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<h2> CHAPTER 25 </h2>
<p>'"This is where I was prisoner for three days," he murmured to me (it was
on the occasion of our visit to the Rajah), while we were making our way
slowly through a kind of awestruck riot of dependants across Tunku
Allang's courtyard. "Filthy place, isn't it? And I couldn't get anything
to eat either, unless I made a row about it, and then it was only a small
plate of rice and a fried fish not much bigger than a stickleback—confound
them! Jove! I've been hungry prowling inside this stinking enclosure with
some of these vagabonds shoving their mugs right under my nose. I had
given up that famous revolver of yours at the first demand. Glad to get
rid of the bally thing. Look like a fool walking about with an empty
shooting-iron in my hand." At that moment we came into the presence, and
he became unflinchingly grave and complimentary with his late captor. Oh!
magnificent! I want to laugh when I think of it. But I was impressed, too.
The old disreputable Tunku Allang could not help showing his fear (he was
no hero, for all the tales of his hot youth he was fond of telling); and
at the same time there was a wistful confidence in his manner towards his
late prisoner. Note! Even where he would be most hated he was still
trusted. Jim—as far as I could follow the conversation—was
improving the occasion by the delivery of a lecture. Some poor villagers
had been waylaid and robbed while on their way to Doramin's house with a
few pieces of gum or beeswax which they wished to exchange for rice. "It
was Doramin who was a thief," burst out the Rajah. A shaking fury seemed
to enter that old frail body. He writhed weirdly on his mat, gesticulating
with his hands and feet, tossing the tangled strings of his mop—an
impotent incarnation of rage. There were staring eyes and dropping jaws
all around us. Jim began to speak. Resolutely, coolly, and for some time
he enlarged upon the text that no man should be prevented from getting his
food and his children's food honestly. The other sat like a tailor at his
board, one palm on each knee, his head low, and fixing Jim through the
grey hair that fell over his very eyes. When Jim had done there was a
great stillness. Nobody seemed to breathe even; no one made a sound till
the old Rajah sighed faintly, and looking up, with a toss of his head,
said quickly, "You hear, my people! No more of these little games." This
decree was received in profound silence. A rather heavy man, evidently in
a position of confidence, with intelligent eyes, a bony, broad, very dark
face, and a cheerily of officious manner (I learned later on he was the
executioner), presented to us two cups of coffee on a brass tray, which he
took from the hands of an inferior attendant. "You needn't drink,"
muttered Jim very rapidly. I didn't perceive the meaning at first, and
only looked at him. He took a good sip and sat composedly, holding the
saucer in his left hand. In a moment I felt excessively annoyed. "Why the
devil," I whispered, smiling at him amiably, "do you expose me to such a
stupid risk?" I drank, of course, there was nothing for it, while he gave
no sign, and almost immediately afterwards we took our leave. While we
were going down the courtyard to our boat, escorted by the intelligent and
cheery executioner, Jim said he was very sorry. It was the barest chance,
of course. Personally he thought nothing of poison. The remotest chance.
He was—he assured me—considered to be infinitely more useful
than dangerous, and so . . . "But the Rajah is afraid of you abominably.
Anybody can see that," I argued with, I own, a certain peevishness, and
all the time watching anxiously for the first twist of some sort of
ghastly colic. I was awfully disgusted. "If I am to do any good here and
preserve my position," he said, taking his seat by my side in the boat, "I
must stand the risk: I take it once every month, at least. Many people
trust me to do that—for them. Afraid of me! That's just it. Most
likely he is afraid of me because I am not afraid of his coffee." Then
showing me a place on the north front of the stockade where the pointed
tops of several stakes were broken, "This is where I leaped over on my
third day in Patusan. They haven't put new stakes there yet. Good leap,
eh?" A moment later we passed the mouth of a muddy creek. "This is my
second leap. I had a bit of a run and took this one flying, but fell
short. Thought I would leave my skin there. Lost my shoes struggling. And
all the time I was thinking to myself how beastly it would be to get a jab
with a bally long spear while sticking in the mud like this. I remember
how sick I felt wriggling in that slime. I mean really sick—as if I
had bitten something rotten."</p>
<p>'That's how it was—and the opportunity ran by his side, leaped over
the gap, floundered in the mud . . . still veiled. The unexpectedness of
his coming was the only thing, you understand, that saved him from being
at once dispatched with krisses and flung into the river. They had him,
but it was like getting hold of an apparition, a wraith, a portent. What
did it mean? What to do with it? Was it too late to conciliate him? Hadn't
he better be killed without more delay? But what would happen then?
Wretched old Allang went nearly mad with apprehension and through the
difficulty of making up his mind. Several times the council was broken up,
and the advisers made a break helter-skelter for the door and out on to
the verandah. One—it is said—even jumped down to the ground—fifteen
feet, I should judge—and broke his leg. The royal governor of
Patusan had bizarre mannerisms, and one of them was to introduce boastful
rhapsodies into every arduous discussion, when, getting gradually excited,
he would end by flying off his perch with a kriss in his hand. But,
barring such interruptions, the deliberations upon Jim's fate went on
night and day.</p>
<p>'Meanwhile he wandered about the courtyard, shunned by some, glared at by
others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy of the first
casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took possession of a small
tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of filth and rotten matter
incommoded him greatly: it seems he had not lost his appetite though,
because—he told me—he had been hungry all the blessed time.
Now and again "some fussy ass" deputed from the council-room would come
out running to him, and in honeyed tones would administer amazing
interrogatories: "Were the Dutch coming to take the country? Would the
white man like to go back down the river? What was the object of coming to
such a miserable country? The Rajah wanted to know whether the white man
could repair a watch?" They did actually bring out to him a nickel clock
of New England make, and out of sheer unbearable boredom he busied himself
in trying to get the alarum to work. It was apparently when thus occupied
in his shed that the true perception of his extreme peril dawned upon him.
He dropped the thing—he says—"like a hot potato," and walked
out hastily, without the slightest idea of what he would, or indeed could,
do. He only knew that the position was intolerable. He strolled aimlessly
beyond a sort of ramshackle little granary on posts, and his eyes fell on
the broken stakes of the palisade; and then—he says—at once,
without any mental process as it were, without any stir of emotion, he set
about his escape as if executing a plan matured for a month. He walked off
carelessly to give himself a good run, and when he faced about there was
some dignitary, with two spearmen in attendance, close at his elbow ready
with a question. He started off "from under his very nose," went over
"like a bird," and landed on the other side with a fall that jarred all
his bones and seemed to split his head. He picked himself up instantly. He
never thought of anything at the time; all he could remember—he said—was
a great yell; the first houses of Patusan were before him four hundred
yards away; he saw the creek, and as it were mechanically put on more
pace. The earth seemed fairly to fly backwards under his feet. He took off
from the last dry spot, felt himself flying through the air, felt himself,
without any shock, planted upright in an extremely soft and sticky
mudbank. It was only when he tried to move his legs and found he couldn't
that, in his own words, "he came to himself." He began to think of the
"bally long spears." As a matter of fact, considering that the people
inside the stockade had to run to the gate, then get down to the
landing-place, get into boats, and pull round a point of land, he had more
advance than he imagined. Besides, it being low water, the creek was
without water—you couldn't call it dry—and practically he was
safe for a time from everything but a very long shot perhaps. The higher
firm ground was about six feet in front of him. "I thought I would have to
die there all the same," he said. He reached and grabbed desperately with
his hands, and only succeeded in gathering a horrible cold shiny heap of
slime against his breast—up to his very chin. It seemed to him he
was burying himself alive, and then he struck out madly, scattering the
mud with his fists. It fell on his head, on his face, over his eyes, into
his mouth. He told me that he remembered suddenly the courtyard, as you
remember a place where you had been very happy years ago. He longed—so
he said—to be back there again, mending the clock. Mending the clock—that
was the idea. He made efforts, tremendous sobbing, gasping efforts,
efforts that seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him
blind, and culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness to
crack the earth asunder, to throw it off his limbs—and he felt
himself creeping feebly up the bank. He lay full length on the firm ground
and saw the light, the sky. Then as a sort of happy thought the notion
came to him that he would go to sleep. He will have it that he <i>did</i>
actually go to sleep; that he slept—perhaps for a minute, perhaps
for twenty seconds, or only for one second, but he recollects distinctly
the violent convulsive start of awakening. He remained lying still for a
while, and then he arose muddy from head to foot and stood there, thinking
he was alone of his kind for hundreds of miles, alone, with no help, no
sympathy, no pity to expect from any one, like a hunted animal. The first
houses were not more than twenty yards from him; and it was the desperate
screaming of a frightened woman trying to carry off a child that started
him again. He pelted straight on in his socks, beplastered with filth out
of all semblance to a human being. He traversed more than half the length
of the settlement. The nimbler women fled right and left, the slower men
just dropped whatever they had in their hands, and remained petrified with
dropping jaws. He was a flying terror. He says he noticed the little
children trying to run for life, falling on their little stomachs and
kicking. He swerved between two houses up a slope, clambered in
desperation over a barricade of felled trees (there wasn't a week without
some fight in Patusan at that time), burst through a fence into a
maize-patch, where a scared boy flung a stick at him, blundered upon a
path, and ran all at once into the arms of several startled men. He just
had breath enough to gasp out, "Doramin! Doramin!" He remembers being
half-carried, half-rushed to the top of the slope, and in a vast enclosure
with palms and fruit trees being run up to a large man sitting massively
in a chair in the midst of the greatest possible commotion and excitement.
He fumbled in mud and clothes to produce the ring, and, finding himself
suddenly on his back, wondered who had knocked him down. They had simply
let him go—don't you know?—but he couldn't stand. At the foot
of the slope random shots were fired, and above the roofs of the
settlement there rose a dull roar of amazement. But he was safe. Doramin's
people were barricading the gate and pouring water down his throat;
Doramin's old wife, full of business and commiseration, was issuing shrill
orders to her girls. "The old woman," he said softly, "made a to-do over
me as if I had been her own son. They put me into an immense bed—her
state bed—and she ran in and out wiping her eyes to give me pats on
the back. I must have been a pitiful object. I just lay there like a log
for I don't know how long."</p>
<p>'He seemed to have a great liking for Doramin's old wife. She on her side
had taken a motherly fancy to him. She had a round, nut-brown, soft face,
all fine wrinkles, large, bright red lips (she chewed betel assiduously),
and screwed up, winking, benevolent eyes. She was constantly in movement,
scolding busily and ordering unceasingly a troop of young women with clear
brown faces and big grave eyes, her daughters, her servants, her
slave-girls. You know how it is in these households: it's generally
impossible to tell the difference. She was very spare, and even her ample
outer garment, fastened in front with jewelled clasps, had somehow a
skimpy effect. Her dark bare feet were thrust into yellow straw slippers
of Chinese make. I have seen her myself flitting about with her extremely
thick, long, grey hair falling about her shoulders. She uttered homely
shrewd sayings, was of noble birth, and was eccentric and arbitrary. In
the afternoon she would sit in a very roomy arm-chair, opposite her
husband, gazing steadily through a wide opening in the wall which gave an
extensive view of the settlement and the river.</p>
<p>'She invariably tucked up her feet under her, but old Doramin sat
squarely, sat imposingly as a mountain sits on a plain. He was only of the
nakhoda or merchant class, but the respect shown to him and the dignity of
his bearing were very striking. He was the chief of the second power in
Patusan. The immigrants from Celebes (about sixty families that, with
dependants and so on, could muster some two hundred men "wearing the
kriss") had elected him years ago for their head. The men of that race are
intelligent, enterprising, revengeful, but with a more frank courage than
the other Malays, and restless under oppression. They formed the party
opposed to the Rajah. Of course the quarrels were for trade. This was the
primary cause of faction fights, of the sudden outbreaks that would fill
this or that part of the settlement with smoke, flame, the noise of shots
and shrieks. Villages were burnt, men were dragged into the Rajah's
stockade to be killed or tortured for the crime of trading with anybody
else but himself. Only a day or two before Jim's arrival several heads of
households in the very fishing village that was afterwards taken under his
especial protection had been driven over the cliffs by a party of the
Rajah's spearmen, on suspicion of having been collecting edible birds'
nests for a Celebes trader. Rajah Allang pretended to be the only trader
in his country, and the penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death;
but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of
robbery. His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice,
and he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only—till
Jim came—he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them
through his subjects, and thought himself pathetically in the right. The
situation was complicated by a wandering stranger, an Arab half-breed,
who, I believe, on purely religious grounds, had incited the tribes in the
interior (the bush-folk, as Jim himself called them) to rise, and had
established himself in a fortified camp on the summit of one of the twin
hills. He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard,
but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on
their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal
into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a
curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation
stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were not
sure which one this partisan most desired to plunder. The Rajah intrigued
with him feebly. Some of the Bugis settlers, weary with endless
insecurity, were half inclined to call him in. The younger spirits amongst
them, chaffing, advised to "get Sherif Ali with his wild men and drive the
Rajah Allang out of the country." Doramin restrained them with difficulty.
He was growing old, and, though his influence had not diminished, the
situation was getting beyond him. This was the state of affairs when Jim,
bolting from the Rajah's stockade, appeared before the chief of the Bugis,
produced the ring, and was received, in a manner of speaking, into the
heart of the community.'</p>
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<h2> CHAPTER 26 </h2>
<p>'Doramin was one of the most remarkable men of his race I had ever seen.
His bulk for a Malay was immense, but he did not look merely fat; he
looked imposing, monumental. This motionless body, clad in rich stuffs,
coloured silks, gold embroideries; this huge head, enfolded in a
red-and-gold headkerchief; the flat, big, round face, wrinkled, furrowed,
with two semicircular heavy folds starting on each side of wide, fierce
nostrils, and enclosing a thick-lipped mouth; the throat like a bull; the
vast corrugated brow overhanging the staring proud eyes—made a whole
that, once seen, can never be forgotten. His impassive repose (he seldom
stirred a limb when once he sat down) was like a display of dignity. He
was never known to raise his voice. It was a hoarse and powerful murmur,
slightly veiled as if heard from a distance. When he walked, two short,
sturdy young fellows, naked to the waist, in white sarongs and with black
skull-caps on the backs of their heads, sustained his elbows; they would
ease him down and stand behind his chair till he wanted to rise, when he
would turn his head slowly, as if with difficulty, to the right and to the
left, and then they would catch him under his armpits and help him up. For
all that, there was nothing of a cripple about him: on the contrary, all
his ponderous movements were like manifestations of a mighty deliberate
force. It was generally believed he consulted his wife as to public
affairs; but nobody, as far as I know, had ever heard them exchange a
single word. When they sat in state by the wide opening it was in silence.
They could see below them in the declining light the vast expanse of the
forest country, a dark sleeping sea of sombre green undulating as far as
the violet and purple range of mountains; the shining sinuosity of the
river like an immense letter S of beaten silver; the brown ribbon of
houses following the sweep of both banks, overtopped by the twin hills
uprising above the nearer tree-tops. They were wonderfully contrasted:
she, light, delicate, spare, quick, a little witch-like, with a touch of
motherly fussiness in her repose; he, facing her, immense and heavy, like
a figure of a man roughly fashioned of stone, with something magnanimous
and ruthless in his immobility. The son of these old people was a most
distinguished youth.</p>
<p>'They had him late in life. Perhaps he was not really so young as he
looked. Four- or five-and-twenty is not so young when a man is already
father of a family at eighteen. When he entered the large room, lined and
carpeted with fine mats, and with a high ceiling of white sheeting, where
the couple sat in state surrounded by a most deferential retinue, he would
make his way straight to Doramin, to kiss his hand—which the other
abandoned to him, majestically—and then would step across to stand
by his mother's chair. I suppose I may say they idolised him, but I never
caught them giving him an overt glance. Those, it is true, were public
functions. The room was generally thronged. The solemn formality of
greetings and leave-takings, the profound respect expressed in gestures,
on the faces, in the low whispers, is simply indescribable. "It's well
worth seeing," Jim had assured me while we were crossing the river, on our
way back. "They are like people in a book, aren't they?" he said
triumphantly. "And Dain Waris—their son—is the best friend
(barring you) I ever had. What Mr. Stein would call a good 'war-comrade.'
I was in luck. Jove! I was in luck when I tumbled amongst them at my last
gasp." He meditated with bowed head, then rousing himself he added—'"Of
course I didn't go to sleep over it, but . . ." He paused again. "It
seemed to come to me," he murmured. "All at once I saw what I had to do .
. ."</p>
<p>'There was no doubt that it had come to him; and it had come through war,
too, as is natural, since this power that came to him was the power to
make peace. It is in this sense alone that might so often is right. You
must not think he had seen his way at once. When he arrived the Bugis
community was in a most critical position. "They were all afraid," he said
to me—"each man afraid for himself; while I could see as plain as
possible that they must do something at once, if they did not want to go
under one after another, what between the Rajah and that vagabond Sherif."
But to see that was nothing. When he got his idea he had to drive it into
reluctant minds, through the bulwarks of fear, of selfishness. He drove it
in at last. And that was nothing. He had to devise the means. He devised
them—an audacious plan; and his task was only half done. He had to
inspire with his own confidence a lot of people who had hidden and absurd
reasons to hang back; he had to conciliate imbecile jealousies, and argue
away all sorts of senseless mistrusts. Without the weight of Doramin's
authority, and his son's fiery enthusiasm, he would have failed. Dain
Waris, the distinguished youth, was the first to believe in him; theirs
was one of those strange, profound, rare friendships between brown and
white, in which the very difference of race seems to draw two human beings
closer by some mystic element of sympathy. Of Dain Waris, his own people
said with pride that he knew how to fight like a white man. This was true;
he had that sort of courage—the courage in the open, I may say—but
he had also a European mind. You meet them sometimes like that, and are
surprised to discover unexpectedly a familiar turn of thought, an
unobscured vision, a tenacity of purpose, a touch of altruism. Of small
stature, but admirably well proportioned, Dain Waris had a proud carriage,
a polished, easy bearing, a temperament like a clear flame. His dusky
face, with big black eyes, was in action expressive, and in repose
thoughtful. He was of a silent disposition; a firm glance, an ironic
smile, a courteous deliberation of manner seemed to hint at great reserves
of intelligence and power. Such beings open to the Western eye, so often
concerned with mere surfaces, the hidden possibilities of races and lands
over which hangs the mystery of unrecorded ages. He not only trusted Jim,
he understood him, I firmly believe. I speak of him because he had
captivated me. His—if I may say so—his caustic placidity, and,
at the same time, his intelligent sympathy with Jim's aspirations,
appealed to me. I seemed to behold the very origin of friendship. If Jim
took the lead, the other had captivated his leader. In fact, Jim the
leader was a captive in every sense. The land, the people, the friendship,
the love, were like the jealous guardians of his body. Every day added a
link to the fetters of that strange freedom. I felt convinced of it, as
from day to day I learned more of the story.</p>
<p>'The story! Haven't I heard the story? I've heard it on the march, in camp
(he made me scour the country after invisible game); I've listened to a
good part of it on one of the twin summits, after climbing the last
hundred feet or so on my hands and knees. Our escort (we had volunteer
followers from village to village) had camped meantime on a bit of level
ground half-way up the slope, and in the still breathless evening the
smell of wood-smoke reached our nostrils from below with the penetrating
delicacy of some choice scent. Voices also ascended, wonderful in their
distinct and immaterial clearness. Jim sat on the trunk of a felled tree,
and pulling out his pipe began to smoke. A new growth of grass and bushes
was springing up; there were traces of an earthwork under a mass of thorny
twigs. "It all started from here," he said, after a long and meditative
silence. On the other hill, two hundred yards across a sombre precipice, I
saw a line of high blackened stakes, showing here and there ruinously—the
remnants of Sherif Ali's impregnable camp.</p>
<p>'But it had been taken, though. That had been his idea. He had mounted
Doramin's old ordnance on the top of that hill; two rusty iron 7-pounders,
a lot of small brass cannon—currency cannon. But if the brass guns
represent wealth, they can also, when crammed recklessly to the muzzle,
send a solid shot to some little distance. The thing was to get them up
there. He showed me where he had fastened the cables, explained how he had
improvised a rude capstan out of a hollowed log turning upon a pointed
stake, indicated with the bowl of his pipe the outline of the earthwork.
The last hundred feet of the ascent had been the most difficult. He had
made himself responsible for success on his own head. He had induced the
war party to work hard all night. Big fires lighted at intervals blazed
all down the slope, "but up here," he explained, "the hoisting gang had to
fly around in the dark." From the top he saw men moving on the hillside
like ants at work. He himself on that night had kept on rushing down and
climbing up like a squirrel, directing, encouraging, watching all along
the line. Old Doramin had himself carried up the hill in his arm-chair.
They put him down on the level place upon the slope, and he sat there in
the light of one of the big fires—"amazing old chap—real old
chieftain," said Jim, "with his little fierce eyes—a pair of immense
flintlock pistols on his knees. Magnificent things, ebony, silver-mounted,
with beautiful locks and a calibre like an old blunderbuss. A present from
Stein, it seems—in exchange for that ring, you know. Used to belong
to good old McNeil. God only knows how <i>he</i> came by them. There he
sat, moving neither hand nor foot, a flame of dry brushwood behind him,
and lots of people rushing about, shouting and pulling round him—the
most solemn, imposing old chap you can imagine. He wouldn't have had much
chance if Sherif Ali had let his infernal crew loose at us and stampeded
my lot. Eh? Anyhow, he had come up there to die if anything went wrong. No
mistake! Jove! It thrilled me to see him there—like a rock. But the
Sherif must have thought us mad, and never troubled to come and see how we
got on. Nobody believed it could be done. Why! I think the very chaps who
pulled and shoved and sweated over it did not believe it could be done!
Upon my word I don't think they did. . . ."</p>
<p>'He stood erect, the smouldering brier-wood in his clutch, with a smile on
his lips and a sparkle in his boyish eyes. I sat on the stump of a tree at
his feet, and below us stretched the land, the great expanse of the
forests, sombre under the sunshine, rolling like a sea, with glints of
winding rivers, the grey spots of villages, and here and there a clearing,
like an islet of light amongst the dark waves of continuous tree-tops. A
brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell
on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off,
along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint
haze, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel.</p>
<p>'And there I was with him, high in the sunshine on the top of that
historic hill of his. He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the old
mankind. He was like a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his
persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never
grow old, that have emerged from the gloom. I don't know why he should
always have appeared to me symbolic. Perhaps this is the real cause of my
interest in his fate. I don't know whether it was exactly fair to him to
remember the incident which had given a new direction to his life, but at
that very moment I remembered very distinctly. It was like a shadow in the
light.'</p>
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