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<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>
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