<p><SPAN name="link2HCH0041" id="link2HCH0041"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER 41 </h2>
<p>'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 presented it seemed to him that the white man
there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position
through binoculars. 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 disappearing between
the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown
jumped off and went down to meet him on his side.</p>
<p>'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 pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre
irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of
his life condemned and flouted.</p>
<p>'"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?"</p>
<p>'"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of
this strange conversation between those two men, separated 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!'"</p>
<p>'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.</p>
<p>'"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 <i>you</i> 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.' . . ."</p>
<p>'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 Melanesia 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>I</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,
immaculate, 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!"'</p>
<p><SPAN name="link2HCH0042" id="link2HCH0042"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER 42 </h2>
<p>'I don't think 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
instantly 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 argued 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.</p>
<p>'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 everything 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
breechloaders on board; and I expect to sell the lot in Madagascar, if I
ever get so far—begging my way from ship to ship."</p>
<p>'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?"</p>
<p>'"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.</p>
<p>'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 yellow old face;
and as he went down he glanced askant here and there, never giving up his
fixed idea.</p>
<p>'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 bewilderment he preserves his air of guardianship, of obedience,
of care.</p>
<p>'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 and 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
killing?" "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.</p>
<p>'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."</p>
<p>'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 suffering 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 courage . . . 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."'</p>
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