. "Then," said Jim, "call in Dain Waris, your son, my
friend, for in this business I shall not lead." '


                        CHAPTER 43


'Tamb' Itam behind his chair was thunderstruck. The declar-
ation produced an immense sensation. "Let them go because this is
best in my knowledge, which has never deceived you," Jim insisted.
There was a silence. In the darkness of the courtyard could be heard
the subdued whispering, shuffling noise of many people. Doramin
raised his heavy head and said that there was no more reading of
hearts than touching the sky with the hand, but -- he consented.
The others gave their opinion in turn. "It is best," "Let them go,"
and so on. But most of them simply said that they "believed Tuan
Jim."

'In this simple form of assent to his will lies the whole gist of the
situation; their creed, his truth; and the testimony to that faithful-
ness which made him in his own eyes the equal of the impeccable
men who never fall out of the ranks. Stein's words, "Romantic! --
Romantic!" seem to ring over those distances that will never give
him up now to a world indifferent to his failings and his virtues,
and to that ardent and clinging affection that refuses him the dole
of tears in the bewilderment of a great grief and of eternal separ-
ation. From the moment the sheer truthfulness of his last three
years of life carries the day against the ignorance, the fear, and the
anger of men, he appears no longer to me as I saw him last -- a white
speck catching all the dim light left upon a sombre coast and the
darkened seaf -- but greater and more pitiful in the loneliness of his
soul, that remains even for her who loved him best a cruel and
insoluble mystery.

'It is evident that he did not mistrust Brown; there was no reason
to doubt the story, whose truth seemed warranted by the rough
frankness, by a sort of virile sincerity in accepting the morality and
the consequences of his acts. But Jim did not know the almost
inconceivable egotism of the man which made him, when resisted
and foiled in his will, mad with the indignant and revengeful rage
of a thwarted autocrat. But if Jim did not mistrust Brown, he was
evidently anxious that some misunderstanding should not occur,
ending perhaps in collision and bloodshed. It was for this reason
that directly the Malay chiefs had gone he asked Jewel to get him
something to eat, as he was going out of the fort to take command
in the town. On her remonstrating against this on the score of his
fatigue, he said that something might happen for which he would
never forgive himself. "I am responsible for every life in the land,"
he said. He was moody at first; she served him with her own hands,
taking the plates and dishes (of the dinner-service presented him
by Stein) from Tamb' Itam. He brightened up after a while; told
her she would be again in command of the fort for another night.
"There's no sleep for us, old girl," he said, "while our people are
in danger." Later on he said jokingly that she was the best man of
them all. "If you and Dain Waris had done what you wanted, not
one of these poor devils would be alive to-day." "Are they very
bad?" she asked, leaning over his chair. "Men act badly sometimes
without being much worse than others," he said after some hesita-
tion.

'Tamb' Itam followed his master to the landing-stage outside the
fort. The night was clear but without a moon, and the middle of
the river was dark, while the water under each bank reflected the
light of many fires "as on a night of Ramadan," Tamb' Itam said.
War-boats drifted silently in the dark lane or, anchored, floated
motionless with a loud ripple. That night there was much paddling
in a canoe and walking at his master's heels for Tamb' Itam: up and
down the street they tramped, where the fires were burning, inland
on the outskirts of the town where small parties of men kept guard
in the fields. Tuan Jim gave his orders and was obeyed. Last of all
they went to the Rajah's stockade, which a detachment of Jim's
people manned on that night. The old Rajah had fled early in the
morning with most of his women to a small house he had near a
jungle village on a tributary stream. Kassim, left behind, had
attended the council with his air of diligent activity to explain away
the diplomacy of the day before. He was considerably cold-shoul-
dered, but managed to preserve his smiling, quiet alertness, and
professed himself highly delighted when Jim told him sternly that
he proposed to occupy the stockade on that night with his own men.
After the council broke up he was heard outside accosting this and
that deputing chief, and speaking in a loud, gratified tone of the
Rajah's property being protected in the Rajah's absence.

'About ten or so Jim's men marched in. The stockade com-
manded the mouth of the creek, and Jim meant to remain there till
Brown had passed below. A small fire was lit on the flat, grassy
point outside the wall of stakes, and Tamb' Itam placed a little
folding-stool for his master. Jim told him to try and sleep. Tamb'
Itam got a mat and lay down a little way off; but he could not sleep,
though he knew he had to go on an important journey before the
night was out. His master walked to and fro before the fire with
bowed head and with his hands behind his back. His face was sad.
Whenever his master approached him Tamb' Itam pretended to
sleep, not wishing his master to know he had been watched. At last
his master stood still, looking down on him as he lay, and said
softly, "It is time."

'Tamb' Itam arose directly and made his preparations. His mis-
sion was to go down the river, preceding Brown's boat by an hour
or more, to tell Dain Waris finally and formally that the whites were
to be allowed to pass out unmolested. Jim would not trust anybody
else with that service. Before starting, Tamb' Itam, more as a matter
of form (since his position about Jim made him perfectly known),
asked for a token. "Because, Tuan," he said, "the message is
important, and these are thy very words I carry." His master first
put his hand into one pocket, then into another, and finally took
off his forefinger Stein's silver ring, which he habitually wore, and
gave it to Tamb' Itam. When Tamb' Itam left on his mission,
Brown's camp on the knoll was dark but for a single small glow
shining through the branches of one of the trees the white men had
cut down.

'Early in the evening Brown had received from Jim a folded piece
of paper on which was written, "You get the clear road. Start as
soon as your boat floats on the morning tide. Let your men be
careful. The bushes on both sides of the creek and the stockade at
the mouth are full of well-armed men. You would have no chance,
but I don't believe you want bloodshed." Brown read it, tore the
paper into small pieces, and, turning to Cornelius, who had brought
it, said jeeringly, "Good-bye, my excellent friend." Cornelius had
been in the fort, and had been sneaking around Jim's house during
the afternoon. Jim chose him to carry the note because he could
speak English, was known to Brown, and was not likely to be shot
by some nervous mistake of one of the men as a Malay, approaching
in the dusk, perhaps might have been.

'Cornelius didn't go away after delivering the paper. Brown was
sitting up over a tiny fire; all the others were lying down. "I could
tell you something you would like to know," Cornelius mumbled
crossly. Brown paid no attention. "You did not kill him," went on
the other, "and what do you get for it? You might have had money
from the Rajah, besides the loot of all the Bugis houses, and now
you get nothing." "You had better clear out from here," growled
Brown, without even looking at him. But Cornelius let himself drop
by his side and began to whisper very fast, touching his elbow from
time to time. What he had to say made Brown sit up at first, with
a curse. He had simply informed him of Dain Waris's armed party
down the river. At first Brown saw himself completely sold and
betrayed, but a moment's reflection convinced him that there could
be no treachery intended. He said nothing, and after a while Corne-
lius remarked, in a tone of complete indifference, that there was
another way out of the river which he knew very well. "A good
thing to know, too," said Brown, pricking up his ears; and Corne-
lius began to talk of what went on in town and repeated all that had
been said in council, gossiping in an even undertone at Brown's ear
as you talk amongst sleeping men you do not wish to wake. "He
thinks he has made me harmless, does he?" mumbled Brown very
low.... "Yes. He is a fool. A little child. He came here and robbed
me," droned on Cornelius, "and he made all the people believe
him. But if something happened that they did not believe him any
more, where would he be? And the Bugis Dain who is waiting for
you down the river there, captain, is the very man who chased you
up here when you first came." Brown observed nonchalantly that
it would be just as well to avoid him, and with the same detached,
musing air Cornelius declared himself acquainted with a backwater
broad enough to take Brown's boat past Waris's camp. "You will
have to be quiet," he said as an afterthought, "for in one place we
pass close behind his camp. Very close. They are camped ashore
with their boats hauled up." "Oh, we know how to be as quiet as
mice; never fear," said Brown. Cornelius stipulated that in case he
were to pilot Brown out, his canoe should be towed. "I'll have to
get back quick," he explained.

'It was two hours before the dawn when word was passed to the
stockade from outlying watchers that the white robbers were com-
ing down to their boat. In a very short time every armed man from
one end of Patusan to the other was on the alert, yet the banks of
the river remained so silent that but for the fires burning with
sudden blurred flares the town might have been asleep as if in peace-
time. A heavy mist lay very low on the water, making a sort of
illusive grey light that showed nothing. When Brown's long-boat
glided out of the creek into the river, Jim was standing on the low
point of land before the Rajah's stockade -- on the very spot where
for the first time he put his foot on Patusan shore. A shadow loomed
up, moving in the greyness, solitary, very bulky, and yet constantly
eluding the eye. A murmur of low talking came out of it. Brown at
the tiller heard Jim speak calmly: "A clear road. You had better
trust to the current while the fog lasts; but this will lift presently."
"Yes, presently we shall see clear," replied Brown.

'The thirty or forty men standing with muskets at ready outside
the stockade held their breath. The Bugis owner of the prau, whom
I saw on Stein's verandah, and who was amongst them, told me
that the boat, shaving the low point close, seemed for a moment to
grow big and hang over it like a mountain. "If you think it worth
your while to wait a day outside," called out Jim, "I'll try to send
you down something -- a bullock, some yams -- what I can." The
shadow went on moving. "Yes. Do," said a voice, blank and muf-
fled out of the fog. Not one of the many attentive listeners under-
stood what the words meant; and then Brown and his men in their
boat floated away, fading spectrally without the slightest sound.

'Thus Brown, invisible in the mist, goes out of Patusan elbow to
elbow with Cornelius in the stern-sheets of the long-boat. "Perhaps
you shall get a small bullock," said Cornelius. "Oh yes. Bullock.
Yam. You'll get it if he said so. He always speaks the truth. He stole
everything I had. I suppose you like a small bullock better than the
loot of many houses." "I would advise you to hold your tongue, or
somebody here may fling you overboard into this damned fog," said
Brown. The boat seemed to be standing still; nothing could be seen,
not even the river alongside, only the water-dust flew and trickled,
condensed, down their beards and faces. It was weird, Brown told
me. Every individual man of them felt as though he were adrift
alone in a boat, haunted by an almost imperceptible suspicion of
sighing, muttering ghosts. "Throw me out, would you? But I would
know where I was," mumbled Cornelius surlily. "I've lived many
years here." "Not long enough to see through a fog like this,"
Brown said, lolling back with his arm swinging to and fro on the
useless tiller. "Yes. Long enough for that," snarled Cornelius.
"That's very useful," commented Brown. "Am I to believe you
could find that backway you spoke of blindfold, like this?" Corne-
lius grunted. "Are you too tired to row?" he asked after a silence.
"No, by God!" shouted Brown suddenly. "Out with your oars
there." There was a great knocking in the fog, which after a while
settled into a regular grind of invisible sweeps against invisible
thole-pins. Otherwise nothing was changed, and but for the slight
splash of a dipped blade it was like rowing a balloon car in a cloud,
said Brown. Thereafter Cornelius did not open his lips except to
ask querulously for somebody to bale out his canoe, which was
towing behind the long-boat. Gradually the fog whitened and
became luminous ahead. To the left Brown saw a darkness as
though he had been looking at the back of the deputing night. All
at once a big bough covered with leaves appeared above his head,
and ends of twigs, dripping and still, curved slenderly close along-
side. Cornelius, without a word, took the tiller from his hand.'


                        CHAPTER 44


'I don't think they spoke together again. The boat entered a
narrow by-channel, where it was pushed by the oar-blades set into
crumbling banks, and there was a gloom as if enormous black wings
had been outspread above the mist that filled its depth to the sum-
mits of the trees. The branches overhead showered big drops
through the gloomy fog. At a mutter from Cornelius, Brown
ordered his men to load. "I'll give you a chance to get even with
them before we're done, you dismal cripples, you," he said to his
gang. "Mind you don't throw it away -- you hounds." Low growls
answered that speech. Cornelius showed much fussy concern for
the safety of his canoe.

'Meantime Tamb' Itam had reached the end of his journey. The
fog had delayed him a little, but he had paddled steadily, keeping
in touch with the south bank. By-and-by daylight came like a glow
in a ground glass globe. The shores made on each side of the river
a dark smudge, in which one could detect hints of columnar forms
and shadows of twisted branches high up. The mist was still thick
on the water, but a good watch was being kept, for as Iamb' Itam
approached the camp the figures of two men emerged out of the
white vapour, and voices spoke to him boisterously. He answered,
and presently a canoe lay alongside, and he exchanged news with
the paddlers. All was well. The trouble was over. Then the men in
the canoe let go their grip on the side of his dug-out and incontin-
ently fell out of sight. He pursued his way till he heard voices
coming to him quietly over the water, and saw, under the now
lifting, swirling mist, the glow of many little fires burning on a
sandy stretch, backed by lofty thin timber and bushes. There again
a look-out was kept, for he was challenged. He shouted his name
as the two last sweeps of his paddle ran his canoe up on the strand.
It was a big camp. Men crouched in many little knots under a
subdued murmur of early morning talk. Many thin threads of
smoke curled slowly on the white mist. Little shelters, elevated
above the ground, had been built for the chiefs. Muskets were
stacked in small pyramids, and long spears were stuck singly into
the sand near the fires.

'Tamb' Itam, assuming an air of importance, demanded to be led
to Dain Waris. He found the friend of his white lord lying on a
raised couch made of bamboo, and sheltered by a sort of shed of
sticks covered with mats. Dain Waris was awake, and a bright
fire was burning before his sleeping-place, which resembled a rude
shrine. The only son of nakhoda Doramin answered his greeting
kindly. Tamb' Itam began by handing him the ring which vouched
for the truth of the messenger's words. Dain Waris, reclining on
his elbow, bade him speak and tell all the news. Beginning with the
consecrated formula, "The news is good," Tamb' Itam delivered
Jim's own words. The white men, deputing with the consent of all
the chiefs, were to be allowed to pass down the river. In unswer to
a question or two Tamb' Itam then reported the proceedings of the
last council. Dain Waris listened attentively to the end, toying with
the ring which ultimately he slipped on the forefinger of his right
hand. After hearing all he had to say he dismissed Tamb' Itam to
have food and rest. Orders for the return in the afternoon were
given immediately. Afterwards Dain Waris lay down again, open-
eyed, while his personal attendants were preparing his food at the
fire, by which Tamb' Itam also sat talking to the men who lounged
up to hear the latest intelligence from the town. The sun was eating
up the mist. A good watch was kept upon the reach of the main
stream where the boat of the whites was expected to appear every
moment.

'It was then that Brown took his revenge upon the world
which, after twenty years of contemptuous and reckless bullying,
refused him the tribute of a common robber's success. It was an
act of cold-blooded ferocity, and it consoled him on his death-
bed like a memory of an indomitable defiance. Stealthily he
landed his men on the other side of the island opposite to the
Bugis camp, and led them across. After a short but quite silent
scuffle, Cornelius, who had tried to slink away at the moment of
landing, resigned himself to show the way where the undergrowth
was most sparse. Brown held both his skinny hands together
behind his back in the grip of one vast fist, and now and then
impelled him forward with a fierce push. Cornelius remained
as mute as a fish, abject but faithful to his purpose, whose
accomplishment loomed before him dimly. At the edge of the
patch of forest Brown's men spread themselves out in cover and
waited. The camp was plain from end to end before their eyes,
and no one looked their way. Nobody even dreamed that the
white men could have any knowledge of the narrow channel at
the back of the island. When he judged the moment come, Brown
yelled, "Let them have it," and fourteen shots rang out like one.

'Tamb' Itam told me the surprise was so great that, except for
those who fell dead or wounded, not a soul of them moved for quite
an appreciable time after the first discharge. Then a man screamed,
and after that scream a great yell of amazement and fear went up
from all the throats. A blind panic drove these men in a surging
swaying mob to and fro along the shore like a herd of cattle afraid
of the water. Some few jumped into the river then, but most of
them did so only after the last discharge. Three times Brown's men
fired into the ruck, Brown, the only one in view, cursing and yelling,
"Aim low! aim low!"

'Tamb' Itam says that, as for him, he understood at the first
volley what had happened. Though untouched he fell down and lay
as if dead, but with his eyes open. At the sound of the first shots
Dain Waris, reclining on the couch, jumped up and ran out upon
the open shore, just in time to receive a bullet in his forehead at the
second discharge. Tamb' Itam saw him fling his arms wide open
before he fell. Then, he says, a great fear came upon him -- not
before. The white men retired as they had come -- unseen.

'Thus Brown balanced his account with the evil fortune. Notice
that even in this awful outbreak there is a superiority as of a man
who carries right -- the abstract thing -- within the envelope of his
common desires. It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it
was a lesson, a retribution -- a demonstration of some obscure and
awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far
under the surface as we like to think.

'Afterwards the whites depart unseen by Tamb' Itam, and seem
to vanish from before men's eyes altogether; and the schooner, too,
vanishes after the manner of stolen goods. But a story is told of a
white long-boat picked up a month later in the Indian Ocean by a
cargo steamer. Two parched, yellow, glassy-eyed, whispering skel-
etons in her recognised the authority of a third, who declared that
his name was Brown. His schooner, he reported, bound south with
a cargo of Java sugar, had sprung a bad leak and sank under his
feet. He and his companions were the survivors of a crew of six.
The two died on board the steamer which rescued them. Brown
lived to be seen by me, and I can testify that he had played his part
to the last.

'It seems, however, that in going away they had neglected to cast
off Cornelius's canoe. Cornelius himself Brown had let go at the
beginning of the shooting, with a kick for a parting benediction.
Tamb' Itam, after arising from amongst the dead, saw the Nazarene
running up and down the shore amongst the corpses and the expir-
ing fires. He uttered little cries. Suddenly he rushed to the water,
and made frantic efforts to get one of the Bugis boats into the water.
"Afterwards, till he had seen me," related Tamb' Itam, "he stood
looking at the heavy canoe and scratching his head." "What became
of him?" I asked. Tamb' Itam, staring hard at me, made an express-
ive gesture with his right arm. "Twice I struck, Tuan," he said.
"When he beheld me approaching he cast himself violently on the
ground and made a great outcry, kicking. He screeched like a fright-
ened hen till he felt the point; then he was still, und lay staring at
me while his life went out of his eyes."

'This done, Tamb' Itam did not tarry. He understood the import-
ance of being the first with the awful news at the fort. There were,
of course, many survivors of Dain Waris's party; but in the
extremity of panic some had swum across the river, others had
bolted into the bush. The fact is that they did not know really who
struck that blow -- whether more white robbers were not coming,
whether they had not already got hold of the whole land. They
imagined themselves to be the victims of a vast treachery, and
utterly doomed to destruction. It is said that some small parties did
not come in till three days afterwards. However, a few tried to make
their way back to Patusan at once, and one of the canoes that were
patrolling the river that morning was in sight of the camp at the
very moment of the attack. It is true that at first the men in her
leaped overboard and swam to the opposite bank, but afterwards
they returned to their boat and started fearfully up-stream. Of these
Tamb' Itam had an hour's advance.'


                        CHAPTER 45


'When Tamb' Itam, paddling madly, came into the town-reach,
the women, thronging the platforms before the houses, were look-
ing out for the return of Dain Waris's little fleet of boats. The town
had a festive air; here and there men, still with spears or guns in
their hands, could be seen moving or standing on the shore in
groups. Chinamen's shops had been opened early; but the market-
place was empty, and a sentry, still posted at the corner of the fort,
made out Tamb' Itam, and shouted to those within. The gate was
wide open. Tamb' Itam jumped ashore and ran in headlong. The
first person he met was the girl coming down from the house.

'Tamb' Itam, disordered, panting, with trembling lips and wild
eyes, stood for a time before her as if a sudden spell had been laid
on him. Then he broke out very quickly: "They have killed Dain
Waris and many more." She clapped her hands, and her first words
were, "Shut the gates." Most of the fortmen had gone back to their
houses, but Tamb' Itam hurried on the few who remained for their
turn of duty within. The girl stood in the middle of the courtyard
while the others ran about. "Doramin," she cried despairingly as
Tamb' Itam passed her. Next time he went by he answered her
thought rapidly, "Yes. But we have all the powder in Patusan."
She caught him by the arm, and, pointing at the house, "Call him
out," she whispered, trembling.

'Tamb' Itam ran up the steps. His master was sleeping. "It is I,
Tamb' Itam," he cried at the door, "with tidings that cannot wait."
He saw Jim turn over on the pillow and open his eyes, and he burst
out at once. "This, Tuan, is a day of evil, an accursed day." His
master raised himself on his elbow to listen -- just as Dain Waris
had done. And then Tamb' Itam began his tale, trying to relate the
story in order, calling Dain Waris Panglima, and saying: "The
Panglima then called out to the chief of his own boatmen, 'Give
Tamb' Itam something to eat' " -- when his master put his feet to
the ground and looked at him with such a discomposed face that
the words remained in his throat.

' "Speak out," said Jim. "Is he dead?" "May you live long,"
cried Tamb' Itam. "It was a most cruel treachery. He ran out at the
first shots and fell." . . . His master walked to the window and with
his fist struck at the shutter. The room was made light; and then in
a steady voice, but speaking fast, he began to give him orders to
assemble a fleet of boats for immediate pursuit, go to this man, to
the other -- send messengers; and as he talked he sat down on the
bed, stooping to lace his boots hurriedly, and suddenly looked up.
"Why do you stand here?" he asked very red-faced. "Waste no
time." Tamb' Itam did not move. "Forgive me, Tuan, but . . .
but," he began to stummer. "What?" cried his master aloud, look-
ing terrible, leaning forward with his hands gripping the edge of
the bed. "It is not safe for thy servant to go out amongst the people,"
said Tamb' Itam, after hesitating a moment.

'Then Jim understood. He had retreated from one world, for a
small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of
his own hands, had fallen in ruins upon his head. It was not safe
for his servant to go out amongst his own people! I believe that in
that very moment he had decided to defy the disaster in the only
way it occurred to him such a disaster could be defied; but all I
know is that, without a word, he came out of his room and sat
before the long table, at the head of which he was accustomed to
regulate the affairs of his world, proclaiming daily the truth that
surely lived in his heart. The dark powers should not rob him twice
of his peace. He sat like a stone figure. Tamb' Itam, deferential,
hinted at preparations for defence. The girl he loved came in and
spoke to him, but he made a sign with his hand, and she was awed
by the dumb appeal for silence in it. She went out on the verandah
and sat on the threshold, as if to guard him with her body from
dangers outside.

'What thoughts passed through his head -- what memories?
Who can tell? Everything was gone, and he who had been once
unfaithful to his trust had lost again all men's confidence. It was
then, I believe, he tried to write -- to somebody -- and gave it
up. Loneliness was closing on him. People had trusted him with
their lives -- only for that; and yet they could never, as he had
said, never be made to understand him. Those without did not
hear him make a sound. Later, towards the evening, he came to
the door and called for Tamb' Itam. "Well?" he asked. "There
is much weeping. Much anger too," said Tamb' Itam. Jim looked
up at him. "You know," he murmured. "Yes, Tuan," said
Tamb' Itam. "Thy servant does know, and the gates are closed.
We shall have to fight." "Fight! What for?" he asked. "For our
lives." "I have no life," he said. Tamb' Itam heard a cry from
the girl at the door. "Who knows?" said Tamb' Itam. "By
audacity and cunning we may even escape. There is much fear
in men's hearts too." He went out, thinking vaguely of boats
and of open sea, leaving Jim and the girl together.

'I haven't the heart to set down here such glimpses as she had
given me of the hour or more she passed in there wrestling with
him for the possession of her happiness. Whether he had any hope --
what he expected, what he imagined -- it is impossible to say. He
was inflexible, and with the growing loneliness of his obstinacy his
spirit seemed to rise above the ruins of his existence. She cried
"Fight!" into his ear. She could not understand. There was nothing
to fight for. He was going to prove his power in another way and
conquer the fatal destiny itself. He came out into the courtyard,
and behind him, with streaming hair, wild of face, breathless, she
staggered out and leaned on the side of the doorway. "Open the
gates," he ordered. Afterwards, turning to those of his men who
were inside, he gave them leave to depart to their homes. "For how
long, Tuan?" asked one of them timidly. "For all life," he said, in
a sombre tone.

'A hush had fallen upon the town after the outburst of wailing
and lamentation that had swept over the river, like a gust of wind
from the opened abode of sorrow. But rumours flew in whispers,
filling the hearts with consternation and horrible doubts. The rob-
bers were coming back, bringing many others with them, in a great
ship, and there would be no refuge in the land for any one. A sense
of utter insecurity as during an earthquake pervaded the minds of
men, who whispered their suspicions, looking at each other as if in
the presence of some awful portent.

'The sun was sinking towards the forests when Dain Waris's
body was brought into Doramin's campong. Four men carried it
in, covered decently with a white sheet which the old mother had
sent out down to the gate to meet her son on his return. They laid
him at Doramin's feet, and the old man sat still for a long time, one
hand on each knee, looking down. The fronds of palms swayed
gently, and the foliage of fruit trees stirred above his head. Every
single man of his people was there, fully armed, when the old nak-
hoda at last raised his eyes. He moved them slowly over the crowd,
as if seeking for a missing face. Again his chin sank on his breast.
The whispers of many men mingled with the slight rustling of the
leaves.

'The Malay who had brought Tamb' Itam and the girl to Sama-
rang was there too. "Not so angry as many," he said to me, but
struck with a great awe and wonder at the "suddenness of men's
fate, which hangs over their heads like a cloud charged with thun-
der." He told me that when Dain Waris's body was uncovered at a
sign of Doramin's, he whom they often called the white lord's friend
was disclosed lying unchanged with his eyelids a little open as if
about to wake. Doramin leaned forward a little more, like one
looking for something fallen on the ground. His eyes searched the
body from its feet to its head, for the wound maybe. It was in the
forehead and small; and there was no word spoken while one of the
by-standers, stooping, took off the silver ring from the cold stiff
hand. In silence he held it up before Doramin. A murmur of dismay
and horror ran through the crowd at the sight of that familiar token.
The old nakhoda stared at it, and suddenly let out one great fierce
cry, deep from the chest, a roar of pain und fury, as mighty as the
bellow of a wounded bull, bringing great fear into men's hearts, by
the magnitude of his anger and his sorrow that could be plainly
discerned without words. There was a great stillness afterwards for
a space, while the body was being borne aside by four men. They
laid it down under a tree, and on the instant, with one long shriek,
all the women of the household began to wail together; they
mourned with shrill cries; the sun was setting, and in the intervals
of screamed lamentations the high sing-song voices of two old men
intoning the Koran chanted alone.

'About this time Jim, leaning on a gun-carriage, looked at the
river, and turned his back on the house; and the girl, in the door-
way, panting as if she had run herself to a standstill, was looking at
him across the yard. Tamb' Itam stood not far from his master,
waiting patiendy for what might happen. All at once Jim, who
seemed to be lost in quiet thought, turned to him and said, "Time
to finish this."

' "Tuan?" said Tamb' Itam, advancing with alacrity. He did not
know what his master meant, but as soon as Jim made a movement
the girl started too and walked down into the open space. It seems
that no one else of the people of the house was in sight. She tottered
slightly, and about half-way down called out to Jim, who had appar-
ently resumed his peaceful contemplation of the river. He turned
round, setting his back against the gun. "Will you fight?" she cried.
"There is nothing to fight for," he said; "nothing is lost." Saying
this he made a step towards her. "Will you fly?" she cried again.
"There is no escape," he said, stopping short, and she stood still
also, silent, devouring him with her eyes. "And you shall go?" she
said slowly. He bent his head. "Ah!" she exclaimed, peering at him
as it were, "you are mad or false. Do you remember the night I
prayed you to leave me, and you said that you could not? That it
was impossible! Impossible! Do you remember you said you would
never leave me? Why? I asked you for no promise. You promised
unasked -- remember." "Enough, poor girl," he said. "I should not
be worth having."

'Tamb' Itam said that while they were talking she would laugh
loud and senselessly like one under the visitation of God. His master
put his hands to his head. He was fully dressed as for every day,
but without a hat. She stopped laughing suddenly. "For the last
time," she cried menacindy, "will you defend yourself?" "Nothing
can touch me," he said in a last flicker of superb egoism. Tamb'
Itam saw her lean forward where she stood, open her arms, and run
at him swiftly. She flung herself upon his breast and clasped him
round the neck.

' "Ah! but I shall hold thee thus," she cried.... "Thou art
mine!"

'She sobbed on his shoulder. The sky over Patusan was blood-
red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun
nestled crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest below had a
black and forbidding face.

'Tamb' Itam tells me that on that evening the aspect of the
heavens was angry and frightful. I may well believe it, for I know
that on that very day a cyclone passed within sixty miles of the
coast, though there was hardly more than a languid stir of air in the
place.

'Suddenly Tamb' Itam saw Jim catch her arms, trying to
unclasp her hands. She hung on them with her head fallen back;
her hair touched the ground. "Come here!" his master called,
and Tamb' Itam helped to ease her down. It was difficult to
separate her fingers. Jim, bending over her, looked earnestly
upon her face, and all at once ran to the landing-stage. Tamb'
Itam followed him, but turning his head, he saw that she had
struggled up to her feet. She ran after them a few steps, then
fell down heavily on her knees. "Tuan! Tuan!" called Tamb'
Itam, "look back;" but Jim was already in a canoe, standing up
paddle in hand. He did not look back. Tamb' Itam had just time
to scramble in after him when the canoe floated clear. The girl
was then on her knees, with clasped hands, at the water-gate.
She remained thus for a time in a supplicating attitude before
she sprang up. "You are false!" she screamed out after Jim.
"Forgive me," he cried. "Never! Never!" she called back.

'Tamb' Itam took the paddle from Jim's hands, it being unseemly
that he should sit while his lord paddled. When they reached the
other shore his master forbade him to come any farther; but Tamb'
Itam did follow him at a distance, walking up the slope to Doramin's
campong.

'It was beginning to grow dark. Torches twinkled here and
there. Those they met seemed awestruck, and stood aside hastily
to let Jim pass. The wailing of women came from above. The
courtyard was full of armed Bugis with their followers, and of
Patusan people.

'I do not know what this gathering really meant. Were these
preparations for war, or for vengeance, or to repulse a threatened
invasion? Many days elapsed before the people had ceased to look
out, quaking, for the return of the white men with long beards and
in rags, whose exact relation to their own white man they could
never understand. Even for those simple minds poor Jim remains
under a cloud.

'Doramin, alone! immense and desolate, sat in his arm-chair with
the pair of flintlock pistols on his knees, faced by a armed throng.
When Jim appeared, at somebody's exclamation, all the heads
turned round together, and then the mass opened right and left,
and he walked up a lane of averted glances. Whispers followed him;
murmurs: "He has worked all the evil." "He hath a charm." . . .
He heard them -- perhaps!

'When he came up into the light of torches the wailing of the
women ceased suddenly. Doramin did not lift his head, and Jim
stood silent before him for a time. Then he looked to the left, and
moved in that direction with measured steps. Dain Waris's mother
crouched at the head of the body, and the grey dishevelled hair
concealed her face. Jim came up slowly, looked at his dead friend,
lifting the sheet, than dropped it without a word. Slowly he walked
back.

' "He came! He came!" was running from lip to lip, making a
murmur to which he moved. "He hath taken it upon his own
head," a voice said aloud. He heard this and turned to the crowd.
"Yes. Upon my head." A few people recoiled. Jim waited awhile
before Doramin, and then said gently, "I am come in sorrow." He
waited again. "I am come ready and unarmed," he repeated.

'The unwieldy old man, lowering his big forehead like an ox
under a yoke, made an effort to rise, clutching at the flintlock pistols
on his knees. From his throat came gurgling, choking, inhuman
sounds, and his two attendants helped him from behind. People
remarked that the ring which he had dropped on his lap fell and
rolled against the foot of the white man, and that poor Jim glanced
down at the talisman that had opened for him the door of fame,
love, and success within the wall of forests fringed with white foam,
within the coast that under the western sun looks like the very
stronghold of the night. Doramin, struggling to keep his feet, made
with his two supporters a swaying, tottering group; his little eyes
stared with an expression of mad pain, of rage, with a ferocious
glitter, which the bystanders noticed; and then, while Jim stood
stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him
straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the
neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his
son's friend through the chest.

'The crowd, which had fallen apart behind Jim as soon as Dora-
min had raised his hand, rushed tumultuously forward after the
shot. They say that the white man sent right and left at all those
faces a proud and unflinching glance. Then with his hand over his
lips he fell forward, dead.


'And that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable
at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in
the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring
shape of such an extraordinary success! For it may very well be that
in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance, he
had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern
bride, had come veiled to his side.

'But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing him-
self out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his
exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his
pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied --
quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us -- and
have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his
eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all? Now he is no
more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me
with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my
honour there are moments too when he passes from my eyes like a
disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready
to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of
shades.

'Who knows? He is gone, inscrutable at heart, and the poor girl
is leading a sort of soundless, inert life in Stein's house. Stein has
aged greatly of late. He feels it himself, and says often that he is
"preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave . . ." while he waves
his hand sadly at his butterflies.'

September 1899 -- July 1900.