"LORD JIM"
CHAPTER 1
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully
built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop
of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare
which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep,
loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged
self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed
a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at
himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat,
apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the
various Eastern ports where he got his living as
ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.
A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything
under the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract and
demonstrate it practically. His work consists in racing
under sail, steam, or oars against other water-clerks for
any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily,
forcing upon him a card—the business card of the
ship-chandler—and on his first visit on shore piloting him
firmly but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop
which is full of things that are eaten and drunk on board
ship; where you can get everything to make her seaworthy and
beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her cable to a book
of gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where her
commander is received like a brother by a ship-chandler he
has never seen before. There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs,
bottles, cigars, writing implements, a copy of harbour
regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the salt of
a three months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The
connection thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship
remains in harbour, by the daily visits of the water-clerk.
To the captain he is faithful like a friend and attentive
like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion
of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on
the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane
occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a
water-clerk who possesses Ability in the abstract has also
the advantage of having been brought up to the sea, he is
worth to his employer a lot of money and some humouring. Jim
had always good wages and as much humouring as would have
bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with black
ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart.
To his employers the reasons he gave were obviously
inadequate. They said 'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back
was turned. This was their criticism on his exquisite
sensibility.
To the white men in the waterside business and to the
captains of ships he was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of
course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not
be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a
sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When
the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly
the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to
another—generally farther east. He kept to seaports because
he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in
the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a
water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising
sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus
in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay,
in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia—and in each
of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk.
Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerable
drove him away for good from seaports and white men, even
into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village,
where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty,
added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They
called him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim.
Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of
fine merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and
peace. Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the
Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in
cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom
an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The
little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock
seen through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there
for centuries, but the trees around probably remembered the
laying of the first stone. Below, the red front of the
rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of
grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at
the back, a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping
glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks. The
living had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim
was one of five sons, and when after a course of light
holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared
itself, he was sent at once to a 'training-ship for officers
of the mercantile marine.'
He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross
top-gallant yards. He was generally liked. He had the third
place in navigation and pulled stroke in the first cutter.
Having a steady head with an excellent physique, he was very
smart aloft. His station was in the fore-top, and often from
there he looked down, with the contempt of a man destined to
shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of
roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while
scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the
factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky,
each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a
volcano. He could see the big ships departing, the
broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little
boats floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendour
of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a stirring life
in the world of adventure.
On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he
would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the
sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people
from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane,
swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely
castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered
reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He
confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on
the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up
the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion
to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.
'Something's up. Come along.'
He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the
ladders. Above could be heard a great scurrying about and
shouting, and when he got through the hatchway he stood
still—as if confounded.
It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened
since noon, stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew
with the strength of a hurricane in fitful bursts that
boomed like salvoes of great guns firing over the ocean. The
rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided, and
between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling
tide, the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore,
the motionless buildings in the driving mist, the broad
ferry-boats pitching ponderously at anchor, the vast
landing-stages heaving up and down and smothered in sprays.
The next gust seemed to blow all this away. The air was full
of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a
furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the
brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him,
and made him hold his breath in awe. He stood still. It
seemed to him he was whirled around.
He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A
coaster running in for shelter had crashed through a
schooner at anchor, and one of the ship's instructors had
seen the accident. A mob of boys clambered on the rails,
clustered round the davits. 'Collision. Just ahead of us.
Mr. Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger against the
mizzen-mast, and he caught hold of a rope. The old
training-ship chained to her moorings quivered all over,
bowing gently head to wind, and with her scanty rigging
humming in a deep bass the breathless song of her youth at
sea. 'Lower away!' He saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly
below the rail, and rushed after her. He heard a splash.
'Let go; clear the falls!' He leaned over. The river
alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter could be
seen in the falling darkness under the spell of tide and
wind, that for a moment held her bound, and tossing abreast
of the ship. A yelling voice in her reached him faintly:
'Keep stroke, you young whelps, if you want to save anybody!
Keep stroke!' And suddenly she lifted high her bow, and,
leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke the spell cast
upon her by the wind and tide.
Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 'Too late,
youngster.' The captain of the ship laid a restraining hand
on that boy, who seemed on the point of leaping overboard,
and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious defeat in his
eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically. 'Better luck next
time. This will teach you to be smart.'
A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back
half full of water, and with two exhausted men washing about
on her bottom boards. The tumult and the menace of wind and
sea now appeared very contemptible to Jim, increasing the
regret of his awe at their inefficient menace. Now he knew
what to think of it. It seemed to him he cared nothing for
the gale. He could affront greater perils. He would do
so—better than anybody. Not a particle of fear was left.
Nevertheless he brooded apart that evening while the bowman
of the cutter—a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey
eyes—was the hero of the lower deck. Eager questioners
crowded round him. He narrated: 'I just saw his head
bobbing, and I dashed my boat-hook in the water. It caught
in his breeches and I nearly went overboard, as I thought I
would, only old Symons let go the tiller and grabbed my
legs—the boat nearly swamped. Old Symons is a fine old chap.
I don't mind a bit him being grumpy with us. He swore at me
all the time he held my leg, but that was only his way of
telling me to stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully
excitable—isn't he? No—not the little fair chap—the other,
the big one with a beard. When we pulled him in he groaned,
"Oh, my leg! oh, my leg!" and turned up his eyes. Fancy such
a big chap fainting like a girl. Would any of you fellows
faint for a jab with a boat-hook?—I wouldn't. It went into
his leg so far.' He showed the boat-hook, which he had
carried below for the purpose, and produced a sensation.
'No, silly! It was not his flesh that held him—his breeches
did. Lots of blood, of course.'
Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had
ministered to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of
terror. He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and
sky for taking him unawares and checking unfairly a generous
readiness for narrow escapes. Otherwise he was rather glad
he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement
had served the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge more than
those who had done the work. When all men flinched, then—he
felt sure—he alone would know how to deal with the spurious
menace of wind and seas. He knew what to think of it. Seen
dispassionately, it seemed contemptible. He could detect no
trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a
staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the
noisy crowd of boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his
avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided courage.
CHAPTER 2
After two years of training he went to sea, and entering
the regions so well known to his imagination, found them
strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew
the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he
had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea,
and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives
bread—but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the
work. This reward eluded him. Yet he could not go back,
because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and
enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his prospects were
good. He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a thorough
knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young,
he became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having
been tested by those events of the sea that show in the
light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his
temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality
of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not
only to others but also to himself.
Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the
earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so
often made apparent as people might think. There are many
shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only
now and then that there appears on the face of facts a
sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something
which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that
this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are
coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength
beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear
out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue
and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy,
to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or
hated; all that is priceless and necessary—the sunshine, the
memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole
precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and
appalling act of taking his life.
Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a
week of which his Scottish captain used to say afterwards,
'Man! it's a pairfect meeracle to me how she lived through
it!' spent many days stretched on his back, dazed, battered,
hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an abyss of
unrest. He did not care what the end would be, and in his
lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when
not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The
fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the
father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the
dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing but the
disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in
the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he
had not to go on deck. But now and again an uncontrollable
rush of anguish would grip him bodily, make him gasp and
writhe under the blankets, and then the unintelligent
brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such
sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at
any cost. Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more
about It.
His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship
arrived at an Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His
recovery was slow, and he was left behind.
There were only two other patients in the white men's
ward: the purser of a gunboat, who had broken his leg
falling down a hatchway; and a kind of railway contractor
from a neighbouring province, afflicted by some mysterious
tropical disease, who held the doctor for an ass, and
indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medicine which his
Tamil servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devotion.
They told each other the story of their lives, played cards
a little, or, yawning and in pyjamas, lounged through the
day in easy-chairs without saying a word. The hospital stood
on a hill, and a gentle breeze entering through the windows,
always flung wide open, brought into the bare room the
softness of the sky, the languor of the earth, the
bewitching breath of the Eastern waters. There were perfumes
in it, suggestions of infinite repose, the gift of endless
dreams. Jim looked every day over the thickets of gardens,
beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of palms
growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a
thoroughfare to the East,—at the roadstead dotted by
garlanded islets, lighted by festal sunshine, its ships like
toys, its brilliant activity resembling a holiday pageant,
with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead and
the smiling peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space
as far as the horizon.
Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into
the town to look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing
offered just then, and, while waiting, he associated
naturally with the men of his calling in the port. These
were of two kinds. Some, very few and seen there but seldom,
led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with
the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They
appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers,
enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of
the sea; and their death was the only event of their
fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable
certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like
himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as
officers of country ships. They had now a horror of the home
service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty,
and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the
eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short
passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the
distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of
hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the
verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement,
serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes—would have served the
devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked
everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of
a boat on the coast of China—a soft thing; how this one had
an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing
well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said—in their
actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected
the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to
lounge safely through existence.
To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at
first more unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length
he found a fascination in the sight of those men, in their
appearance of doing so well on such a small allowance of
danger and toil. In time, beside the original disdain there
grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly, giving up
the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the
Patna.
The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean
like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a
condemned water-tank. She was owned by a Chinaman, chartered
by an Arab, and commanded by a sort of renegade New South
Wales German, very anxious to curse publicly his native
country, but who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck's
victorious policy, brutalised all those he was not afraid
of, and wore a 'blood-and-iron' air,' combined with a purple
nose and a red moustache. After she had been painted outside
and whitewashed inside, eight hundred pilgrims (more or
less) were driven on board of her as she lay with steam up
alongside a wooden jetty.
They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed
in urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in
with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a
word, a murmur, or a look back; and when clear of confining
rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and
aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner
recesses of the ship—like water filling a cistern, like
water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising
silently even with the rim. Eight hundred men and women with
faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had
collected there, coming from north and south and from the
outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths,
descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows,
crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing
through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange
fears, upheld by one desire. They came from solitary huts in
the wilderness, from populous campongs, from villages by the
sea. At the call of an idea they had left their forests,
their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their
prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth
and the graves of their fathers. They came covered with
dust, with sweat, with grime, with rags—the strong men at
the head of family parties, the lean old men pressing
forward without hope of return; young boys with fearless
eyes glancing curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long
hair; the timid women muffled up and clasping to their
breasts, wrapped in loose ends of soiled head-cloths, their
sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of an exacting
belief.
'Look at dese cattle,' said the German skipper to his new
chief mate.
An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He
walked slowly aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown
and large turban. A string of servants followed, loaded with
his luggage; the Patna cast off and backed away from the
wharf.
She was headed between two small islets, crossed
obliquely the anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung
through half a circle in the shadow of a hill, then ranged
close to a ledge of foaming reefs. The Arab, standing up
aft, recited aloud the prayer of travellers by sea. He
invoked the favour of the Most High upon that journey,
implored His blessing on men's toil and on the secret
purposes of their hearts; the steamer pounded in the dusk
the calm water of the Strait; and far astern of the pilgrim
ship a screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on a
treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame,
as if in derision of her errand of faith.
She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her
way through the 'One-degree' passage. She held on straight
for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching
and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed
all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of
strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of
that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without
a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle—viscous,
stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over
that plain, luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of
smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a white
ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a
track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.
Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his
revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged
with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance
astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the
concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the
men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into
the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance
ahead of her advancing bows. The five whites on board lived
amidships, isolated from the human cargo. The awnings
covered the deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a
faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the
presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the
ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing
one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for
ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely
under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and
smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a
flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
The nights descended on her like a benediction.
CHAPTER 3
A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars,
together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed
upon the earth the assurance of everlasting security. The
young moon recurved, and shining low in the west, was like a
slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the
Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice,
extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark
horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its
beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on
each side of the Patna two deep folds of water, permanent
and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their
straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam
bursting in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few
undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the
sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, subsided
splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular
stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the
moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.
Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude
of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the
silent aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love
upon the placid tenderness of a mother's face. Below the
roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men and
to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and
the iron shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an
exacting faith slept on mats, on blankets, on bare planks,
on every deck, in all the dark corners, wrapped in dyed
cloths, muffled in soiled rags, with their heads resting on
small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent forearms:
the men, the women, the children; the old with the young,
the decrepit with the lusty—all equal before sleep, death's
brother.
A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the
ship, passed steadily through the long gloom between the
high bulwarks, swept over the rows of prone bodies; a few
dim flames in globe-lamps were hung short here and there
under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles of light
thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing
vibration of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed
eyelids, a dark hand with silver rings, a meagre limb draped
in a torn covering, a head bent back, a naked foot, a throat
bared and stretched as if offering itself to the knife. The
well-to-do had made for their families shelters with heavy
boxes and dusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with all
they had on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the
lone old men slept, with drawn-up legs, upon their
prayer-carpets, with their hands over their ears and one
elbow on each side of the face; a father, his shoulders up
and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a boy
who slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm
commandingly extended; a woman covered from head to foot,
like a corpse, with a piece of white sheeting, had a naked
child in the hollow of each arm; the Arab's belongings,
piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken outlines, with
a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of vague
forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of
a deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an
old sword leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a
tin coffee-pot. The patent log on the taffrail periodically
rang a single tinkling stroke for every mile traversed on an
errand of faith. Above the mass of sleepers a faint and
patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a troubled
dream; and short metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in
the depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel, the
violent slam of a furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the
men handling the mysterious things below had their breasts
full of fierce anger: while the slim high hull of the
steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare
masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters
under the inaccessible serenity of the sky.
Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence
were loud to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful
stars: his eyes, roaming about the line of the horizon,
seemed to gaze hungrily into the unattainable, and did not
see the shadow of the coming event. The only shadow on the
sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from
the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly
dissolving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost
motionless, steered, one on each side of the wheel, whose
brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval of light thrown
out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black fingers
alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving
spokes, appeared in the illumined part; the links of
wheel-chains ground heavily in the grooves of the barrel.
Jim would glance at the compass, would glance around the
unattainable horizon, would stretch himself till his joints
cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very
excess of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the
invincible aspect of the peace, he felt he cared for nothing
that could happen to him to the end of his days. From time
to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged out with four
drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths
of the sea presented a shiny surface under the light of a
bull's-eye lamp lashed to a stanchion, a surface as level
and smooth as the glimmering surface of the waters. Parallel
rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the ship's
position at last noon was marked with a small black cross,
and the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim
figured the course of the ship—the path of souls towards the
holy place, the promise of salvation, the reward of eternal
life—while the pencil with its sharp end touching the Somali
coast lay round and still like a naked ship's spar floating
in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,'
thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for
this high peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts
would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and
the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the
best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality.
They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they
passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his
soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine
philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was
nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea
that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and
when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of
the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea
as the black line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.
The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the
stoke-hold ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him
the end of his watch was near. He sighed with content, with
regret as well at having to part from that serenity which
fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts. He was a
little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor running
through every limb as though all the blood in his body had
turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in
pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of
face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right
staring stupid and glassy, he hung his big head over the
chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something
obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his
fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a
voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a
wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double
chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his
jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but
the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first
time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for
ever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that
lurks in the world we love: in our own hearts we trust for
our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the sights
that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in
the air that fills our lungs.
The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly
downwards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the
waters, and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down
nearer to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the
stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an
opaque sea. The ship moved so smoothly that her onward
motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she
had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces
of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm
solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations. 'Hot is
no name for it down below,' said a voice.
Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented
an unmoved breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to
appear pointedly unaware of your existence unless it suited
his purpose to turn at you with a devouring glare before he
let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon that came like
a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt; the
second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading
with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the
tale of his complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up
here, and what was the use of them in the world he would be
blowed if he could see. The poor devils of engineers had to
get the ship along anyhow, and they could very well do the
rest too; by gosh they—'Shut up!' growled the German
stolidly. 'Oh yes! Shut up—and when anything goes wrong you
fly to us, don't you?' went on the other. He was more than
half cooked, he expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind
how much he sinned, because these last three days he had
passed through a fine course of training for the place where
the bad boys go when they die—b'gosh, he had—besides being
made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below. The
durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap
rattled and banged down there like an old deck-winch, only
more so; and what made him risk his life every night and day
that God made amongst the refuse of a breaking-up yard
flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more than he
could tell. He must have been born reckless, b'gosh. He . .
. 'Where did you get drink?' inquired the German, very
savage; but motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a
clumsy effigy of a man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went
on smiling at the retreating horizon; his heart was full of
generous impulses, and his thought was contemplating his own
superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with amiable
scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a
shadowy figure with flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain.
You're far too mean, b'gosh. You would let a good man die
sooner than give him a drop of schnapps. That's what you
Germans call economy. Penny wise, pound foolish.' He became
sentimental. The chief had given him a four-finger nip about
ten o'clock—'only one, s'elp me!'—good old chief; but as to
getting the old fraud out of his bunk—a five-ton crane
couldn't do it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping
sweetly like a little child, with a bottle of prime brandy
under his pillow. From the thick throat of the commander of
the Patna came a low rumble, on which the sound of the word
schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious feather in
a faint stir of air. He and the chief engineer had been
cronies for a good few years—serving the same jovial,
crafty, old Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings
of red silk plaited into the venerable grey hairs of his
pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the Patna's home-port was
that these two in the way of brazen peculation 'had done
together pretty well everything you can think of.' Outwardly
they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of
soft fleshy curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head
long and bony like the head of an old horse, with sunken
cheeks, with sunken temples, with an indifferent glazed
glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
somewhere—in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he
probably did not care to remember himself the exact
locality, nor yet the cause of his shipwreck. He had been,
in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly out of his ship twenty
years ago or more, and it might have been so much worse for
him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these
seas and men of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got
on' after a sort. He was eager to let strangers know in a
dismal mumble that he was 'an old stager out here.' When he
moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his clothes; his
walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish,
doctored tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood
stem four feet long, with the imbecile gravity of a thinker
evolving a system of philosophy from the hazy glimpse of a
truth. He was usually anything but free with his private
store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of
Wapping, what with the unexpectedness of the treat and the
strength of the stuff, had become very happy, cheeky, and
talkative. The fury of the New South Wales German was
extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim, faintly
amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he
could get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were
irritating like a gun that hangs fire; those men did not
belong to the world of heroic adventure; they weren't bad
chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . . His gorge rose
at the mass of panting flesh from which issued gurgling
mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any
other thing. The quality of these men did not matter; he
rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not touch him; he
shared the air they breathed, but he was different. . . .
Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life was
easy and he was too sure of himself—too sure of himself to .
. . The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious
doze on his feet was thinner than a thread in a spider's
web.
The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the
consideration of his finances and of his courage.
'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You
ought to know by this time the chief ain't free-hearted
enough to make a sparrow drunk, b'gosh. I've never been the
worse for liquor in my life; the stuff ain't made yet that
would make me drunk. I could drink liquid fire
against your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as
a cucumber. If I thought I was drunk I would jump
overboard—do away with myself, b'gosh. I would! Straight!
And I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect me to
take the air on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that
vermin down there? Likely—ain't it! And I am not afraid of
anything you can do.'
The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook
them a little without a word.
'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with
the enthusiasm of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of
doing all the bloomin' work in this rotten hooker, b'gosh!
And a jolly good thing for you that there are some of us
about the world that aren't afraid of their lives, or where
would you be—you and this old thing here with her plates
like brown paper—brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very fine
for you—you get a power of pieces out of her one way and
another; but what about me—what do I get? A measly hundred
and fifty dollars a month and find yourself. I wish to ask
you respectfully—respectfully, mind—who wouldn't chuck a
dratted job like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it ain't!
Only I am one of them fearless fellows . . .'
He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if
demonstrating in the air the shape and extent of his valour;
his thin voice darted in prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he
tiptoed back and forth for the better emphasis of utterance,
and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he had been
clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!' as he tumbled; an
instant of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the
skipper staggered forward by common accord, and catching
themselves up, stood very stiff and still gazing, amazed, at
the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they looked upwards
at the stars.
What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went
on. Had the earth been checked in her course? They could not
understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a
cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as
if poised on the brow of yawning destruction. The engineer
rebounded vertically full length and collapsed again into a
vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled
accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of
thunder infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more
than a vibration, passed slowly, and the ship quivered in
response, as if the thunder had growled deep down in the
water. The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel glittered
towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to
rise a few inches in succession through its whole length, as
though it had become pliable, and settled down again rigidly
to its work of cleaving the smooth surface of the sea. Its
quivering stopped, and the faint noise of thunder ceased all
at once, as though the ship had steamed across a narrow belt
of vibrating water and of humming air.
CHAPTER 4
A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed
questions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this
experience, he said, speaking of the ship: 'She went over
whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling over a stick.'
The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at
facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police
court of an Eastern port. He stood elevated in the
witness-box, with burning cheeks in a cool lofty room: the
big framework of punkahs moved gently to and fro high above
his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him out
of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of
faces attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting
in orderly rows upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the
fascination of his voice. It was very loud, it rang
startling in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in
the world, for the terribly distinct questions that extorted
his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain
within his breast,—came to him poignant and silent like the
terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court
the sun blazed—within was the wind of great punkahs that
made you shiver, the shame that made you burn, the attentive
eyes whose glance stabbed. The face of the presiding
magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at him
deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical
assessors. The light of a broad window under the ceiling
fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men,
and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big
court-room where the audience seemed composed of staring
shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from
him, as if facts could explain anything!
'After you had concluded you had collided with something
floating awash, say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered
by your captain to go forward and ascertain if there was any
damage done. Did you think it likely from the force of the
blow?' asked the assessor sitting to the left. He had a thin
horseshoe beard, salient cheek-bones, and with both elbows
on the desk clasped his rugged hands before his face,
looking at Jim with thoughtful blue eyes; the other, a
heavy, scornful man, thrown back in his seat, his left arm
extended full length, drummed delicately with his
finger-tips on a blotting-pad: in the middle the magistrate
upright in the roomy arm-chair, his head inclined slightly
on the shoulder, had his arms crossed on his breast and a
few flowers in a glass vase by the side of his inkstand.
'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to
make no noise for fear of creating a panic. I thought the
precaution reasonable. I took one of the lamps that were
hung under the awnings and went forward. After opening the
forepeak hatch I heard splashing in there. I lowered then
the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard, and saw that the
forepeak was more than half full of water already. I knew
then there must be a big hole below the water-line.' He
paused.
'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the
blotting-pad; his fingers played incessantly, touching the
paper without noise.
'I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a
little startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and
so very suddenly. I knew there was no other bulkhead in the
ship but the collision bulkhead separating the forepeak from
the forehold. I went back to tell the captain. I came upon
the second engineer getting up at the foot of the
bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he thought his
left arm was broken; he had slipped on the top step when
getting down while I was forward. He exclaimed, "My God!
That rotten bulkhead'll give way in a minute, and the damned
thing will go down under us like a lump of lead." He pushed
me away with his right arm and ran before me up the ladder,
shouting as he climbed. His left arm hung by his side. I
followed up in time to see the captain rush at him and knock
him down flat on his back. He did not strike him again: he
stood bending over him and speaking angrily but quite low. I
fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't go and stop
the engines, instead of making a row about it on deck. I
heard him say, "Get up! Run! fly!" He swore also. The
engineer slid down the starboard ladder and bolted round the
skylight to the engine-room companion which was on the port
side. He moaned as he ran. . . .'
He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme
vividness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning
of the engineer for the better information of these men who
wanted facts. After his first feeling of revolt he had come
round to the view that only a meticulous precision of
statement would bring out the true horror behind the
appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager
to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses,
occupying their place in space and time, requiring for their
existence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven
minutes by the watch; they made a whole that had features,
shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be
remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something
invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt
within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body. He was
anxious to make this clear. This had not been a common
affair, everything in it had been of the utmost importance,
and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on
talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and
while his utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew
round and round the serried circle of facts that had surged
up all about him to cut him off from the rest of his kind:
it was like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned
within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a
crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may
squeeze itself and escape. This awful activity of mind made
him hesitate at times in his speech. . . .
'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge;
he seemed calm enough, only he stumbled several times; and
once as I stood speaking to him he walked right into me as
though he had been stone-blind. He made no definite answer
to what I had to tell. He mumbled to himself; all I heard of
it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!"
and "infernal steam!"—something about steam. I thought . .
.'
He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut
short his speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely
discouraged and weary. He was coming to that, he was coming
to that—and now, checked brutally, he had to answer by yes
or no. He answered truthfully by a curt 'Yes, I did'; and
fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy eyes, he held
his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed
within him. He was made to answer another question so much
to the point and so useless, then waited again. His mouth
was tastelessly dry, as though he had been eating dust, then
salt and bitter as after a drink of sea-water. He wiped his
damp forehead, passed his tongue over parched lips, felt a
shiver run down his back. The big assessor had dropped his
eyelids, and drummed on without a sound, careless and
mournful; the eyes of the other above the sunburnt, clasped
fingers seemed to glow with kindliness; the magistrate had
swayed forward; his pale face hovered near the flowers, and
then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair, he rested
his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs
eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound
about in voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting
together very hot and in drill suits that seemed to fit them
as close as their skins, and holding their round pith hats
on their knees; while gliding along the walls the court
peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted rapidly
to and fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed, red turban on
head, as noiseless as ghosts, and on the alert like so many
retrievers.
Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers,
rested upon a white man who sat apart from the others, with
his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced
straight, interested and clear. Jim answered another
question and was tempted to cry out, 'What's the good of
this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot slightly,
bit his lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the eyes
of the white man. The glance directed at him was not the
fascinated stare of the others. It was an act of intelligent
volition. Jim between two questions forgot himself so far as
to find leisure for a thought. This fellow—ran the
thought—looks at me as though he could see somebody or
something past my shoulder. He had come across that man
before—in the street perhaps. He was positive he had never
spoken to him. For days, for many days, he had spoken to no
one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless converse
with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a
wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At present he was answering
questions that did not matter though they had a purpose, but
he doubted whether he would ever again speak out as long as
he lived. The sound of his own truthful statements confirmed
his deliberate opinion that speech was of no use to him any
longer. That man there seemed to be aware of his hopeless
difficulty. Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely,
as after a final parting.
And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world,
Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember
him at length, in detail and audibly.
Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in
motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep
dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of
each cane-chair harboured a silent listener. Now and then a
small red glow would move abruptly, and expanding light up
the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound
repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes
overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and
with the very first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at
rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his
spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and
were speaking through his lips from the past.
CHAPTER 5
'Oh yes. I attended the inquiry,' he would say, 'and to
this day I haven't left off wondering why I went. I am
willing to believe each of us has a guardian angel, if you
fellows will concede to me that each of us has a familiar
devil as well. I want you to own up, because I don't like to
feel exceptional in any way, and I know I have him—the
devil, I mean. I haven't seen him, of course, but I go upon
circumstantial evidence. He is there right enough, and,
being malicious, he lets me in for that kind of thing. What
kind of thing, you ask? Why, the inquiry thing, the
yellow-dog thing—you wouldn't think a mangy, native tyke
would be allowed to trip up people in the verandah of a
magistrate's court, would you?—the kind of thing that by
devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run
up against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden
plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the
sight of me for their infernal confidences; as though,
forsooth, I had no confidences to make to myself, as
though—God help me!—I didn't have enough confidential
information about myself to harrow my own soul till the end
of my appointed time. And what I have done to be thus
favoured I want to know. I declare I am as full of my own
concerns as the next man, and I have as much memory as the
average pilgrim in this valley, so you see I am not
particularly fit to be a receptacle of confessions. Then
why? Can't tell—unless it be to make time pass away after
dinner. Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely
good, and in consequence these men here look upon a quiet
rubber as a tumultuous occupation. They wallow in your good
chairs and think to themselves, "Hang exertion. Let that
Marlow talk."
'Talk? So be it. And it's easy enough to talk of Master
Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above the
sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed
evening of freshness and starlight that would make the best
of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick
our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and
every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go
out decently in the end—but not so sure of it after all—and
with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows
with right and left. Of course there are men here and there
to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with
a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some
fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is
told—before the end is told—even if there happens to be any
end to it.
'My eyes met his for the first time at that inquiry. You
must know that everybody connected in any way with the sea
was there, because the affair had been notorious for days,
ever since that mysterious cable message came from Aden to
start us all cackling. I say mysterious, because it was so
in a sense though it contained a naked fact, about as naked
and ugly as a fact can well be. The whole waterside talked
of nothing else. First thing in the morning as I was
dressing in my state-room, I would hear through the bulkhead
my Parsee Dubash jabbering about the Patna with the steward,
while he drank a cup of tea, by favour, in the pantry. No
sooner on shore I would meet some acquaintance, and the
first remark would be, "Did you ever hear of anything to
beat this?" and according to his kind the man would smile
cynically, or look sad, or let out a swear or two. Complete
strangers would accost each other familiarly, just for the
sake of easing their minds on the subject: every confounded
loafer in the town came in for a harvest of drinks over this
affair: you heard of it in the harbour office, at every
ship-broker's, at your agent's, from whites, from natives,
from half-castes, from the very boatmen squatting half naked
on the stone steps as you went up—by Jove! There was some
indignation, not a few jokes, and no end of discussions as
to what had become of them, you know. This went on for a
couple of weeks or more, and the opinion that whatever was
mysterious in this affair would turn out to be tragic as
well, began to prevail, when one fine morning, as I was
standing in the shade by the steps of the harbour office, I
perceived four men walking towards me along the quay. I
wondered for a while where that queer lot had sprung from,
and suddenly, I may say, I shouted to myself, "Here they
are!"
'There they were, sure enough, three of them as large as
life, and one much larger of girth than any living man has a
right to be, just landed with a good breakfast inside of
them from an outward-bound Dale Line steamer that had come
in about an hour after sunrise. There could be no mistake; I
spotted the jolly skipper of the Patna at the first glance:
the fattest man in the whole blessed tropical belt clear
round that good old earth of ours. Moreover, nine months or
so before, I had come across him in Samarang. His steamer
was loading in the Roads, and he was abusing the tyrannical
institutions of the German empire, and soaking himself in
beer all day long and day after day in De Jongh's back-shop,
till De Jongh, who charged a guilder for every bottle
without as much as the quiver of an eyelid, would beckon me
aside, and, with his little leathery face all puckered up,
declare confidentially, "Business is business, but this man,
captain, he make me very sick. Tfui!"
'I was looking at him from the shade. He was hurrying on
a little in advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought
out his bulk in a startling way. He made me think of a
trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was
extravagantly gorgeous too—got up in a soiled sleeping-suit,
bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair
of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's
cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for
him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big
head. You understand a man like that hasn't the ghost of a
chance when it comes to borrowing clothes. Very well. On he
came in hot haste, without a look right or left, passed
within three feet of me, and in the innocence of his heart
went on pelting upstairs into the harbour office to make his
deposition, or report, or whatever you like to call it.
'It appears he addressed himself in the first instance to
the principal shipping-master. Archie Ruthvel had just come
in, and, as his story goes, was about to begin his arduous
day by giving a dressing-down to his chief clerk. Some of
you might have known him—an obliging little Portuguese
half-caste with a miserably skinny neck, and always on the
hop to get something from the shipmasters in the way of
eatables—a piece of salt pork, a bag of biscuits, a few
potatoes, or what not. One voyage, I recollect, I tipped him
a live sheep out of the remnant of my sea-stock: not that I
wanted him to do anything for me—he couldn't, you know—but
because his childlike belief in the sacred right to
perquisites quite touched my heart. It was so strong as to
be almost beautiful. The race—the two races rather—and the
climate . . . However, never mind. I know where I have a
friend for life.
'Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture—on
official morality, I suppose—when he heard a kind of subdued
commotion at his back, and turning his head he saw, in his
own words, something round and enormous, resembling a
sixteen-hundred-weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in striped
flannelette, up-ended in the middle of the large floor space
in the office. He declares he was so taken aback that for
quite an appreciable time he did not realise the thing was
alive, and sat still wondering for what purpose and by what
means that object had been transported in front of his desk.
The archway from the ante-room was crowded with
punkah-pullers, sweepers, police peons, the coxswain and
crew of the harbour steam-launch, all craning their necks
and almost climbing on each other's backs. Quite a riot. By
that time the fellow had managed to tug and jerk his hat
clear of his head, and advanced with slight bows at Ruthvel,
who told me the sight was so discomposing that for some time
he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition
wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but
intrepid, and little by little it dawned upon Archie that
this was a development of the Patna case. He says that as
soon as he understood who it was before him he felt quite
unwell—Archie is so sympathetic and easily upset—but pulled
himself together and shouted "Stop! I can't listen to you.
You must go to the Master Attendant. I can't possibly listen
to you. Captain Elliot is the man you want to see. This way,
this way." He jumped up, ran round that long counter,
pulled, shoved: the other let him, surprised but obedient at
first, and only at the door of the private office some sort
of animal instinct made him hang back and snort like a
frightened bullock. "Look here! what's up? Let go! Look
here!" Archie flung open the door without knocking. "The
master of the Patna, sir," he shouts. "Go in, captain." He
saw the old man lift his head from some writing so sharp
that his nose-nippers fell off, banged the door to, and fled
to his desk, where he had some papers waiting for his
signature: but he says the row that burst out in there was
so awful that he couldn't collect his senses sufficiently to
remember the spelling of his own name. Archie's the most
sensitive shipping-master in the two hemispheres. He
declares he felt as though he had thrown a man to a hungry
lion. No doubt the noise was great. I heard it down below,
and I have every reason to believe it was heard clear across
the Esplanade as far as the band-stand. Old father Elliot
had a great stock of words and could shout—and didn't mind
who he shouted at either. He would have shouted at the
Viceroy himself. As he used to tell me: "I am as high as I
can get; my pension is safe. I've a few pounds laid by, and
if they don't like my notions of duty I would just as soon
go home as not. I am an old man, and I have always spoken my
mind. All I care for now is to see my girls married before I
die." He was a little crazy on that point. His three
daughters were awfully nice, though they resembled him
amazingly, and on the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view
of their matrimonial prospects the office would read it in
his eye and tremble, because, they said, he was sure to have
somebody for breakfast. However, that morning he did not eat
the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to carry on the
metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and—ah!
ejected him again.
'Thus in a very few moments I saw his monstrous bulk
descend in haste and stand still on the outer steps. He had
stopped close to me for the purpose of profound meditation:
his large purple cheeks quivered. He was biting his thumb,
and after a while noticed me with a sidelong vexed look. The
other three chaps that had landed with him made a little
group waiting at some distance. There was a sallow-faced,
mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long
individual in a blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no
stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey moustaches,
who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility. The
third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his
hands in his pockets, turning his back on the other two who
appeared to be talking together earnestly. He stared across
the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust and
venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the
driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave
himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The
young chap, making no movement, not even stirring his head,
just stared into the sunshine. This was my first view of
Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the
young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced,
firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone
on; and, looking at him, knowing all he knew and a little
more too, I was as angry as though I had detected him trying
to get something out of me by false pretences. He had no
business to look so sound. I thought to myself—well, if this
sort can go wrong like that . . . and I felt as though I
could fling down my hat and dance on it from sheer
mortification, as I once saw the skipper of an Italian
barque do because his duffer of a mate got into a mess with
his anchors when making a flying moor in a roadstead full of
ships. I asked myself, seeing him there apparently so much
at ease—is he silly? is he callous? He seemed ready to start
whistling a tune. And note, I did not care a rap about the
behaviour of the other two. Their persons somehow fitted the
tale that was public property, and was going to be the
subject of an official inquiry. "That old mad rogue upstairs
called me a hound," said the captain of the Patna. I can't
tell whether he recognised me—I rather think he did; but at
any rate our glances met. He glared—I smiled; hound was the
very mildest epithet that had reached me through the open
window. "Did he?" I said from some strange inability to hold
my tongue. He nodded, bit his thumb again, swore under his
breath: then lifting his head and looking at me with sullen
and passionate impudence—"Bah! the Pacific is big, my
friendt. You damned Englishmen can do your worst; I know
where there's plenty room for a man like me: I am well
aguaindt in Apia, in Honolulu, in . . ." He paused
reflectively, while without effort I could depict to myself
the sort of people he was "aguaindt" with in those places. I
won't make a secret of it that I had been "aguaindt" with
not a few of that sort myself. There are times when a man
must act as though life were equally sweet in any company.
I've known such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now
pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a
good many of that bad company from want of moral—moral—what
shall I say?—posture, or from some other equally profound
cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more
amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you
fellows ask to sit at your table without any real
necessity—from habit, from cowardice, from good-nature, from
a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons.
'"You Englishmen are all rogues," went on my patriotic
Flensborg or Stettin Australian. I really don't recollect
now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was
defiled by being the nest of that precious bird. "What are
you to shout? Eh? You tell me? You no better than other
people, and that old rogue he make Gottam fuss with me." His
thick carcass trembled on its legs that were like a pair of
pillars; it trembled from head to foot. "That's what you
English always make—make a tam' fuss—for any little thing,
because I was not born in your tam' country. Take away my
certificate. Take it. I don't want the certificate. A man
like me don't want your verfluchte certificate. I shpit on
it." He spat. "I vill an Amerigan citizen begome," he cried,
fretting and fuming and shuffling his feet as if to free his
ankles from some invisible and mysterious grasp that would
not let him get away from that spot. He made himself so warm
that the top of his bullet head positively smoked. Nothing
mysterious prevented me from going away: curiosity is the
most obvious of sentiments, and it held me there to see the
effect of a full information upon that young fellow who,
hands in pockets, and turning his back upon the sidewalk,
gazed across the grass-plots of the Esplanade at the yellow
portico of the Malabar Hotel with the air of a man about to
go for a walk as soon as his friend is ready. That's how he
looked, and it was odious. I waited to see him overwhelmed,
confounded, pierced through and through, squirming like an
impaled beetle—and I was half afraid to see it too—if you
understand what I mean. Nothing more awful than to watch a
man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more
than criminal weakness. The commonest sort of fortitude
prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is
from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some
parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every
bush—from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or
unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or
maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is
safe. We are snared into doing things for which we get
called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet
the spirit may well survive—survive the condemnation,
survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things—they look
small enough sometimes too—by which some of us are totally
and completely undone. I watched the youngster there. I
liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from
the right place; he was one of us. He stood there for all
the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means
clever or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon
honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage. I don't mean
military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of
courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations
straight in the face—a readiness unintellectual enough,
goodness knows, but without pose—a power of resistance,
don't you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless—an
unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and
inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive
corruption of men—backed by a faith invulnerable to the
strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the
solicitation of ideas. Hang ideas! They are tramps,
vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each
taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some
crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling
to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
'This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was
outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to
feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that
is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the
perversions of—of nerves, let us say. He was the kind of
fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in
charge of the deck—figuratively and professionally speaking.
I say I would, and I ought to know. Haven't I turned out
youngsters enough in my time, for the service of the Red
Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft whose whole
secret could be expressed in one short sentence, and yet
must be driven afresh every day into young heads till it
becomes the component part of every waking thought—till it
is present in every dream of their young sleep! The sea has
been good to me, but when I remember all these boys that
passed through my hands, some grown up now and some drowned
by this time, but all good stuff for the sea, I don't think
I have done badly by it either. Were I to go home to-morrow,
I bet that before two days passed over my head some sunburnt
young chief mate would overtake me at some dock gateway or
other, and a fresh deep voice speaking above my hat would
ask: "Don't you remember me, sir? Why! little So-and-so.
Such and such a ship. It was my first voyage." And I would
remember a bewildered little shaver, no higher than the back
of this chair, with a mother and perhaps a big sister on the
quay, very quiet but too upset to wave their handkerchiefs
at the ship that glides out gently between the pier-heads;
or perhaps some decent middle-aged father who had come early
with his boy to see him off, and stays all the morning,
because he is interested in the windlass apparently, and
stays too long, and has got to scramble ashore at last with
no time at all to say good-bye. The mud pilot on the poop
sings out to me in a drawl, "Hold her with the check line
for a moment, Mister Mate. There's a gentleman wants to get
ashore. . . . Up with you, sir. Nearly got carried off to
Talcahuano, didn't you? Now's your time; easy does it. . . .
All right. Slack away again forward there." The tugs,
smoking like the pit of perdition, get hold and churn the
old river into fury; the gentleman ashore is dusting his
knees—the benevolent steward has shied his umbrella after
him. All very proper. He has offered his bit of sacrifice to
the sea, and now he may go home pretending he thinks nothing
of it; and the little willing victim shall be very sea-sick
before next morning. By-and-by, when he has learned all the
little mysteries and the one great secret of the craft, he
shall be fit to live or die as the sea may decree; and the
man who had taken a hand in this fool game, in which the sea
wins every toss, will be pleased to have his back slapped by
a heavy young hand, and to hear a cheery sea-puppy voice:
"Do you remember me, sir? The little So-and-so."
'I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your
life at least you had gone the right way to work. I have
been thus slapped, and I have winced, for the slap was
heavy, and I have glowed all day long and gone to bed
feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of that hearty
thump. Don't I remember the little So-and-so's! I tell you I
ought to know the right kind of looks. I would have trusted
the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single
glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes—and, by Jove! it
wouldn't have been safe. There are depths of horror in that
thought. He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there
was some infernal alloy in his metal. How much? The least
thing—the least drop of something rare and accursed; the
least drop!—but he made you—standing there with his
don't-care-hang air—he made you wonder whether perchance he
were nothing more rare than brass.
'I couldn't believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him
squirm for the honour of the craft. The other two no-account
chaps spotted their captain, and began to move slowly
towards us. They chatted together as they strolled, and I
did not care any more than if they had not been visible to
the naked eye. They grinned at each other—might have been
exchanging jokes, for all I know. I saw that with one of
them it was a case of a broken arm; and as to the long
individual with grey moustaches he was the chief engineer,
and in various ways a pretty notorious personality. They
were nobodies. They approached. The skipper gazed in an
inanimate way between his feet: he seemed to be swollen to
an unnatural size by some awful disease, by the mysterious
action of an unknown poison. He lifted his head, saw the two
before him waiting, opened his mouth with an extraordinary,
sneering contortion of his puffed face—to speak to them, I
suppose—and then a thought seemed to strike him. His thick,
purplish lips came together without a sound, he went off in
a resolute waddle to the gharry and began to jerk at the
door-handle with such a blind brutality of impatience that I
expected to see the whole concern overturned on its side,
pony and all. The driver, shaken out of his meditation over
the sole of his foot, displayed at once all the signs of
intense terror, and held with both hands, looking round from
his box at this vast carcass forcing its way into his
conveyance. The little machine shook and rocked
tumultuously, and the crimson nape of that lowered neck, the
size of those straining thighs, the immense heaving of that
dingy, striped green-and-orange back, the whole burrowing
effort of that gaudy and sordid mass, troubled one's sense
of probability with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of
those grotesque and distinct visions that scare and
fascinate one in a fever. He disappeared. I half expected
the roof to split in two, the little box on wheels to burst
open in the manner of a ripe cotton-pod—but it only sank
with a click of flattened springs, and suddenly one venetian
blind rattled down. His shoulders reappeared, jammed in the
small opening; his head hung out, distended and tossing like
a captive balloon, perspiring, furious, spluttering. He
reached for the gharry-wallah with vicious flourishes of a
fist as dumpy and red as a lump of raw meat. He roared at
him to be off, to go on. Where? Into the Pacific, perhaps.
The driver lashed; the pony snorted, reared once, and darted
off at a gallop. Where? To Apia? To Honolulu? He had 6000
miles of tropical belt to disport himself in, and I did not
hear the precise address. A snorting pony snatched him into
"Ewigkeit" in the twinkling of an eye, and I never saw him
again; and, what's more, I don't know of anybody that ever
had a glimpse of him after he departed from my knowledge
sitting inside a ramshackle little gharry that fled round
the corner in a white smother of dust. He departed,
disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly enough it
looked as though he had taken that gharry with him, for
never again did I come across a sorrel pony with a slit ear
and a lackadaisical Tamil driver afflicted by a sore foot.
The Pacific is indeed big; but whether he found a place for
a display of his talents in it or not, the fact remains he
had flown into space like a witch on a broomstick. The
little chap with his arm in a sling started to run after the
carriage, bleating, "Captain! I say, Captain! I
sa-a-ay!"—but after a few steps stopped short, hung his
head, and walked back slowly. At the sharp rattle of the
wheels the young fellow spun round where he stood. He made
no other movement, no gesture, no sign, and remained facing
in the new direction after the gharry had swung out of
sight.
'All this happened in much less time than it takes to
tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow
speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions. Next
moment the half-caste clerk, sent by Archie to look a little
after the poor castaways of the Patna, came upon the scene.
He ran out eager and bareheaded, looking right and left, and
very full of his mission. It was doomed to be a failure as
far as the principal person was concerned, but he approached
the others with fussy importance, and, almost immediately,
found himself involved in a violent altercation with the
chap that carried his arm in a sling, and who turned out to
be extremely anxious for a row. He wasn't going to be
ordered about—"not he, b'gosh." He wouldn't be terrified
with a pack of lies by a cocky half-bred little
quill-driver. He was not going to be bullied by "no object
of that sort," if the story were true "ever so"! He bawled
his wish, his desire, his determination to go to bed. "If
you weren't a God-forsaken Portuguee," I heard him yell,
"you would know that the hospital is the right place for
me." He pushed the fist of his sound arm under the other's
nose; a crowd began to collect; the half-caste, flustered,
but doing his best to appear dignified, tried to explain his
intentions. I went away without waiting to see the end.
'But it so happened that I had a man in the hospital at
the time, and going there to see about him the day before
the opening of the Inquiry, I saw in the white men's ward
that little chap tossing on his back, with his arm in
splints, and quite light-headed. To my great surprise the
other one, the long individual with drooping white
moustache, had also found his way there. I remembered I had
seen him slinking away during the quarrel, in a half prance,
half shuffle, and trying very hard not to look scared. He
was no stranger to the port, it seems, and in his distress
was able to make tracks straight for Mariani's billiard-room
and grog-shop near the bazaar. That unspeakable vagabond,
Mariani, who had known the man and had ministered to his
vices in one or two other places, kissed the ground, in a
manner of speaking, before him, and shut him up with a
supply of bottles in an upstairs room of his infamous hovel.
It appears he was under some hazy apprehension as to his
personal safety, and wished to be concealed. However,
Mariani told me a long time after (when he came on board one
day to dun my steward for the price of some cigars) that he
would have done more for him without asking any questions,
from gratitude for some unholy favour received very many
years ago—as far as I could make out. He thumped twice his
brawny chest, rolled enormous black-and-white eyes
glistening with tears: "Antonio never forget—Antonio never
forget!" What was the precise nature of the immoral
obligation I never learned, but be it what it may, he had
every facility given him to remain under lock and key, with
a chair, a table, a mattress in a corner, and a litter of
fallen plaster on the floor, in an irrational state of funk,
and keeping up his pecker with such tonics as Mariani
dispensed. This lasted till the evening of the third day,
when, after letting out a few horrible screams, he found
himself compelled to seek safety in flight from a legion of
centipedes. He burst the door open, made one leap for dear
life down the crazy little stairway, landed bodily on
Mariani's stomach, picked himself up, and bolted like a
rabbit into the streets. The police plucked him off a
garbage-heap in the early morning. At first he had a notion
they were carrying him off to be hanged, and fought for
liberty like a hero, but when I sat down by his bed he had
been very quiet for two days. His lean bronzed head, with
white moustaches, looked fine and calm on the pillow, like
the head of a war-worn soldier with a child-like soul, had
it not been for a hint of spectral alarm that lurked in the
blank glitter of his glance, resembling a nondescript form
of a terror crouching silently behind a pane of glass. He
was so extremely calm, that I began to indulge in the
eccentric hope of hearing something explanatory of the
famous affair from his point of view. Why I longed to go
grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence which,
after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an
obscure body of men held together by a community of
inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of
conduct, I can't explain. You may call it an unhealthy
curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished
to find something. Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would
find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some
merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse. I
see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible—for the
laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's
creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret
and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the
certitude of death—the doubt of the sovereign power
enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct. It is the hardest
thing to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds
yelling panics and good little quiet villainies; it's the
true shadow of calamity. Did I believe in a miracle? and why
did I desire it so ardently? Was it for my own sake that I
wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young
fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance
alone added a touch of personal concern to the thoughts
suggested by the knowledge of his weakness—made it a thing
of mystery and terror—like a hint of a destructive fate
ready for us all whose youth—in its day—had resembled his
youth? I fear that such was the secret motive of my prying.
I was, and no mistake, looking for a miracle. The only thing
that at this distance of time strikes me as miraculous is
the extent of my imbecility. I positively hoped to obtain
from that battered and shady invalid some exorcism against
the ghost of doubt. I must have been pretty desperate too,
for, without loss of time, after a few indifferent and
friendly sentences which he answered with languid readiness,
just as any decent sick man would do, I produced the word
Patna wrapped up in a delicate question as in a wisp of
floss silk. I was delicate selfishly; I did not want to
startle him; I had no solicitude for him; I was not furious
with him and sorry for him: his experience was of no
importance, his redemption would have had no point for me.
He had grown old in minor iniquities, and could no longer
inspire aversion or pity. He repeated Patna?
interrogatively, seemed to make a short effort of memory,
and said: "Quite right. I am an old stager out here. I saw
her go down." I made ready to vent my indignation at such a
stupid lie, when he added smoothly, "She was full of
reptiles."
'This made me pause. What did he mean? The unsteady
phantom of terror behind his glassy eyes seemed to stand
still and look into mine wistfully. "They turned me out of
my bunk in the middle watch to look at her sinking," he
pursued in a reflective tone. His voice sounded alarmingly
strong all at once. I was sorry for my folly. There was no
snowy-winged coif of a nursing sister to be seen flitting in
the perspective of the ward; but away in the middle of a
long row of empty iron bedsteads an accident case from some
ship in the Roads sat up brown and gaunt with a white
bandage set rakishly on the forehead. Suddenly my
interesting invalid shot out an arm thin like a tentacle and
clawed my shoulder. "Only my eyes were good enough to see. I
am famous for my eyesight. That's why they called me, I
expect. None of them was quick enough to see her go, but
they saw that she was gone right enough, and sang out
together—like this." . . . A wolfish howl searched the very
recesses of my soul. "Oh! make 'im dry up," whined the
accident case irritably. "You don't believe me, I suppose,"
went on the other, with an air of ineffable conceit. "I tell
you there are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian
Gulf. Look under the bed."
'Of course I stooped instantly. I defy anybody not to
have done so. "What can you see?" he asked. "Nothing," I
said, feeling awfully ashamed of myself. He scrutinised my
face with wild and withering contempt. "Just so," he said,
"but if I were to look I could see—there's no eyes like
mine, I tell you." Again he clawed, pulling at me downwards
in his eagerness to relieve himself by a confidential
communication. "Millions of pink toads. There's no eyes like
mine. Millions of pink toads. It's worse than seeing a ship
sink. I could look at sinking ships and smoke my pipe all
day long. Why don't they give me back my pipe? I would get a
smoke while I watched these toads. The ship was full of
them. They've got to be watched, you know." He winked
facetiously. The perspiration dripped on him off my head, my
drill coat clung to my wet back: the afternoon breeze swept
impetuously over the row of bedsteads, the stiff folds of
curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods,
the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the
bare floor all along the line, and I shivered to the very
marrow. The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked
ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old barn at home.
"Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed from
afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came
ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a
tunnel. The clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at
me knowingly. "The ship was full of them, you know, and we
had to clear out on the strict Q.T.," he whispered with
extreme rapidity. "All pink. All pink—as big as mastiffs,
with an eye on the top of the head and claws all round their
ugly mouths. Ough! Ough!" Quick jerks as of galvanic shocks
disclosed under the flat coverlet the outlines of meagre and
agitated legs; he let go my shoulder and reached after
something in the air; his body trembled tensely like a
released harp-string; and while I looked down, the spectral
horror in him broke through his glassy gaze. Instantly his
face of an old soldier, with its noble and calm outlines,
became decomposed before my eyes by the corruption of
stealthy cunning, of an abominable caution and of desperate
fear. He restrained a cry—"Ssh! what are they doing now down
there?" he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic
precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne upon
my mind in a lurid flash, made me very sick of my
cleverness. "They are all asleep," I answered, watching him
narrowly. That was it. That's what he wanted to hear; these
were the exact words that could calm him. He drew a long
breath. "Ssh! Quiet, steady. I am an old stager out here. I
know them brutes. Bash in the head of the first that stirs.
There's too many of them, and she won't swim more than ten
minutes." He panted again. "Hurry up," he yelled suddenly,
and went on in a steady scream: "They are all awake—millions
of them. They are trampling on me! Wait! Oh, wait! I'll
smash them in heaps like flies. Wait for me! Help! H-e-elp!"
An interminable and sustained howl completed my
discomfiture. I saw in the distance the accident case raise
deplorably both his hands to his bandaged head; a dresser,
aproned to the chin showed himself in the vista of the ward,
as if seen in the small end of a telescope. I confessed
myself fairly routed, and without more ado, stepping out
through one of the long windows, escaped into the outside
gallery. The howl pursued me like a vengeance. I turned into
a deserted landing, and suddenly all became very still and
quiet around me, and I descended the bare and shiny
staircase in a silence that enabled me to compose my
distracted thoughts. Down below I met one of the resident
surgeons who was crossing the courtyard and stopped me.
"Been to see your man, Captain? I think we may let him go
to-morrow. These fools have no notion of taking care of
themselves, though. I say, we've got the chief engineer of
that pilgrim ship here. A curious case. D.T.'s of the worst
kind. He has been drinking hard in that Greek's or Italian's
grog-shop for three days. What can you expect? Four bottles
of that kind of brandy a day, I am told. Wonderful, if true.
Sheeted with boiler-iron inside I should think. The head,
ah! the head, of course, gone, but the curious part is
there's some sort of method in his raving. I am trying to
find out. Most unusual—that thread of logic in such a
delirium. Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he
doesn't. Good old tradition's at a discount nowadays. Eh!
His—er—visions are batrachian. Ha! ha! No, seriously, I
never remember being so interested in a case of jim-jams
before. He ought to be dead, don't you know, after such a
festive experiment. Oh! he is a tough object.
Four-and-twenty years of the tropics too. You ought really
to take a peep at him. Noble-looking old boozer. Most
extraordinary man I ever met—medically, of course. Won't
you?"
'I have been all along exhibiting the usual polite signs
of interest, but now assuming an air of regret I murmured of
want of time, and shook hands in a hurry. "I say," he cried
after me; "he can't attend that inquiry. Is his evidence
material, you think?"
'"Not in the least," I called back from the gateway.'
CHAPTER 6
'The authorities were evidently of the same opinion. The
inquiry was not adjourned. It was held on the appointed day
to satisfy the law, and it was well attended because of its
human interest, no doubt. There was no incertitude as to
facts—as to the one material fact, I mean. How the Patna
came by her hurt it was impossible to find out; the court
did not expect to find out; and in the whole audience there
was not a man who cared. Yet, as I've told you, all the
sailors in the port attended, and the waterside business was
fully represented. Whether they knew it or not, the interest
that drew them here was purely psychological—the expectation
of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power,
the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind
could be disclosed. The examination of the only man able and
willing to face it was beating futilely round the well-known
fact, and the play of questions upon it was as instructive
as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box, were the object
to find out what's inside. However, an official inquiry
could not be any other thing. Its object was not the
fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.
'The young chap could have told them, and, though that
very thing was the thing that interested the audience, the
questions put to him necessarily led him away from what to
me, for instance, would have been the only truth worth
knowing. You can't expect the constituted authorities to
inquire into the state of a man's soul—or is it only of his
liver? Their business was to come down upon the
consequences, and frankly, a casual police magistrate and
two nautical assessors are not much good for anything else.
I don't mean to imply these fellows were stupid. The
magistrate was very patient. One of the assessors was a
sailing-ship skipper with a reddish beard, and of a pious
disposition. Brierly was the other. Big Brierly. Some of you
must have heard of Big Brierly—the captain of the crack ship
of the Blue Star line. That's the man.
'He seemed consumedly bored by the honour thrust upon
him. He had never in his life made a mistake, never had an
accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise,
and he seemed to be one of those lucky fellows who know
nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust. At
thirty-two he had one of the best commands going in the
Eastern trade—and, what's more, he thought a lot of what he
had. There was nothing like it in the world, and I suppose
if you had asked him point-blank he would have confessed
that in his opinion there was not such another commander.
The choice had fallen upon the right man. The rest of
mankind that did not command the sixteen-knot steel steamer
Ossa were rather poor creatures. He had saved lives at sea,
had rescued ships in distress, had a gold chronometer
presented to him by the underwriters, and a pair of
binoculars with a suitable inscription from some foreign
Government, in commemoration of these services. He was
acutely aware of his merits and of his rewards. I liked him
well enough, though some I know—meek, friendly men at
that—couldn't stand him at any price. I haven't the
slightest doubt he considered himself vastly my
superior—indeed, had you been Emperor of East and West, you
could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence—but
I couldn't get up any real sentiment of offence. He did not
despise me for anything I could help, for anything I
was—don't you know? I was a negligible quantity simply
because I was not the fortunate man of the earth, not
Montague Brierly in command of the Ossa, not the owner of an
inscribed gold chronometer and of silver-mounted binoculars
testifying to the excellence of my seamanship and to my
indomitable pluck; not possessed of an acute sense of my
merits and of my rewards, besides the love and worship of a
black retriever, the most wonderful of its kind—for never
was such a man loved thus by such a dog. No doubt, to have
all this forced upon you was exasperating enough; but when I
reflected that I was associated in these fatal disadvantages
with twelve hundred millions of other more or less human
beings, I found I could bear my share of his good-natured
and contemptuous pity for the sake of something indefinite
and attractive in the man. I have never defined to myself
this attraction, but there were moments when I envied him.
The sting of life could do no more to his complacent soul
than the scratch of a pin to the smooth face of a rock. This
was enviable. As I looked at him, flanking on one side the
unassuming pale-faced magistrate who presided at the
inquiry, his self-satisfaction presented to me and to the
world a surface as hard as granite. He committed suicide
very soon after.
'No wonder Jim's case bored him, and while I thought with
something akin to fear of the immensity of his contempt for
the young man under examination, he was probably holding
silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been
of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of the evidence
with him in that leap into the sea. If I understand anything
of men, the matter was no doubt of the gravest import, one
of those trifles that awaken ideas—start into life some
thought with which a man unused to such a companionship
finds it impossible to live. I am in a position to know that
it wasn't money, and it wasn't drink, and it wasn't woman.
He jumped overboard at sea barely a week after the end of
the inquiry, and less than three days after leaving port on
his outward passage; as though on that exact spot in the
midst of waters he had suddenly perceived the gates of the
other world flung open wide for his reception.
'Yet it was not a sudden impulse. His grey-headed mate, a
first-rate sailor and a nice old chap with strangers, but in
his relations with his commander the surliest chief officer
I've ever seen, would tell the story with tears in his eyes.
It appears that when he came on deck in the morning Brierly
had been writing in the chart-room. "It was ten minutes to
four," he said, "and the middle watch was not relieved yet
of course. He heard my voice on the bridge speaking to the
second mate, and called me in. I was loth to go, and that's
the truth, Captain Marlow—I couldn't stand poor Captain
Brierly, I tell you with shame; we never know what a man is
made of. He had been promoted over too many heads, not
counting my own, and he had a damnable trick of making you
feel small, nothing but by the way he said 'Good morning.' I
never addressed him, sir, but on matters of duty, and then
it was as much as I could do to keep a civil tongue in my
head." (He flattered himself there. I often wondered how
Brierly could put up with his manners for more than half a
voyage.) "I've a wife and children," he went on, "and I had
been ten years in the Company, always expecting the next
command—more fool I. Says he, just like this: 'Come in here,
Mr. Jones,' in that swagger voice of his—'Come in here, Mr.
Jones.' In I went. 'We'll lay down her position,' says he,
stooping over the chart, a pair of dividers in hand. By the
standing orders, the officer going off duty would have done
that at the end of his watch. However, I said nothing, and
looked on while he marked off the ship's position with a
tiny cross and wrote the date and the time. I can see him
this moment writing his neat figures: seventeen, eight, four
A.M. The year would be written in red ink at the top of the
chart. He never used his charts more than a year, Captain
Brierly didn't. I've the chart now. When he had done he
stands looking down at the mark he had made and smiling to
himself, then looks up at me. 'Thirty-two miles more as she
goes,' says he, 'and then we shall be clear, and you may
alter the course twenty degrees to the southward.'
'"We were passing to the north of the Hector Bank that
voyage. I said, 'All right, sir,' wondering what he was
fussing about, since I had to call him before altering the
course anyhow. Just then eight bells were struck: we came
out on the bridge, and the second mate before going off
mentions in the usual way—'Seventy-one on the log.' Captain
Brierly looks at the compass and then all round. It was dark
and clear, and all the stars were out as plain as on a
frosty night in high latitudes. Suddenly he says with a sort
of a little sigh: 'I am going aft, and shall set the log at
zero for you myself, so that there can be no mistake.
Thirty-two miles more on this course and then you are safe.
Let's see—the correction on the log is six per cent.
additive; say, then, thirty by the dial to run, and you may
come twenty degrees to starboard at once. No use losing any
distance—is there?' I had never heard him talk so much at a
stretch, and to no purpose as it seemed to me. I said
nothing. He went down the ladder, and the dog, that was
always at his heels whenever he moved, night or day,
followed, sliding nose first, after him. I heard his
boot-heels tap, tap on the after-deck, then he stopped and
spoke to the dog—'Go back, Rover. On the bridge, boy! Go
on—get.' Then he calls out to me from the dark, 'Shut that
dog up in the chart-room, Mr. Jones—will you?'
'"This was the last time I heard his voice, Captain
Marlow. These are the last words he spoke in the hearing of
any living human being, sir." At this point the old chap's
voice got quite unsteady. "He was afraid the poor brute
would jump after him, don't you see?" he pursued with a
quaver. "Yes, Captain Marlow. He set the log for me;
he—would you believe it?—he put a drop of oil in it too.
There was the oil-feeder where he left it near by. The
boat-swain's mate got the hose along aft to wash down at
half-past five; by-and-by he knocks off and runs up on the
bridge—'Will you please come aft, Mr. Jones,' he says.
'There's a funny thing. I don't like to touch it.' It was
Captain Brierly's gold chronometer watch carefully hung
under the rail by its chain.
'"As soon as my eyes fell on it something struck me, and
I knew, sir. My legs got soft under me. It was as if I had
seen him go over; and I could tell how far behind he was
left too. The taffrail-log marked eighteen miles and
three-quarters, and four iron belaying-pins were missing
round the mainmast. Put them in his pockets to help him
down, I suppose; but, Lord! what's four iron pins to a
powerful man like Captain Brierly. Maybe his confidence in
himself was just shook a bit at the last. That's the only
sign of fluster he gave in his whole life, I should think;
but I am ready to answer for him, that once over he did not
try to swim a stroke, the same as he would have had pluck
enough to keep up all day long on the bare chance had he
fallen overboard accidentally. Yes, sir. He was second to
none—if he said so himself, as I heard him once. He had
written two letters in the middle watch, one to the Company
and the other to me. He gave me a lot of instructions as to
the passage—I had been in the trade before he was out of his
time—and no end of hints as to my conduct with our people in
Shanghai, so that I should keep the command of the Ossa. He
wrote like a father would to a favourite son, Captain
Marlow, and I was five-and-twenty years his senior and had
tasted salt water before he was fairly breeched. In his
letter to the owners—it was left open for me to see—he said
that he had always done his duty by them—up to that
moment—and even now he was not betraying their confidence,
since he was leaving the ship to as competent a seaman as
could be found—meaning me, sir, meaning me! He told them
that if the last act of his life didn't take away all his
credit with them, they would give weight to my faithful
service and to his warm recommendation, when about to fill
the vacancy made by his death. And much more like this, sir.
I couldn't believe my eyes. It made me feel queer all over,"
went on the old chap, in great perturbation, and squashing
something in the corner of his eye with the end of a thumb
as broad as a spatula. "You would think, sir, he had jumped
overboard only to give an unlucky man a last show to get on.
What with the shock of him going in this awful rash way, and
thinking myself a made man by that chance, I was nearly off
my chump for a week. But no fear. The captain of the Pelion
was shifted into the Ossa—came aboard in Shanghai—a little
popinjay, sir, in a grey check suit, with his hair parted in
the middle. 'Aw—I am—aw—your new captain,
Mister—Mister—aw—Jones.' He was drowned in scent—fairly
stunk with it, Captain Marlow. I dare say it was the look I
gave him that made him stammer. He mumbled something about
my natural disappointment—I had better know at once that his
chief officer got the promotion to the Pelion—he had nothing
to do with it, of course—supposed the office knew
best—sorry. . . . Says I, 'Don't you mind old Jones, sir;
dam' his soul, he's used to it.' I could see directly I had
shocked his delicate ear, and while we sat at our first
tiffin together he began to find fault in a nasty manner
with this and that in the ship. I never heard such a voice
out of a Punch and Judy show. I set my teeth hard, and glued
my eyes to my plate, and held my peace as long as I could;
but at last I had to say something. Up he jumps tiptoeing,
ruffling all his pretty plumes, like a little fighting-cock.
'You'll find you have a different person to deal with than
the late Captain Brierly.' 'I've found it,' says I, very
glum, but pretending to be mighty busy with my steak. 'You
are an old ruffian, Mister—aw—Jones; and what's more, you
are known for an old ruffian in the employ,' he squeaks at
me. The damned bottle-washers stood about listening with
their mouths stretched from ear to ear. 'I may be a hard
case,' answers I, 'but I ain't so far gone as to put up with
the sight of you sitting in Captain Brierly's chair.' With
that I lay down my knife and fork. 'You would like to sit in
it yourself—that's where the shoe pinches,' he sneers. I
left the saloon, got my rags together, and was on the quay
with all my dunnage about my feet before the stevedores had
turned to again. Yes. Adrift—on shore—after ten years'
service—and with a poor woman and four children six thousand
miles off depending on my half-pay for every mouthful they
ate. Yes, sir! I chucked it rather than hear Captain Brierly
abused. He left me his night-glasses—here they are; and he
wished me to take care of the dog—here he is. Hallo, Rover,
poor boy. Where's the captain, Rover?" The dog looked up at
us with mournful yellow eyes, gave one desolate bark, and
crept under the table.
'All this was taking place, more than two years
afterwards, on board that nautical ruin the Fire-Queen this
Jones had got charge of—quite by a funny accident, too—from
Matherson—mad Matherson they generally called him—the same
who used to hang out in Hai-phong, you know, before the
occupation days. The old chap snuffled on—
'"Ay, sir, Captain Brierly will be remembered here, if
there's no other place on earth. I wrote fully to his father
and did not get a word in reply—neither Thank you, nor Go to
the devil!—nothing! Perhaps they did not want to know."
'The sight of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald
head with a red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of
the dog, the squalor of that fly-blown cuddy which was the
only shrine of his memory, threw a veil of inexpressibly
mean pathos over Brierly's remembered figure, the posthumous
revenge of fate for that belief in his own splendour which
had almost cheated his life of its legitimate terrors.
Almost! Perhaps wholly. Who can tell what flattering view he
had induced himself to take of his own suicide?
'"Why did he commit the rash act, Captain Marlow—can you
think?" asked Jones, pressing his palms together. "Why? It
beats me! Why?" He slapped his low and wrinkled forehead.
"If he had been poor and old and in debt—and never a show—or
else mad. But he wasn't of the kind that goes mad, not he.
You trust me. What a mate don't know about his skipper isn't
worth knowing. Young, healthy, well off, no cares. . . . I
sit here sometimes thinking, thinking, till my head fairly
begins to buzz. There was some reason."
'"You may depend on it, Captain Jones," said I, "it
wasn't anything that would have disturbed much either of us
two," I said; and then, as if a light had been flashed into
the muddle of his brain, poor old Jones found a last word of
amazing profundity. He blew his nose, nodding at me
dolefully: "Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought
so much of ourselves."
'Of course the recollection of my last conversation with
Brierly is tinged with the knowledge of his end that
followed so close upon it. I spoke with him for the last
time during the progress of the inquiry. It was after the
first adjournment, and he came up with me in the street. He
was in a state of irritation, which I noticed with surprise,
his usual behaviour when he condescended to converse being
perfectly cool, with a trace of amused tolerance, as if the
existence of his interlocutor had been a rather good joke.
"They caught me for that inquiry, you see," he began, and
for a while enlarged complainingly upon the inconveniences
of daily attendance in court. "And goodness knows how long
it will last. Three days, I suppose." I heard him out in
silence; in my then opinion it was a way as good as another
of putting on side. "What's the use of it? It is the
stupidest set-out you can imagine," he pursued hotly. I
remarked that there was no option. He interrupted me with a
sort of pent-up violence. "I feel like a fool all the time."
I looked up at him. This was going very far—for Brierly—when
talking of Brierly. He stopped short, and seizing the lapel
of my coat, gave it a slight tug. "Why are we tormenting
that young chap?" he asked. This question chimed in so well
to the tolling of a certain thought of mine that, with the
image of the absconding renegade in my eye, I answered at
once, "Hanged if I know, unless it be that he lets you." I
was astonished to see him fall into line, so to speak, with
that utterance, which ought to have been tolerably cryptic.
He said angrily, "Why, yes. Can't he see that wretched
skipper of his has cleared out? What does he expect to
happen? Nothing can save him. He's done for." We walked on
in silence a few steps. "Why eat all that dirt?" he
exclaimed, with an oriental energy of expression—about the
only sort of energy you can find a trace of east of the
fiftieth meridian. I wondered greatly at the direction of
his thoughts, but now I strongly suspect it was strictly in
character: at bottom poor Brierly must have been thinking of
himself. I pointed out to him that the skipper of the Patna
was known to have feathered his nest pretty well, and could
procure almost anywhere the means of getting away. With Jim
it was otherwise: the Government was keeping him in the
Sailors' Home for the time being, and probably he hadn't a
penny in his pocket to bless himself with. It costs some
money to run away. "Does it? Not always," he said, with a
bitter laugh, and to some further remark of mine—"Well,
then, let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there!
By heavens! I would." I don't know why his tone
provoked me, and I said, "There is a kind of courage in
facing it out as he does, knowing very well that if he went
away nobody would trouble to run after hmm." "Courage be
hanged!" growled Brierly. "That sort of courage is of no use
to keep a man straight, and I don't care a snap for such
courage. If you were to say it was a kind of cowardice
now—of softness. I tell you what, I will put up two hundred
rupees if you put up another hundred and undertake to make
the beggar clear out early to-morrow morning. The fellow's a
gentleman if he ain't fit to be touched—he will understand.
He must! This infernal publicity is too shocking: there he
sits while all these confounded natives, serangs, lascars,
quartermasters, are giving evidence that's enough to burn a
man to ashes with shame. This is abominable. Why, Marlow,
don't you think, don't you feel, that this is abominable;
don't you now—come—as a seaman? If he went away all this
would stop at once." Brierly said these words with a most
unusual animation, and made as if to reach after his
pocket-book. I restrained him, and declared coldly that the
cowardice of these four men did not seem to me a matter of
such great importance. "And you call yourself a seaman, I
suppose," he pronounced angrily. I said that's what I called
myself, and I hoped I was too. He heard me out, and made a
gesture with his big arm that seemed to deprive me of my
individuality, to push me away into the crowd. "The worst of
it," he said, "is that all you fellows have no sense of
dignity; you don't think enough of what you are supposed to
be."
'We had been walking slowly meantime, and now stopped
opposite the harbour office, in sight of the very spot from
which the immense captain of the Patna had vanished as
utterly as a tiny feather blown away in a hurricane. I
smiled. Brierly went on: "This is a disgrace. We've got all
kinds amongst us—some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but,
hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become
no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are
trusted. Do you understand?—trusted! Frankly, I don't care a
snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a
decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo
of old rags in bales. We aren't an organised body of men,
and the only thing that holds us together is just the name
for that kind of decency. Such an affair destroys one's
confidence. A man may go pretty near through his whole
sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip. But
when the call comes . . . Aha! . . . If I . . ."
'He broke off, and in a changed tone, "I'll give you two
hundred rupees now, Marlow, and you just talk to that chap.
Confound him! I wish he had never come out here. Fact is, I
rather think some of my people know his. The old man's a
parson, and I remember now I met him once when staying with
my cousin in Essex last year. If I am not mistaken, the old
chap seemed rather to fancy his sailor son. Horrible. I
can't do it myself—but you . . ."
'Thus, apropos of Jim, I had a glimpse of the real
Brierly a few days before he committed his reality and his
sham together to the keeping of the sea. Of course I
declined to meddle. The tone of this last "but you" (poor
Brierly couldn't help it), that seemed to imply I was no
more noticeable than an insect, caused me to look at the
proposal with indignation, and on account of that
provocation, or for some other reason, I became positive in
my mind that the inquiry was a severe punishment to that
Jim, and that his facing it—practically of his own free
will—was a redeeming feature in his abominable case. I
hadn't been so sure of it before. Brierly went off in a
huff. At the time his state of mind was more of a mystery to
me than it is now.
'Next day, coming into court late, I sat by myself. Of
course I could not forget the conversation I had with
Brierly, and now I had them both under my eyes. The
demeanour of one suggested gloomy impudence and of the other
a contemptuous boredom; yet one attitude might not have been
truer than the other, and I was aware that one was not true.
Brierly was not bored—he was exasperated; and if so, then
Jim might not have been impudent. According to my theory he
was not. I imagined he was hopeless. Then it was that our
glances met. They met, and the look he gave me was
discouraging of any intention I might have had to speak to
him. Upon either hypothesis—insolence or despair—I felt I
could be of no use to him. This was the second day of the
proceedings. Very soon after that exchange of glances the
inquiry was adjourned again to the next day. The white men
began to troop out at once. Jim had been told to stand down
some time before, and was able to leave amongst the first. I
saw his broad shoulders and his head outlined in the light
of the door, and while I made my way slowly out talking with
some one—some stranger who had addressed me casually—I could
see him from within the court-room resting both elbows on
the balustrade of the verandah and turning his back on the
small stream of people trickling down the few steps. There
was a murmur of voices and a shuffle of boots.
'The next case was that of assault and battery committed
upon a money-lender, I believe; and the defendant—a
venerable villager with a straight white beard—sat on a mat
just outside the door with his sons, daughters, sons-in-law,
their wives, and, I should think, half the population of his
village besides, squatting or standing around him. A slim
dark woman, with part of her back and one black shoulder
bared, and with a thin gold ring in her nose, suddenly began
to talk in a high-pitched, shrewish tone. The man with me
instinctively looked up at her. We were then just through
the door, passing behind Jim's burly back.
'Whether those villagers had brought the yellow dog with
them, I don't know. Anyhow, a dog was there, weaving himself
in and out amongst people's legs in that mute stealthy way
native dogs have, and my companion stumbled over him. The
dog leaped away without a sound; the man, raising his voice
a little, said with a slow laugh, "Look at that wretched
cur," and directly afterwards we became separated by a lot
of people pushing in. I stood back for a moment against the
wall while the stranger managed to get down the steps and
disappeared. I saw Jim spin round. He made a step forward
and barred my way. We were alone; he glared at me with an
air of stubborn resolution. I became aware I was being held
up, so to speak, as if in a wood. The verandah was empty by
then, the noise and movement in court had ceased: a great
silence fell upon the building, in which, somewhere far
within, an oriental voice began to whine abjectly. The dog,
in the very act of trying to sneak in at the door, sat down
hurriedly to hunt for fleas.
'"Did you speak to me?" asked Jim very low, and bending
forward, not so much towards me but at me, if you know what
I mean. I said "No" at once. Something in the sound of that
quiet tone of his warned me to be on my defence. I watched
him. It was very much like a meeting in a wood, only more
uncertain in its issue, since he could possibly want neither
my money nor my life—nothing that I could simply give up or
defend with a clear conscience. "You say you didn't," he
said, very sombre. "But I heard." "Some mistake," I
protested, utterly at a loss, and never taking my eyes off
him. To watch his face was like watching a darkening sky
before a clap of thunder, shade upon shade imperceptibly
coming on, the doom growing mysteriously intense in the calm
of maturing violence.
'"As far as I know, I haven't opened my lips in your
hearing," I affirmed with perfect truth. I was getting a
little angry, too, at the absurdity of this encounter. It
strikes me now I have never in my life been so near a
beating—I mean it literally; a beating with fists. I suppose
I had some hazy prescience of that eventuality being in the
air. Not that he was actively threatening me. On the
contrary, he was strangely passive—don't you know? but he
was lowering, and, though not exceptionally big, he looked
generally fit to demolish a wall. The most reassuring
symptom I noticed was a kind of slow and ponderous
hesitation, which I took as a tribute to the evident
sincerity of my manner and of my tone. We faced each other.
In the court the assault case was proceeding. I caught the
words: "Well—buffalo—stick—in the greatness of my fear. . .
."
'"What did you mean by staring at me all the morning?"
said Jim at last. He looked up and looked down again. "Did
you expect us all to sit with downcast eyes out of regard
for your susceptibilities?" I retorted sharply. I was not
going to submit meekly to any of his nonsense. He raised his
eyes again, and this time continued to look me straight in
the face. "No. That's all right," he pronounced with an air
of deliberating with himself upon the truth of this
statement—"that's all right. I am going through with that.
Only"—and there he spoke a little faster—"I won't let any
man call me names outside this court. There was a fellow
with you. You spoke to him—oh yes—I know; 'tis all very
fine. You spoke to him, but you meant me to hear. . . ."
'I assured him he was under some extraordinary delusion.
I had no conception how it came about. "You thought I would
be afraid to resent this," he said, with just a faint tinge
of bitterness. I was interested enough to discern the
slightest shades of expression, but I was not in the least
enlightened; yet I don't know what in these words, or
perhaps just the intonation of that phrase, induced me
suddenly to make all possible allowances for him. I ceased
to be annoyed at my unexpected predicament. It was some
mistake on his part; he was blundering, and I had an
intuition that the blunder was of an odious, of an
unfortunate nature. I was anxious to end this scene on
grounds of decency, just as one is anxious to cut short some
unprovoked and abominable confidence. The funniest part was,
that in the midst of all these considerations of the higher
order I was conscious of a certain trepidation as to the
possibility—nay, likelihood—of this encounter ending in some
disreputable brawl which could not possibly be explained,
and would make me ridiculous. I did not hanker after a three
days' celebrity as the man who got a black eye or something
of the sort from the mate of the Patna. He, in all
probability, did not care what he did, or at any rate would
be fully justified in his own eyes. It took no magician to
see he was amazingly angry about something, for all his
quiet and even torpid demeanour. I don't deny I was
extremely desirous to pacify him at all costs, had I only
known what to do. But I didn't know, as you may well
imagine. It was a blackness without a single gleam. We
confronted each other in silence. He hung fire for about
fifteen seconds, then made a step nearer, and I made ready
to ward off a blow, though I don't think I moved a muscle.
"If you were as big as two men and as strong as six," he
said very softly, "I would tell you what I think of you. You
. . ." "Stop!" I exclaimed. This checked him for a second.
"Before you tell me what you think of me," I went on
quickly, "will you kindly tell me what it is I've said or
done?" During the pause that ensued he surveyed me with
indignation, while I made supernatural efforts of memory, in
which I was hindered by the oriental voice within the
court-room expostulating with impassioned volubility against
a charge of falsehood. Then we spoke almost together. "I
will soon show you I am not," he said, in a tone suggestive
of a crisis. "I declare I don't know," I protested earnestly
at the same time. He tried to crush me by the scorn of his
glance. "Now that you see I am not afraid you try to crawl
out of it," he said. "Who's a cur now—hey?" Then, at last, I
understood.
'He had been scanning my features as though looking for a
place where he would plant his fist. "I will allow no man,"
. . . he mumbled threateningly. It was, indeed, a hideous
mistake; he had given himself away utterly. I can't give you
an idea how shocked I was. I suppose he saw some reflection
of my feelings in my face, because his expression changed
just a little. "Good God!" I stammered, "you don't think I .
. ." "But I am sure I've heard," he persisted, raising his
voice for the first time since the beginning of this
deplorable scene. Then with a shade of disdain he added, "It
wasn't you, then? Very well; I'll find the other." "Don't be
a fool," I cried in exasperation; "it wasn't that at all."
"I've heard," he said again with an unshaken and sombre
perseverance.
'There may be those who could have laughed at his
pertinacity; I didn't. Oh, I didn't! There had never been a
man so mercilessly shown up by his own natural impulse. A
single word had stripped him of his discretion—of that
discretion which is more necessary to the decencies of our
inner being than clothing is to the decorum of our body.
"Don't be a fool," I repeated. "But the other man said it,
you don't deny that?" he pronounced distinctly, and looking
in my face without flinching. "No, I don't deny," said I,
returning his gaze. At last his eyes followed downwards the
direction of my pointing finger. He appeared at first
uncomprehending, then confounded, and at last amazed and
scared as though a dog had been a monster and he had never
seen a dog before. "Nobody dreamt of insulting you," I said.
'He contemplated the wretched animal, that moved no more
than an effigy: it sat with ears pricked and its sharp
muzzle pointed into the doorway, and suddenly snapped at a
fly like a piece of mechanism.
'I looked at him. The red of his fair sunburnt complexion
deepened suddenly under the down of his cheeks, invaded his
forehead, spread to the roots of his curly hair. His ears
became intensely crimson, and even the clear blue of his
eyes was darkened many shades by the rush of blood to his
head. His lips pouted a little, trembling as though he had
been on the point of bursting into tears. I perceived he was
incapable of pronouncing a word from the excess of his
humiliation. From disappointment too—who knows? Perhaps he
looked forward to that hammering he was going to give me for
rehabilitation, for appeasement? Who can tell what relief he
expected from this chance of a row? He was naive enough to
expect anything; but he had given himself away for nothing
in this case. He had been frank with himself—let alone with
me—in the wild hope of arriving in that way at some
effective refutation, and the stars had been ironically
unpropitious. He made an inarticulate noise in his throat
like a man imperfectly stunned by a blow on the head. It was
pitiful.
'I didn't catch up again with him till well outside the
gate. I had even to trot a bit at the last, but when, out of
breath at his elbow, I taxed him with running away, he said,
"Never!" and at once turned at bay. I explained I never
meant to say he was running away from me. "From no
man—from not a single man on earth," he affirmed with a
stubborn mien. I forbore to point out the one obvious
exception which would hold good for the bravest of us; I
thought he would find out by himself very soon. He looked at
me patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but I
could find nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began
to walk on. I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said
hurriedly that I couldn't think of leaving him under a false
impression of my—of my—I stammered. The stupidity of the
phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish it, but the
power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the
logic of their construction. My idiotic mumble seemed to
please him. He cut it short by saying, with courteous
placidity that argued an immense power of self-control or
else a wonderful elasticity of spirits—"Altogether my
mistake." I marvelled greatly at this expression: he might
have been alluding to some trifling occurrence. Hadn't he
understood its deplorable meaning? "You may well forgive
me," he continued, and went on a little moodily, "All these
staring people in court seemed such fools that—that it might
have been as I supposed."
'This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I
looked at him curiously and met his unabashed and
impenetrable eyes. "I can't put up with this kind of thing,"
he said, very simply, "and I don't mean to. In court it's
different; I've got to stand that—and I can do it too."
'I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me
have of himself were like those glimpses through the
shifting rents in a thick fog—bits of vivid and vanishing
detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a
country. They fed one's curiosity without satisfying it;
they were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon the
whole he was misleading. That's how I summed him up to
myself after he left me late in the evening. I had been
staying at the Malabar House for a few days, and on my
pressing invitation he dined with me there.'
CHAPTER 7
'An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon,
and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full
of people with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in
their pockets. There were married couples looking
domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their
travels; there were small parties and large parties, and
lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously,
but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was
their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of
new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they
would be labelled as having passed through this and that
place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish
this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed
tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as
the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise. The
dark-faced servants tripped without noise over the vast and
polished floor; now and then a girl's laugh would be heard,
as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush of
crockery, a few words in an affected drawl from some wit
embroidering for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last
funny story of shipboard scandal. Two nomadic old maids,
dressed up to kill, worked acrimoniously through the bill of
fare, whispering to each other with faded lips, wooden-faced
and bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows. A little wine
opened Jim's heart and loosened his tongue. His appetite was
good, too, I noticed. He seemed to have buried somewhere the
opening episode of our acquaintance. It was like a thing of
which there would be no more question in this world. And all
the time I had before me these blue, boyish eyes looking
straight into mine, this young face, these capable
shoulders, the open bronzed forehead with a white line under
the roots of clustering fair hair, this appearance appealing
at sight to all my sympathies: this frank aspect, the
artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He was of the right
sort; he was one of us. He talked soberly, with a sort of
composed unreserve, and with a quiet bearing that might have
been the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of
callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic
deception. Who can tell! From our tone we might have been
discussing a third person, a football match, last year's
weather. My mind floated in a sea of conjectures till the
turn of the conversation enabled me, without being
offensive, to remark that, upon the whole, this inquiry must
have been pretty trying to him. He darted his arm across the
tablecloth, and clutching my hand by the side of my plate,
glared fixedly. I was startled. "It must be awfully hard," I
stammered, confused by this display of speechless feeling.
"It is—hell," he burst out in a muffled voice.
'This movement and these words caused two well-groomed
male globe-trotters at a neighbouring table to look up in
alarm from their iced pudding. I rose, and we passed into
the front gallery for coffee and cigars.
'On little octagon tables candles burned in glass globes;
clumps of stiff-leaved plants separated sets of cosy wicker
chairs; and between the pairs of columns, whose reddish
shafts caught in a long row the sheen from the tall windows,
the night, glittering and sombre, seemed to hang like a
splendid drapery. The riding lights of ships winked afar
like setting stars, and the hills across the roadstead
resembled rounded black masses of arrested thunder-clouds.
'"I couldn't clear out," Jim began. "The skipper
did—that's all very well for him. I couldn't, and I
wouldn't. They all got out of it in one way or another, but
it wouldn't do for me."
'I listened with concentrated attention, not daring to
stir in my chair; I wanted to know—and to this day I don't
know, I can only guess. He would be confident and depressed
all in the same breath, as if some conviction of innate
blamelessness had checked the truth writhing within him at
every turn. He began by saying, in the tone in which a man
would admit his inability to jump a twenty-foot wall, that
he could never go home now; and this declaration recalled to
my mind what Brierly had said, "that the old parson in Essex
seemed to fancy his sailor son not a little."
'I can't tell you whether Jim knew he was especially
"fancied," but the tone of his references to "my Dad" was
calculated to give me a notion that the good old rural dean
was about the finest man that ever had been worried by the
cares of a large family since the beginning of the world.
This, though never stated, was implied with an anxiety that
there should be no mistake about it, which was really very
true and charming, but added a poignant sense of lives far
off to the other elements of the story. "He has seen it all
in the home papers by this time," said Jim. "I can never
face the poor old chap." I did not dare to lift my eyes at
this till I heard him add, "I could never explain. He
wouldn't understand." Then I looked up. He was smoking
reflectively, and after a moment, rousing himself, began to
talk again. He discovered at once a desire that I should not
confound him with his partners in—in crime, let us call it.
He was not one of them; he was altogether of another sort. I
gave no sign of dissent. I had no intention, for the sake of
barren truth, to rob him of the smallest particle of any
saving grace that would come in his way. I didn't know how
much of it he believed himself. I didn't know what he was
playing up to—if he was playing up to anything at all—and I
suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man
ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from
the grim shadow of self-knowledge. I made no sound all the
time he was wondering what he had better do after "that
stupid inquiry was over."
'Apparently he shared Brierly's contemptuous opinion of
these proceedings ordained by law. He would not know where
to turn, he confessed, clearly thinking aloud rather than
talking to me. Certificate gone, career broken, no money to
get away, no work that he could obtain as far as he could
see. At home he could perhaps get something; but it meant
going to his people for help, and that he would not do. He
saw nothing for it but ship before the mast—could get
perhaps a quartermaster's billet in some steamer. Would do
for a quartermaster. . . . "Do you think you would?" I asked
pitilessly. He jumped up, and going to the stone balustrade
looked out into the night. In a moment he was back, towering
above my chair with his youthful face clouded yet by the
pain of a conquered emotion. He had understood very well I
did not doubt his ability to steer a ship. In a voice that
quavered a bit he asked me why did I say that? I had been
"no end kind" to him. I had not even laughed at him
when—here he began to mumble—"that mistake, you know—made a
confounded ass of myself." I broke in by saying rather
warmly that for me such a mistake was not a matter to laugh
at. He sat down and drank deliberately some coffee, emptying
the small cup to the last drop. "That does not mean I admit
for a moment the cap fitted," he declared distinctly. "No?"
I said. "No," he affirmed with quiet decision. "Do you know
what you would have done? Do you? And you don't think
yourself" . . . he gulped something . . . "you don't think
yourself a—a—cur?"
'And with this—upon my honour!—he looked up at me
inquisitively. It was a question it appears—a bona fide
question! However, he didn't wait for an answer. Before I
could recover he went on, with his eyes straight before him,
as if reading off something written on the body of the
night. "It is all in being ready. I wasn't; not—not then. I
don't want to excuse myself; but I would like to explain—I
would like somebody to understand—somebody—one person at
least! You! Why not you?"
'It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they
always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save
from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be,
this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules
of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly
effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural
instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure. He began
his story quietly enough. On board that Dale Line steamer
that had picked up these four floating in a boat upon the
discreet sunset glow of the sea, they had been after the
first day looked askance upon. The fat skipper told some
story, the others had been silent, and at first it had been
accepted. You don't cross-examine poor castaways you had the
good luck to save, if not from cruel death, then at least
from cruel suffering. Afterwards, with time to think it
over, it might have struck the officers of the Avondale that
there was "something fishy" in the affair; but of course
they would keep their doubts to themselves. They had picked
up the captain, the mate, and two engineers of the steamer
Patna sunk at sea, and that, very properly, was enough for
them. I did not ask Jim about the nature of his feelings
during the ten days he spent on board. From the way he
narrated that part I was at liberty to infer he was partly
stunned by the discovery he had made—the discovery about
himself—and no doubt was at work trying to explain it away
to the only man who was capable of appreciating all its
tremendous magnitude. You must understand he did not try to
minimise its importance. Of that I am sure; and therein lies
his distinction. As to what sensations he experienced when
he got ashore and heard the unforeseen conclusion of the
tale in which he had taken such a pitiful part, he told me
nothing of them, and it is difficult to imagine.
'I wonder whether he felt the ground cut from under his
feet? I wonder? But no doubt he managed to get a fresh
foothold very soon. He was ashore a whole fortnight waiting
in the Sailors' Home, and as there were six or seven men
staying there at the time, I had heard of him a little.
Their languid opinion seemed to be that, in addition to his
other shortcomings, he was a sulky brute. He had passed
these days on the verandah, buried in a long chair, and
coming out of his place of sepulture only at meal-times or
late at night, when he wandered on the quays all by himself,
detached from his surroundings, irresolute and silent, like
a ghost without a home to haunt. "I don't think I've spoken
three words to a living soul in all that time," he said,
making me very sorry for him; and directly he added, "One of
these fellows would have been sure to blurt out something I
had made up my mind not to put up with, and I didn't want a
row. No! Not then. I was too—too . . . I had no heart for
it." "So that bulkhead held out after all," I remarked
cheerfully. "Yes," he murmured, "it held. And yet I swear to
you I felt it bulge under my hand." "It's extraordinary what
strains old iron will stand sometimes," I said. Thrown back
in his seat, his legs stiffly out and arms hanging down, he
nodded slightly several times. You could not conceive a
sadder spectacle. Suddenly he lifted his head; he sat up; he
slapped his thigh. "Ah! what a chance missed! My God! what a
chance missed!" he blazed out, but the ring of the last
"missed" resembled a cry wrung out by pain.
'He was silent again with a still, far-away look of
fierce yearning after that missed distinction, with his
nostrils for an instant dilated, sniffing the intoxicating
breath of that wasted opportunity. If you think I was either
surprised or shocked you do me an injustice in more ways
than one! Ah, he was an imaginative beggar! He would give
himself away; he would give himself up. I could see in his
glance darted into the night all his inner being carried on,
projected headlong into the fanciful realm of recklessly
heroic aspirations. He had no leisure to regret what he had
lost, he was so wholly and naturally concerned for what he
had failed to obtain. He was very far away from me who
watched him across three feet of space. With every instant
he was penetrating deeper into the impossible world of
romantic achievements. He got to the heart of it at last! A
strange look of beatitude overspread his features, his eyes
sparkled in the light of the candle burning between us; he
positively smiled! He had penetrated to the very heart—to
the very heart. It was an ecstatic smile that your faces—or
mine either—will never wear, my dear boys. I whisked him
back by saying, "If you had stuck to the ship, you mean!"
'He turned upon me, his eyes suddenly amazed and full of
pain, with a bewildered, startled, suffering face, as though
he had tumbled down from a star. Neither you nor I will ever
look like this on any man. He shuddered profoundly, as if a
cold finger-tip had touched his heart. Last of all he
sighed.
'I was not in a merciful mood. He provoked one by his
contradictory indiscretions. "It is unfortunate you didn't
know beforehand!" I said with every unkind intention; but
the perfidious shaft fell harmless—dropped at his feet like
a spent arrow, as it were, and he did not think of picking
it up. Perhaps he had not even seen it. Presently, lolling
at ease, he said, "Dash it all! I tell you it bulged. I was
holding up my lamp along the angle-iron in the lower deck
when a flake of rust as big as the palm of my hand fell off
the plate, all of itself." He passed his hand over his
forehead. "The thing stirred and jumped off like something
alive while I was looking at it." "That made you feel pretty
bad," I observed casually. "Do you suppose," he said, "that
I was thinking of myself, with a hundred and sixty people at
my back, all fast asleep in that fore-'tween-deck alone—and
more of them aft; more on the deck—sleeping—knowing nothing
about it—three times as many as there were boats for, even
if there had been time? I expected to see the iron open out
as I stood there and the rush of water going over them as
they lay. . . . What could I do—what?"
'I can easily picture him to myself in the peopled gloom
of the cavernous place, with the light of the globe-lamp
falling on a small portion of the bulkhead that had the
weight of the ocean on the other side, and the breathing of
unconscious sleepers in his ears. I can see him glaring at
the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by the
knowledge of an imminent death. This, I gathered, was the
second time he had been sent forward by that skipper of his,
who, I rather think, wanted to keep him away from the
bridge. He told me that his first impulse was to shout and
straightway make all those people leap out of sleep into
terror; but such an overwhelming sense of his helplessness
came over him that he was not able to produce a sound. This
is, I suppose, what people mean by the tongue cleaving to
the roof of the mouth. "Too dry," was the concise expression
he used in reference to this state. Without a sound, then,
he scrambled out on deck through the number one hatch. A
windsail rigged down there swung against him accidentally,
and he remembered that the light touch of the canvas on his
face nearly knocked him off the hatchway ladder.
'He confessed that his knees wobbled a good deal as he
stood on the foredeck looking at another sleeping crowd. The
engines having been stopped by that time, the steam was
blowing off. Its deep rumble made the whole night vibrate
like a bass string. The ship trembled to it.
'He saw here and there a head lifted off a mat, a vague
form uprise in sitting posture, listen sleepily for a
moment, sink down again into the billowy confusion of boxes,
steam-winches, ventilators. He was aware all these people
did not know enough to take intelligent notice of that
strange noise. The ship of iron, the men with white faces,
all the sights, all the sounds, everything on board to that
ignorant and pious multitude was strange alike, and as
trustworthy as it would for ever remain incomprehensible. It
occurred to him that the fact was fortunate. The idea of it
was simply terrible.
'You must remember he believed, as any other man would
have done in his place, that the ship would go down at any
moment; the bulging, rust-eaten plates that kept back the
ocean, fatally must give way, all at once like an undermined
dam, and let in a sudden and overwhelming flood. He stood
still looking at these recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware
of his fate, surveying the silent company of the dead. They
were dead! Nothing could save them! There were boats
enough for half of them perhaps, but there was no time. No
time! No time! It did not seem worth while to open his lips,
to stir hand or foot. Before he could shout three words, or
make three steps, he would be floundering in a sea whitened
awfully by the desperate struggles of human beings,
clamorous with the distress of cries for help. There was no
help. He imagined what would happen perfectly; he went
through it all motionless by the hatchway with the lamp in
his hand—he went through it to the very last harrowing
detail. I think he went through it again while he was
telling me these things he could not tell the court.
'"I saw as clearly as I see you now that there was
nothing I could do. It seemed to take all life out of my
limbs. I thought I might just as well stand where I was and
wait. I did not think I had many seconds. . . ." Suddenly
the steam ceased blowing off. The noise, he remarked, had
been distracting, but the silence at once became intolerably
oppressive.
'"I thought I would choke before I got drowned," he said.
'He protested he did not think of saving himself. The
only distinct thought formed, vanishing, and re-forming in
his brain, was: eight hundred people and seven boats; eight
hundred people and seven boats.
'"Somebody was speaking aloud inside my head," he said a
little wildly. "Eight hundred people and seven boats—and no
time! Just think of it." He leaned towards me across the
little table, and I tried to avoid his stare. "Do you think
I was afraid of death?" he asked in a voice very fierce and
low. He brought down his open hand with a bang that made the
coffee-cups dance. "I am ready to swear I was not—I was not.
. . . By God—no!" He hitched himself upright and crossed his
arms; his chin fell on his breast.
'The soft clashes of crockery reached us faintly through
the high windows. There was a burst of voices, and several
men came out in high good-humour into the gallery. They were
exchanging jocular reminiscences of the donkeys in Cairo. A
pale anxious youth stepping softly on long legs was being
chaffed by a strutting and rubicund globe-trotter about his
purchases in the bazaar. "No, really—do you think I've been
done to that extent?" he inquired very earnest and
deliberate. The band moved away, dropping into chairs as
they went; matches flared, illuminating for a second faces
without the ghost of an expression and the flat glaze of
white shirt-fronts; the hum of many conversations animated
with the ardour of feasting sounded to me absurd and
infinitely remote.
'"Some of the crew were sleeping on the number one hatch
within reach of my arm," began Jim again.
'You must know they kept Kalashee watch in that ship, all
hands sleeping through the night, and only the reliefs of
quartermasters and look-out men being called. He was tempted
to grip and shake the shoulder of the nearest lascar, but he
didn't. Something held his arms down along his sides. He was
not afraid—oh no! only he just couldn't—that's all. He was
not afraid of death perhaps, but I'll tell you what, he was
afraid of the emergency. His confounded imagination had
evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush,
the pitiful screams, boats swamped—all the appalling
incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of. He
might have been resigned to die but I suspect he wanted to
die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful
trance. A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare,
but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in
the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a
losing battle to the last; the desire of peace waxes
stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very
desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or
maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own
person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of
effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with
unreasonable forces know it well,—the shipwrecked castaways
in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against
the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of
crowds.'
CHAPTER 8
'How long he stood stock-still by the hatch expecting
every moment to feel the ship dip under his feet and the
rush of water take him at the back and toss him like a chip,
I cannot say. Not very long—two minutes perhaps. A couple of
men he could not make out began to converse drowsily, and
also, he could not tell where, he detected a curious noise
of shuffling feet. Above these faint sounds there was that
awful stillness preceding a catastrophe, that trying silence
of the moment before the crash; then it came into his head
that perhaps he would have time to rush along and cut all
the lanyards of the gripes, so that the boats would float as
the ship went down.
'The Patna had a long bridge, and all the boats were up
there, four on one side and three on the other—the smallest
of them on the port-side and nearly abreast of the steering
gear. He assured me, with evident anxiety to be believed,
that he had been most careful to keep them ready for instant
service. He knew his duty. I dare say he was a good enough
mate as far as that went. "I always believed in being
prepared for the worst," he commented, staring anxiously in
my face. I nodded my approval of the sound principle,
averting my eyes before the subtle unsoundness of the man.
'He started unsteadily to run. He had to step over legs,
avoid stumbling against the heads. Suddenly some one caught
hold of his coat from below, and a distressed voice spoke
under his elbow. The light of the lamp he carried in his
right hand fell upon an upturned dark face whose eyes
entreated him together with the voice. He had picked up
enough of the language to understand the word water,
repeated several times in a tone of insistence, of prayer,
almost of despair. He gave a jerk to get away, and felt an
arm embrace his leg.
'"The beggar clung to me like a drowning man," he said
impressively. "Water, water! What water did he mean? What
did he know? As calmly as I could I ordered him to let go.
He was stopping me, time was pressing, other men began to
stir; I wanted time—time to cut the boats adrift. He got
hold of my hand now, and I felt that he would begin to
shout. It flashed upon me it was enough to start a panic,
and I hauled off with my free arm and slung the lamp in his
face. The glass jingled, the light went out, but the blow
made him let go, and I ran off—I wanted to get at the boats;
I wanted to get at the boats. He leaped after me from
behind. I turned on him. He would not keep quiet; he tried
to shout; I had half throttled him before I made out what he
wanted. He wanted some water—water to drink; they were on
strict allowance, you know, and he had with him a young boy
I had noticed several times. His child was sick—and thirsty.
He had caught sight of me as I passed by, and was begging
for a little water. That's all. We were under the bridge, in
the dark. He kept on snatching at my wrists; there was no
getting rid of him. I dashed into my berth, grabbed my
water-bottle, and thrust it into his hands. He vanished. I
didn't find out till then how much I was in want of a drink
myself." He leaned on one elbow with a hand over his eyes.
'I felt a creepy sensation all down my backbone; there
was something peculiar in all this. The fingers of the hand
that shaded his brow trembled slightly. He broke the short
silence.
'"These things happen only once to a man and . . . Ah!
well! When I got on the bridge at last the beggars were
getting one of the boats off the chocks. A boat! I was
running up the ladder when a heavy blow fell on my shoulder,
just missing my head. It didn't stop me, and the chief
engineer—they had got him out of his bunk by then—raised the
boat-stretcher again. Somehow I had no mind to be surprised
at anything. All this seemed natural—and awful—and awful. I
dodged that miserable maniac, lifted him off the deck as
though he had been a little child, and he started whispering
in my arms: 'Don't! don't! I thought you were one of them
niggers.' I flung him away, he skidded along the bridge and
knocked the legs from under the little chap—the second. The
skipper, busy about the boat, looked round and came at me
head down, growling like a wild beast. I flinched no more
than a stone. I was as solid standing there as this," he
tapped lightly with his knuckles the wall beside his chair.
"It was as though I had heard it all, seen it all, gone
through it all twenty times already. I wasn't afraid of
them. I drew back my fist and he stopped short, muttering—
'"'Ah! it's you. Lend a hand quick.'
'"That's what he said. Quick! As if anybody could be
quick enough. 'Aren't you going to do something?' I asked.
'Yes. Clear out,' he snarled over his shoulder.
'"I don't think I understood then what he meant. The
other two had picked themselves up by that time, and they
rushed together to the boat. They tramped, they wheezed,
they shoved, they cursed the boat, the ship, each
other—cursed me. All in mutters. I didn't move, I didn't
speak. I watched the slant of the ship. She was as still as
if landed on the blocks in a dry dock—only she was like
this," He held up his hand, palm under, the tips of the
fingers inclined downwards. "Like this," he repeated. "I
could see the line of the horizon before me, as clear as a
bell, above her stem-head; I could see the water far off
there black and sparkling, and still—still as a-pond, deadly
still, more still than ever sea was before—more still than I
could bear to look at. Have you watched a ship floating head
down, checked in sinking by a sheet of old iron too rotten
to stand being shored up? Have you? Oh yes, shored up? I
thought of that—I thought of every mortal thing; but can you
shore up a bulkhead in five minutes—or in fifty for that
matter? Where was I going to get men that would go down
below? And the timber—the timber! Would you have had the
courage to swing the maul for the first blow if you had seen
that bulkhead? Don't say you would: you had not seen it;
nobody would. Hang it—to do a thing like that you must
believe there is a chance, one in a thousand, at least, some
ghost of a chance; and you would not have believed. Nobody
would have believed. You think me a cur for standing there,
but what would you have done? What! You can't tell—nobody
can tell. One must have time to turn round. What would you
have me do? Where was the kindness in making crazy with
fright all those people I could not save single-handed—that
nothing could save? Look here! As true as I sit on this
chair before you . . ."
'He drew quick breaths at every few words and shot quick
glances at my face, as though in his anguish he were
watchful of the effect. He was not speaking to me, he was
only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible
personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his
existence—another possessor of his soul. These were issues
beyond the competency of a court of inquiry: it was a subtle
and momentous quarrel as to the true essence of life, and
did not want a judge. He wanted an ally, a helper, an
accomplice. I felt the risk I ran of being circumvented,
blinded, decoyed, bullied, perhaps, into taking a definite
part in a dispute impossible of decision if one had to be
fair to all the phantoms in possession—to the reputable that
had its claims and to the disreputable that had its
exigencies. I can't explain to you who haven't seen him and
who hear his words only at second hand the mixed nature of
my feelings. It seemed to me I was being made to comprehend
the Inconceivable—and I know of nothing to compare with the
discomfort of such a sensation. I was made to look at the
convention that lurks in all truth and on the essential
sincerity of falsehood. He appealed to all sides at once—to
the side turned perpetually to the light of day, and to that
side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon,
exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful
ashy light falling at times on the edge. He swayed me. I own
to it, I own up. The occasion was obscure,
insignificant—what you will: a lost youngster, one in a
million—but then he was one of us; an incident as completely
devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet
the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had
been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the
obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect
mankind's conception of itself. . . .'
Marlow paused to put new life into his expiring cheroot,
seemed to forget all about the story, and abruptly began
again.
'My fault of course. One has no business really to get
interested. It's a weakness of mine. His was of another
kind. My weakness consists in not having a discriminating
eye for the incidental—for the externals—no eye for the hod
of the rag-picker or the fine linen of the next man. Next
man—that's it. I have met so many men,' he pursued, with
momentary sadness—'met them too with a
certain—certain—impact, let us say; like this fellow, for
instance—and in each case all I could see was merely the
human being. A confounded democratic quality of vision which
may be better than total blindness, but has been of no
advantage to me, I can assure you. Men expect one to take
into account their fine linen. But I never could get up any
enthusiasm about these things. Oh! it's a failing; it's a
failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too
indolent for whist—and a story. . . .'
He paused again to wait for an encouraging remark,
perhaps, but nobody spoke; only the host, as if reluctantly
performing a duty, murmured—
'You are so subtle, Marlow.'
'Who? I?' said Marlow in a low voice. 'Oh no! But he
was; and try as I may for the success of this yarn, I am
missing innumerable shades—they were so fine, so difficult
to render in colourless words. Because he complicated
matters by being so simple, too—the simplest poor devil! . .
. By Jove! he was amazing. There he sat telling me that just
as I saw him before my eyes he wouldn't be afraid to face
anything—and believing in it too. I tell you it was
fabulously innocent and it was enormous, enormous! I watched
him covertly, just as though I had suspected him of an
intention to take a jolly good rise out of me. He was
confident that, on the square, "on the square, mind!" there
was nothing he couldn't meet. Ever since he had been "so
high"—"quite a little chap," he had been preparing himself
for all the difficulties that can beset one on land and
water. He confessed proudly to this kind of foresight. He
had been elaborating dangers and defences, expecting the
worst, rehearsing his best. He must have led a most exalted
existence. Can you fancy it? A succession of adventures, so
much glory, such a victorious progress! and the deep sense
of his sagacity crowning every day of his inner life. He
forgot himself; his eyes shone; and with every word my
heart, searched by the light of his absurdity, was growing
heavier in my breast. I had no mind to laugh, and lest I
should smile I made for myself a stolid face. He gave signs
of irritation.
'"It is always the unexpected that happens," I said in a
propitiatory tone. My obtuseness provoked him into a
contemptuous "Pshaw!" I suppose he meant that the unexpected
couldn't touch him; nothing less than the unconceivable
itself could get over his perfect state of preparation. He
had been taken unawares—and he whispered to himself a
malediction upon the waters and the firmament, upon the
ship, upon the men. Everything had betrayed him! He had been
tricked into that sort of high-minded resignation which
prevented him lifting as much as his little finger, while
these others who had a very clear perception of the actual
necessity were tumbling against each other and sweating
desperately over that boat business. Something had gone
wrong there at the last moment. It appears that in their
flurry they had contrived in some mysterious way to get the
sliding bolt of the foremost boat-chock jammed tight, and
forthwith had gone out of the remnants of their minds over
the deadly nature of that accident. It must have been a
pretty sight, the fierce industry of these beggars toiling
on a motionless ship that floated quietly in the silence of
a world asleep, fighting against time for the freeing of
that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair,
tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready
to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each
other's throats by the fear of death that stood silent
behind them like an inflexible and cold-eyed taskmaster. Oh
yes! It must have been a pretty sight. He saw it all, he
could talk about it with scorn and bitterness; he had a
minute knowledge of it by means of some sixth sense, I
conclude, because he swore to me he had remained apart
without a glance at them and at the boat—without one single
glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy
watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended
menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect
security—fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his
imaginative head.
'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could
depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards
of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain
of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the
grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight
closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb—the
revolt of his young life—the black end. He could! By Jove!
who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist
in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the
faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it
showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of
his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance
of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute
thoughts—a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he
confessed himself before me as though I had the power to
bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my
absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This
was one of those cases which no solemn deception can
palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems
to abandon a sinner to his own devices.
'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as
he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on
with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a
conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to
the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that,
thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside
themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three
looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings
covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings,
with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes,
arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of
annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me:
given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible
description of accident that could happen. These beggars by
the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk.
Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as
a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above
water to the end of each successive second. And still she
floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish
their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end.
It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had
needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer,
and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the
ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously
inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can
be—as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now
and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life.
Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is
the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the
native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give
evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under
intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth,
yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was.
I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the
interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the
interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court
with an important air—
'"He says he thought nothing."
'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton
handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart
twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim
hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles,
explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing
befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could
not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some
further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and
declared it never came into his mind then that the white men
were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did
not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He
wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a
man of great experience, and he wanted that white
Tuan to know—he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his
head—that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by
serving white men on the sea for a great number of
years—and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon
our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names,
names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country
ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand
of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped
him at last. A silence fell upon the court,—a silence that
remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently
into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the
second day's proceedings—affecting all the audience,
affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at
the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this
extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of
some mysterious theory of defence.
'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship
without steerage-way, where death would have found them if
such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them
half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence.
Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do
nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was
nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a
disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding,
without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of
heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across
the bridge to tug at his sleeve.
'"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!"
'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and
returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and
cursing at the same time.
'"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim
savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and
whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to
crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he
caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit
out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life—you
infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal
coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me—ha! ha! ha! . . ."
'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with
laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as
that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about
donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim
length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches
of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence
became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon
falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out
like a tiny and silvery scream.
'"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people
about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know."
'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a
while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to
probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered
carelessly—"Oh! they'll think I am drunk."
'And after that you would have thought from his
appearance he would never make a sound again. But—no fear!
He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped
living by the mere exertion of his will.'
CHAPTER 9
'"I was saying to myself, 'Sink—curse you! Sink!'" These
were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over.
He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head
this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at
the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing
scenes—as far as I can judge—of low comedy. They were still
at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try
to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand
that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a
desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down
suddenly. "Why don't you—you the strongest?" whined the
little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered
the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels
weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief
engineer rushed again at Jim.
'"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only
chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there—look!"
'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed
with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which
had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how
these squalls come up there about that time of the year.
First you see a darkening of the horizon—no more; then a
cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour
lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the
southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its
shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into
one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no
wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the
tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two
like undulations of the very darkness run past, and
suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar
impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid.
Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They
had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in
surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some
chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the
least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her
instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the
burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become
a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive,
down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their
fright, these new antics in which they displayed their
extreme aversion to die.
'"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody
steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The
infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my
head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over
anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was
angry, as though I had been trapped. I was trapped!
The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air."
'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he
seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it
maddened him; it knocked him over afresh—in a manner of
speaking—but it made him also remember that important
purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to
slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the
lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and
went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had
heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought
him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest
noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done
he returned to the very same spot from which he had started.
The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper
close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite
his ear—
'"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a
show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they
will batter your head for you from these boats."
'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper
kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer!
hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer."
'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken
arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it
seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand
to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness
to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a
cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back
instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause
flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once
and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer,
the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was
clear. Only then he turned to look—only then. But he kept
his distance—he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he
had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common
between him and these men—who had the hammer. Nothing
whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut
off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an
obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without
bottom. He was as far as he could get from them—the whole
breadth of the ship.
'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to
their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely
in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a
stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge—the
Patna had no chart-room amidships—threw a light on their
labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They
pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the
night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They
had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too
hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an
appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to
look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his
abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with
no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil
of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff
before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a
bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a
farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they
pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies,
they pushed with all the might of their souls—only no sooner
had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit
than they would leave off like one man and start a wild
scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would
swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling
against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while,
exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they
could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this
occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness.
He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I
loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he
said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful
glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?"
'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man
driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These
were things he could not explain to the court—and not even
to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception
of his confidences had I not been able at times to
understand the pauses between the words. In this assault
upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a
spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of
burlesque in his ordeal—a degradation of funny grimaces in
the approach of death or dishonour.
'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this
distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only
remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding
rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice,
he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end
was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again.
Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The
shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the
zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her
teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the
awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a
flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out
for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was
to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a
stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after
time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make
another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die
laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising
them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought
to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that
funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes
fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated
twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring.
'He roused himself.
'"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and
I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let
them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just
let them—and do better—that's all. The second time my
eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship
move. She just dipped her bows—and lifted them gently—and
slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't
done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this
first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was
no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over
something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure
of yourself—aren't you? What would you do if you felt
now—this minute—the house here move, just move a little
under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one
spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes
yonder."
'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone
balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily,
very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied
now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or
a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself
which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not
disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had
him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not
to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind
telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the
distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of
the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would
have landed short by several feet—and that's the only thing
of which I am fairly certain.
'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not
move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts
were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment
too that he saw one of the men around the boat step
backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms,
totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid
gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his
shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room
skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced
chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he
explained.
'"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court.
'"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference.
"Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been
complaining of being out of sorts for some time before.
Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It
was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't
it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing
himself! Fooled—neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by
heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if
he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to
rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he
had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called
them names!"
'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down.
'"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured.
'"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell.
Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been."
'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with
deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't you understand?" he
cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said
angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This
shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man
to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too
unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my
missile had been thrown away,—that he had not even heard the
twang of the bow.
'Of course he could not know at the time the man was
dead. The next minute—his last on board—was crowded with a
tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like
the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because
from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved
through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though
he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by
the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of
their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was
the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at
last—a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck
through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to
the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now,
another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a
threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain
and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by
panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let
go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped
through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in
startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did
break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he
said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally
dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and
tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook!
Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the
squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the
faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry
of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel
hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed
hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all
this—because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in
face, in voice—he went on to say without the slightest
warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs."
'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I
could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had
started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the
cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more
than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low.
All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs
of the dead man—by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed
devilishly down his throat, but—look you—he was not going to
admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's
extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his
illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work
upon a corpse.
'"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the
last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did
not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking
himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course:
I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into
the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about
down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out
'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They
came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one
howled. Ough!"
'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if
a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the
chair by his hair. Up, slowly—to his full height, and when
his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he
swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful
stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice
when he said "They shouted"—and involuntarily I pricked up
my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard
directly through the false effect of silence. "There were
eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to
the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight
hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one
dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh,
jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very
quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither
sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and
not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under
me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled
'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the
first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they
screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship
began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken
sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into
my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower
another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was
going down, down, head first under me. . . ."
'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made
picking motions with his fingers as though he had been
bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the
open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out—
'"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his
gaze. . . . "It seems," he added.
'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare,
and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt,
I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled
with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless
before a childish disaster.
'"Looks like it," I muttered.
'"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained
hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him
as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It
had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had
landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He
felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken;
then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had
deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing
large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen
through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed
like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he
cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped
into a well—into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."'
CHAPTER 10
'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart.
Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an
everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could
never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving
forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to
see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half
drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a
flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the
squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to
keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the
end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy
blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles."
That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind
after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the
inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent.
He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance
back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light
high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It
terrified me to see it still there," he said. That's what he
said. What terrified him was the thought that the drowning
was not over yet. No doubt he wanted to be done with that
abomination as quickly as possible. Nobody in the boat made
a sound. In the dark she seemed to fly, but of course she
could not have had much way. Then the shower swept ahead,
and the great, distracting, hissing noise followed the rain
into distance and died out. There was nothing to be heard
then but the slight wash about the boat's sides. Somebody's
teeth were chattering violently. A hand touched his back. A
faint voice said, "You there?" Another cried out shakily,
"She's gone!" and they all stood up together to look astern.
They saw no lights. All was black. A thin cold drizzle was
driving into their faces. The boat lurched slightly. The
teeth chattered faster, stopped, and began again twice
before the man could master his shiver sufficiently to say,
"Ju-ju-st in ti-ti-me. . . . Brrrr." He recognised the voice
of the chief engineer saying surlily, "I saw her go down. I
happened to turn my head." The wind had dropped almost
completely.
'They watched in the dark with their heads half turned to
windward as if expecting to hear cries. At first he was
thankful the night had covered up the scene before his eyes,
and then to know of it and yet to have seen and heard
nothing appeared somehow the culminating point of an awful
misfortune. "Strange, isn't it?" he murmured, interrupting
himself in his disjointed narrative.
'It did not seem so strange to me. He must have had an
unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as
bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the
created terror of his imagination. I believe that, in this
first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering,
that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear,
all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human
beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent
death, else why should he have said, "It seemed to me that I
must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to
see—half a mile—more—any distance—to the very spot . . ."?
Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to
the very spot? Why not drown alongside—if he meant drowning?
Why back to the very spot, to see—as if his imagination had
to be soothed by the assurance that all was over before
death could bring relief? I defy any one of you to offer
another explanation. It was one of those bizarre and
exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary
disclosure. He let it out as the most natural thing one
could say. He fought down that impulse and then he became
conscious of the silence. He mentioned this to me. A silence
of the sea, of the sky, merged into one indefinite immensity
still as death around these saved, palpitating lives. "You
might have heard a pin drop in the boat," he said with a
queer contraction of his lips, like a man trying to master
his sensibilities while relating some extremely moving fact.
A silence! God alone, who had willed him as he was, knows
what he made of it in his heart. "I didn't think any spot on
earth could be so still," he said. "You couldn't distinguish
the sea from the sky; there was nothing to see and nothing
to hear. Not a glimmer, not a shape, not a sound. You could
have believed that every bit of dry land had gone to the
bottom; that every man on earth but I and these beggars in
the boat had got drowned." He leaned over the table with his
knuckles propped amongst coffee-cups, liqueur-glasses,
cigar-ends. "I seemed to believe it. Everything was gone
and—all was over . . ." he fetched a deep sigh . . . "with
me."'
Marlow sat up abruptly and flung away his cheroot with
force. It made a darting red trail like a toy rocket fired
through the drapery of creepers. Nobody stirred.
'Hey, what do you think of it?' he cried with sudden
animation. 'Wasn't he true to himself, wasn't he? His saved
life was over for want of ground under his feet, for want of
sights for his eyes, for want of voices in his ears.
Annihilation—hey! And all the time it was only a clouded
sky, a sea that did not break, the air that did not stir.
Only a night; only a silence.
'It lasted for a while, and then they were suddenly and
unanimously moved to make a noise over their escape. "I knew
from the first she would go." "Not a minute too soon." "A
narrow squeak, b'gosh!" He said nothing, but the breeze that
had dropped came back, a gentle draught freshened steadily,
and the sea joined its murmuring voice to this talkative
reaction succeeding the dumb moments of awe. She was gone!
She was gone! Not a doubt of it. Nobody could have helped.
They repeated the same words over and over again as though
they couldn't stop themselves. Never doubted she would go.
The lights were gone. No mistake. The lights were gone.
Couldn't expect anything else. She had to go. . . . He
noticed that they talked as though they had left behind them
nothing but an empty ship. They concluded she would not have
been long when she once started. It seemed to cause them
some sort of satisfaction. They assured each other that she
couldn't have been long about it—"Just shot down like a
flat-iron." The chief engineer declared that the mast-head
light at the moment of sinking seemed to drop "like a
lighted match you throw down." At this the second laughed
hysterically. "I am g-g-glad, I am gla-a-a-d." His teeth
went on "like an electric rattle," said Jim, "and all at
once he began to cry. He wept and blubbered like a child,
catching his breath and sobbing 'Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!'
He would be quiet for a while and start suddenly, 'Oh, my
poor arm! oh, my poor a-a-a-arm!' I felt I could knock him
down. Some of them sat in the stern-sheets. I could just
make out their shapes. Voices came to me, mumble, mumble,
grunt, grunt. All this seemed very hard to bear. I was cold
too. And I could do nothing. I thought that if I moved I
would have to go over the side and . . ."
'His hand groped stealthily, came in contact with a
liqueur-glass, and was withdrawn suddenly as if it had
touched a red-hot coal. I pushed the bottle slightly. "Won't
you have some more?" I asked. He looked at me angrily.
"Don't you think I can tell you what there is to tell
without screwing myself up?" he asked. The squad of
globe-trotters had gone to bed. We were alone but for a
vague white form erect in the shadow, that, being looked at,
cringed forward, hesitated, backed away silently. It was
getting late, but I did not hurry my guest.
'In the midst of his forlorn state he heard his
companions begin to abuse some one. "What kept you from
jumping, you lunatic?" said a scolding voice. The chief
engineer left the stern-sheets, and could be heard
clambering forward as if with hostile intentions against
"the greatest idiot that ever was." The skipper shouted with
rasping effort offensive epithets from where he sat at the
oar. He lifted his head at that uproar, and heard the name
"George," while a hand in the dark struck him on the breast.
"What have you got to say for yourself, you fool?" queried
somebody, with a sort of virtuous fury. "They were after
me," he said. "They were abusing me—abusing me . . . by the
name of George."
'He paused to stare, tried to smile, turned his eyes away
and went on. "That little second puts his head right under
my nose, 'Why, it's that blasted mate!' 'What!' howls the
skipper from the other end of the boat. 'No!' shrieks the
chief. And he too stooped to look at my face."
'The wind had left the boat suddenly. The rain began to
fall again, and the soft, uninterrupted, a little mysterious
sound with which the sea receives a shower arose on all
sides in the night. "They were too taken aback to say
anything more at first," he narrated steadily, "and what
could I have to say to them?" He faltered for a moment, and
made an effort to go on. "They called me horrible names."
His voice, sinking to a whisper, now and then would leap up
suddenly, hardened by the passion of scorn, as though he had
been talking of secret abominations. "Never mind what they
called me," he said grimly. "I could hear hate in their
voices. A good thing too. They could not forgive me for
being in that boat. They hated it. It made them mad. . . ."
He laughed short. . . . "But it kept me from—Look! I was
sitting with my arms crossed, on the gunwale! . . ." He
perched himself smartly on the edge of the table and crossed
his arms. . . . "Like this—see? One little tilt backwards
and I would have been gone—after the others. One little
tilt—the least bit—the least bit." He frowned, and tapping
his forehead with the tip of his middle finger, "It was
there all the time," he said impressively. "All the
time—that notion. And the rain—cold, thick, cold as melted
snow—colder—on my thin cotton clothes—I'll never be so cold
again in my life, I know. And the sky was black too—all
black. Not a star, not a light anywhere. Nothing outside
that confounded boat and those two yapping before me like a
couple of mean mongrels at a tree'd thief. Yap! yap! 'What
you doing here? You're a fine sort! Too much of a bloomin'
gentleman to put your hand to it. Come out of your trance,
did you? To sneak in? Did you?' Yap! yap! 'You ain't fit to
live!' Yap! yap! Two of them together trying to out-bark
each other. The other would bay from the stern through the
rain—couldn't see him—couldn't make it out—some of his
filthy jargon. Yap! yap! Bow-ow-ow-ow-ow! Yap! yap! It was
sweet to hear them; it kept me alive, I tell you. It saved
my life. At it they went, as if trying to drive me overboard
with the noise! . . . 'I wonder you had pluck enough to
jump. You ain't wanted here. If I had known who it was, I
would have tipped you over—you skunk! What have you done
with the other? Where did you get the pluck to jump—you
coward? What's to prevent us three from firing you
overboard?' . . . They were out of breath; the shower passed
away upon the sea. Then nothing. There was nothing round the
boat, not even a sound. Wanted to see me overboard, did
they? Upon my soul! I think they would have had their wish
if they had only kept quiet. Fire me overboard! Would they?
'Try,' I said. 'I would for twopence.' 'Too good for you,'
they screeched together. It was so dark that it was only
when one or the other of them moved that I was quite sure of
seeing him. By heavens! I only wish they had tried."
'I couldn't help exclaiming, "What an extraordinary
affair!"
'"Not bad—eh?" he said, as if in some sort astounded.
"They pretended to think I had done away with that
donkey-man for some reason or other. Why should I? And how
the devil was I to know? Didn't I get somehow into that
boat? into that boat—I . . ." The muscles round his lips
contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the
mask of his usual expression—something violent, short-lived
and illuminating like a twist of lightning that admits the
eye for an instant into the secret convolutions of a cloud.
"I did. I was plainly there with them—wasn't I? Isn't it
awful a man should be driven to do a thing like that—and be
responsible? What did I know about their George they were
howling after? I remembered I had seen him curled up on the
deck. 'Murdering coward!' the chief kept on calling me. He
didn't seem able to remember any other two words. I didn't
care, only his noise began to worry me. 'Shut up,' I said.
At that he collected himself for a confounded screech. 'You
killed him! You killed him!' 'No,' I shouted, 'but I will
kill you directly.' I jumped up, and he fell backwards over
a thwart with an awful loud thump. I don't know why. Too
dark. Tried to step back I suppose. I stood still facing
aft, and the wretched little second began to whine, 'You
ain't going to hit a chap with a broken arm—and you call
yourself a gentleman, too.' I heard a heavy
tramp—one—two—and wheezy grunting. The other beast was
coming at me, clattering his oar over the stern. I saw him
moving, big, big—as you see a man in a mist, in a dream.
'Come on,' I cried. I would have tumbled him over like a
bale of shakings. He stopped, muttered to himself, and went
back. Perhaps he had heard the wind. I didn't. It was the
last heavy gust we had. He went back to his oar. I was
sorry. I would have tried to—to . . ."
'He opened and closed his curved fingers, and his hands
had an eager and cruel flutter. "Steady, steady," I
murmured.
'"Eh? What? I am not excited," he remonstrated, awfully
hurt, and with a convulsive jerk of his elbow knocked over
the cognac bottle. I started forward, scraping my chair. He
bounced off the table as if a mine had been exploded behind
his back, and half turned before he alighted, crouching on
his feet to show me a startled pair of eyes and a face white
about the nostrils. A look of intense annoyance succeeded.
"Awfully sorry. How clumsy of me!" he mumbled, very vexed,
while the pungent odour of spilt alcohol enveloped us
suddenly with an atmosphere of a low drinking-bout in the
cool, pure darkness of the night. The lights had been put
out in the dining-hall; our candle glimmered solitary in the
long gallery, and the columns had turned black from pediment
to capital. On the vivid stars the high corner of the
Harbour Office stood out distinct across the Esplanade, as
though the sombre pile had glided nearer to see and hear.
'He assumed an air of indifference.
'"I dare say I am less calm now than I was then. I was
ready for anything. These were trifles. . . ."
'"You had a lively time of it in that boat," I remarked
'"I was ready," he repeated. "After the ship's lights had
gone, anything might have happened in that boat—anything in
the world—and the world no wiser. I felt this, and I was
pleased. It was just dark enough too. We were like men
walled up quick in a roomy grave. No concern with anything
on earth. Nobody to pass an opinion. Nothing mattered." For
the third time during this conversation he laughed harshly,
but there was no one about to suspect him of being only
drunk. "No fear, no law, no sounds, no eyes—not even our
own, till—till sunrise at least."
'I was struck by the suggestive truth of his words. There
is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea.
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there
seems to fall the shadow of madness. When your ship fails
you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made
you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls
of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had
been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or
abomination. Of course, as with belief, thought, love, hate,
conviction, or even the visual aspect of material things,
there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and in this
one there was something abject which made the isolation more
complete—there was a villainy of circumstances that cut
these men off more completely from the rest of mankind,
whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a
fiendish and appalling joke. They were exasperated with him
for being a half-hearted shirker: he focussed on them his
hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a
signal revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in
his way. Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the
Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought,
sentiment, sensation, emotion. It was part of the burlesque
meanness pervading that particular disaster at sea that they
did not come to blows. It was all threats, all a terribly
effective feint, a sham from beginning to end, planned by
the tremendous disdain of the Dark Powers whose real
terrors, always on the verge of triumph, are perpetually
foiled by the steadfastness of men. I asked, after waiting
for a while, "Well, what happened?" A futile question. I
knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single
uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of
shadowed horror. "Nothing," he said. "I meant business, but
they meant noise only. Nothing happened."
'And the rising sun found him just as he had jumped up
first in the bows of the boat. What a persistence of
readiness! He had been holding the tiller in his hand, too,
all the night. They had dropped the rudder overboard while
attempting to ship it, and I suppose the tiller got kicked
forward somehow while they were rushing up and down that
boat trying to do all sorts of things at once so as to get
clear of the side. It was a long heavy piece of hard wood,
and apparently he had been clutching it for six hours or so.
If you don't call that being ready! Can you imagine him,
silent and on his feet half the night, his face to the gusts
of rain, staring at sombre forms watchful of vague
movements, straining his ears to catch rare low murmurs in
the stern-sheets! Firmness of courage or effort of fear?
What do you think? And the endurance is undeniable too. Six
hours more or less on the defensive; six hours of alert
immobility while the boat drove slowly or floated arrested,
according to the caprice of the wind; while the sea, calmed,
slept at last; while the clouds passed above his head; while
the sky from an immensity lustreless and black, diminished
to a sombre and lustrous vault, scintillated with a greater
brilliance, faded to the east, paled at the zenith; while
the dark shapes blotting the low stars astern got outlines,
relief became shoulders, heads, faces, features,—confronted
him with dreary stares, had dishevelled hair, torn clothes,
blinked red eyelids at the white dawn. "They looked as
though they had been knocking about drunk in gutters for a
week," he described graphically; and then he muttered
something about the sunrise being of a kind that foretells a
calm day. You know that sailor habit of referring to the
weather in every connection. And on my side his few mumbled
words were enough to make me see the lower limb of the sun
clearing the line of the horizon, the tremble of a vast
ripple running over all the visible expanse of the sea, as
if the waters had shuddered, giving birth to the globe of
light, while the last puff of the breeze would stir the air
in a sigh of relief.
'"They sat in the stern shoulder to shoulder, with the
skipper in the middle, like three dirty owls, and stared at
me," I heard him say with an intention of hate that
distilled a corrosive virtue into the commonplace words like
a drop of powerful poison falling into a glass of water; but
my thoughts dwelt upon that sunrise. I could imagine under
the pellucid emptiness of the sky these four men imprisoned
in the solitude of the sea, the lonely sun, regardless of
the speck of life, ascending the clear curve of the heaven
as if to gaze ardently from a greater height at his own
splendour reflected in the still ocean. "They called out to
me from aft," said Jim, "as though we had been chums
together. I heard them. They were begging me to be sensible
and drop that 'blooming piece of wood.' Why would I
carry on so? They hadn't done me any harm—had they? There
had been no harm. . . . No harm!"
'His face crimsoned as though he could not get rid of the
air in his lungs.
'"No harm!" he burst out. "I leave it to you. You can
understand. Can't you? You see it—don't you? No harm! Good
God! What more could they have done? Oh yes, I know very
well—I jumped. Certainly. I jumped! I told you I jumped; but
I tell you they were too much for any man. It was their
doing as plainly as if they had reached up with a boat-hook
and pulled me over. Can't you see it? You must see it. Come.
Speak—straight out."
'His uneasy eyes fastened upon mine, questioned, begged,
challenged, entreated. For the life of me I couldn't help
murmuring, "You've been tried." "More than is fair," he
caught up swiftly. "I wasn't given half a chance—with a gang
like that. And now they were friendly—oh, so damnably
friendly! Chums, shipmates. All in the same boat. Make the
best of it. They hadn't meant anything. They didn't care a
hang for George. George had gone back to his berth for
something at the last moment and got caught. The man was a
manifest fool. Very sad, of course. . . . Their eyes looked
at me; their lips moved; they wagged their heads at the
other end of the boat—three of them; they beckoned—to me.
Why not? Hadn't I jumped? I said nothing. There are no words
for the sort of things I wanted to say. If I had opened my
lips just then I would have simply howled like an animal. I
was asking myself when I would wake up. They urged me aloud
to come aft and hear quietly what the skipper had to say. We
were sure to be picked up before the evening—right in the
track of all the Canal traffic; there was smoke to the
north-west now.
'"It gave me an awful shock to see this faint, faint
blur, this low trail of brown mist through which you could
see the boundary of sea and sky. I called out to them that I
could hear very well where I was. The skipper started
swearing, as hoarse as a crow. He wasn't going to talk at
the top of his voice for my accommodation. 'Are you
afraid they will hear you on shore?' I asked. He glared as
if he would have liked to claw me to pieces. The chief
engineer advised him to humour me. He said I wasn't right in
my head yet. The other rose astern, like a thick pillar of
flesh—and talked—talked. . . ."
'Jim remained thoughtful. "Well?" I said. "What did I
care what story they agreed to make up?" he cried
recklessly. "They could tell what they jolly well liked. It
was their business. I knew the story. Nothing they could
make people believe could alter it for me. I let him talk,
argue—talk, argue. He went on and on and on. Suddenly I felt
my legs give way under me. I was sick, tired—tired to death.
I let fall the tiller, turned my back on them, and sat down
on the foremost thwart. I had enough. They called to me to
know if I understood—wasn't it true, every word of it? It
was true, by God! after their fashion. I did not turn my
head. I heard them palavering together. 'The silly ass won't
say anything.' 'Oh, he understands well enough.' 'Let him
be; he will be all right.' 'What can he do?' What could I
do? Weren't we all in the same boat? I tried to be deaf. The
smoke had disappeared to the northward. It was a dead calm.
They had a drink from the water-breaker, and I drank too.
Afterwards they made a great business of spreading the
boat-sail over the gunwales. Would I keep a look-out? They
crept under, out of my sight, thank God! I felt weary,
weary, done up, as if I hadn't had one hour's sleep since
the day I was born. I couldn't see the water for the glitter
of the sunshine. From time to time one of them would creep
out, stand up to take a look all round, and get under again.
I could hear spells of snoring below the sail. Some of them
could sleep. One of them at least. I couldn't! All was
light, light, and the boat seemed to be falling through it.
Now and then I would feel quite surprised to find myself
sitting on a thwart. . . ."
'He began to walk with measured steps to and fro before
my chair, one hand in his trousers-pocket, his head bent
thoughtfully, and his right arm at long intervals raised for
a gesture that seemed to put out of his way an invisible
intruder.
'"I suppose you think I was going mad," he began in a
changed tone. "And well you may, if you remember I had lost
my cap. The sun crept all the way from east to west over my
bare head, but that day I could not come to any harm, I
suppose. The sun could not make me mad. . . ." His right arm
put aside the idea of madness. . . . "Neither could it kill
me. . . ." Again his arm repulsed a shadow. . . . "That
rested with me."
'"Did it?" I said, inexpressibly amazed at this new turn,
and I looked at him with the same sort of feeling I might be
fairly conceived to experience had he, after spinning round
on his heel, presented an altogether new face.
'"I didn't get brain fever, I did not drop dead either,"
he went on. "I didn't bother myself at all about the sun
over my head. I was thinking as coolly as any man that ever
sat thinking in the shade. That greasy beast of a skipper
poked his big cropped head from under the canvas and screwed
his fishy eyes up at me. 'Donnerwetter! you will die,' he
growled, and drew in like a turtle. I had seen him. I had
heard him. He didn't interrupt me. I was thinking just then
that I wouldn't."
'He tried to sound my thought with an attentive glance
dropped on me in passing. "Do you mean to say you had been
deliberating with yourself whether you would die?" I asked
in as impenetrable a tone as I could command. He nodded
without stopping. "Yes, it had come to that as I sat there
alone," he said. He passed on a few steps to the imaginary
end of his beat, and when he flung round to come back both
his hands were thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped
short in front of my chair and looked down. "Don't you
believe it?" he inquired with tense curiosity. I was moved
to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe
implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me.'
CHAPTER 11
'He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had
another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved
and had his being. The dim candle spluttered within the ball
of glass, and that was all I had to see him by; at his back
was the dark night with the clear stars, whose distant
glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the
depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light
seemed to show me his boyish head, as if in that moment the
youth within him had, for a moment, glowed and expired. "You
are an awful good sort to listen like this," he said. "It
does me good. You don't know what it is to me. You don't" .
. . words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He
was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of
the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the
sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these
illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and
which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame,
give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of
light . . . of heat! . . . Yes; I had a glimpse of him then
. . . and it was not the last of that kind. . . . "You don't
know what it is for a fellow in my position to be
believed—make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so
difficult—so awfully unfair—so hard to understand."
'The mists were closing again. I don't know how old I
appeared to him—and how much wise. Not half as old as I felt
just then; not half as uselessly wise as I knew myself to
be. Surely in no other craft as in that of the sea do the
hearts of those already launched to sink or swim go out so
much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes
upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a
reflection of his own glances full of fire. There is such
magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven
each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a
beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only
reward. What we get—well, we won't talk of that; but can one
of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the
illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning
all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the
subjugation more complete. Hadn't we all commenced with the
same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the
memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days
of imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets
home the bond is found to be close; that besides the
fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a
wider feeling—the feeling that binds a man to a child. He
was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find
a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of
himself as a young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil
of a scrape, the sort of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly
while they hide a smile. And he had been deliberating upon
death—confound him! He had found that to meditate about
because he thought he had saved his life, while all its
glamour had gone with the ship in the night. What more
natural! It was tragic enough and funny enough in all
conscience to call aloud for compassion, and in what was I
better than the rest of us to refuse him my pity? And even
as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent, and his
voice spoke—
'"I was so lost, you know. It was the sort of thing one
does not expect to happen to one. It was not like a fight,
for instance."
'"It was not," I admitted. He appeared changed, as if he
had suddenly matured.
'"One couldn't be sure," he muttered.
'"Ah! You were not sure," I said, and was placated by the
sound of a faint sigh that passed between us like the flight
of a bird in the night.
'"Well, I wasn't," he said courageously. "It was
something like that wretched story they made up. It was not
a lie—but it wasn't truth all the same. It was something. .
. . One knows a downright lie. There was not the thickness
of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this
affair."
'"How much more did you want?" I asked; but I think I
spoke so low that he did not catch what I said. He had
advanced his argument as though life had been a network of
paths separated by chasms. His voice sounded reasonable.
'"Suppose I had not—I mean to say, suppose I had stuck to
the ship? Well. How much longer? Say a minute—half a minute.
Come. In thirty seconds, as it seemed certain then, I would
have been overboard; and do you think I would not have laid
hold of the first thing that came in my way—oar, life-buoy,
grating—anything? Wouldn't you?"
'"And be saved," I interjected.
'"I would have meant to be," he retorted. "And that's
more than I meant when I" . . . he shivered as if about to
swallow some nauseous drug . . . "jumped," he pronounced
with a convulsive effort, whose stress, as if propagated by
the waves of the air, made my body stir a little in the
chair. He fixed me with lowering eyes. "Don't you believe
me?" he cried. "I swear! . . . Confound it! You got me here
to talk, and . . . You must! . . . You said you would
believe." "Of course I do," I protested, in a matter-of-fact
tone which produced a calming effect. "Forgive me," he said.
"Of course I wouldn't have talked to you about all this if
you had not been a gentleman. I ought to have known . . . I
am—I am—a gentleman too . . ." "Yes, yes," I said hastily.
He was looking me squarely in the face, and withdrew his
gaze slowly. "Now you understand why I didn't after all . .
. didn't go out in that way. I wasn't going to be frightened
at what I had done. And, anyhow, if I had stuck to the ship
I would have done my best to be saved. Men have been known
to float for hours—in the open sea—and be picked up not much
the worse for it. I might have lasted it out better than
many others. There's nothing the matter with my heart." He
withdrew his right fist from his pocket, and the blow he
struck on his chest resounded like a muffled detonation in
the night.
'"No," I said. He meditated, with his legs slightly apart
and his chin sunk. "A hair's-breadth," he muttered. "Not the
breadth of a hair between this and that. And at the time . .
."
'"It is difficult to see a hair at midnight," I put in, a
little viciously I fear. Don't you see what I mean by the
solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as
though he had cheated me—me!—of a splendid opportunity to
keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had
robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour.
"And so you cleared out—at once."
'"Jumped," he corrected me incisively. "Jumped—mind!" he
repeated, and I wondered at the evident but obscure
intention. "Well, yes! Perhaps I could not see then. But I
had plenty of time and any amount of light in that boat. And
I could think, too. Nobody would know, of course, but this
did not make it any easier for me. You've got to believe
that, too. I did not want all this talk. . . . No . . . Yes
. . . I won't lie . . . I wanted it: it is the very thing I
wanted—there. Do you think you or anybody could have made me
if I . . . I am—I am not afraid to tell. And I wasn't afraid
to think either. I looked it in the face. I wasn't going to
run away. At first—at night, if it hadn't been for those
fellows I might have . . . No! by heavens! I was not going
to give them that satisfaction. They had done enough. They
made up a story, and believed it for all I know. But I knew
the truth, and I would live it down—alone, with myself. I
wasn't going to give in to such a beastly unfair thing. What
did it prove after all? I was confoundedly cut up. Sick of
life—to tell you the truth; but what would have been the
good to shirk it—in—in—that way? That was not the way. I
believe—I believe it would have—it would have
ended—nothing."
'He had been walking up and down, but with the last word
he turned short at me.
'"What do you believe?" he asked with violence. A
pause ensued, and suddenly I felt myself overcome by a
profound and hopeless fatigue, as though his voice had
startled me out of a dream of wandering through empty spaces
whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body.
'". . . Would have ended nothing," he muttered over me
obstinately, after a little while. "No! the proper thing was
to face it out—alone for myself—wait for another chance—find
out . . ."'
CHAPTER 12
'All around everything was still as far as the ear could
reach. The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if
disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the
immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct
of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic
figure in a picture. The chill air of the night seemed to
lie on my limbs as heavy as a slab of marble.
'"I see," I murmured, more to prove to myself that I
could break my state of numbness than for any other reason.
'"The Avondale picked us up just before sunset," he
remarked moodily. "Steamed right straight for us. We had
only to sit and wait."
'After a long interval, he said, "They told their story."
And again there was that oppressive silence. "Then only I
knew what it was I had made up my mind to," he added.
'"You said nothing," I whispered.
'"What could I say?" he asked, in the same low tone. . .
. "Shock slight. Stopped the ship. Ascertained the damage.
Took measures to get the boats out without creating a panic.
As the first boat was lowered ship went down in a squall.
Sank like lead. . . . What could be more clear" . . . he
hung his head . . . "and more awful?" His lips quivered
while he looked straight into my eyes. "I had jumped—hadn't
I?" he asked, dismayed. "That's what I had to live down. The
story didn't matter." . . . He clasped his hands for an
instant, glanced right and left into the gloom: "It was like
cheating the dead," he stammered.
'"And there were no dead," I said.
'He went away from me at this. That is the only way I can
describe it. In a moment I saw his back close to the
balustrade. He stood there for some time, as if admiring the
purity and the peace of the night. Some flowering-shrub in
the garden below spread its powerful scent through the damp
air. He returned to me with hasty steps.
'"And that did not matter," he said, as stubbornly as you
please.
'"Perhaps not," I admitted. I began to have a notion he
was too much for me. After all, what did I know?
'"Dead or not dead, I could not get clear," he said. "I
had to live; hadn't I?"
'"Well, yes—if you take it in that way," I mumbled.
'"I was glad, of course," he threw out carelessly, with
his mind fixed on something else. "The exposure," he
pronounced slowly, and lifted his head. "Do you know what
was my first thought when I heard? I was relieved. I was
relieved to learn that those shouts—did I tell you I had
heard shouts? No? Well, I did. Shouts for help . . . blown
along with the drizzle. Imagination, I suppose. And yet I
can hardly . . . How stupid. . . . The others did not. I
asked them afterwards. They all said No. No? And I was
hearing them even then! I might have known—but I didn't
think—I only listened. Very faint screams—day after day.
Then that little half-caste chap here came up and spoke to
me. 'The Patna . . . French gunboat . . . towed successfully
to Aden . . . Investigation . . . Marine Office . . .
Sailors' Home . . . arrangements made for your board and
lodging!' I walked along with him, and I enjoyed the
silence. So there had been no shouting. Imagination. I had
to believe him. I could hear nothing any more. I wonder how
long I could have stood it. It was getting worse, too . . .
I mean—louder." 'He fell into thought.
'"And I had heard nothing! Well—so be it. But the lights!
The lights did go! We did not see them. They were not there.
If they had been, I would have swam back—I would have gone
back and shouted alongside—I would have begged them to take
me on board. . . . I would have had my chance. . . . You
doubt me? . . . How do you know how I felt? . . . What right
have you to doubt? . . . I very nearly did it as it was—do
you understand?" His voice fell. "There was not a
glimmer—not a glimmer," he protested mournfully. "Don't you
understand that if there had been, you would not have seen
me here? You see me—and you doubt."
'I shook my head negatively. This question of the lights
being lost sight of when the boat could not have been more
than a quarter of a mile from the ship was a matter for much
discussion. Jim stuck to it that there was nothing to be
seen after the first shower had cleared away; and the others
had affirmed the same thing to the officers of the Avondale.
Of course people shook their heads and smiled. One old
skipper who sat near me in court tickled my ear with his
white beard to murmur, "Of course they would lie." As a
matter of fact nobody lied; not even the chief engineer with
his story of the mast-head light dropping like a match you
throw down. Not consciously, at least. A man with his liver
in such a state might very well have seen a floating spark
in the corner of his eye when stealing a hurried glance over
his shoulder. They had seen no light of any sort though they
were well within range, and they could only explain this in
one way: the ship had gone down. It was obvious and
comforting. The foreseen fact coming so swiftly had
justified their haste. No wonder they did not cast about for
any other explanation. Yet the true one was very simple, and
as soon as Brierly suggested it the court ceased to bother
about the question. If you remember, the ship had been
stopped, and was lying with her head on the course steered
through the night, with her stern canted high and her bows
brought low down in the water through the filling of the
fore-compartment. Being thus out of trim, when the squall
struck her a little on the quarter, she swung head to wind
as sharply as though she had been at anchor. By this change
in her position all her lights were in a very few moments
shut off from the boat to leeward. It may very well be that,
had they been seen, they would have had the effect of a mute
appeal—that their glimmer lost in the darkness of the cloud
would have had the mysterious power of the human glance that
can awaken the feelings of remorse and pity. It would have
said, "I am here—still here" . . . and what more can the eye
of the most forsaken of human beings say? But she turned her
back on them as if in disdain of their fate: she had swung
round, burdened, to glare stubbornly at the new danger of
the open sea which she so strangely survived to end her days
in a breaking-up yard, as if it had been her recorded fate
to die obscurely under the blows of many hammers. What were
the various ends their destiny provided for the pilgrims I
am unable to say; but the immediate future brought, at about
nine o'clock next morning, a French gunboat homeward bound
from Reunion. The report of her commander was public
property. He had swept a little out of his course to
ascertain what was the matter with that steamer floating
dangerously by the head upon a still and hazy sea. There was
an ensign, union down, flying at her main gaff (the serang
had the sense to make a signal of distress at daylight); but
the cooks were preparing the food in the cooking-boxes
forward as usual. The decks were packed as close as a
sheep-pen: there were people perched all along the rails,
jammed on the bridge in a solid mass; hundreds of eyes
stared, and not a sound was heard when the gunboat ranged
abreast, as if all that multitude of lips had been sealed by
a spell.
'The Frenchman hailed, could get no intelligible reply,
and after ascertaining through his binoculars that the crowd
on deck did not look plague-stricken, decided to send a
boat. Two officers came on board, listened to the serang,
tried to talk with the Arab, couldn't make head or tail of
it: but of course the nature of the emergency was obvious
enough. They were also very much struck by discovering a
white man, dead and curled up peacefully on the bridge.
"Fort intrigues par ce cadavre," as I was informed a long
time after by an elderly French lieutenant whom I came
across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a
sort of cafe, and who remembered the affair perfectly.
Indeed this affair, I may notice in passing, had an
extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and
the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of
uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their
tongues. I've had the questionable pleasure of meeting it
often, years afterwards, thousands of miles away, emerging
from the remotest possible talk, coming to the surface of
the most distant allusions. Has it not turned up to-night
between us? And I am the only seaman here. I am the only one
to whom it is a memory. And yet it has made its way out! But
if two men who, unknown to each other, knew of this affair
met accidentally on any spot of this earth, the thing would
pop up between them as sure as fate, before they parted. I
had never seen that Frenchman before, and at the end of an
hour we had done with each other for life: he did not seem
particularly talkative either; he was a quiet, massive chap
in a creased uniform, sitting drowsily over a tumbler half
full of some dark liquid. His shoulder-straps were a bit
tarnished, his clean-shaved cheeks were large and sallow; he
looked like a man who would be given to taking snuff—don't
you know? I won't say he did; but the habit would have
fitted that kind of man. It all began by his handing me a
number of Home News, which I didn't want, across the marble
table. I said "Merci." We exchanged a few apparently
innocent remarks, and suddenly, before I knew how it had
come about, we were in the midst of it, and he was telling
me how much they had been "intrigued by that corpse." It
turned out he had been one of the boarding officers.
'In the establishment where we sat one could get a
variety of foreign drinks which were kept for the visiting
naval officers, and he took a sip of the dark
medical-looking stuff, which probably was nothing more nasty
than cassis a l'eau, and glancing with one eye into the
tumbler, shook his head slightly. "Impossible de
comprendre—vous concevez," he said, with a curious mixture
of unconcern and thoughtfulness. I could very easily
conceive how impossible it had been for them to understand.
Nobody in the gunboat knew enough English to get hold of the
story as told by the serang. There was a good deal of noise,
too, round the two officers. "They crowded upon us. There
was a circle round that dead man (autour de ce mort)," he
described. "One had to attend to the most pressing. These
people were beginning to agitate themselves—Parbleu! A mob
like that—don't you see?" he interjected with philosophic
indulgence. As to the bulkhead, he had advised his commander
that the safest thing was to leave it alone, it was so
villainous to look at. They got two hawsers on board
promptly (en toute hale) and took the Patna in tow—stern
foremost at that—which, under the circumstances, was not so
foolish, since the rudder was too much out of the water to
be of any great use for steering, and this manoeuvre eased
the strain on the bulkhead, whose state, he expounded with
stolid glibness, demanded the greatest care (exigeait les
plus grands menagements). I could not help thinking that my
new acquaintance must have had a voice in most of these
arrangements: he looked a reliable officer, no longer very
active, and he was seamanlike too, in a way, though as he
sat there, with his thick fingers clasped lightly on his
stomach, he reminded you of one of those snuffy, quiet
village priests, into whose ears are poured the sins, the
sufferings, the remorse of peasant generations, on whose
faces the placid and simple expression is like a veil thrown
over the mystery of pain and distress. He ought to have had
a threadbare black soutane buttoned smoothly up to his ample
chin, instead of a frock-coat with shoulder-straps and brass
buttons. His broad bosom heaved regularly while he went on
telling me that it had been the very devil of a job, as
doubtless (sans doute) I could figure to myself in my
quality of a seaman (en votre qualite de marin). At the end
of the period he inclined his body slightly towards me, and,
pursing his shaved lips, allowed the air to escape with a
gentle hiss. "Luckily," he continued, "the sea was level
like this table, and there was no more wind than there is
here." . . . The place struck me as indeed intolerably
stuffy, and very hot; my face burned as though I had been
young enough to be embarrassed and blushing. They had
directed their course, he pursued, to the nearest English
port "naturellement," where their responsibility ceased,
"Dieu merci." . . . He blew out his flat cheeks a little. .
. . "Because, mind you (notez bien), all the time of towing
we had two quartermasters stationed with axes by the
hawsers, to cut us clear of our tow in case she . . ." He
fluttered downwards his heavy eyelids, making his meaning as
plain as possible. . . . "What would you! One does what one
can (on fait ce qu'on peut)," and for a moment he managed to
invest his ponderous immobility with an air of resignation.
"Two quartermasters—thirty hours—always there. Two!" he
repeated, lifting up his right hand a little, and exhibiting
two fingers. This was absolutely the first gesture I saw him
make. It gave me the opportunity to "note" a starred scar on
the back of his hand—effect of a gunshot clearly; and, as if
my sight had been made more acute by this discovery, I
perceived also the seam of an old wound, beginning a little
below the temple and going out of sight under the short grey
hair at the side of his head—the graze of a spear or the cut
of a sabre. He clasped his hands on his stomach again. "I
remained on board that—that—my memory is going (s'en va).
Ah! Patt-na. C'est bien ca. Patt-na. Merci. It is droll how
one forgets. I stayed on that ship thirty hours. . . ."
'"You did!" I exclaimed. Still gazing at his hands, he
pursed his lips a little, but this time made no hissing
sound. "It was judged proper," he said, lifting his eyebrows
dispassionately, "that one of the officers should remain to
keep an eye open (pour ouvrir l'oeil)" . . . he sighed idly
. . . "and for communicating by signals with the towing
ship—do you see?—and so on. For the rest, it was my opinion
too. We made our boats ready to drop over—and I also on that
ship took measures. . . . Enfin! One has done one's
possible. It was a delicate position. Thirty hours! They
prepared me some food. As for the wine—go and whistle for
it—not a drop." In some extraordinary way, without any
marked change in his inert attitude and in the placid
expression of his face, he managed to convey the idea of
profound disgust. "I—you know—when it comes to eating
without my glass of wine—I am nowhere."
'I was afraid he would enlarge upon the grievance, for
though he didn't stir a limb or twitch a feature, he made
one aware how much he was irritated by the recollection. But
he seemed to forget all about it. They delivered their
charge to the "port authorities," as he expressed it. He was
struck by the calmness with which it had been received. "One
might have thought they had such a droll find (drole de
trouvaille) brought them every day. You are
extraordinary—you others," he commented, with his back
propped against the wall, and looking himself as incapable
of an emotional display as a sack of meal. There happened to
be a man-of-war and an Indian Marine steamer in the harbour
at the time, and he did not conceal his admiration of the
efficient manner in which the boats of these two ships
cleared the Patna of her passengers. Indeed his torpid
demeanour concealed nothing: it had that mysterious, almost
miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means
impossible of detection which is the last word of the
highest art. "Twenty-five minutes—watch in hand—twenty-five,
no more." . . . He unclasped and clasped again his fingers
without removing his hands from his stomach, and made it
infinitely more effective than if he had thrown up his arms
to heaven in amazement. . . . "All that lot (tout ce monde)
on shore—with their little affairs—nobody left but a guard
of seamen (marins de l'Etat) and that interesting corpse
(cet interessant cadavre). Twenty-five minutes." . . . With
downcast eyes and his head tilted slightly on one side he
seemed to roll knowingly on his tongue the savour of a smart
bit of work. He persuaded one without any further
demonstration that his approval was eminently worth having,
and resuming his hardly interrupted immobility, he went on
to inform me that, being under orders to make the best of
their way to Toulon, they left in two hours' time, "so that
(de sorte que) there are many things in this incident of my
life (dans cet episode de ma vie) which have remained
obscure."'
CHAPTER 13
'After these words, and without a change of attitude, he,
so to speak, submitted himself passively to a state of
silence. I kept him company; and suddenly, but not abruptly,
as if the appointed time had arrived for his moderate and
husky voice to come out of his immobility, he pronounced,
"Mon Dieu! how the time passes!" Nothing could have been
more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance
coincided for me with a moment of vision. It's extraordinary
how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears,
with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may
be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the
incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known
one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear,
understand ever so much—everything—in a flash—before we fall
back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes
when he spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him
before. I saw his chin sunk on his breast, the clumsy folds
of his coat, his clasped hands, his motionless pose, so
curiously suggestive of his having been simply left there.
Time had passed indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead.
It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the
iron-grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two
scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps; one of those
steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great
reputations, one of those uncounted lives that are buried
without drums and trumpets under the foundations of
monumental successes. "I am now third lieutenant of the
Victorieuse" (she was the flagship of the French Pacific
squadron at the time), he said, detaching his shoulders from
the wall a couple of inches to introduce himself. I bowed
slightly on my side of the table, and told him I commanded a
merchant vessel at present anchored in Rushcutters' Bay. He
had "remarked" her,—a pretty little craft. He was very civil
about it in his impassive way. I even fancy he went the
length of tilting his head in compliment as he repeated,
breathing visibly the while, "Ah, yes. A little craft
painted black—very pretty—very pretty (tres coquet)." After
a time he twisted his body slowly to face the glass door on
our right. "A dull town (triste ville)," he observed,
staring into the street. It was a brilliant day; a southerly
buster was raging, and we could see the passers-by, men and
women, buffeted by the wind on the sidewalks, the sunlit
fronts of the houses across the road blurred by the tall
whirls of dust. "I descended on shore," he said, "to stretch
my legs a little, but . . ." He didn't finish, and sank into
the depths of his repose. "Pray—tell me," he began, coming
up ponderously, "what was there at the bottom of this
affair—precisely (au juste)? It is curious. That dead man,
for instance—and so on."
'"There were living men too," I said; "much more
curious."
'"No doubt, no doubt," he agreed half audibly, then, as
if after mature consideration, murmured, "Evidently." I made
no difficulty in communicating to him what had interested me
most in this affair. It seemed as though he had a right to
know: hadn't he spent thirty hours on board the Palna—had he
not taken the succession, so to speak, had he not done "his
possible"? He listened to me, looking more priest-like than
ever, and with what—probably on account of his downcast
eyes—had the appearance of devout concentration. Once or
twice he elevated his eyebrows (but without raising his
eyelids), as one would say "The devil!" Once he calmly
exclaimed, "Ah, bah!" under his breath, and when I had
finished he pursed his lips in a deliberate way and emitted
a sort of sorrowful whistle.
'In any one else it might have been an evidence of
boredom, a sign of indifference; but he, in his occult way,
managed to make his immobility appear profoundly responsive,
and as full of valuable thoughts as an egg is of meat. What
he said at last was nothing more than a "Very interesting,"
pronounced politely, and not much above a whisper. Before I
got over my disappointment he added, but as if speaking to
himself, "That's it. That is it." His chin seemed to
sink lower on his breast, his body to weigh heavier on his
seat. I was about to ask him what he meant, when a sort of
preparatory tremor passed over his whole person, as a faint
ripple may be seen upon stagnant water even before the wind
is felt. "And so that poor young man ran away along with the
others," he said, with grave tranquillity.
'I don't know what made me smile: it is the only genuine
smile of mine I can remember in connection with Jim's
affair. But somehow this simple statement of the matter
sounded funny in French. . . . "S'est enfui avec les
autres," had said the lieutenant. And suddenly I began to
admire the discrimination of the man. He had made out the
point at once: he did get hold of the only thing I cared
about. I felt as though I were taking professional opinion
on the case. His imperturbable and mature calmness was that
of an expert in possession of the facts, and to whom one's
perplexities are mere child's-play. "Ah! The young, the
young," he said indulgently. "And after all, one does not
die of it." "Die of what?" I asked swiftly. "Of being
afraid." He elucidated his meaning and sipped his drink.
'I perceived that the three last fingers of his wounded
hand were stiff and could not move independently of each
other, so that he took up his tumbler with an ungainly
clutch. "One is always afraid. One may talk, but . . ." He
put down the glass awkwardly. . . . "The fear, the fear—look
you—it is always there." . . . He touched his breast near a
brass button, on the very spot where Jim had given a thump
to his own when protesting that there was nothing the matter
with his heart. I suppose I made some sign of dissent,
because he insisted, "Yes! yes! One talks, one talks; this
is all very fine; but at the end of the reckoning one is no
cleverer than the next man—and no more brave. Brave! This is
always to be seen. I have rolled my hump (roule ma bosse),"
he said, using the slang expression with imperturbable
seriousness, "in all parts of the world; I have known brave
men—famous ones! Allez!" . . . He drank carelessly. . . .
"Brave—you conceive—in the Service—one has got to be—the
trade demands it (le metier veut ca). Is it not so?" he
appealed to me reasonably. "Eh bien! Each of them—I say each
of them, if he were an honest man—bien entendu—would confess
that there is a point—there is a point—for the best of
us—there is somewhere a point when you let go everything
(vous lachez tout). And you have got to live with that
truth—do you see? Given a certain combination of
circumstances, fear is sure to come. Abominable funk (un
trac epouvantable). And even for those who do not believe
this truth there is fear all the same—the fear of
themselves. Absolutely so. Trust me. Yes. Yes. . . . At my
age one knows what one is talking about—que diable!" . . .
He had delivered himself of all this as immovably as though
he had been the mouthpiece of abstract wisdom, but at this
point he heightened the effect of detachment by beginning to
twirl his thumbs slowly. "It's evident—parbleu!" he
continued; "for, make up your mind as much as you like, even
a simple headache or a fit of indigestion (un derangement
d'estomac) is enough to . . . Take me, for instance—I have
made my proofs. Eh bien! I, who am speaking to you, once . .
."
'He drained his glass and returned to his twirling. "No,
no; one does not die of it," he pronounced finally, and when
I found he did not mean to proceed with the personal
anecdote, I was extremely disappointed; the more so as it
was not the sort of story, you know, one could very well
press him for. I sat silent, and he too, as if nothing could
please him better. Even his thumbs were still now. Suddenly
his lips began to move. "That is so," he resumed placidly.
"Man is born a coward (L'homme est ne poltron). It is a
difficulty—parbleu! It would be too easy other vise. But
habit—habit—necessity—do you see?—the eye of others—voila.
One puts up with it. And then the example of others who are
no better than yourself, and yet make good countenance. . .
."
'His voice ceased.
'"That young man—you will observe—had none of these
inducements—at least at the moment," I remarked.
'He raised his eyebrows forgivingly: "I don't say; I
don't say. The young man in question might have had the best
dispositions—the best dispositions," he repeated, wheezing a
little.
'"I am glad to see you taking a lenient view," I said.
"His own feeling in the matter was—ah!—hopeful, and . . ."
'The shuffle of his feet under the table interrupted me.
He drew up his heavy eyelids. Drew up, I say—no other
expression can describe the steady deliberation of the
act—and at last was disclosed completely to me. I was
confronted by two narrow grey circlets, like two tiny steel
rings around the profound blackness of the pupils. The sharp
glance, coming from that massive body, gave a notion of
extreme efficiency, like a razor-edge on a battle-axe.
"Pardon," he said punctiliously. His right hand went up, and
he swayed forward. "Allow me . . . I contended that one may
get on knowing very well that one's courage does not come of
itself (ne vient pas tout seul). There's nothing much in
that to get upset about. One truth the more ought not to
make life impossible. . . . But the honour—the honour,
monsieur! . . . The honour . . . that is real—that is! And
what life may be worth when" . . . he got on his feet with a
ponderous impetuosity, as a startled ox might scramble up
from the grass . . . "when the honour is gone—ah ca! par
exemple—I can offer no opinion. I can offer no
opinion—because—monsieur—I know nothing of it."
'I had risen too, and, trying to throw infinite
politeness into our attitudes, we faced each other mutely,
like two china dogs on a mantelpiece. Hang the fellow! he
had pricked the bubble. The blight of futility that lies in
wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation,
and made it a thing of empty sounds. "Very well," I said,
with a disconcerted smile; "but couldn't it reduce itself to
not being found out?" He made as if to retort readily, but
when he spoke he had changed his mind. "This, monsieur, is
too fine for me—much above me—I don't think about it." He
bowed heavily over his cap, which he held before him by the
peak, between the thumb and the forefinger of his wounded
hand. I bowed too. We bowed together: we scraped our feet at
each other with much ceremony, while a dirty specimen of a
waiter looked on critically, as though he had paid for the
performance. "Serviteur," said the Frenchman. Another
scrape. "Monsieur" . . . "Monsieur." . . . The glass door
swung behind his burly back. I saw the southerly buster get
hold of him and drive him down wind with his hand to his
head, his shoulders braced, and the tails of his coat blown
hard against his legs.
'I sat down again alone and discouraged—discouraged about
Jim's case. If you wonder that after more than three years
it had preserved its actuality, you must know that I had
seen him only very lately. I had come straight from
Samarang, where I had loaded a cargo for Sydney: an utterly
uninteresting bit of business,—what Charley here would call
one of my rational transactions,—and in Samarang I had seen
something of Jim. He was then working for De Jongh, on my
recommendation. Water-clerk. "My representative afloat," as
De Jongh called him. You can't imagine a mode of life more
barren of consolation, less capable of being invested with a
spark of glamour—unless it be the business of an insurance
canvasser. Little Bob Stanton—Charley here knew him well—had
gone through that experience. The same who got drowned
afterwards trying to save a lady's-maid in the Sephora
disaster. A case of collision on a hazy morning off the
Spanish coast—you may remember. All the passengers had been
packed tidily into the boats and shoved clear of the ship,
when Bob sheered alongside again and scrambled back on deck
to fetch that girl. How she had been left behind I can't
make out; anyhow, she had gone completely crazy—wouldn't
leave the ship—held to the rail like grim death. The
wrestling-match could be seen plainly from the boats; but
poor Bob was the shortest chief mate in the merchant
service, and the woman stood five feet ten in her shoes and
was as strong as a horse, I've been told. So it went on,
pull devil, pull baker, the wretched girl screaming all the
time, and Bob letting out a yell now and then to warn his
boat to keep well clear of the ship. One of the hands told
me, hiding a smile at the recollection, "It was for all the
world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his
mother." The same old chap said that "At the last we could
see that Mr. Stanton had given up hauling at the gal, and
just stood by looking at her, watchful like. We thought
afterwards he must've been reckoning that, maybe, the rush
of water would tear her away from the rail by-and-by and
give him a show to save her. We daren't come alongside for
our life; and after a bit the old ship went down all on a
sudden with a lurch to starboard—plop. The suck in was
something awful. We never saw anything alive or dead come
up." Poor Bob's spell of shore-life had been one of the
complications of a love affair, I believe. He fondly hoped
he had done with the sea for ever, and made sure he had got
hold of all the bliss on earth, but it came to canvassing in
the end. Some cousin of his in Liverpool put up to it. He
used to tell us his experiences in that line. He made us
laugh till we cried, and, not altogether displeased at the
effect, undersized and bearded to the waist like a gnome, he
would tiptoe amongst us and say, "It's all very well for you
beggars to laugh, but my immortal soul was shrivelled down
to the size of a parched pea after a week of that work." I
don't know how Jim's soul accommodated itself to the new
conditions of his life—I was kept too busy in getting him
something to do that would keep body and soul together—but I
am pretty certain his adventurous fancy was suffering all
the pangs of starvation. It had certainly nothing to feed
upon in this new calling. It was distressing to see him at
it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which
I must give him full credit. I kept my eye on his shabby
plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for
the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after
more glamour than he could carry. He had loved too well to
imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was
condemned to toil without honour like a costermonger's
donkey. He did it very well. He shut himself in, put his
head down, said never a word. Very well; very well
indeed—except for certain fantastic and violent outbreaks,
on the deplorable occasions when the irrepressible Patna
case cropped up. Unfortunately that scandal of the Eastern
seas would not die out. And this is the reason why I could
never feel I had done with Jim for good.
'I sat thinking of him after the French lieutenant had
left, not, however, in connection with De Jongh's cool and
gloomy backshop, where we had hurriedly shaken hands not
very long ago, but as I had seen him years before in the
last flickers of the candle, alone with me in the long
gallery of the Malabar House, with the chill and the
darkness of the night at his back. The respectable sword of
his country's law was suspended over his head. To-morrow—or
was it to-day? (midnight had slipped by long before we
parted)—the marble-faced police magistrate, after
distributing fines and terms of imprisonment in the
assault-and-battery case, would take up the awful weapon and
smite his bowed neck. Our communion in the night was
uncommonly like a last vigil with a condemned man. He was
guilty too. He was guilty—as I had told myself repeatedly,
guilty and done for; nevertheless, I wished to spare him the
mere detail of a formal execution. I don't pretend to
explain the reasons of my desire—I don't think I could; but
if you haven't got a sort of notion by this time, then I
must have been very obscure in my narrative, or you too
sleepy to seize upon the sense of my words. I don't defend
my morality. There was no morality in the impulse which
induced me to lay before him Brierly's plan of evasion—I may
call it—in all its primitive simplicity. There were the
rupees—absolutely ready in my pocket and very much at his
service. Oh! a loan; a loan of course—and if an introduction
to a man (in Rangoon) who could put some work in his way . .
. Why! with the greatest pleasure. I had pen, ink, and paper
in my room on the first floor And even while I was speaking
I was impatient to begin the letter—day, month, year, 2.30
A.M. . . . for the sake of our old friendship I ask you to
put some work in the way of Mr. James So-and-so, in whom,
&c., &c. . . . I was even ready to write in that strain
about him. If he had not enlisted my sympathies he had done
better for himself—he had gone to the very fount and origin
of that sentiment he had reached the secret sensibility of
my egoism. I am concealing nothing from you, because were I
to do so my action would appear more unintelligible than any
man's action has the right to be, and—in the second
place—to-morrow you will forget my sincerity along with the
other lessons of the past. In this transaction, to speak
grossly and precisely, I was the irreproachable man; but the
subtle intentions of my immorality were defeated by the
moral simplicity of the criminal. No doubt he was selfish
too, but his selfishness had a higher origin, a more lofty
aim. I discovered that, say what I would, he was eager to go
through the ceremony of execution, and I didn't say much,
for I felt that in argument his youth would tell against me
heavily: he believed where I had already ceased to doubt.
There was something fine in the wildness of his unexpressed,
hardly formulated hope. "Clear out! Couldn't think of it,"
he said, with a shake of the head. "I make you an offer for
which I neither demand nor expect any sort of gratitude," I
said; "you shall repay the money when convenient, and . . ."
"Awfully good of you," he muttered without looking up. I
watched him narrowly: the future must have appeared horribly
uncertain to him; but he did not falter, as though indeed
there had been nothing wrong with his heart. I felt
angry—not for the first time that night. "The whole wretched
business," I said, "is bitter enough, I should think, for a
man of your kind . . ." "It is, it is," he whispered twice,
with his eyes fixed on the floor. It was heartrending. He
towered above the light, and I could see the down on his
cheek, the colour mantling warm under the smooth skin of his
face. Believe me or not, I say it was outrageously
heartrending. It provoked me to brutality. "Yes," I said;
"and allow me to confess that I am totally unable to imagine
what advantage you can expect from this licking of the
dregs." "Advantage!" he murmured out of his stillness. "I am
dashed if I do," I said, enraged. "I've been trying to tell
you all there is in it," he went on slowly, as if meditating
something unanswerable. "But after all, it is my
trouble." I opened my mouth to retort, and discovered
suddenly that I'd lost all confidence in myself; and it was
as if he too had given me up, for he mumbled like a man
thinking half aloud. "Went away . . . went into hospitals. .
. . Not one of them would face it. . . . They! . . ." He
moved his hand slightly to imply disdain. "But I've got to
get over this thing, and I mustn't shirk any of it or . . .
I won't shirk any of it." He was silent. He gazed as though
he had been haunted. His unconscious face reflected the
passing expressions of scorn, of despair, of
resolution—reflected them in turn, as a magic mirror would
reflect the gliding passage of unearthly shapes. He lived
surrounded by deceitful ghosts, by austere shades. "Oh!
nonsense, my dear fellow," I began. He had a movement of
impatience. "You don't seem to understand," he said
incisively; then looking at me without a wink, "I may have
jumped, but I don't run away." "I meant no offence," I said;
and added stupidly, "Better men than you have found it
expedient to run, at times." He coloured all over, while in
my confusion I half-choked myself with my own tongue.
"Perhaps so," he said at last, "I am not good enough; I
can't afford it. I am bound to fight this thing down—I am
fighting it now." I got out of my chair and felt stiff all
over. The silence was embarrassing, and to put an end to it
I imagined nothing better but to remark, "I had no idea it
was so late," in an airy tone. . . . "I dare say you have
had enough of this," he said brusquely: "and to tell you the
truth"—he began to look round for his hat—"so have I."
'Well! he had refused this unique offer. He had struck
aside my helping hand; he was ready to go now, and beyond
the balustrade the night seemed to wait for him very still,
as though he had been marked down for its prey. I heard his
voice. "Ah! here it is." He had found his hat. For a few
seconds we hung in the wind. "What will you do after—after .
. ." I asked very low. "Go to the dogs as likely as not," he
answered in a gruff mutter. I had recovered my wits in a
measure, and judged best to take it lightly. "Pray
remember," I said, "that I should like very much to see you
again before you go." "I don't know what's to prevent you.
The damned thing won't make me invisible," he said with
intense bitterness,—"no such luck." And then at the moment
of taking leave he treated me to a ghastly muddle of dubious
stammers and movements, to an awful display of hesitations.
God forgive him—me! He had taken it into his fanciful head
that I was likely to make some difficulty as to shaking
hands. It was too awful for words. I believe I shouted
suddenly at him as you would bellow to a man you saw about
to walk over a cliff; I remember our voices being raised,
the appearance of a miserable grin on his face, a crushing
clutch on my hand, a nervous laugh. The candle spluttered
out, and the thing was over at last, with a groan that
floated up to me in the dark. He got himself away somehow.
The night swallowed his form. He was a horrible bungler.
Horrible. I heard the quick crunch-crunch of the gravel
under his boots. He was running. Absolutely running, with
nowhere to go to. And he was not yet four-and-twenty.'
CHAPTER 14
'I slept little, hurried over my breakfast, and after a
slight hesitation gave up my early morning visit to my ship.
It was really very wrong of me, because, though my chief
mate was an excellent man all round, he was the victim of
such black imaginings that if he did not get a letter from
his wife at the expected time he would go quite distracted
with rage and jealousy, lose all grip on the work, quarrel
with all hands, and either weep in his cabin or develop such
a ferocity of temper as all but drove the crew to the verge
of mutiny. The thing had always seemed inexplicable to me:
they had been married thirteen years; I had a glimpse of her
once, and, honestly, I couldn't conceive a man abandoned
enough to plunge into sin for the sake of such an
unattractive person. I don't know whether I have not done
wrong by refraining from putting that view before poor
Selvin: the man made a little hell on earth for himself, and
I also suffered indirectly, but some sort of, no doubt,
false delicacy prevented me. The marital relations of seamen
would make an interesting subject, and I could tell you
instances. . . . However, this is not the place, nor the
time, and we are concerned with Jim—who was unmarried. If
his imaginative conscience or his pride; if all the
extravagant ghosts and austere shades that were the
disastrous familiars of his youth would not let him run away
from the block, I, who of course can't be suspected of such
familiars, was irresistibly impelled to go and see his head
roll off. I wended my way towards the court. I didn't hope
to be very much impressed or edified, or interested or even
frightened—though, as long as there is any life before one,
a jolly good fright now and then is a salutary discipline.
But neither did I expect to be so awfully depressed. The
bitterness of his punishment was in its chill and mean
atmosphere. The real significance of crime is in its being a
breach of faith with the community of mankind, and from that
point of view he was no mean traitor, but his execution was
a hole-and-corner affair. There was no high scaffolding, no
scarlet cloth (did they have scarlet cloth on Tower Hill?
They should have had), no awe-stricken multitude to be
horrified at his guilt and be moved to tears at his fate—no
air of sombre retribution. There was, as I walked along, the
clear sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling,
the streets full of jumbled bits of colour like a damaged
kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling white, the brown
nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock-cart with a red
canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with
dark heads marching in dusty laced boots, a native policeman
in a sombre uniform of scanty cut and belted in patent
leather, who looked up at me with orientally pitiful eyes as
though his migrating spirit were suffering exceedingly from
that unforeseen—what d'ye call 'em?—avatar—incarnation.
Under the shade of a lonely tree in the courtyard, the
villagers connected with the assault case sat in a
picturesque group, looking like a chromo-lithograph of a
camp in a book of Eastern travel. One missed the obligatory
thread of smoke in the foreground and the pack-animals
grazing. A blank yellow wall rose behind overtopping the
tree, reflecting the glare. The court-room was sombre,
seemed more vast. High up in the dim space the punkahs were
swaying short to and fro, to and fro. Here and there a
draped figure, dwarfed by the bare walls, remained without
stirring amongst the rows of empty benches, as if absorbed
in pious meditation. The plaintiff, who had been beaten,—an
obese chocolate-coloured man with shaved head, one fat
breast bare and a bright yellow caste-mark above the bridge
of his nose,—sat in pompous immobility: only his eyes
glittered, rolling in the gloom, and the nostrils dilated
and collapsed violently as he breathed. Brierly dropped into
his seat looking done up, as though he had spent the night
in sprinting on a cinder-track. The pious sailing-ship
skipper appeared excited and made uneasy movements, as if
restraining with difficulty an impulse to stand up and
exhort us earnestly to prayer and repentance. The head of
the magistrate, delicately pale under the neatly arranged
hair, resembled the head of a hopeless invalid after he had
been washed and brushed and propped up in bed. He moved
aside the vase of flowers—a bunch of purple with a few pink
blossoms on long stalks—and seizing in both hands a long
sheet of bluish paper, ran his eye over it, propped his
forearms on the edge of the desk, and began to read aloud in
an even, distinct, and careless voice.
'By Jove! For all my foolishness about scaffolds and
heads rolling off—I assure you it was infinitely worse than
a beheading. A heavy sense of finality brooded over all
this, unrelieved by the hope of rest and safety following
the fall of the axe. These proceedings had all the cold
vengefulness of a death-sentence, and the cruelty of a
sentence of exile. This is how I looked at it that
morning—and even now I seem to see an undeniable vestige of
truth in that exaggerated view of a common occurrence. You
may imagine how strongly I felt this at the time. Perhaps it
is for that reason that I could not bring myself to admit
the finality. The thing was always with me, I was always
eager to take opinion on it, as though it had not been
practically settled: individual opinion—international
opinion—by Jove! That Frenchman's, for instance. His own
country's pronouncement was uttered in the passionless and
definite phraseology a machine would use, if machines could
speak. The head of the magistrate was half hidden by the
paper, his brow was like alabaster.
'There were several questions before the court. The first
as to whether the ship was in every respect fit and
seaworthy for the voyage. The court found she was not. The
next point, I remember, was, whether up to the time of the
accident the ship had been navigated with proper and
seamanlike care. They said Yes to that, goodness knows why,
and then they declared that there was no evidence to show
the exact cause of the accident. A floating derelict
probably. I myself remember that a Norwegian barque bound
out with a cargo of pitch-pine had been given up as missing
about that time, and it was just the sort of craft that
would capsize in a squall and float bottom up for months—a
kind of maritime ghoul on the prowl to kill ships in the
dark. Such wandering corpses are common enough in the North
Atlantic, which is haunted by all the terrors of the
sea,—fogs, icebergs, dead ships bent upon mischief, and long
sinister gales that fasten upon one like a vampire till all
the strength and the spirit and even hope are gone, and one
feels like the empty shell of a man. But there—in those
seas—the incident was rare enough to resemble a special
arrangement of a malevolent providence, which, unless it had
for its object the killing of a donkeyman and the bringing
of worse than death upon Jim, appeared an utterly aimless
piece of devilry. This view occurring to me took off my
attention. For a time I was aware of the magistrate's voice
as a sound merely; but in a moment it shaped itself into
distinct words . . . "in utter disregard of their plain
duty," it said. The next sentence escaped me somehow, and
then . . . "abandoning in the moment of danger the lives and
property confided to their charge" . . . went on the voice
evenly, and stopped. A pair of eyes under the white forehead
shot darkly a glance above the edge of the paper. I looked
for Jim hurriedly, as though I had expected him to
disappear. He was very still—but he was there. He sat pink
and fair and extremely attentive. "Therefore, . . ." began
the voice emphatically. He stared with parted lips, hanging
upon the words of the man behind the desk. These came out
into the stillness wafted on the wind made by the punkahs,
and I, watching for their effect upon him, caught only the
fragments of official language. . . . "The Court . . .
Gustav So-and-so . . . master . . . native of Germany . . .
James So-and-so . . . mate . . . certificates cancelled." A
silence fell. The magistrate had dropped the paper, and,
leaning sideways on the arm of his chair, began to talk with
Brierly easily. People started to move out; others were
pushing in, and I also made for the door. Outside I stood
still, and when Jim passed me on his way to the gate, I
caught at his arm and detained him. The look he gave
discomposed me, as though I had been responsible for his
state he looked at me as if I had been the embodied evil of
life. "It's all over," I stammered. "Yes," he said thickly.
"And now let no man . . ." He jerked his arm out of my
grasp. I watched his back as he went away. It was a long
street, and he remained in sight for some time. He walked
rather slow, and straddling his legs a little, as if he had
found it difficult to keep a straight line. Just before I
lost him I fancied he staggered a bit.
'"Man overboard," said a deep voice behind me. Turning
round, I saw a fellow I knew slightly, a West Australian;
Chester was his name. He, too, had been looking after Jim.
He was a man with an immense girth of chest, a rugged,
clean-shaved face of mahogany colour, and two blunt tufts of
iron-grey, thick, wiry hairs on his upper lip. He had been
pearler, wrecker, trader, whaler too, I believe; in his own
words—anything and everything a man may be at sea, but a
pirate. The Pacific, north and south, was his proper
hunting-ground; but he had wandered so far afield looking
for a cheap steamer to buy. Lately he had discovered—so he
said—a guano island somewhere, but its approaches were
dangerous, and the anchorage, such as it was, could not be
considered safe, to say the least of it. "As good as a
gold-mine," he would exclaim. "Right bang in the middle of
the Walpole Reefs, and if it's true enough that you can get
no holding-ground anywhere in less than forty fathom, then
what of that? There are the hurricanes, too. But it's a
first-rate thing. As good as a gold-mine—better! Yet there's
not a fool of them that will see it. I can't get a skipper
or a shipowner to go near the place. So I made up my mind to
cart the blessed stuff myself." . . . This was what he
required a steamer for, and I knew he was just then
negotiating enthusiastically with a Parsee firm for an old,
brig-rigged, sea-anachronism of ninety horse-power. We had
met and spoken together several times. He looked knowingly
after Jim. "Takes it to heart?" he asked scornfully. "Very
much," I said. "Then he's no good," he opined. "What's all
the to-do about? A bit of ass's skin. That never yet made a
man. You must see things exactly as they are—if you don't,
you may just as well give in at once. You will never do
anything in this world. Look at me. I made it a practice
never to take anything to heart." "Yes," I said, "you see
things as they are." "I wish I could see my partner coming
along, that's what I wish to see," he said. "Know my
partner? Old Robinson. Yes; the Robinson. Don't
you know? The notorious Robinson. The man who smuggled
more opium and bagged more seals in his time than any loose
Johnny now alive. They say he used to board the
sealing-schooners up Alaska way when the fog was so thick
that the Lord God, He alone, could tell one man from
another. Holy-Terror Robinson. That's the man. He is with me
in that guano thing. The best chance he ever came across in
his life." He put his lips to my ear. "Cannibal?—well, they
used to give him the name years and years ago. You remember
the story? A shipwreck on the west side of Stewart Island;
that's right; seven of them got ashore, and it seems they
did not get on very well together. Some men are too
cantankerous for anything—don't know how to make the best of
a bad job—don't see things as they are—as they are,
my boy! And then what's the consequence? Obvious! Trouble,
trouble; as likely as not a knock on the head; and serve 'em
right too. That sort is the most useful when it's dead. The
story goes that a boat of Her Majesty's ship Wolverine found
him kneeling on the kelp, naked as the day he was born, and
chanting some psalm-tune or other; light snow was falling at
the time. He waited till the boat was an oar's length from
the shore, and then up and away. They chased him for an hour
up and down the boulders, till a marihe flung a stone that
took him behind the ear providentially and knocked him
senseless. Alone? Of course. But that's like that tale of
sealing-schooners; the Lord God knows the right and the
wrong of that story. The cutter did not investigate much.
They wrapped him in a boat-cloak and took him off as quick
as they could, with a dark night coming on, the weather
threatening, and the ship firing recall guns every five
minutes. Three weeks afterwards he was as well as ever. He
didn't allow any fuss that was made on shore to upset him;
he just shut his lips tight, and let people screech. It was
bad enough to have lost his ship, and all he was worth
besides, without paying attention to the hard names they
called him. That's the man for me." He lifted his arm for a
signal to some one down the street. "He's got a little
money, so I had to let him into my thing. Had to! It would
have been sinful to throw away such a find, and I was
cleaned out myself. It cut me to the quick, but I could see
the matter just as it was, and if I must share—thinks
I—with any man, then give me Robinson. I left him at
breakfast in the hotel to come to court, because I've an
idea. . . . Ah! Good morning, Captain Robinson. . . . Friend
of mine, Captain Robinson."
'An emaciated patriarch in a suit of white drill, a solah
topi with a green-lined rim on a head trembling with age,
joined us after crossing the street in a trotting shuffle,
and stood propped with both hands on the handle of an
umbrella. A white beard with amber streaks hung lumpily down
to his waist. He blinked his creased eyelids at me in a
bewildered way. "How do you do? how do you do?" he piped
amiably, and tottered. "A little deaf," said Chester aside.
"Did you drag him over six thousand miles to get a cheap
steamer?" I asked. "I would have taken him twice round the
world as soon as look at him," said Chester with immense
energy. "The steamer will be the making of us, my lad. Is it
my fault that every skipper and shipowner in the whole of
blessed Australasia turns out a blamed fool? Once I talked
for three hours to a man in Auckland. 'Send a ship,' I said,
'send a ship. I'll give you half of the first cargo for
yourself, free gratis for nothing—just to make a good
start.' Says he, 'I wouldn't do it if there was no other
place on earth to send a ship to.' Perfect ass, of course.
Rocks, currents, no anchorage, sheer cliff to lay to, no
insurance company would take the risk, didn't see how he
could get loaded under three years. Ass! I nearly went on my
knees to him. 'But look at the thing as it is,' says I.
'Damn rocks and hurricanes. Look at it as it is. There's
guano there Queensland sugar-planters would fight for—fight
for on the quay, I tell you.' . . . What can you do with a
fool? . . . 'That's one of your little jokes, Chester,' he
says. . . . Joke! I could have wept. Ask Captain Robinson
here. . . . And there was another shipowning fellow—a fat
chap in a white waistcoat in Wellington, who seemed to think
I was up to some swindle or other. 'I don't know what sort
of fool you're looking for,' he says, 'but I am busy just
now. Good morning.' I longed to take him in my two hands and
smash him through the window of his own office. But I
didn't. I was as mild as a curate. 'Think of it,' says I. 'Do
think it over. I'll call to-morrow.' He grunted something
about being 'out all day.' On the stairs I felt ready to
beat my head against the wall from vexation. Captain
Robinson here can tell you. It was awful to think of all
that lovely stuff lying waste under the sun—stuff that would
send the sugar-cane shooting sky-high. The making of
Queensland! The making of Queensland! And in Brisbane, where
I went to have a last try, they gave me the name of a
lunatic. Idiots! The only sensible man I came across was the
cabman who drove me about. A broken-down swell he was, I
fancy. Hey! Captain Robinson? You remember I told you about
my cabby in Brisbane—don't you? The chap had a wonderful eye
for things. He saw it all in a jiffy. It was a real pleasure
to talk with him. One evening after a devil of a day amongst
shipowners I felt so bad that, says I, 'I must get drunk.
Come along; I must get drunk, or I'll go mad.' 'I am your
man,' he says; 'go ahead.' I don't know what I would have
done without him. Hey! Captain Robinson."
'He poked the ribs of his partner. "He! he! he!" laughed
the Ancient, looked aimlessly down the street, then peered
at me doubtfully with sad, dim pupils. . . . "He! he! he!" .
. . He leaned heavier on the umbrella, and dropped his gaze
on the ground. I needn't tell you I had tried to get away
several times, but Chester had foiled every attempt by
simply catching hold of my coat. "One minute. I've a
notion." "What's your infernal notion?" I exploded at last.
"If you think I am going in with you . . ." "No, no, my boy.
Too late, if you wanted ever so much. We've got a steamer."
"You've got the ghost of a steamer," I said. "Good enough
for a start—there's no superior nonsense about us. Is there,
Captain Robinson?" "No! no! no!" croaked the old man without
lifting his eyes, and the senile tremble of his head became
almost fierce with determination. "I understand you know
that young chap," said Chester, with a nod at the street
from which Jim had disappeared long ago. "He's been having
grub with you in the Malabar last night—so I was told."
'I said that was true, and after remarking that he too
liked to live well and in style, only that, for the present,
he had to be saving of every penny—"none too many for the
business! Isn't that so, Captain Robinson?"—he squared his
shoulders and stroked his dumpy moustache, while the
notorious Robinson, coughing at his side, clung more than
ever to the handle of the umbrella, and seemed ready to
subside passively into a heap of old bones. "You see, the
old chap has all the money," whispered Chester
confidentially. "I've been cleaned out trying to engineer
the dratted thing. But wait a bit, wait a bit. The good time
is coming." . . . He seemed suddenly astonished at the signs
of impatience I gave. "Oh, crakee!" he cried; "I am telling
you of the biggest thing that ever was, and you . . ." "I
have an appointment," I pleaded mildly. "What of that?" he
asked with genuine surprise; "let it wait." "That's exactly
what I am doing now," I remarked; "hadn't you better tell me
what it is you want?" "Buy twenty hotels like that," he
growled to himself; "and every joker boarding in them
too—twenty times over." He lifted his head smartly "I want
that young chap." "I don't understand," I said. "He's no
good, is he?" said Chester crisply. "I know nothing about
it," I protested. "Why, you told me yourself he was taking
it to heart," argued Chester. "Well, in my opinion a chap
who . . . Anyhow, he can't be much good; but then you see I
am on the look-out for somebody, and I've just got a thing
that will suit him. I'll give him a job on my island." He
nodded significantly. "I'm going to dump forty coolies
there—if I've to steal 'em. Somebody must work the stuff.
Oh! I mean to act square: wooden shed, corrugated-iron
roof—I know a man in Hobart who will take my bill at six
months for the materials. I do. Honour bright. Then there's
the water-supply. I'll have to fly round and get somebody to
trust me for half-a-dozen second-hand iron tanks. Catch
rain-water, hey? Let him take charge. Make him supreme boss
over the coolies. Good idea, isn't it? What do you say?"
"There are whole years when not a drop of rain falls on
Walpole," I said, too amazed to laugh. He bit his lip and
seemed bothered. "Oh, well, I will fix up something for
them—or land a supply. Hang it all! That's not the
question."
'I said nothing. I had a rapid vision of Jim perched on a
shadowless rock, up to his knees in guano, with the screams
of sea-birds in his ears, the incandescent ball of the sun
above his head; the empty sky and the empty ocean all
a-quiver, simmering together in the heat as far as the eye
could reach. "I wouldn't advise my worst enemy . . ." I
began. "What's the matter with you?" cried Chester; "I mean
to give him a good screw—that is, as soon as the thing is
set going, of course. It's as easy as falling off a log.
Simply nothing to do; two six-shooters in his belt . . .
Surely he wouldn't be afraid of anything forty coolies could
do—with two six-shooters and he the only armed man too! It's
much better than it looks. I want you to help me to talk him
over." "No!" I shouted. Old Robinson lifted his bleared eyes
dismally for a moment, Chester looked at me with infinite
contempt. "So you wouldn't advise him?" he uttered slowly.
"Certainly not," I answered, as indignant as though he had
requested me to help murder somebody; "moreover, I am sure
he wouldn't. He is badly cut up, but he isn't mad as far as
I know." "He is no earthly good for anything," Chester mused
aloud. "He would just have done for me. If you only could
see a thing as it is, you would see it's the very thing for
him. And besides . . . Why! it's the most splendid, sure
chance . . ." He got angry suddenly. "I must have a man.
There! . . ." He stamped his foot and smiled unpleasantly.
"Anyhow, I could guarantee the island wouldn't sink under
him—and I believe he is a bit particular on that point."
"Good morning," I said curtly. He looked at me as though I
had been an incomprehensible fool. . . . "Must be moving,
Captain Robinson," he yelled suddenly into the old man's
ear. "These Parsee Johnnies are waiting for us to clinch the
bargain." He took his partner under the arm with a firm
grip, swung him round, and, unexpectedly, leered at me over
his shoulder. "I was trying to do him a kindness," he
asserted, with an air and tone that made my blood boil.
"Thank you for nothing—in his name," I rejoined. "Oh! you
are devilish smart," he sneered; "but you are like the rest
of them. Too much in the clouds. See what you will do with
him." "I don't know that I want to do anything with him."
"Don't you?" he spluttered; his grey moustache bristled with
anger, and by his side the notorious Robinson, propped on
the umbrella, stood with his back to me, as patient and
still as a worn-out cab-horse. "I haven't found a guano
island," I said. "It's my belief you wouldn't know one if
you were led right up to it by the hand," he riposted
quickly; "and in this world you've got to see a thing first,
before you can make use of it. Got to see it through and
through at that, neither more nor less." "And get others to
see it, too," I insinuated, with a glance at the bowed back
by his side. Chester snorted at me. "His eyes are right
enough—don't you worry. He ain't a puppy." "Oh, dear, no!" I
said. "Come along, Captain Robinson," he shouted, with a
sort of bullying deference under the rim of the old man's
hat; the Holy Terror gave a submissive little jump. The
ghost of a steamer was waiting for them, Fortune on that
fair isle! They made a curious pair of Argonauts. Chester
strode on leisurely, well set up, portly, and of conquering
mien; the other, long, wasted, drooping, and hooked to his
arm, shuffled his withered shanks with desperate haste.'
CHAPTER 15
'I did not start in search of Jim at once, only because I
had really an appointment which I could not neglect. Then,
as ill-luck would have it, in my agent's office I was
fastened upon by a fellow fresh from Madagascar with a
little scheme for a wonderful piece of business. It had
something to do with cattle and cartridges and a Prince
Ravonalo something; but the pivot of the whole affair was
the stupidity of some admiral—Admiral Pierre, I think.
Everything turned on that, and the chap couldn't find words
strong enough to express his confidence. He had globular
eyes starting out of his head with a fishy glitter, bumps on
his forehead, and wore his long hair brushed back without a
parting. He had a favourite phrase which he kept on
repeating triumphantly, "The minimum of risk with the
maximum of profit is my motto. What?" He made my head ache,
spoiled my tiffin, but got his own out of me all right; and
as soon as I had shaken him off, I made straight for the
water-side. I caught sight of Jim leaning over the parapet
of the quay. Three native boatmen quarrelling over five
annas were making an awful row at his elbow. He didn't hear
me come up, but spun round as if the slight contact of my
finger had released a catch. "I was looking," he stammered.
I don't remember what I said, not much anyhow, but he made
no difficulty in following me to the hotel.
'He followed me as manageable as a little child, with an
obedient air, with no sort of manifestation, rather as
though he had been waiting for me there to come along and
carry him off. I need not have been so surprised as I was at
his tractability. On all the round earth, which to some
seems so big and that others affect to consider as rather
smaller than a mustard-seed, he had no place where he
could—what shall I say?—where he could withdraw. That's it!
Withdraw—be alone with his loneliness. He walked by my side
very calm, glancing here and there, and once turned his head
to look after a Sidiboy fireman in a cutaway coat and
yellowish trousers, whose black face had silky gleams like a
lump of anthracite coal. I doubt, however, whether he saw
anything, or even remained all the time aware of my
companionship, because if I had not edged him to the left
here, or pulled him to the right there, I believe he would
have gone straight before him in any direction till stopped
by a wall or some other obstacle. I steered him into my
bedroom, and sat down at once to write letters. This was the
only place in the world (unless, perhaps, the Walpole
Reef—but that was not so handy) where he could have it out
with himself without being bothered by the rest of the
universe. The damned thing—as he had expressed it—had not
made him invisible, but I behaved exactly as though he were.
No sooner in my chair I bent over my writing-desk like a
medieval scribe, and, but for the movement of the hand
holding the pen, remained anxiously quiet. I can't say I was
frightened; but I certainly kept as still as if there had
been something dangerous in the room, that at the first hint
of a movement on my part would be provoked to pounce upon
me. There was not much in the room—you know how these
bedrooms are—a sort of four-poster bedstead under a
mosquito-net, two or three chairs, the table I was writing
at, a bare floor. A glass door opened on an upstairs
verandah, and he stood with his face to it, having a hard
time with all possible privacy. Dusk fell; I lit a candle
with the greatest economy of movement and as much prudence
as though it were an illegal proceeding. There is no doubt
that he had a very hard time of it, and so had I, even to
the point, I must own, of wishing him to the devil, or on
Walpole Reef at least. It occurred to me once or twice that,
after all, Chester was, perhaps, the man to deal effectively
with such a disaster. That strange idealist had found a
practical use for it at once—unerringly, as it were. It was
enough to make one suspect that, maybe, he really could see
the true aspect of things that appeared mysterious or
utterly hopeless to less imaginative persons. I wrote and
wrote; I liquidated all the arrears of my correspondence,
and then went on writing to people who had no reason
whatever to expect from me a gossipy letter about nothing at
all. At times I stole a sidelong glance. He was rooted to
the spot, but convulsive shudders ran down his back; his
shoulders would heave suddenly. He was fighting, he was
fighting—mostly for his breath, as it seemed. The massive
shadows, cast all one way from the straight flame of the
candle, seemed possessed of gloomy consciousness; the
immobility of the furniture had to my furtive eye an air of
attention. I was becoming fanciful in the midst of my
industrious scribbling; and though, when the scratching of
my pen stopped for a moment, there was complete silence and
stillness in the room, I suffered from that profound
disturbance and confusion of thought which is caused by a
violent and menacing uproar—of a heavy gale at sea, for
instance. Some of you may know what I mean: that mingled
anxiety, distress, and irritation with a sort of craven
feeling creeping in—not pleasant to acknowledge, but which
gives a quite special merit to one's endurance. I don't
claim any merit for standing the stress of Jim's emotions; I
could take refuge in the letters; I could have written to
strangers if necessary. Suddenly, as I was taking up a fresh
sheet of notepaper, I heard a low sound, the first sound
that, since we had been shut up together, had come to my
ears in the dim stillness of the room. I remained with my
head down, with my hand arrested. Those who have kept vigil
by a sick-bed have heard such faint sounds in the stillness
of the night watches, sounds wrung from a racked body, from
a weary soul. He pushed the glass door with such force that
all the panes rang: he stepped out, and I held my breath,
straining my ears without knowing what else I expected to
hear. He was really taking too much to heart an empty
formality which to Chester's rigorous criticism seemed
unworthy the notice of a man who could see things as they
were. An empty formality; a piece of parchment. Well, well.
As to an inaccessible guano deposit, that was another story
altogether. One could intelligibly break one's heart over
that. A feeble burst of many voices mingled with the tinkle
of silver and glass floated up from the dining-room below;
through the open door the outer edge of the light from my
candle fell on his back faintly; beyond all was black; he
stood on the brink of a vast obscurity, like a lonely figure
by the shore of a sombre and hopeless ocean. There was the
Walpole Reef in it—to be sure—a speck in the dark void, a
straw for the drowning man. My compassion for him took the
shape of the thought that I wouldn't have liked his people
to see him at that moment. I found it trying myself. His
back was no longer shaken by his gasps; he stood straight as
an arrow, faintly visible and still; and the meaning of this
stillness sank to the bottom of my soul like lead into the
water, and made it so heavy that for a second I wished
heartily that the only course left open for me was to pay
for his funeral. Even the law had done with him. To bury him
would have been such an easy kindness! It would have been so
much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists
in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of
our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our
efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our
undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends. Perhaps he
did take it too much to heart. And if so then—Chester's
offer. . . . At this point I took up a fresh sheet and began
to write resolutely. There was nothing but myself between
him and the dark ocean. I had a sense of responsibility. If
I spoke, would that motionless and suffering youth leap into
the obscurity—clutch at the straw? I found out how difficult
it may be sometimes to make a sound. There is a weird power
in a spoken word. And why the devil not? I was asking myself
persistently while I drove on with my writing. All at once,
on the blank page, under the very point of the pen, the two
figures of Chester and his antique partner, very distinct
and complete, would dodge into view with stride and
gestures, as if reproduced in the field of some optical toy.
I would watch them for a while. No! They were too phantasmal
and extravagant to enter into any one's fate. And a word
carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the
bullets go flying through space. I said nothing; and he, out
there with his back to the light, as if bound and gagged by
all the invisible foes of man, made no stir and made no
sound.'
CHAPTER 16
'The time was coming when I should see him loved,
trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess
forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a
hero. It's true—I assure you; as true as I'm sitting here
talking about him in vain. He, on his side, had that faculty
of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape
of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover
and no adventurer. He captured much honour and an Arcadian
happiness (I won't say anything about innocence) in the
bush, and it was as good to him as the honour and the
Arcadian happiness of the streets to another man. Felicity,
felicity—how shall I say it?—is quaffed out of a golden cup
in every latitude: the flavour is with you—with you alone,
and you can make it as intoxicating as you please. He was of
the sort that would drink deep, as you may guess from what
went before. I found him, if not exactly intoxicated, then
at least flushed with the elixir at his lips. He had not
obtained it at once. There had been, as you know, a period
of probation amongst infernal ship-chandlers, during which
he had suffered and I had worried about—about—my trust—you
may call it. I don't know that I am completely reassured
now, after beholding him in all his brilliance. That was my
last view of him—in a strong light, dominating, and yet in
complete accord with his surroundings—with the life of the
forests and with the life of men. I own that I was
impressed, but I must admit to myself that after all this is
not the lasting impression. He was protected by his
isolation, alone of his own superior kind, in close touch
with Nature, that keeps faith on such easy terms with her
lovers. But I cannot fix before my eye the image of his
safety. I shall always remember him as seen through the open
door of my room, taking, perhaps, too much to heart the mere
consequences of his failure. I am pleased, of course, that
some good—and even some splendour—came out of my endeavours;
but at times it seems to me it would have been better for my
peace of mind if I had not stood between him and Chester's
confoundedly generous offer. I wonder what his exuberant
imagination would have made of Walpole islet—that most
hopelessly forsaken crumb of dry land on the face of the
waters. It is not likely I would ever have heard, for I must
tell you that Chester, after calling at some Australian port
to patch up his brig-rigged sea-anachronism, steamed out
into the Pacific with a crew of twenty-two hands all told,
and the only news having a possible bearing upon the mystery
of his fate was the news of a hurricane which is supposed to
have swept in its course over the Walpole shoals, a month or
so afterwards. Not a vestige of the Argonauts ever turned
up; not a sound came out of the waste. Finis! The Pacific is
the most discreet of live, hot-tempered oceans: the chilly
Antarctic can keep a secret too, but more in the manner of a
grave.
'And there is a sense of blessed finality in such
discretion, which is what we all more or less sincerely are
ready to admit—for what else is it that makes the idea of
death supportable? End! Finis! the potent word that
exorcises from the house of life the haunting shadow of
fate. This is what—notwithstanding the testimony of my eyes
and his own earnest assurances—I miss when I look back upon
Jim's success. While there's life there is hope, truly; but
there is fear too. I don't mean to say that I regret my
action, nor will I pretend that I can't sleep o' nights in
consequence; still, the idea obtrudes itself that he made so
much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that
matters. He was not—if I may say so—clear to me. He was not
clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself
either. There were his fine sensibilities, his fine
feelings, his fine longings—a sort of sublimated, idealised
selfishness. He was—if you allow me to say so—very fine;
very fine—and very unfortunate. A little coarser nature
would not have borne the strain; it would have had to come
to terms with itself—with a sigh, with a grunt, or even with
a guffaw; a still coarser one would have remained
invulnerably ignorant and completely uninteresting.
'But he was too interesting or too unfortunate to be
thrown to the dogs, or even to Chester. I felt this while I
sat with my face over the paper and he fought and gasped,
struggling for his breath in that terribly stealthy way, in
my room; I felt it when he rushed out on the verandah as if
to fling himself over—and didn't; I felt it more and more
all the time he remained outside, faintly lighted on the
background of night, as if standing on the shore of a sombre
and hopeless sea.
'An abrupt heavy rumble made me lift my head. The noise
seemed to roll away, and suddenly a searching and violent
glare fell on the blind face of the night. The sustained and
dazzling flickers seemed to last for an unconscionable time.
The growl of the thunder increased steadily while I looked
at him, distinct and black, planted solidly upon the shores
of a sea of light. At the moment of greatest brilliance the
darkness leaped back with a culminating crash, and he
vanished before my dazzled eyes as utterly as though he had
been blown to atoms. A blustering sigh passed; furious hands
seemed to tear at the shrubs, shake the tops of the trees
below, slam doors, break window-panes, all along the front
of the building. He stepped in, closing the door behind him,
and found me bending over the table: my sudden anxiety as to
what he would say was very great, and akin to a fright. "May
I have a cigarette?" he asked. I gave a push to the box
without raising my head. "I want—want—tobacco," he muttered.
I became extremely buoyant. "Just a moment." I grunted
pleasantly. He took a few steps here and there. "That's
over," I heard him say. A single distant clap of thunder
came from the sea like a gun of distress. "The monsoon
breaks up early this year," he remarked conversationally,
somewhere behind me. This encouraged me to turn round, which
I did as soon as I had finished addressing the last
envelope. He was smoking greedily in the middle of the room,
and though he heard the stir I made, he remained with his
back to me for a time.
'"Come—I carried it off pretty well," he said, wheeling
suddenly. "Something's paid off—not much. I wonder what's to
come." His face did not show any emotion, only it appeared a
little darkened and swollen, as though he had been holding
his breath. He smiled reluctantly as it were, and went on
while I gazed up at him mutely. . . . "Thank you,
though—your room—jolly convenient—for a chap—badly hipped."
. . . The rain pattered and swished in the garden; a
water-pipe (it must have had a hole in it) performed just
outside the window a parody of blubbering woe with funny
sobs and gurgling lamentations, interrupted by jerky spasms
of silence. . . . "A bit of shelter," he mumbled and ceased.
'A flash of faded lightning darted in through the black
framework of the windows and ebbed out without any noise. I
was thinking how I had best approach him (I did not want to
be flung off again) when he gave a little laugh. "No better
than a vagabond now" . . . the end of the cigarette
smouldered between his fingers . . . "without a
single—single," he pronounced slowly; "and yet . . ." He
paused; the rain fell with redoubled violence. "Some day
one's bound to come upon some sort of chance to get it all
back again. Must!" he whispered distinctly, glaring at my
boots.
'I did not even know what it was he wished so much to
regain, what it was he had so terribly missed. It might have
been so much that it was impossible to say. A piece of ass's
skin, according to Chester. . . . He looked up at me
inquisitively. "Perhaps. If life's long enough," I muttered
through my teeth with unreasonable animosity. "Don't reckon
too much on it."
'"Jove! I feel as if nothing could ever touch me," he
said in a tone of sombre conviction. "If this business
couldn't knock me over, then there's no fear of there being
not enough time to—climb out, and . . ." He looked upwards.
'It struck me that it is from such as he that the great
army of waifs and strays is recruited, the army that marches
down, down into all the gutters of the earth. As soon as he
left my room, that "bit of shelter," he would take his place
in the ranks, and begin the journey towards the bottomless
pit. I at least had no illusions; but it was I, too, who a
moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now
was afraid to speak, in the same way one dares not move for
fear of losing a slippery hold. It is when we try to grapple
with another man's intimate need that we perceive how
incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that
share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the
sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute
condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on
which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand,
and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and
elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp. It
was the fear of losing him that kept me silent, for it was
borne upon me suddenly and with unaccountable force that
should I let him slip away into the darkness I would never
forgive myself.
'"Well. Thanks—once more. You've
been—er—uncommonly—really there's no word to . . .
Uncommonly! I don't know why, I am sure. I am afraid I don't
feel as grateful as I would if the whole thing hadn't been
so brutally sprung on me. Because at bottom . . . you,
yourself . . ." He stuttered.
'"Possibly," I struck in. He frowned.
'"All the same, one is responsible." He watched me like a
hawk.
'"And that's true, too," I said.
'"Well. I've gone with it to the end, and I don't intend
to let any man cast it in my teeth without—without—resenting
it." He clenched his fist.
'"There's yourself," I said with a smile—mirthless
enough, God knows—but he looked at me menacingly. "That's my
business," he said. An air of indomitable resolution came
and went upon his face like a vain and passing shadow. Next
moment he looked a dear good boy in trouble, as before. He
flung away the cigarette. "Good-bye," he said, with the
sudden haste of a man who had lingered too long in view of a
pressing bit of work waiting for him; and then for a second
or so he made not the slightest movement. The downpour fell
with the heavy uninterrupted rush of a sweeping flood, with
a sound of unchecked overwhelming fury that called to one's
mind the images of collapsing bridges, of uprooted trees, of
undermined mountains. No man could breast the colossal and
headlong stream that seemed to break and swirl against the
dim stillness in which we were precariously sheltered as if
on an island. The perforated pipe gurgled, choked, spat, and
splashed in odious ridicule of a swimmer fighting for his
life. "It is raining," I remonstrated, "and I . . ." "Rain
or shine," he began brusquely, checked himself, and walked
to the window. "Perfect deluge," he muttered after a while:
he leaned his forehead on the glass. "It's dark, too."
'"Yes, it is very dark," I said.
'He pivoted on his heels, crossed the room, and had
actually opened the door leading into the corridor before I
leaped up from my chair. "Wait," I cried, "I want you to . .
." "I can't dine with you again to-night," he flung at me,
with one leg out of the room already. "I haven't the
slightest intention to ask you," I shouted. At this he drew
back his foot, but remained mistrustfully in the very
doorway. I lost no time in entreating him earnestly not to
be absurd; to come in and shut the door.'
CHAPTER 17
'He came in at last; but I believe it was mostly the rain
that did it; it was falling just then with a devastating
violence which quieted down gradually while we talked. His
manner was very sober and set; his bearing was that of a
naturally taciturn man possessed by an idea. My talk was of
the material aspect of his position; it had the sole aim of
saving him from the degradation, ruin, and despair that out
there close so swiftly upon a friendless, homeless man; I
pleaded with him to accept my help; I argued reasonably: and
every time I looked up at that absorbed smooth face, so
grave and youthful, I had a disturbing sense of being no
help but rather an obstacle to some mysterious,
inexplicable, impalpable striving of his wounded spirit.
'"I suppose you intend to eat and drink and to sleep
under shelter in the usual way," I remember saying with
irritation. "You say you won't touch the money that is due
to you." . . . He came as near as his sort can to making a
gesture of horror. (There were three weeks and five days'
pay owing him as mate of the Patna.) "Well, that's too
little to matter anyhow; but what will you do to-morrow?
Where will you turn? You must live . . ." "That isn't the
thing," was the comment that escaped him under his breath. I
ignored it, and went on combating what I assumed to be the
scruples of an exaggerated delicacy. "On every conceivable
ground," I concluded, "you must let me help you." "You
can't," he said very simply and gently, and holding fast to
some deep idea which I could detect shimmering like a pool
of water in the dark, but which I despaired of ever
approaching near enough to fathom. I surveyed his
well-proportioned bulk. "At any rate," I said, "I am able to
help what I can see of you. I don't pretend to do more." He
shook his head sceptically without looking at me. I got very
warm. "But I can," I insisted. "I can do even more. I am
doing more. I am trusting you . . ." "The money . . ." he
began. "Upon my word you deserve being told to go to the
devil," I cried, forcing the note of indignation. He was
startled, smiled, and I pressed my attack home. "It isn't a
question of money at all. You are too superficial," I said
(and at the same time I was thinking to myself: Well, here
goes! And perhaps he is, after all). "Look at the letter I
want you to take. I am writing to a man of whom I've never
asked a favour, and I am writing about you in terms that one
only ventures to use when speaking of an intimate friend. I
make myself unreservedly responsible for you. That's what I
am doing. And really if you will only reflect a little what
that means . . ."
'He lifted his head. The rain had passed away; only the
water-pipe went on shedding tears with an absurd drip, drip
outside the window. It was very quiet in the room, whose
shadows huddled together in corners, away from the still
flame of the candle flaring upright in the shape of a
dagger; his face after a while seemed suffused by a
reflection of a soft light as if the dawn had broken
already.
'"Jove!" he gasped out. "It is noble of you!"
'Had he suddenly put out his tongue at me in derision, I
could not have felt more humiliated. I thought to
myself—Serve me right for a sneaking humbug. . . . His eyes
shone straight into my face, but I perceived it was not a
mocking brightness. All at once he sprang into jerky
agitation, like one of those flat wooden figures that are
worked by a string. His arms went up, then came down with a
slap. He became another man altogether. "And I had never
seen," he shouted; then suddenly bit his lip and frowned.
"What a bally ass I've been," he said very slow in an awed
tone. . . . "You are a brick!" he cried next in a muffled
voice. He snatched my hand as though he had just then seen
it for the first time, and dropped it at once. "Why! this is
what I—you—I . . ." he stammered, and then with a return of
his old stolid, I may say mulish, manner he began heavily,
"I would be a brute now if I . . ." and then his voice
seemed to break. "That's all right," I said. I was almost
alarmed by this display of feeling, through which pierced a
strange elation. I had pulled the string accidentally, as it
were; I did not fully understand the working of the toy. "I
must go now," he said. "Jove! You have helped me.
Can't sit still. The very thing . . ." He looked at me with
puzzled admiration. "The very thing . . ."
'Of course it was the thing. It was ten to one that I had
saved him from starvation—of that peculiar sort that is
almost invariably associated with drink. This was all. I had
not a single illusion on that score, but looking at him, I
allowed myself to wonder at the nature of the one he had,
within the last three minutes, so evidently taken into his
bosom. I had forced into his hand the means to carry on
decently the serious business of life, to get food, drink,
and shelter of the customary kind while his wounded spirit,
like a bird with a broken wing, might hop and flutter into
some hole to die quietly of inanition there. This is what I
had thrust upon him: a definitely small thing;
and—behold!—by the manner of its reception it loomed in the
dim light of the candle like a big, indistinct, perhaps a
dangerous shadow. "You don't mind me not saying anything
appropriate," he burst out. "There isn't anything one could
say. Last night already you had done me no end of good.
Listening to me—you know. I give you my word I've thought
more than once the top of my head would fly off. . ." He
darted—positively darted—here and there, rammed his hands
into his pockets, jerked them out again, flung his cap on
his head. I had no idea it was in him to be so airily brisk.
I thought of a dry leaf imprisoned in an eddy of wind, while
a mysterious apprehension, a load of indefinite doubt,
weighed me down in my chair. He stood stock-still, as if
struck motionless by a discovery. "You have given me
confidence," he declared, soberly. "Oh! for God's sake, my
dear fellow—don't!" I entreated, as though he had hurt me.
"All right. I'll shut up now and henceforth. Can't prevent
me thinking though. . . . Never mind! . . . I'll show yet .
. ." He went to the door in a hurry, paused with his head
down, and came back, stepping deliberately. "I always
thought that if a fellow could begin with a clean slate . .
. And now you . . . in a measure . . . yes . . . clean
slate." I waved my hand, and he marched out without looking
back; the sound of his footfalls died out gradually behind
the closed door—the unhesitating tread of a man walking in
broad daylight.
'But as to me, left alone with the solitary candle, I
remained strangely unenlightened. I was no longer young
enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets
our insignificant footsteps in good and in evil. I smiled to
think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the
light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say? As if the
initial word of each our destiny were not graven in
imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.'
CHAPTER 18
'Six months afterwards my friend (he was a cynical, more
than middle-aged bachelor, with a reputation for
eccentricity, and owned a rice-mill) wrote to me, and
judging, from the warmth of my recommendation, that I would
like to hear, enlarged a little upon Jim's perfections.
These were apparently of a quiet and effective sort. "Not
having been able so far to find more in my heart than a
resigned toleration for any individual of my kind, I have
lived till now alone in a house that even in this steaming
climate could be considered as too big for one man. I have
had him to live with me for some time past. It seems I
haven't made a mistake." It seemed to me on reading this
letter that my friend had found in his heart more than
tolerance for Jim—that there were the beginnings of active
liking. Of course he stated his grounds in a characteristic
way. For one thing, Jim kept his freshness in the climate.
Had he been a girl—my friend wrote—one could have said he
was blooming—blooming modestly—like a violet, not like some
of these blatant tropical flowers. He had been in the house
for six weeks, and had not as yet attempted to slap him on
the back, or address him as "old boy," or try to make him
feel a superannuated fossil. He had nothing of the
exasperating young man's chatter. He was good-tempered, had
not much to say for himself, was not clever by any means,
thank goodness—wrote my friend. It appeared, however, that
Jim was clever enough to be quietly appreciative of his wit,
while, on the other hand, he amused him by his naiveness.
"The dew is yet on him, and since I had the bright idea of
giving him a room in the house and having him at meals I
feel less withered myself. The other day he took it into his
head to cross the room with no other purpose but to open a
door for me; and I felt more in touch with mankind than I
had been for years. Ridiculous, isn't it? Of course I guess
there is something—some awful little scrape—which you know
all about—but if I am sure that it is terribly heinous, I
fancy one could manage to forgive it. For my part, I declare
I am unable to imagine him guilty of anything much worse
than robbing an orchard. Is it much worse? Perhaps you ought
to have told me; but it is such a long time since we both
turned saints that you may have forgotten we, too, had
sinned in our time? It may be that some day I shall have to
ask you, and then I shall expect to be told. I don't care to
question him myself till I have some idea what it is.
Moreover, it's too soon as yet. Let him open the door a few
times more for me. . . ." Thus my friend. I was trebly
pleased—at Jim's shaping so well, at the tone of the letter,
at my own cleverness. Evidently I had known what I was
doing. I had read characters aright, and so on. And what if
something unexpected and wonderful were to come of it? That
evening, reposing in a deck-chair under the shade of my own
poop awning (it was in Hong-Kong harbour), I laid on Jim's
behalf the first stone of a castle in Spain.
'I made a trip to the northward, and when I returned I
found another letter from my friend waiting for me. It was
the first envelope I tore open. "There are no spoons
missing, as far as I know," ran the first line; "I haven't
been interested enough to inquire. He is gone, leaving on
the breakfast-table a formal little note of apology, which
is either silly or heartless. Probably both—and it's all one
to me. Allow me to say, lest you should have some more
mysterious young men in reserve, that I have shut up shop,
definitely and for ever. This is the last eccentricity I
shall be guilty of. Do not imagine for a moment that I care
a hang; but he is very much regretted at tennis-parties, and
for my own sake I've told a plausible lie at the club. . .
." I flung the letter aside and started looking through the
batch on my table, till I came upon Jim's handwriting. Would
you believe it? One chance in a hundred! But it is always
that hundredth chance! That little second engineer of the
Patna had turned up in a more or less destitute state, and
got a temporary job of looking after the machinery of the
mill. "I couldn't stand the familiarity of the little
beast," Jim wrote from a seaport seven hundred miles south
of the place where he should have been in clover. "I am now
for the time with Egstrom & Blake, ship-chandlers, as
their—well—runner, to call the thing by its right name. For
reference I gave them your name, which they know of course,
and if you could write a word in my favour it would be a
permanent employment." I was utterly crushed under the ruins
of my castle, but of course I wrote as desired. Before the
end of the year my new charter took me that way, and I had
an opportunity of seeing him.
'He was still with Egstrom & Blake, and we met in what
they called "our parlour" opening out of the store. He had
that moment come in from boarding a ship, and confronted me
head down, ready for a tussle. "What have you got to say for
yourself?" I began as soon as we had shaken hands. "What I
wrote you—nothing more," he said stubbornly. "Did the fellow
blab—or what?" I asked. He looked up at me with a troubled
smile. "Oh, no! He didn't. He made it a kind of confidential
business between us. He was most damnably mysterious
whenever I came over to the mill; he would wink at me in a
respectful manner—as much as to say 'We know what we know.'
Infernally fawning and familiar—and that sort of thing . .
." He threw himself into a chair and stared down his legs.
"One day we happened to be alone and the fellow had the
cheek to say, 'Well, Mr. James'—I was called Mr. James there
as if I had been the son—'here we are together once more.
This is better than the old ship—ain't it?' . . . Wasn't it
appalling, eh? I looked at him, and he put on a knowing air.
'Don't you be uneasy, sir,' he says. 'I know a gentleman
when I see one, and I know how a gentleman feels. I hope,
though, you will be keeping me on this job. I had a hard
time of it too, along of that rotten old Patna racket.'
Jove! It was awful. I don't know what I should have said or
done if I had not just then heard Mr. Denver calling me in
the passage. It was tiffin-time, and we walked together
across the yard and through the garden to the bungalow. He
began to chaff me in his kindly way . . . I believe he liked
me . . ."
'Jim was silent for a while.
'"I know he liked me. That's what made it so hard. Such a
splendid man! . . . That morning he slipped his hand under
my arm. . . . He, too, was familiar with me." He burst into
a short laugh, and dropped his chin on his breast. "Pah!
When I remembered how that mean little beast had been
talking to me," he began suddenly in a vibrating voice, "I
couldn't bear to think of myself . . . I suppose you know .
. ." I nodded. . . . "More like a father," he cried; his
voice sank. "I would have had to tell him. I couldn't let it
go on—could I?" "Well?" I murmured, after waiting a while.
"I preferred to go," he said slowly; "this thing must be
buried."
'We could hear in the shop Blake upbraiding Egstrom in an
abusive, strained voice. They had been associated for many
years, and every day from the moment the doors were opened
to the last minute before closing, Blake, a little man with
sleek, jetty hair and unhappy, beady eyes, could be heard
rowing his partner incessantly with a sort of scathing and
plaintive fury. The sound of that everlasting scolding was
part of the place like the other fixtures; even strangers
would very soon come to disregard it completely unless it be
perhaps to mutter "Nuisance," or to get up suddenly and shut
the door of the "parlour." Egstrom himself, a raw-boned,
heavy Scandinavian, with a busy manner and immense blonde
whiskers, went on directing his people, checking parcels,
making out bills or writing letters at a stand-up desk in
the shop, and comported himself in that clatter exactly as
though he had been stone-deaf. Now and again he would emit a
bothered perfunctory "Sssh," which neither produced nor was
expected to produce the slightest effect. "They are very
decent to me here," said Jim. "Blake's a little cad, but
Egstrom's all right." He stood up quickly, and walking with
measured steps to a tripod telescope standing in the window
and pointed at the roadstead, he applied his eye to it.
"There's that ship which has been becalmed outside all the
morning has got a breeze now and is coming in," he remarked
patiently; "I must go and board." We shook hands in silence,
and he turned to go. "Jim!" I cried. He looked round with
his hand on the lock. "You—you have thrown away something
like a fortune." He came back to me all the way from the
door. "Such a splendid old chap," he said. "How could I? How
could I?" His lips twitched. "Here it does not matter." "Oh!
you—you—" I began, and had to cast about for a suitable
word, but before I became aware that there was no name that
would just do, he was gone. I heard outside Egstrom's deep
gentle voice saying cheerily, "That's the Sarah W. Granger,
Jimmy. You must manage to be first aboard"; and directly
Blake struck in, screaming after the manner of an outraged
cockatoo, "Tell the captain we've got some of his mail here.
That'll fetch him. D'ye hear, Mister What's-your-name?" And
there was Jim answering Egstrom with something boyish in his
tone. "All right. I'll make a race of it." He seemed to take
refuge in the boat-sailing part of that sorry business.
'I did not see him again that trip, but on my next (I had
a six months' charter) I went up to the store. Ten yards
away from the door Blake's scolding met my ears, and when I
came in he gave me a glance of utter wretchedness; Egstrom,
all smiles, advanced, extending a large bony hand. "Glad to
see you, captain. . . . Sssh. . . . Been thinking you were
about due back here. What did you say, sir? . . . Sssh. . .
. Oh! him! He has left us. Come into the parlour." . . .
After the slam of the door Blake's strained voice became
faint, as the voice of one scolding desperately in a
wilderness. . . . "Put us to a great inconvenience, too.
Used us badly—I must say . . ." "Where's he gone to? Do you
know?" I asked. "No. It's no use asking either," said
Egstrom, standing bewhiskered and obliging before me with
his arms hanging down his sides clumsily, and a thin silver
watch-chain looped very low on a rucked-up blue serge
waistcoat. "A man like that don't go anywhere in
particular." I was too concerned at the news to ask for the
explanation of that pronouncement, and he went on. "He
left—let's see—the very day a steamer with returning
pilgrims from the Red Sea put in here with two blades of her
propeller gone. Three weeks ago now." "Wasn't there
something said about the Patna case?" I asked, fearing the
worst. He gave a start, and looked at me as if I had been a
sorcerer. "Why, yes! How do you know? Some of them were
talking about it here. There was a captain or two, the
manager of Vanlo's engineering shop at the harbour, two or
three others, and myself. Jim was in here too, having a
sandwich and a glass of beer; when we are busy—you see,
captain—there's no time for a proper tiffin. He was standing
by this table eating sandwiches, and the rest of us were
round the telescope watching that steamer come in; and
by-and-by Vanlo's manager began to talk about the chief of
the Patna; he had done some repairs for him once, and from
that he went on to tell us what an old ruin she was, and the
money that had been made out of her. He came to mention her
last voyage, and then we all struck in. Some said one thing
and some another—not much—what you or any other man might
say; and there was some laughing. Captain O'Brien of the
Sarah W. Granger, a large, noisy old man with a stick—he was
sitting listening to us in this arm-chair here—he let drive
suddenly with his stick at the floor, and roars out,
'Skunks!' . . . Made us all jump. Vanlo's manager winks at
us and asks, 'What's the matter, Captain O'Brien?' 'Matter!
matter!' the old man began to shout; 'what are you Injuns
laughing at? It's no laughing matter. It's a disgrace to
human natur'—that's what it is. I would despise being seen
in the same room with one of those men. Yes, sir!' He seemed
to catch my eye like, and I had to speak out of civility.
'Skunks!' says I, 'of course, Captain O'Brien, and I
wouldn't care to have them here myself, so you're quite safe
in this room, Captain O'Brien. Have a little something cool
to drink.' 'Dam' your drink, Egstrom,' says he, with a
twinkle in his eye; 'when I want a drink I will shout for
it. I am going to quit. It stinks here now.' At this all the
others burst out laughing, and out they go after the old
man. And then, sir, that blasted Jim he puts down the
sandwich he had in his hand and walks round the table to me;
there was his glass of beer poured out quite full. 'I am
off,' he says—just like this. 'It isn't half-past one yet,'
says I; 'you might snatch a smoke first.' I thought he meant
it was time for him to go down to his work. When I
understood what he was up to, my arms fell—so! Can't get a
man like that every day, you know, sir; a regular devil for
sailing a boat; ready to go out miles to sea to meet ships
in any sort of weather. More than once a captain would come
in here full of it, and the first thing he would say would
be, 'That's a reckless sort of a lunatic you've got for
water-clerk, Egstrom. I was feeling my way in at daylight
under short canvas when there comes flying out of the mist
right under my forefoot a boat half under water, sprays
going over the mast-head, two frightened niggers on the
bottom boards, a yelling fiend at the tiller. Hey! hey! Ship
ahoy! ahoy! Captain! Hey! hey! Egstrom & Blake's man first
to speak to you! Hey! hey! Egstrom & Blake! Hallo! hey!
whoop! Kick the niggers—out reefs—a squall on at the
time—shoots ahead whooping and yelling to me to make sail
and he would give me a lead in—more like a demon than a man.
Never saw a boat handled like that in all my life. Couldn't
have been drunk—was he? Such a quiet, soft-spoken chap
too—blush like a girl when he came on board. . . .' I tell
you, Captain Marlow, nobody had a chance against us with a
strange ship when Jim was out. The other ship-chandlers just
kept their old customers, and . . ."
'Egstrom appeared overcome with emotion.
'"Why, sir—it seemed as though he wouldn't mind going a
hundred miles out to sea in an old shoe to nab a ship for
the firm. If the business had been his own and all to make
yet, he couldn't have done more in that way. And now . . .
all at once . . . like this! Thinks I to myself: 'Oho! a
rise in the screw—that's the trouble—is it?' 'All right,'
says I, 'no need of all that fuss with me, Jimmy. Just
mention your figure. Anything in reason.' He looks at me as
if he wanted to swallow something that stuck in his throat.
'I can't stop with you.' 'What's that blooming joke?' I
asks. He shakes his head, and I could see in his eye he was
as good as gone already, sir. So I turned to him and slanged
him till all was blue. 'What is it you're running away
from?' I asks. 'Who has been getting at you? What scared
you? You haven't as much sense as a rat; they don't clear
out from a good ship. Where do you expect to get a better
berth?—you this and you that.' I made him look sick, I can
tell you. 'This business ain't going to sink,' says I. He
gave a big jump. 'Good-bye,' he says, nodding at me like a
lord; 'you ain't half a bad chap, Egstrom. I give you my
word that if you knew my reasons you wouldn't care to keep
me.' 'That's the biggest lie you ever told in your life,'
says I; 'I know my own mind.' He made me so mad that I had
to laugh. 'Can't you really stop long enough to drink this
glass of beer here, you funny beggar, you?' I don't know
what came over him; he didn't seem able to find the door;
something comical, I can tell you, captain. I drank the beer
myself. 'Well, if you're in such a hurry, here's luck to you
in your own drink,' says I; 'only, you mark my words, if you
keep up this game you'll very soon find that the earth ain't
big enough to hold you—that's all.' He gave me one black
look, and out he rushed with a face fit to scare little
children."
'Egstrom snorted bitterly, and combed one auburn whisker
with knotty fingers. "Haven't been able to get a man that
was any good since. It's nothing but worry, worry, worry in
business. And where might you have come across him, captain,
if it's fair to ask?"
'"He was the mate of the Patna that voyage," I said,
feeling that I owed some explanation. For a time Egstrom
remained very still, with his fingers plunged in the hair at
the side of his face, and then exploded. "And who the devil
cares about that?" "I daresay no one," I began . . . "And
what the devil is he—anyhow—for to go on like this?" He
stuffed suddenly his left whisker into his mouth and stood
amazed. "Jee!" he exclaimed, "I told him the earth wouldn't
be big enough to hold his caper."'
CHAPTER 19
'I have told you these two episodes at length to show his
manner of dealing with himself under the new conditions of
his life. There were many others of the sort, more than I
could count on the fingers of my two hands. They were all
equally tinged by a high-minded absurdity of intention which
made their futility profound and touching. To fling away
your daily bread so as to get your hands free for a grapple
with a ghost may be an act of prosaic heroism. Men had done
it before (though we who have lived know full well that it
is not the haunted soul but the hungry body that makes an
outcast), and men who had eaten and meant to eat every day
had applauded the creditable folly. He was indeed
unfortunate, for all his recklessness could not carry him
out from under the shadow. There was always a doubt of his
courage. The truth seems to be that it is impossible to lay
the ghost of a fact. You can face it or shirk it—and I have
come across a man or two who could wink at their familiar
shades. Obviously Jim was not of the winking sort; but what
I could never make up my mind about was whether his line of
conduct amounted to shirking his ghost or to facing him out.
'I strained my mental eyesight only to discover that, as
with the complexion of all our actions, the shade of
difference was so delicate that it was impossible to say. It
might have been flight and it might have been a mode of
combat. To the common mind he became known as a rolling
stone, because this was the funniest part: he did after a
time become perfectly known, and even notorious, within the
circle of his wanderings (which had a diameter of, say,
three thousand miles), in the same way as an eccentric
character is known to a whole countryside. For instance, in
Bankok, where he found employment with Yucker Brothers,
charterers and teak merchants, it was almost pathetic to see
him go about in sunshine hugging his secret, which was known
to the very up-country logs on the river. Schomberg, the
keeper of the hotel where he boarded, a hirsute Alsatian of
manly bearing and an irrepressible retailer of all the
scandalous gossip of the place, would, with both elbows on
the table, impart an adorned version of the story to any
guest who cared to imbibe knowledge along with the more
costly liquors. "And, mind you, the nicest fellow you could
meet," would be his generous conclusion; "quite superior."
It says a lot for the casual crowd that frequented
Schomberg's establishment that Jim managed to hang out in
Bankok for a whole six months. I remarked that people,
perfect strangers, took to him as one takes to a nice child.
His manner was reserved, but it was as though his personal
appearance, his hair, his eyes, his smile, made friends for
him wherever he went. And, of course, he was no fool. I
heard Siegmund Yucker (native of Switzerland), a gentle
creature ravaged by a cruel dyspepsia, and so frightfully
lame that his head swung through a quarter of a circle at
every step he took, declare appreciatively that for one so
young he was "of great gabasidy," as though it had been a
mere question of cubic contents. "Why not send him up
country?" I suggested anxiously. (Yucker Brothers had
concessions and teak forests in the interior.) "If he has
capacity, as you say, he will soon get hold of the work. And
physically he is very fit. His health is always excellent."
"Ach! It's a great ting in dis goundry to be vree vrom
tispep-shia," sighed poor Yucker enviously, casting a
stealthy glance at the pit of his ruined stomach. I left him
drumming pensively on his desk and muttering, "Es ist ein'
Idee. Es ist ein' Idee." Unfortunately, that very evening an
unpleasant affair took place in the hotel.
'I don't know that I blame Jim very much, but it was a
truly regrettable incident. It belonged to the lamentable
species of bar-room scuffles, and the other party to it was
a cross-eyed Dane of sorts whose visiting-card recited,
under his misbegotten name: first lieutenant in the Royal
Siamese Navy. The fellow, of course, was utterly hopeless at
billiards, but did not like to be beaten, I suppose. He had
had enough to drink to turn nasty after the sixth game, and
make some scornful remark at Jim's expense. Most of the
people there didn't hear what was said, and those who had
heard seemed to have had all precise recollection scared out
of them by the appalling nature of the consequences that
immediately ensued. It was very lucky for the Dane that he
could swim, because the room opened on a verandah and the
Menam flowed below very wide and black. A boat-load of
Chinamen, bound, as likely as not, on some thieving
expedition, fished out the officer of the King of Siam, and
Jim turned up at about midnight on board my ship without a
hat. "Everybody in the room seemed to know," he said,
gasping yet from the contest, as it were. He was rather
sorry, on general principles, for what had happened, though
in this case there had been, he said, "no option." But what
dismayed him was to find the nature of his burden as well
known to everybody as though he had gone about all that time
carrying it on his shoulders. Naturally after this he
couldn't remain in the place. He was universally condemned
for the brutal violence, so unbecoming a man in his delicate
position; some maintained he had been disgracefully drunk at
the time; others criticised his want of tact. Even Schomberg
was very much annoyed. "He is a very nice young man," he
said argumentatively to me, "but the lieutenant is a
first-rate fellow too. He dines every night at my table
d'hote, you know. And there's a billiard-cue broken. I can't
allow that. First thing this morning I went over with my
apologies to the lieutenant, and I think I've made it all
right for myself; but only think, captain, if everybody
started such games! Why, the man might have been drowned!
And here I can't run out into the next street and buy a new
cue. I've got to write to Europe for them. No, no! A temper
like that won't do!" . . . He was extremely sore on the
subject.
'This was the worst incident of all in his—his retreat.
Nobody could deplore it more than myself; for if, as
somebody said hearing him mentioned, "Oh yes! I know. He has
knocked about a good deal out here," yet he had somehow
avoided being battered and chipped in the process. This last
affair, however, made me seriously uneasy, because if his
exquisite sensibilities were to go the length of involving
him in pot-house shindies, he would lose his name of an
inoffensive, if aggravating, fool, and acquire that of a
common loafer. For all my confidence in him I could not help
reflecting that in such cases from the name to the thing
itself is but a step. I suppose you will understand that by
that time I could not think of washing my hands of him. I
took him away from Bankok in my ship, and we had a longish
passage. It was pitiful to see how he shrank within himself.
A seaman, even if a mere passenger, takes an interest in a
ship, and looks at the sea-life around him with the critical
enjoyment of a painter, for instance, looking at another
man's work. In every sense of the expression he is "on
deck"; but my Jim, for the most part, skulked down below as
though he had been a stowaway. He infected me so that I
avoided speaking on professional matters, such as would
suggest themselves naturally to two sailors during a
passage. For whole days we did not exchange a word; I felt
extremely unwilling to give orders to my officers in his
presence. Often, when alone with him on deck or in the
cabin, we didn't know what to do with our eyes.
'I placed him with De Jongh, as you know, glad enough to
dispose of him in any way, yet persuaded that his position
was now growing intolerable. He had lost some of that
elasticity which had enabled him to rebound back into his
uncompromising position after every overthrow. One day,
coming ashore, I saw him standing on the quay; the water of
the roadstead and the sea in the offing made one smooth
ascending plane, and the outermost ships at anchor seemed to
ride motionless in the sky. He was waiting for his boat,
which was being loaded at our feet with packages of small
stores for some vessel ready to leave. After exchanging
greetings, we remained silent—side by side. "Jove!" he said
suddenly, "this is killing work."
'He smiled at me; I must say he generally could manage a
smile. I made no reply. I knew very well he was not alluding
to his duties; he had an easy time of it with De Jongh.
Nevertheless, as soon as he had spoken I became completely
convinced that the work was killing. I did not even look at
him. "Would you like," said I, "to leave this part of the
world altogether; try California or the West Coast? I'll see
what I can do . . ." He interrupted me a little scornfully.
"What difference would it make?" . . . I felt at once
convinced that he was right. It would make no difference; it
was not relief he wanted; I seemed to perceive dimly that
what he wanted, what he was, as it were, waiting for, was
something not easy to define—something in the nature of an
opportunity. I had given him many opportunities, but they
had been merely opportunities to earn his bread. Yet what
more could any man do? The position struck me as hopeless,
and poor Brierly's saying recurred to me, "Let him creep
twenty feet underground and stay there." Better that, I
thought, than this waiting above ground for the impossible.
Yet one could not be sure even of that. There and then,
before his boat was three oars' lengths away from the quay,
I had made up my mind to go and consult Stein in the
evening.
'This Stein was a wealthy and respected merchant. His
"house" (because it was a house, Stein & Co., and there was
some sort of partner who, as Stein said, "looked after the
Moluccas") had a large inter-island business, with a lot of
trading posts established in the most out-of-the-way places
for collecting the produce. His wealth and his
respectability were not exactly the reasons why I was
anxious to seek his advice. I desired to confide my
difficulty to him because he was one of the most trustworthy
men I had ever known. The gentle light of a simple,
unwearied, as it were, and intelligent good-nature illumined
his long hairless face. It had deep downward folds, and was
pale as of a man who had always led a sedentary life—which
was indeed very far from being the case. His hair was thin,
and brushed back from a massive and lofty forehead. One
fancied that at twenty he must have looked very much like
what he was now at threescore. It was a student's face; only
the eyebrows nearly all white, thick and bushy, together
with the resolute searching glance that came from under
them, were not in accord with his, I may say, learned
appearance. He was tall and loose-jointed; his slight stoop,
together with an innocent smile, made him appear
benevolently ready to lend you his ear; his long arms with
pale big hands had rare deliberate gestures of a pointing
out, demonstrating kind. I speak of him at length, because
under this exterior, and in conjunction with an upright and
indulgent nature, this man possessed an intrepidity of
spirit and a physical courage that could have been called
reckless had it not been like a natural function of the
body—say good digestion, for instance—completely unconscious
of itself. It is sometimes said of a man that he carries his
life in his hand. Such a saying would have been inadequate
if applied to him; during the early part of his existence in
the East he had been playing ball with it. All this was in
the past, but I knew the story of his life and the origin of
his fortune. He was also a naturalist of some distinction,
or perhaps I should say a learned collector. Entomology was
his special study. His collection of Buprestidae and
Longicorns—beetles all—horrible miniature monsters, looking
malevolent in death and immobility, and his cabinet of
butterflies, beautiful and hovering under the glass of cases
on lifeless wings, had spread his fame far over the earth.
The name of this merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a
Malay sultan (to whom he never alluded otherwise than as "my
poor Mohammed Bonso"), had, on account of a few bushels of
dead insects, become known to learned persons in Europe, who
could have had no conception, and certainly would not have
cared to know anything, of his life or character. I, who
knew, considered him an eminently suitable person to receive
my confidences about Jim's difficulties as well as my own.'
CHAPTER 20
'Late in the evening I entered his study, after
traversing an imposing but empty dining-room very dimly lit.
The house was silent. I was preceded by an elderly grim
Javanese servant in a sort of livery of white jacket and
yellow sarong, who, after throwing the door open, exclaimed
low, "O master!" and stepping aside, vanished in a
mysterious way as though he had been a ghost only
momentarily embodied for that particular service. Stein
turned round with the chair, and in the same movement his
spectacles seemed to get pushed up on his forehead. He
welcomed me in his quiet and humorous voice. Only one corner
of the vast room, the corner in which stood his
writing-desk, was strongly lighted by a shaded reading-lamp,
and the rest of the spacious apartment melted into shapeless
gloom like a cavern. Narrow shelves filled with dark boxes
of uniform shape and colour ran round the walls, not from
floor to ceiling, but in a sombre belt about four feet
broad. Catacombs of beetles. Wooden tablets were hung above
at irregular intervals. The light reached one of them, and
the word Coleoptera written in gold letters glittered
mysteriously upon a vast dimness. The glass cases containing
the collection of butterflies were ranged in three long rows
upon slender-legged little tables. One of these cases had
been removed from its place and stood on the desk, which was
bestrewn with oblong slips of paper blackened with minute
handwriting.
'"So you see me—so," he said. His hand hovered over the
case where a butterfly in solitary grandeur spread out dark
bronze wings, seven inches or more across, with exquisite
white veinings and a gorgeous border of yellow spots. "Only
one specimen like this they have in your London, and
then—no more. To my small native town this my collection I
shall bequeath. Something of me. The best."
'He bent forward in the chair and gazed intently, his
chin over the front of the case. I stood at his back.
"Marvellous," he whispered, and seemed to forget my
presence. His history was curious. He had been born in
Bavaria, and when a youth of twenty-two had taken an active
part in the revolutionary movement of 1848. Heavily
compromised, he managed to make his escape, and at first
found a refuge with a poor republican watchmaker in Trieste.
From there he made his way to Tripoli with a stock of cheap
watches to hawk about,—not a very great opening truly, but
it turned out lucky enough, because it was there he came
upon a Dutch traveller—a rather famous man, I believe, but I
don't remember his name. It was that naturalist who,
engaging him as a sort of assistant, took him to the East.
They travelled in the Archipelago together and separately,
collecting insects and birds, for four years or more. Then
the naturalist went home, and Stein, having no home to go
to, remained with an old trader he had come across in his
journeys in the interior of Celebes—if Celebes may be said
to have an interior. This old Scotsman, the only white man
allowed to reside in the country at the time, was a
privileged friend of the chief ruler of Wajo States, who was
a woman. I often heard Stein relate how that chap, who was
slightly paralysed on one side, had introduced him to the
native court a short time before another stroke carried him
off. He was a heavy man with a patriarchal white beard, and
of imposing stature. He came into the council-hall where all
the rajahs, pangerans, and headmen were assembled, with the
queen, a fat wrinkled woman (very free in her speech, Stein
said), reclining on a high couch under a canopy. He dragged
his leg, thumping with his stick, and grasped Stein's arm,
leading him right up to the couch. "Look, queen, and you
rajahs, this is my son," he proclaimed in a stentorian
voice. "I have traded with your fathers, and when I die he
shall trade with you and your sons."
'By means of this simple formality Stein inherited the
Scotsman's privileged position and all his stock-in-trade,
together with a fortified house on the banks of the only
navigable river in the country. Shortly afterwards the old
queen, who was so free in her speech, died, and the country
became disturbed by various pretenders to the throne. Stein
joined the party of a younger son, the one of whom thirty
years later he never spoke otherwise but as "my poor
Mohammed Bonso." They both became the heroes of innumerable
exploits; they had wonderful adventures, and once stood a
siege in the Scotsman's house for a month, with only a score
of followers against a whole army. I believe the natives
talk of that war to this day. Meantime, it seems, Stein
never failed to annex on his own account every butterfly or
beetle he could lay hands on. After some eight years of war,
negotiations, false truces, sudden outbreaks,
reconciliation, treachery, and so on, and just as peace
seemed at last permanently established, his "poor Mohammed
Bonso" was assassinated at the gate of his own royal
residence while dismounting in the highest spirits on his
return from a successful deer-hunt. This event rendered
Stein's position extremely insecure, but he would have
stayed perhaps had it not been that a short time afterwards
he lost Mohammed's sister ("my dear wife the princess," he
used to say solemnly), by whom he had had a daughter—mother
and child both dying within three days of each other from
some infectious fever. He left the country, which this cruel
loss had made unbearable to him. Thus ended the first and
adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so
different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained
with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream. He
had a little money; he started life afresh, and in the
course of years acquired a considerable fortune. At first he
had travelled a good deal amongst the islands, but age had
stolen upon him, and of late he seldom left his spacious
house three miles out of town, with an extensive garden, and
surrounded by stables, offices, and bamboo cottages for his
servants and dependants, of whom he had many. He drove in
his buggy every morning to town, where he had an office with
white and Chinese clerks. He owned a small fleet of
schooners and native craft, and dealt in island produce on a
large scale. For the rest he lived solitary, but not
misanthropic, with his books and his collection, classing
and arranging specimens, corresponding with entomologists in
Europe, writing up a descriptive catalogue of his treasures.
Such was the history of the man whom I had come to consult
upon Jim's case without any definite hope. Simply to hear
what he would have to say would have been a relief. I was
very anxious, but I respected the intense, almost
passionate, absorption with which he looked at a butterfly,
as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the
white tracings, in the gorgeous markings, he could see other
things, an image of something as perishable and defying
destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues
displaying a splendour unmarred by death.
'"Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The
beauty—but that is nothing—look at the accuracy, the
harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This
is Nature—the balance of colossal forces. Every star is
so—and every blade of grass stands so—and the mighty Kosmos
il perfect equilibrium produces—this. This wonder; this
masterpiece of Nature—the great artist."
'"Never heard an entomologist go on like this," I
observed cheerfully. "Masterpiece! And what of man?"
'"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," he said,
keeping his eyes fixed on the glass case. "Perhaps the
artist was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it
seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where
there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want
all the place? Why should he run about here and there making
a great noise about himself, talking about the stars,
disturbing the blades of grass? . . ."
'"Catching butterflies," I chimed in.
'He smiled, threw himself back in his chair, and
stretched his legs. "Sit down," he said. "I captured this
rare specimen myself one very fine morning. And I had a very
big emotion. You don't know what it is for a collector to
capture such a rare specimen. You can't know."
'I smiled at my ease in a rocking-chair. His eyes seemed
to look far beyond the wall at which they stared; and he
narrated how, one night, a messenger arrived from his "poor
Mohammed," requiring his presence at the "residenz"—as he
called it—which was distant some nine or ten miles by a
bridle-path over a cultivated plain, with patches of forest
here and there. Early in the morning he started from his
fortified house, after embracing his little Emma, and
leaving the "princess," his wife, in command. He described
how she came with him as far as the gate, walking with one
hand on the neck of his horse; she had on a white jacket,
gold pins in her hair, and a brown leather belt over her
left shoulder with a revolver in it. "She talked as women
will talk," he said, "telling me to be careful, and to try
to get back before dark, and what a great wikedness it was
for me to go alone. We were at war, and the country was not
safe; my men were putting up bullet-proof shutters to the
house and loading their rifles, and she begged me to have no
fear for her. She could defend the house against anybody
till I returned. And I laughed with pleasure a little. I
liked to see her so brave and young and strong. I too was
young then. At the gate she caught hold of my hand and gave
it one squeeze and fell back. I made my horse stand still
outside till I heard the bars of the gate put up behind me.
There was a great enemy of mine, a great noble—and a great
rascal too—roaming with a band in the neighbourhood. I
cantered for four or five miles; there had been rain in the
night, but the musts had gone up, up—and the face of the
earth was clean; it lay smiling to me, so fresh and
innocent—like a little child. Suddenly somebody fires a
volley—twenty shots at least it seemed to me. I hear bullets
sing in my ear, and my hat jumps to the back of my head. It
was a little intrigue, you understand. They got my poor
Mohammed to send for me and then laid that ambush. I see it
all in a minute, and I think—This wants a little management.
My pony snort, jump, and stand, and I fall slowly forward
with my head on his mane. He begins to walk, and with one
eye I could see over his neck a faint cloud of smoke hanging
in front of a clump of bamboos to my left. I think—Aha! my
friends, why you not wait long enough before you shoot? This
is not yet gelungen. Oh no! I get hold of my revolver with
my right hand—quiet—quiet. After all, there were only seven
of these rascals. They get up from the grass and start
running with their sarongs tucked up, waving spears above
their heads, and yelling to each other to look out and catch
the horse, because I was dead. I let them come as close as
the door here, and then bang, bang, bang—take aim each time
too. One more shot I fire at a man's back, but I miss. Too
far already. And then I sit alone on my horse with the clean
earth smiling at me, and there are the bodies of three men
lying on the ground. One was curled up like a dog, another
on his back had an arm over his eyes as if to keep off the
sun, and the third man he draws up his leg very slowly and
makes it with one kick straight again. I watch him very
carefully from my horse, but there is no more—bleibt ganz
ruhig—keep still, so. And as I looked at his face for some
sign of life I observed something like a faint shadow pass
over his forehead. It was the shadow of this butterfly. Look
at the form of the wing. This species fly high with a strong
flight. I raised my eyes and I saw him fluttering away. I
think—Can it be possible? And then I lost him. I dismounted
and went on very slow, leading my horse and holding my
revolver with one hand and my eyes darting up and down and
right and left, everywhere! At last I saw him sitting on a
small heap of dirt ten feet away. At once my heart began to
beat quick. I let go my horse, keep my revolver in one hand,
and with the other snatch my soft felt hat off my head. One
step. Steady. Another step. Flop! I got him! When I got up I
shook like a leaf with excitement, and when I opened these
beautiful wings and made sure what a rare and so
extraordinary perfect specimen I had, my head went round and
my legs became so weak with emotion that I had to sit on the
ground. I had greatly desired to possess myself of a
specimen of that species when collecting for the professor.
I took long journeys and underwent great privations; I had
dreamed of him in my sleep, and here suddenly I had him in
my fingers—for myself! In the words of the poet" (he
pronounced it "boet")—
"'So halt' ich's endlich denn in meinen Handen,
Und nenn' es in gewissem Sinne mein.'"
He gave to the last word the emphasis of a suddenly
lowered voice, and withdrew his eyes slowly from my face. He
began to charge a long-stemmed pipe busily and in silence,
then, pausing with his thumb on the orifice of the bowl,
looked again at me significantly.
'"Yes, my good friend. On that day I had nothing to
desire; I had greatly annoyed my principal enemy; I was
young, strong; I had friendship; I had the love" (he said
"lof") "of woman, a child I had, to make my heart very
full—and even what I had once dreamed in my sleep had come
into my hand too!"
'He struck a match, which flared violently. His
thoughtful placid face twitched once.
'"Friend, wife, child," he said slowly, gazing at the
small flame—"phoo!" The match was blown out. He sighed and
turned again to the glass case. The frail and beautiful
wings quivered faintly, as if his breath had for an instant
called back to life that gorgeous object of his dreams.
'"The work," he began suddenly, pointing to the scattered
slips, and in his usual gentle and cheery tone, "is making
great progress. I have been this rare specimen describing. .
. . Na! And what is your good news?"
'"To tell you the truth, Stein," I said with an effort
that surprised me, "I came here to describe a specimen. . .
."
'"Butterfly?" he asked, with an unbelieving and humorous
eagerness.
'"Nothing so perfect," I answered, feeling suddenly
dispirited with all sorts of doubts. "A man!"
'"Ach so!" he murmured, and his smiling countenance,
turned to me, became grave. Then after looking at me for a
while he said slowly, "Well—I am a man too."
'Here you have him as he was; he knew how to be so
generously encouraging as to make a scrupulous man hesitate
on the brink of confidence; but if I did hesitate it was not
for long.
'He heard me out, sitting with crossed legs. Sometimes
his head would disappear completely in a great eruption of
smoke, and a sympathetic growl would come out from the
cloud. When I finished he uncrossed his legs, laid down his
pipe, leaned forward towards me earnestly with his elbows on
the arms of his chair, the tips of his fingers together.
'"I understand very well. He is romantic."
'He had diagnosed the case for me, and at first I was
quite startled to find how simple it was; and indeed our
conference resembled so much a medical consultation—Stein,
of learned aspect, sitting in an arm-chair before his desk;
I, anxious, in another, facing him, but a little to one
side—that it seemed natural to ask—
'"What's good for it?"
'He lifted up a long forefinger.
'"There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from
being ourselves cure!" The finger came down on the desk with
a smart rap. The case which he had made to look so simple
before became if possible still simpler—and altogether
hopeless. There was a pause. "Yes," said I, "strictly
speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to
live."
'He approved with his head, a little sadly as it seemed.
"Ja! ja! In general, adapting the words of your great poet:
That is the question. . . ." He went on nodding
sympathetically. . . . "How to be! Ach! How to be."
'He stood up with the tips of his fingers resting on the
desk.
'"We want in so many different ways to be," he began
again. "This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of
dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap
of mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he want to be
so. . . ." He moved his hand up, then down. . . . "He wants
to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil—and every time he
shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow—so fine
as he can never be. . . . In a dream. . . ."
'He lowered the glass lid, the automatic lock clicked
sharply, and taking up the case in both hands he bore it
religiously away to its place, passing out of the bright
circle of the lamp into the ring of fainter light—into
shapeless dusk at last. It had an odd effect—as if these few
steps had carried him out of this concrete and perplexed
world. His tall form, as though robbed of its substance,
hovered noiselessly over invisible things with stooping and
indefinite movements; his voice, heard in that remoteness
where he could be glimpsed mysteriously busy with immaterial
cares, was no longer incisive, seemed to roll voluminous and
grave—mellowed by distance.
'"And because you not always can keep your eyes shut
there comes the real trouble—the heart pain—the world pain.
I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you
cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you
not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . . Ja! . . .
And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was?
Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"
'The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies
laughed boisterously.
'"Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is
born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.
If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced
people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? . . . No! I
tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit
yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in
the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask
me—how to be?"
'His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though
away there in the dusk he had been inspired by some whisper
of knowledge. "I will tell you! For that too there is only
one way."
'With a hasty swish-swish of his slippers he loomed up in
the ring of faint light, and suddenly appeared in the bright
circle of the lamp. His extended hand aimed at my breast
like a pistol; his deepset eyes seemed to pierce through me,
but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the austere
exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his
face. The hand that had been pointing at my breast fell, and
by-and-by, coming a step nearer, he laid it gently on my
shoulder. There were things, he said mournfully, that
perhaps could never be told, only he had lived so much alone
that sometimes he forgot—he forgot. The light had destroyed
the assurance which had inspired him in the distant shadows.
He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his
forehead. "And yet it is true—it is true. In the destructive
element immerse." . . . He spoke in a subdued tone, without
looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. "That was
the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the
dream—and so—ewig—usque ad finem. . . ." The whisper of his
conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain
expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn—or
was it, perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not
the courage to decide; but it was a charming and deceptive
light, throwing the impalpable poesy of its dimness over
pitfalls—over graves. His life had begun in sacrifice, in
enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled very far, on
various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed it
had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and
without regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no
doubt. Yet for all that, the great plain on which men wander
amongst graves and pitfalls remained very desolate under the
impalpable poesy of its crepuscular light, overshadowed in
the centre, circled with a bright edge as if surrounded by
an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence it
was to express the opinion that no one could be more
romantic than himself.
'He shook his head slowly, and afterwards looked at me
with a patient and inquiring glance. It was a shame, he
said. There we were sitting and talking like two boys,
instead of putting our heads together to find something
practical—a practical remedy—for the evil—for the great
evil—he repeated, with a humorous and indulgent smile. For
all that, our talk did not grow more practical. We avoided
pronouncing Jim's name as though we had tried to keep flesh
and blood out of our discussion, or he were nothing but an
erring spirit, a suffering and nameless shade. "Na!" said
Stein, rising. "To-night you sleep here, and in the morning
we shall do something practical—practical. . . ." He lit a
two-branched candlestick and led the way. We passed through
empty dark rooms, escorted by gleams from the lights Stein
carried. They glided along the waxed floors, sweeping here
and there over the polished surface of a table, leaped upon
a fragmentary curve of a piece of furniture, or flashed
perpendicularly in and out of distant mirrors, while the
forms of two men and the flicker of two flames could be seen
for a moment stealing silently across the depths of a
crystalline void. He walked slowly a pace in advance with
stooping courtesy; there was a profound, as it were a
listening, quietude on his face; the long flaxen locks mixed
with white threads were scattered thinly upon his slightly
bowed neck.
'"He is romantic—romantic," he repeated. "And that is
very bad—very bad. . . . Very good, too," he added. "But
is he?" I queried.
'"Gewiss," he said, and stood still holding up the
candelabrum, but without looking at me. "Evident! What is it
that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that
for you and me makes him—exist?"
'At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim's
existence—starting from a country parsonage, blurred by
crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing
claims of life and death in a material world—but his
imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an
irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our
progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting
gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures
stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and
pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth,
which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half
submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. "Perhaps
he is," I admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly
loud reverberation made me lower my voice directly; "but I
am sure you are." With his head dropping on his breast and
the light held high he began to walk again. "Well—I exist,
too," he said.
'He preceded me. My eyes followed his movements, but what
I did see was not the head of the firm, the welcome guest at
afternoon receptions, the correspondent of learned
societies, the entertainer of stray naturalists; I saw only
the reality of his destiny, which he had known how to follow
with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humble
surroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship,
love, war—in all the exalted elements of romance. At the
door of my room he faced me. "Yes," I said, as though
carrying on a discussion, "and amongst other things you
dreamed foolishly of a certain butterfly; but when one fine
morning your dream came in your way you did not let the
splendid opportunity escape. Did you? Whereas he . . ."
Stein lifted his hand. "And do you know how many
opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that
had come in my way?" He shook his head regretfully. "It
seems to me that some would have been very fine—if I had
made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself
don't know." "Whether his were fine or not," I said, "he
knows of one which he certainly did not catch." "Everybody
knows of one or two like that," said Stein; "and that is the
trouble—the great trouble. . . ."
'He shook hands on the threshold, peered into my room
under his raised arm. "Sleep well. And to-morrow we must do
something practical—practical. . . ."
'Though his own room was beyond mine I saw him return the
way he came. He was going back to his butterflies.'
CHAPTER 21
'I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?'
Marlow resumed, after a silence occupied in the careful
lighting of a cigar. 'It does not matter; there's many a
heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of a night that
mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere of
its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but
to the astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its
composition, weight, path—the irregularities of its conduct,
the aberrations of its light—a sort of scientific
scandal-mongering. Thus with Patusan. It was referred to
knowingly in the inner government circles in Batavia,
especially as to its irregularities and aberrations, and it
was known by name to some few, very few, in the mercantile
world. Nobody, however, had been there, and I suspect no one
desired to go there in person, just as an astronomer, I
should fancy, would strongly object to being transported
into a distant heavenly body, where, parted from his earthly
emoluments, he would be bewildered by the view of an
unfamiliar heavens. However, neither heavenly bodies nor
astronomers have anything to do with Patusan. It was Jim who
went there. I only meant you to understand that had Stein
arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude the
change could not have been greater. He left his earthly
failings behind him and what sort of reputation he had, and
there was a totally new set of conditions for his
imaginative faculty to work upon. Entirely new, entirely
remarkable. And he got hold of them in a remarkable way.
'Stein was the man who knew more about Patusan than
anybody else. More than was known in the government circles
I suspect. I have no doubt he had been there, either in his
butterfly-hunting days or later on, when he tried in his
incorrigible way to season with a pinch of romance the
fattening dishes of his commercial kitchen. There were very
few places in the Archipelago he had not seen in the
original dusk of their being, before light (and even
electric light) had been carried into them for the sake of
better morality and—and—well—the greater profit, too. It was
at breakfast of the morning following our talk about Jim
that he mentioned the place, after I had quoted poor
Brierly's remark: "Let him creep twenty feet underground and
stay there." He looked up at me with interested attention,
as though I had been a rare insect. "This could be done,
too," he remarked, sipping his coffee. "Bury him in some
sort," I explained. "One doesn't like to do it of course,
but it would be the best thing, seeing what he is." "Yes; he
is young," Stein mused. "The youngest human being now in
existence," I affirmed. "Schon. There's Patusan," he went on
in the same tone. . . . "And the woman is dead now," he
added incomprehensibly.
'Of course I don't know that story; I can only guess that
once before Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin,
transgression, or misfortune. It is impossible to suspect
Stein. The only woman that had ever existed for him was the
Malay girl he called "My wife the princess," or, more
rarely, in moments of expansion, "the mother of my Emma."
Who was the woman he had mentioned in connection with
Patusan I can't say; but from his allusions I understand she
had been an educated and very good-looking Dutch-Malay girl,
with a tragic or perhaps only a pitiful history, whose most
painful part no doubt was her marriage with a Malacca
Portuguese who had been clerk in some commercial house in
the Dutch colonies. I gathered from Stein that this man was
an unsatisfactory person in more ways than one, all being
more or less indefinite and offensive. It was solely for his
wife's sake that Stein had appointed him manager of Stein &
Co.'s trading post in Patusan; but commercially the
arrangement was not a success, at any rate for the firm, and
now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another
agent there. The Portuguese, whose name was Cornelius,
considered himself a very deserving but ill-used person,
entitled by his abilities to a better position. This man Jim
would have to relieve. "But I don't think he will go away
from the place," remarked Stein. "That has nothing to do
with me. It was only for the sake of the woman that I . . .
But as I think there is a daughter left, I shall let him, if
he likes to stay, keep the old house."
'Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state,
and the chief settlement bears the same name. At a point on
the river about forty miles from the sea, where the first
houses come into view, there can be seen rising above the
level of the forests the summits of two steep hills very
close together, and separated by what looks like a deep
fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of
fact, the valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the
appearance from the settlement is of one irregularly conical
hill split in two, and with the two halves leaning slightly
apart. On the third day after the full, the moon, as seen
from the open space in front of Jim's house (he had a very
fine house in the native style when I visited him), rose
exactly behind these hills, its diffused light at first
throwing the two masses into intensely black relief, and
then the nearly perfect disc, glowing ruddily, appeared,
gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, till it
floated away above the summits, as if escaping from a
yawning grave in gentle triumph. "Wonderful effect," said
Jim by my side. "Worth seeing. Is it not?"
'And this question was put with a note of personal pride
that made me smile, as though he had had a hand in
regulating that unique spectacle. He had regulated so many
things in Patusan—things that would have appeared as much
beyond his control as the motions of the moon and the stars.
'It was inconceivable. That was the distinctive quality
of the part into which Stein and I had tumbled him
unwittingly, with no other notion than to get him out of the
way; out of his own way, be it understood. That was our main
purpose, though, I own, I might have had another motive
which had influenced me a little. I was about to go home for
a time; and it may be I desired, more than I was aware of
myself, to dispose of him—to dispose of him, you
understand—before I left. I was going home, and he had come
to me from there, with his miserable trouble and his shadowy
claim, like a man panting under a burden in a mist. I cannot
say I had ever seen him distinctly—not even to this day,
after I had my last view of him; but it seemed to me that
the less I understood the more I was bound to him in the
name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our
knowledge. I did not know so much more about myself. And
then, I repeat, I was going home—to that home distant enough
for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by
which the humblest of us has the right to sit. We wander in
our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious
and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our
money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for
each of us going home must be like going to render an
account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our
friends—those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even
they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible
and bereft of ties,—even those for whom home holds no dear
face, no familiar voice,—even they have to meet the spirit
that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in
its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters
and its trees—a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what
you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its
truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may
seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us
have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the
surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love,
the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the
opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you
must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to
dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I think it is the
lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call
their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the
land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and
unchangeable spirit—it is those who understand best its
severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right
to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us
understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all
without exception, because those who do not feel do not
count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it
draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the
land from which he draws his faith together with his life. I
don't know how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he
felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such
truth or some such illusion—I don't care how you call it,
there is so little difference, and the difference means so
little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he
mattered. He would never go home now. Not he. Never. Had he
been capable of picturesque manifestations he would have
shuddered at the thought and made you shudder too. But he
was not of that sort, though he was expressive enough in his
way. Before the idea of going home he would grow desperately
stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and pouted lips, and
with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a
frown, as if before something unbearable, as if before
something revolting. There was imagination in that hard
skull of his, over which the thick clustering hair fitted
like a cap. As to me, I have no imagination (I would be more
certain about him today, if I had), and I do not mean to
imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land
uprising above the white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what
I—returning with no bones broken, so to speak—had done with
my very young brother. I could not make such a mistake. I
knew very well he was of those about whom there is no
inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish
utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow.
The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great
enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives. Woe to the
stragglers! We exist only in so far as we hang together. He
had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was aware
of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a
man's more intense life makes his death more touching than
the death of a tree. I happened to be handy, and I happened
to be touched. That's all there is to it. I was concerned as
to the way he would go out. It would have hurt me if, for
instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so small that
I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed,
swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his
canvas shoes, and with a flutter of rags about the elbows,
who, on the strength of old acquaintance, would ask for a
loan of five dollars. You know the awful jaunty bearing of
these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past, the
rasping careless voice, the half-averted impudent
glances—those meetings more trying to a man who believes in
the solidarity of our lives than the sight of an impenitent
death-bed to a priest. That, to tell you the truth, was the
only danger I could see for him and for me; but I also
mistrusted my want of imagination. It might even come to
something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of
fancy to foresee. He wouldn't let me forget how imaginative
he was, and your imaginative people swing farther in any
direction, as if given a longer scope of cable in the uneasy
anchorage of life. They do. They take to drink too. It may
be I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I tell?
Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I
only knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be
romantic? I am telling you so much about my own instinctive
feelings and bemused reflections because there remains so
little to be told of him. He existed for me, and after all
it is only through me that he exists for you. I've led him
out by the hand; I have paraded him before you. Were my
commonplace fears unjust? I won't say—not even now. You may
be able to tell better, since the proverb has it that the
onlookers see most of the game. At any rate, they were
superfluous. He did not go out, not at all; on the contrary,
he came on wonderfully, came on straight as a die and in
excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well as
spurt. I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which
I had taken my part; but I am not so pleased as I would have
expected to be. I ask myself whether his rush had really
carried him out of that mist in which he loomed interesting
if not very big, with floating outlines—a straggler yearning
inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And besides,
the last word is not said,—probably shall never be said. Are
not our lives too short for that full utterance which
through all our stammerings is of course our only and
abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last
words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would
shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our
last word—the last word of our love, of our desire, faith,
remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must
not be shaken, I suppose—at least, not by us who know so
many truths about either. My last words about Jim shall be
few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would
be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing.
Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds.
I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had
starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean
to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions—and
safe—and profitable—and dull. Yet you, too, in your time
must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour
created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of
sparks struck from a cold stone—and as short-lived, alas!'
CHAPTER 22
'The conquest of love, honour, men's confidence—the pride
of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale;
only our minds are struck by the externals of such a
success, and to Jim's successes there were no externals.
Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of an
indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along the
coast overpowered the voice of fame. The stream of
civilisation, as if divided on a headland a hundred miles
north of Patusan, branches east and south-east, leaving its
plains and valleys, its old trees and its old mankind,
neglected and isolated, such as an insignificant and
crumbling islet between the two branches of a mighty,
devouring stream. You find the name of the country pretty
often in collections of old voyages. The seventeenth-century
traders went there for pepper, because the passion for
pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of
Dutch and English adventurers about the time of James the
First. Where wouldn't they go for pepper! For a bag of
pepper they would cut each other's throats without
hesitation, and would forswear their souls, of which they
were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that
desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes—the unknown
seas, the loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity,
hunger, pestilence, and despair. It made them great! By
heavens! it made them heroic; and it made them pathetic too
in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying
its toll on young and old. It seems impossible to believe
that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of
purpose, to such a blind persistence in endeavour and
sacrifice. And indeed those who adventured their persons and
lives risked all they had for a slender reward. They left
their bones to lie bleaching on distant shores, so that
wealth might flow to the living at home. To us, their less
tried successors, they appear magnified, not as agents of
trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out
into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an
impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They
were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the
wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their
sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of
strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers.
'In Patusan they had found lots of pepper, and had been
impressed by the magnificence and the wisdom of the Sultan;
but somehow, after a century of chequered intercourse, the
country seems to drop gradually out of the trade. Perhaps
the pepper had given out. Be it as it may, nobody cares for
it now; the glory has departed, the Sultan is an imbecile
youth with two thumbs on his left hand and an uncertain and
beggarly revenue extorted from a miserable population and
stolen from him by his many uncles.
'This of course I have from Stein. He gave me their names
and a short sketch of the life and character of each. He was
as full of information about native states as an official
report, but infinitely more amusing. He had to know.
He traded in so many, and in some districts—as in Patusan,
for instance—his firm was the only one to have an agency by
special permit from the Dutch authorities. The Government
trusted his discretion, and it was understood that he took
all the risks. The men he employed understood that too, but
he made it worth their while apparently. He was perfectly
frank with me over the breakfast-table in the morning. As
far as he was aware (the last news was thirteen months old,
he stated precisely), utter insecurity for life and property
was the normal condition. There were in Patusan antagonistic
forces, and one of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the
Sultan's uncles, the governor of the river, who did the
extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of
extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly
defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating—"For
indeed," as Stein remarked, "where could they go, and how
could they get away?" No doubt they did not even desire to
get away. The world (which is circumscribed by lofty
impassable mountains) has been given into the hand of the
high-born, and this Rajah they knew: he was of their
own royal house. I had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman
later on. He was a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil
eyes and a weak mouth, who swallowed an opium pill every two
hours, and in defiance of common decency wore his hair
uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about his
wizened grimy face. When giving audience he would clamber
upon a sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous
barn with a rotten bamboo floor, through the cracks of which
you could see, twelve or fifteen feet below, the heaps of
refuse and garbage of all kinds lying under the house. That
is where and how he received us when, accompanied by Jim, I
paid him a visit of ceremony. There were about forty people
in the room, and perhaps three times as many in the great
courtyard below. There was constant movement, coming and
going, pushing and murmuring, at our backs. A few youths in
gay silks glared from the distance; the majority, slaves and
humble dependants, were half naked, in ragged sarongs, dirty
with ashes and mud-stains. I had never seen Jim look so
grave, so self-possessed, in an impenetrable, impressive
way. In the midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart
figure in white apparel, the gleaming clusters of his fair
hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine that trickled through
the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim hall, with its
walls of mats and a roof of thatch. He appeared like a
creature not only of another kind but of another essence.
Had they not seen him come up in a canoe they might have
thought he had descended upon them from the clouds. He did,
however, come in a crazy dug-out, sitting (very still and
with his knees together, for fear of overturning the
thing)—sitting on a tin box—which I had lent him—nursing on
his lap a revolver of the Navy pattern—presented by me on
parting—which, through an interposition of Providence, or
through some wrong-headed notion, that was just like him, or
else from sheer instinctive sagacity, he had decided to
carry unloaded. That's how he ascended the Patusan river.
Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more
extravagantly casual, more lonely. Strange, this fatality
that would cast the complexion of a flight upon all his
acts, of impulsive unreflecting desertion of a jump into the
unknown.
'It is precisely the casualness of it that strikes me
most. Neither Stein nor I had a clear conception of what
might be on the other side when we, metaphorically speaking,
took him up and hove him over the wall with scant ceremony.
At the moment I merely wished to achieve his disappearance;
Stein characteristically enough had a sentimental motive. He
had a notion of paying off (in kind, I suppose) the old debt
he had never forgotten. Indeed he had been all his life
especially friendly to anybody from the British Isles. His
late benefactor, it is true, was a Scot—even to the length
of being called Alexander McNeil—and Jim came from a long
way south of the Tweed; but at the distance of six or seven
thousand miles Great Britain, though never diminished, looks
foreshortened enough even to its own children to rob such
details of their importance. Stein was excusable, and his
hinted intentions were so generous that I begged him most
earnestly to keep them secret for a time. I felt that no
consideration of personal advantage should be allowed to
influence Jim; that not even the risk of such influence
should be run. We had to deal with another sort of reality.
He wanted a refuge, and a refuge at the cost of danger
should be offered him—nothing more.
'Upon every other point I was perfectly frank with him,
and I even (as I believed at the time) exaggerated the
danger of the undertaking. As a matter of fact I did not do
it justice; his first day in Patusan was nearly his
last—would have been his last if he had not been so reckless
or so hard on himself and had condescended to load that
revolver. I remember, as I unfolded our precious scheme for
his retreat, how his stubborn but weary resignation was
gradually replaced by surprise, interest, wonder, and by
boyish eagerness. This was a chance he had been dreaming of.
He couldn't think how he merited that I . . . He would be
shot if he could see to what he owed . . . And it was Stein,
Stein the merchant, who . . . but of course it was me he had
to . . . I cut him short. He was not articulate, and his
gratitude caused me inexplicable pain. I told him that if he
owed this chance to any one especially, it was to an old
Scot of whom he had never heard, who had died many years
ago, of whom little was remembered besides a roaring voice
and a rough sort of honesty. There was really no one to
receive his thanks. Stein was passing on to a young man the
help he had received in his own young days, and I had done
no more than to mention his name. Upon this he coloured,
and, twisting a bit of paper in his fingers, he remarked
bashfully that I had always trusted him.
'I admitted that such was the case, and added after a
pause that I wished he had been able to follow my example.
"You think I don't?" he asked uneasily, and remarked in a
mutter that one had to get some sort of show first; then
brightening up, and in a loud voice he protested he would
give me no occasion to regret my confidence, which—which . .
.
'"Do not misapprehend," I interrupted. "It is not in your
power to make me regret anything." There would be no
regrets; but if there were, it would be altogether my own
affair: on the other hand, I wished him to understand
clearly that this arrangement, this—this—experiment, was his
own doing; he was responsible for it and no one else. "Why?
Why," he stammered, "this is the very thing that I . . ." I
begged him not to be dense, and he looked more puzzled than
ever. He was in a fair way to make life intolerable to
himself . . . "Do you think so?" he asked, disturbed; but in
a moment added confidently, "I was going on though. Was I
not?" It was impossible to be angry with him: I could not
help a smile, and told him that in the old days people who
went on like this were on the way of becoming hermits in a
wilderness. "Hermits be hanged!" he commented with engaging
impulsiveness. Of course he didn't mind a wilderness. . . .
"I was glad of it," I said. That was where he would be going
to. He would find it lively enough, I ventured to promise.
"Yes, yes," he said, keenly. He had shown a desire, I
continued inflexibly, to go out and shut the door after him.
. . . "Did I?" he interrupted in a strange access of gloom
that seemed to envelop him from head to foot like the shadow
of a passing cloud. He was wonderfully expressive after all.
Wonderfully! "Did I?" he repeated bitterly. "You can't say I
made much noise about it. And I can keep it up, too—only,
confound it! you show me a door." . . . "Very well. Pass
on," I struck in. I could make him a solemn promise that it
would be shut behind him with a vengeance. His fate,
whatever it was, would be ignored, because the country, for
all its rotten state, was not judged ripe for interference.
Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as though
he had never existed. He would have nothing but the soles of
his two feet to stand upon, and he would have first to find
his ground at that. "Never existed—that's it, by Jove," he
murmured to himself. His eyes, fastened upon my lips,
sparkled. If he had thoroughly understood the conditions, I
concluded, he had better jump into the first gharry he could
see and drive on to Stein's house for his final
instructions. He flung out of the room before I had fairly
finished speaking.'
CHAPTER 23
'He did not return till next morning. He had been kept to
dinner and for the night. There never had been such a
wonderful man as Mr. Stein. He had in his pocket a letter
for Cornelius ("the Johnnie who's going to get the sack," he
explained, with a momentary drop in his elation), and he
exhibited with glee a silver ring, such as natives use, worn
down very thin and showing faint traces of chasing.
'This was his introduction to an old chap called
Doramin—one of the principal men out there—a big pot—who had
been Mr. Stein's friend in that country where he had all
these adventures. Mr. Stein called him "war-comrade."
War-comrade was good. Wasn't it? And didn't Mr. Stein speak
English wonderfully well? Said he had learned it in
Celebes—of all places! That was awfully funny. Was it not?
He did speak with an accent—a twang—did I notice? That chap
Doramin had given him the ring. They had exchanged presents
when they parted for the last time. Sort of promising
eternal friendship. He called it fine—did I not? They had to
make a dash for dear life out of the country when that
Mohammed—Mohammed—What's-his-name had been killed. I knew
the story, of course. Seemed a beastly shame, didn't it? . .
.
'He ran on like this, forgetting his plate, with a knife
and fork in hand (he had found me at tiffin), slightly
flushed, and with his eyes darkened many shades, which was
with him a sign of excitement. The ring was a sort of
credential—("It's like something you read of in books," he
threw in appreciatively)—and Doramin would do his best for
him. Mr. Stein had been the means of saving that chap's life
on some occasion; purely by accident, Mr. Stein had said,
but he—Jim—had his own opinion about that. Mr. Stein was
just the man to look out for such accidents. No matter.
Accident or purpose, this would serve his turn immensely.
Hoped to goodness the jolly old beggar had not gone off the
hooks meantime. Mr. Stein could not tell. There had been no
news for more than a year; they were kicking up no end of an
all-fired row amongst themselves, and the river was closed.
Jolly awkward, this; but, no fear; he would manage to find a
crack to get in.
'He impressed, almost frightened, me with his elated
rattle. He was voluble like a youngster on the eve of a long
holiday with a prospect of delightful scrapes, and such an
attitude of mind in a grown man and in this connection had
in it something phenomenal, a little mad, dangerous, unsafe.
I was on the point of entreating him to take things
seriously when he dropped his knife and fork (he had begun
eating, or rather swallowing food, as it were,
unconsciously), and began a search all round his plate. The
ring! The ring! Where the devil . . . Ah! Here it was . . .
He closed his big hand on it, and tried all his pockets one
after another. Jove! wouldn't do to lose the thing. He
meditated gravely over his fist. Had it? Would hang the
bally affair round his neck! And he proceeded to do this
immediately, producing a string (which looked like a bit of
a cotton shoe-lace) for the purpose. There! That would do
the trick! It would be the deuce if . . . He seemed to catch
sight of my face for the first time, and it steadied him a
little. I probably didn't realise, he said with a naive
gravity, how much importance he attached to that token. It
meant a friend; and it is a good thing to have a friend. He
knew something about that. He nodded at me expressively, but
before my disclaiming gesture he leaned his head on his hand
and for a while sat silent, playing thoughtfully with the
bread-crumbs on the cloth . . . "Slam the door—that was
jolly well put," he cried, and jumping up, began to pace the
room, reminding me by the set of the shoulders, the turn of
his head, the headlong and uneven stride, of that night when
he had paced thus, confessing, explaining—what you will—but,
in the last instance, living—living before me, under his own
little cloud, with all his unconscious subtlety which could
draw consolation from the very source of sorrow. It was the
same mood, the same and different, like a fickle companion
that to-day guiding you on the true path, with the same
eyes, the same step, the same impulse, to-morrow will lead
you hopelessly astray. His tread was assured, his straying,
darkened eyes seemed to search the room for something. One
of his footfalls somehow sounded louder than the other—the
fault of his boots probably—and gave a curious impression of
an invisible halt in his gait. One of his hands was rammed
deep into his trousers' pocket, the other waved suddenly
above his head. "Slam the door!" he shouted. "I've been
waiting for that. I'll show yet . . . I'll . . . I'm ready
for any confounded thing . . . I've been dreaming of it . .
. Jove! Get out of this. Jove! This is luck at last . . .
You wait. I'll . . ."
'He tossed his head fearlessly, and I confess that for
the first and last time in our acquaintance I perceived
myself unexpectedly to be thoroughly sick of him. Why these
vapourings? He was stumping about the room flourishing his
arm absurdly, and now and then feeling on his breast for the
ring under his clothes. Where was the sense of such
exaltation in a man appointed to be a trading-clerk, and in
a place where there was no trade—at that? Why hurl defiance
at the universe? This was not a proper frame of mind to
approach any undertaking; an improper frame of mind not only
for him, I said, but for any man. He stood still over me.
Did I think so? he asked, by no means subdued, and with a
smile in which I seemed to detect suddenly something
insolent. But then I am twenty years his senior. Youth is
insolent; it is its right—its necessity; it has got to
assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is
a defiance, is an insolence. He went off into a far corner,
and coming back, he, figuratively speaking, turned to rend
me. I spoke like that because I—even I, who had been no end
kind to him—even I remembered—remembered—against
him—what—what had happened. And what about
others—the—the—world? Where's the wonder he wanted to get
out, meant to get out, meant to stay out—by heavens! And I
talked about proper frames of mind!
'"It is not I or the world who remember," I shouted. "It
is you—you, who remember."
'He did not flinch, and went on with heat, "Forget
everything, everybody, everybody." . . . His voice fell. . .
"But you," he added.
'"Yes—me too—if it would help," I said, also in a low
tone. After this we remained silent and languid for a time
as if exhausted. Then he began again, composedly, and told
me that Mr. Stein had instructed him to wait for a month or
so, to see whether it was possible for him to remain, before
he began building a new house for himself, so as to avoid
"vain expense." He did make use of funny expressions—Stein
did. "Vain expense" was good. . . . Remain? Why! of course.
He would hang on. Let him only get in—that's all; he would
answer for it he would remain. Never get out. It was easy
enough to remain.
'"Don't be foolhardy," I said, rendered uneasy by his
threatening tone. "If you only live long enough you will
want to come back."
'"Come back to what?" he asked absently, with his eyes
fixed upon the face of a clock on the wall.
'I was silent for a while. "Is it to be never, then?" I
said. "Never," he repeated dreamily without looking at me,
and then flew into sudden activity. "Jove! Two o'clock, and
I sail at four!"
'It was true. A brigantine of Stein's was leaving for the
westward that afternoon, and he had been instructed to take
his passage in her, only no orders to delay the sailing had
been given. I suppose Stein forgot. He made a rush to get
his things while I went aboard my ship, where he promised to
call on his way to the outer roadstead. He turned up
accordingly in a great hurry and with a small leather valise
in his hand. This wouldn't do, and I offered him an old tin
trunk of mine supposed to be water-tight, or at least
damp-tight. He effected the transfer by the simple process
of shooting out the contents of his valise as you would
empty a sack of wheat. I saw three books in the tumble; two
small, in dark covers, and a thick green-and-gold volume—a
half-crown complete Shakespeare. "You read this?" I asked.
"Yes. Best thing to cheer up a fellow," he said hastily. I
was struck by this appreciation, but there was no time for
Shakespearian talk. A heavy revolver and two small boxes of
cartridges were lying on the cuddy-table. "Pray take this,"
I said. "It may help you to remain." No sooner were these
words out of my mouth than I perceived what grim meaning
they could bear. "May help you to get in," I corrected
myself remorsefully. He however was not troubled by obscure
meanings; he thanked me effusively and bolted out, calling
Good-bye over his shoulder. I heard his voice through the
ship's side urging his boatmen to give way, and looking out
of the stern-port I saw the boat rounding under the counter.
He sat in her leaning forward, exciting his men with voice
and gestures; and as he had kept the revolver in his hand
and seemed to be presenting it at their heads, I shall never
forget the scared faces of the four Javanese, and the
frantic swing of their stroke which snatched that vision
from under my eyes. Then turning away, the first thing I saw
were the two boxes of cartridges on the cuddy-table. He had
forgotten to take them.
'I ordered my gig manned at once; but Jim's rowers, under
the impression that their lives hung on a thread while they
had that madman in the boat, made such excellent time that
before I had traversed half the distance between the two
vessels I caught sight of him clambering over the rail, and
of his box being passed up. All the brigantine's canvas was
loose, her mainsail was set, and the windlass was just
beginning to clink as I stepped upon her deck: her master, a
dapper little half-caste of forty or so, in a blue flannel
suit, with lively eyes, his round face the colour of
lemon-peel, and with a thin little black moustache drooping
on each side of his thick, dark lips, came forward smirking.
He turned out, notwithstanding his self-satisfied and cheery
exterior, to be of a careworn temperament. In answer to a
remark of mine (while Jim had gone below for a moment) he
said, "Oh yes. Patusan." He was going to carry the gentleman
to the mouth of the river, but would "never ascend." His
flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary
compiled by a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to
"ascend," he would have "reverentially"—(I think he wanted
to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—"reverentially
made objects for the safety of properties." If disregarded,
he would have presented "resignation to quit." Twelve months
ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr.
Cornelius "propitiated many offertories" to Mr. Rajah Allang
and the "principal populations," on conditions which made
the trade "a snare and ashes in the mouth," yet his ship had
been fired upon from the woods by "irresponsive parties" all
the way down the river; which causing his crew "from
exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings," the
brigantine was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar,
where she "would have been perishable beyond the act of
man." The angry disgust at the recollection, the pride of
his fluency, to which he turned an attentive ear, struggled
for the possession of his broad simple face. He scowled and
beamed at me, and watched with satisfaction the undeniable
effect of his phraseology. Dark frowns ran swiftly over the
placid sea, and the brigantine, with her fore-topsail to the
mast and her main-boom amidships, seemed bewildered amongst
the cat's-paws. He told me further, gnashing his teeth, that
the Rajah was a "laughable hyaena" (can't imagine how he got
hold of hyaenas); while somebody else was many times falser
than the "weapons of a crocodile." Keeping one eye on the
movements of his crew forward, he let loose his
volubility—comparing the place to a "cage of beasts made
ravenous by long impenitence." I fancy he meant impunity. He
had no intention, he cried, to "exhibit himself to be made
attached purposefully to robbery." The long-drawn wails,
giving the time for the pull of the men catting the anchor,
came to an end, and he lowered his voice. "Plenty too much
enough of Patusan," he concluded, with energy.
'I heard afterwards he had been so indiscreet as to get
himself tied up by the neck with a rattan halter to a post
planted in the middle of a mud-hole before the Rajah's
house. He spent the best part of a day and a whole night in
that unwholesome situation, but there is every reason to
believe the thing had been meant as a sort of joke. He
brooded for a while over that horrid memory, I suppose, and
then addressed in a quarrelsome tone the man coming aft to
the helm. When he turned to me again it was to speak
judicially, without passion. He would take the gentleman to
the mouth of the river at Batu Kring (Patusan town "being
situated internally," he remarked, "thirty miles"). But in
his eyes, he continued—a tone of bored, weary conviction
replacing his previous voluble delivery—the gentleman was
already "in the similitude of a corpse." "What? What do you
say?" I asked. He assumed a startlingly ferocious demeanour,
and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from behind.
"Already like the body of one deported," he explained, with
the insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they
imagine a display of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim
smiling silently at me, and with a raised hand checking the
exclamation on my lips.
'Then, while the half-caste, bursting with importance,
shouted his orders, while the yards swung creaking and the
heavy boom came surging over, Jim and I, alone as it were,
to leeward of the mainsail, clasped each other's hands and
exchanged the last hurried words. My heart was freed from
that dull resentment which had existed side by side with
interest in his fate. The absurd chatter of the half-caste
had given more reality to the miserable dangers of his path
than Stein's careful statements. On that occasion the sort
of formality that had been always present in our intercourse
vanished from our speech; I believe I called him "dear boy,"
and he tacked on the words "old man" to some half-uttered
expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against
my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There
was a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and
short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, of some
saving truth. He exerted himself to soothe me as though he
had been the more mature of the two. "All right, all right,"
he said, rapidly, and with feeling. "I promise to take care
of myself. Yes; I won't take any risks. Not a single blessed
risk. Of course not. I mean to hang out. Don't you worry.
Jove! I feel as if nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck
from the word Go. I wouldn't spoil such a magnificent
chance!" . . . A magnificent chance! Well, it was
magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was
I to know? As he had said, even I—even I remembered—his—his
misfortune against him. It was true. And the best thing for
him was to go.
'My gig had dropped in the wake of the brigantine, and I
saw him aft detached upon the light of the westering sun,
raising his cap high above his head. I heard an indistinct
shout, "You—shall—hear—of—me." Of me, or from me, I don't
know which. I think it must have been of me. My eyes were
too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to see
him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; but I can
assure you no man could have appeared less "in the
similitude of a corpse," as that half-caste croaker had put
it. I could see the little wretch's face, the shape and
colour of a ripe pumpkin, poked out somewhere under Jim's
elbow. He, too, raised his arm as if for a downward thrust.
Absit omen!'
CHAPTER 24
'The coast of Patusan (I saw it nearly two years
afterwards) is straight and sombre, and faces a misty ocean.
Red trails are seen like cataracts of rust streaming under
the dark-green foliage of bushes and creepers clothing the
low cliffs. Swampy plains open out at the mouth of rivers,
with a view of jagged blue peaks beyond the vast forests. In
the offing a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, stand
out in the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a
wall breached by the sea.
'There is a village of fisher-folk at the mouth of the
Batu Kring branch of the estuary. The river, which had been
closed so long, was open then, and Stein's little schooner,
in which I had my passage, worked her way up in three tides
without being exposed to a fusillade from "irresponsive
parties." Such a state of affairs belonged already to
ancient history, if I could believe the elderly headman of
the fishing village, who came on board to act as a sort of
pilot. He talked to me (the second white man he had ever
seen) with confidence, and most of his talk was about the
first white man he had ever seen. He called him Tuan Jim,
and the tone of his references was made remarkable by a
strange mixture of familiarity and awe. They, in the
village, were under that lord's special protection, which
showed that Jim bore no grudge. If he had warned me that I
would hear of him it was perfectly true. I was hearing of
him. There was already a story that the tide had turned two
hours before its time to help him on his journey up the
river. The talkative old man himself had steered the canoe
and had marvelled at the phenomenon. Moreover, all the glory
was in his family. His son and his son-in-law had paddled;
but they were only youths without experience, who did not
notice the speed of the canoe till he pointed out to them
the amazing fact.
'Jim's coming to that fishing village was a blessing; but
to them, as to many of us, the blessing came heralded by
terrors. So many generations had been released since the
last white man had visited the river that the very tradition
had been lost. The appearance of the being that descended
upon them and demanded inflexibly to be taken up to Patusan
was discomposing; his insistence was alarming; his
generosity more than suspicious. It was an unheard-of
request. There was no precedent. What would the Rajah say to
this? What would he do to them? The best part of the night
was spent in consultation; but the immediate risk from the
anger of that strange man seemed so great that at last a
cranky dug-out was got ready. The women shrieked with grief
as it put off. A fearless old hag cursed the stranger.
'He sat in it, as I've told you, on his tin box, nursing
the unloaded revolver on his lap. He sat with
precaution—than which there is nothing more fatiguing—and
thus entered the land he was destined to fill with the fame
of his virtues, from the blue peaks inland to the white
ribbon of surf on the coast. At the first bend he lost sight
of the sea with its labouring waves for ever rising,
sinking, and vanishing to rise again—the very image of
struggling mankind—and faced the immovable forests rooted
deep in the soil, soaring towards the sunshine, everlasting
in the shadowy might of their tradition, like life itself.
And his opportunity sat veiled by his side like an Eastern
bride waiting to be uncovered by the hand of the master. He
too was the heir of a shadowy and mighty tradition! He told
me, however, that he had never in his life felt so depressed
and tired as in that canoe. All the movement he dared to
allow himself was to reach, as it were by stealth, after the
shell of half a cocoa-nut floating between his shoes, and
bale some of the water out with a carefully restrained
action. He discovered how hard the lid of a block-tin case
was to sit upon. He had heroic health; but several times
during that journey he experienced fits of giddiness, and
between whiles he speculated hazily as to the size of the
blister the sun was raising on his back. For amusement he
tried by looking ahead to decide whether the muddy object he
saw lying on the water's edge was a log of wood or an
alligator. Only very soon he had to give that up. No fun in
it. Always alligator. One of them flopped into the river and
all but capsized the canoe. But this excitement was over
directly. Then in a long empty reach he was very grateful to
a troop of monkeys who came right down on the bank and made
an insulting hullabaloo on his passage. Such was the way in
which he was approaching greatness as genuine as any man
ever achieved. Principally, he longed for sunset; and
meantime his three paddlers were preparing to put into
execution their plan of delivering him up to the Rajah.
'"I suppose I must have been stupid with fatigue, or
perhaps I did doze off for a time," he said. The first thing
he knew was his canoe coming to the bank. He became
instantaneously aware of the forest having been left behind,
of the first houses being visible higher up, of a stockade
on his left, and of his boatmen leaping out together upon a
low point of land and taking to their heels. Instinctively
he leaped out after them. At first he thought himself
deserted for some inconceivable reason, but he heard excited
shouts, a gate swung open, and a lot of people poured out,
making towards him. At the same time a boat full of armed
men appeared on the river and came alongside his empty
canoe, thus shutting off his retreat.
'"I was too startled to be quite cool—don't you know? and
if that revolver had been loaded I would have shot
somebody—perhaps two, three bodies, and that would have been
the end of me. But it wasn't. . . ." "Why not?" I asked.
"Well, I couldn't fight the whole population, and I wasn't
coming to them as if I were afraid of my life," he said,
with just a faint hint of his stubborn sulkiness in the
glance he gave me. I refrained from pointing out to him that
they could not have known the chambers were actually empty.
He had to satisfy himself in his own way. . . . "Anyhow it
wasn't," he repeated good-humouredly, "and so I just stood
still and asked them what was the matter. That seemed to
strike them dumb. I saw some of these thieves going off with
my box. That long-legged old scoundrel Kassim (I'll show him
to you to-morrow) ran out fussing to me about the Rajah
wanting to see me. I said, 'All right.' I too wanted to see
the Rajah, and I simply walked in through the gate
and—and—here I am." He laughed, and then with unexpected
emphasis, "And do you know what's the best in it?" he asked.
"I'll tell you. It's the knowledge that had I been wiped out
it is this place that would have been the loser."
'He spoke thus to me before his house on that evening
I've mentioned—after we had watched the moon float away
above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit
out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the
ghost of dead sunlight. There is something haunting in the
light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a
disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable
mystery. It is to our sunshine, which—say what you like—is
all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound:
misleading and confusing whether the note be mocking or sad.
It robs all forms of matter—which, after all, is our
domain—of their substance, and gives a sinister reality to
shadows alone. And the shadows were very real around us, but
Jim by my side looked very stalwart, as though nothing—not
even the occult power of moonlight—could rob him of his
reality in my eyes. Perhaps, indeed, nothing could touch him
since he had survived the assault of the dark powers. All
was silent, all was still; even on the river the moonbeams
slept as on a pool. It was the moment of high water, a
moment of immobility that accentuated the utter isolation of
this lost corner of the earth. The houses crowding along the
wide shining sweep without ripple or glitter, stepping into
the water in a line of jostling, vague, grey, silvery forms
mingled with black masses of shadow, were like a spectral
herd of shapeless creatures pressing forward to drink in a
spectral and lifeless stream. Here and there a red gleam
twinkled within the bamboo walls, warm, like a living spark,
significant of human affections, of shelter, of repose.
'He confessed to me that he often watched these tiny warm
gleams go out one by one, that he loved to see people go to
sleep under his eyes, confident in the security of
to-morrow. "Peaceful here, eh?" he asked. He was not
eloquent, but there was a deep meaning in the words that
followed. "Look at these houses; there's not one where I am
not trusted. Jove! I told you I would hang on. Ask any man,
woman, or child . . ." He paused. "Well, I am all right
anyhow."
'I observed quickly that he had found that out in the
end. I had been sure of it, I added. He shook his head.
"Were you?" He pressed my arm lightly above the elbow.
"Well, then—you were right."
'There was elation and pride, there was awe almost, in
that low exclamation. "Jove!" he cried, "only think what it
is to me." Again he pressed my arm. "And you asked me
whether I thought of leaving. Good God! I! want to leave!
Especially now after what you told me of Mr. Stein's . . .
Leave! Why! That's what I was afraid of. It would have
been—it would have been harder than dying. No—on my word.
Don't laugh. I must feel—every day, every time I open my
eyes—that I am trusted—that nobody has a right—don't you
know? Leave! For where? What for? To get what?"
'I had told him (indeed it was the main object of my
visit) that it was Stein's intention to present him at once
with the house and the stock of trading goods, on certain
easy conditions which would make the transaction perfectly
regular and valid. He began to snort and plunge at first.
"Confound your delicacy!" I shouted. "It isn't Stein at all.
It's giving you what you had made for yourself. And in any
case keep your remarks for McNeil—when you meet him in the
other world. I hope it won't happen soon. . . ." He had to
give in to my arguments, because all his conquests, the
trust, the fame, the friendships, the love—all these things
that made him master had made him a captive, too. He looked
with an owner's eye at the peace of the evening, at the
river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the
forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of
the land, at the pride of his own heart; but it was they
that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost
thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath.
'It was something to be proud of. I, too, was proud—for
him, if not so certain of the fabulous value of the bargain.
It was wonderful. It was not so much of his fearlessness
that I thought. It is strange how little account I took of
it: as if it had been something too conventional to be at
the root of the matter. No. I was more struck by the other
gifts he had displayed. He had proved his grasp of the
unfamiliar situation, his intellectual alertness in that
field of thought. There was his readiness, too! Amazing. And
all this had come to him in a manner like keen scent to a
well-bred hound. He was not eloquent, but there was a
dignity in this constitutional reticence, there was a high
seriousness in his stammerings. He had still his old trick
of stubborn blushing. Now and then, though, a word, a
sentence, would escape him that showed how deeply, how
solemnly, he felt about that work which had given him the
certitude of rehabilitation. That is why he seemed to love
the land and the people with a sort of fierce egoism, with a
contemptuous tenderness.'
CHAPTER 25
'"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."
'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.
'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 did 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."
'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.
'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.'
CHAPTER 26
'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.
'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 . . ."
'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.
'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.
'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 he 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. . . ."
'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.
'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.'
CHAPTER 27
'Already the legend had gifted him with supernatural
powers. Yes, it was said, there had been many ropes
cunningly disposed, and a strange contrivance that turned by
the efforts of many men, and each gun went up tearing slowly
through the bushes, like a wild pig rooting its way in the
undergrowth, but . . . and the wisest shook their heads.
There was something occult in all this, no doubt; for what
is the strength of ropes and of men's arms? There is a
rebellious soul in things which must be overcome by powerful
charms and incantations. Thus old Sura—a very respectable
householder of Patusan—with whom I had a quiet chat one
evening. However, Sura was a professional sorcerer also, who
attended all the rice sowings and reapings for miles around
for the purpose of subduing the stubborn souls of things.
This occupation he seemed to think a most arduous one, and
perhaps the souls of things are more stubborn than the souls
of men. As to the simple folk of outlying villages, they
believed and said (as the most natural thing in the world)
that Jim had carried the guns up the hill on his back—two at
a time.
'This would make Jim stamp his foot in vexation and
exclaim with an exasperated little laugh, "What can you do
with such silly beggars? They will sit up half the night
talking bally rot, and the greater the lie the more they
seem to like it." You could trace the subtle influence of
his surroundings in this irritation. It was part of his
captivity. The earnestness of his denials was amusing, and
at last I said, "My dear fellow, you don't suppose I
believe this." He looked at me quite startled. "Well, no! I
suppose not," he said, and burst into a Homeric peal of
laughter. "Well, anyhow the guns were there, and went off
all together at sunrise. Jove! You should have seen the
splinters fly," he cried. By his side Dain Waris, listening
with a quiet smile, dropped his eyelids and shuffled his
feet a little. It appears that the success in mounting the
guns had given Jim's people such a feeling of confidence
that he ventured to leave the battery under charge of two
elderly Bugis who had seen some fighting in their day, and
went to join Dain Waris and the storming party who were
concealed in the ravine. In the small hours they began
creeping up, and when two-thirds of the way up, lay in the
wet grass waiting for the appearance of the sun, which was
the agreed signal. He told me with what impatient anguishing
emotion he watched the swift coming of the dawn; how, heated
with the work and the climbing, he felt the cold dew
chilling his very bones; how afraid he was he would begin to
shiver and shake like a leaf before the time came for the
advance. "It was the slowest half-hour in my life," he
declared. Gradually the silent stockade came out on the sky
above him. Men scattered all down the slope were crouching
amongst the dark stones and dripping bushes. Dain Waris was
lying flattened by his side. "We looked at each other," Jim
said, resting a gentle hand on his friend's shoulder. "He
smiled at me as cheery as you please, and I dared not stir
my lips for fear I would break out into a shivering fit.
'Pon my word, it's true! I had been streaming with
perspiration when we took cover—so you may imagine . . ." He
declared, and I believe him, that he had no fears as to the
result. He was only anxious as to his ability to repress
these shivers. He didn't bother about the result. He was
bound to get to the top of that hill and stay there,
whatever might happen. There could be no going back for him.
Those people had trusted him implicitly. Him alone! His bare
word. . . .
'I remember how, at this point, he paused with his eyes
fixed upon me. "As far as he knew, they never had an
occasion to regret it yet," he said. "Never. He hoped to God
they never would. Meantime—worse luck!—they had got into the
habit of taking his word for anything and everything. I
could have no idea! Why, only the other day an old fool he
had never seen in his life came from some village miles away
to find out if he should divorce his wife. Fact. Solemn
word. That's the sort of thing. . . He wouldn't have
believed it. Would I? Squatted on the verandah chewing
betel-nut, sighing and spitting all over the place for more
than an hour, and as glum as an undertaker before he came
out with that dashed conundrum. That's the kind of thing
that isn't so funny as it looks. What was a fellow to
say?—Good wife?—Yes. Good wife—old though. Started a
confounded long story about some brass pots. Been living
together for fifteen years—twenty years—could not tell. A
long, long time. Good wife. Beat her a little—not much—just
a little, when she was young. Had to—for the sake of his
honour. Suddenly in her old age she goes and lends three
brass pots to her sister's son's wife, and begins to abuse
him every day in a loud voice. His enemies jeered at him;
his face was utterly blackened. Pots totally lost. Awfully
cut up about it. Impossible to fathom a story like that;
told him to go home, and promised to come along myself and
settle it all. It's all very well to grin, but it was the
dashedest nuisance! A day's journey through the forest,
another day lost in coaxing a lot of silly villagers to get
at the rights of the affair. There was the making of a
sanguinary shindy in the thing. Every bally idiot took sides
with one family or the other, and one half of the village
was ready to go for the other half with anything that came
handy. Honour bright! No joke! . . . Instead of attending to
their bally crops. Got him the infernal pots back of
course—and pacified all hands. No trouble to settle it. Of
course not. Could settle the deadliest quarrel in the
country by crooking his little finger. The trouble was to
get at the truth of anything. Was not sure to this day
whether he had been fair to all parties. It worried him. And
the talk! Jove! There didn't seem to be any head or tail to
it. Rather storm a twenty-foot-high old stockade any day.
Much! Child's play to that other job. Wouldn't take so long
either. Well, yes; a funny set out, upon the whole—the fool
looked old enough to be his grandfather. But from another
point of view it was no joke. His word decided
everything—ever since the smashing of Sherif Ali. An awful
responsibility," he repeated. "No, really—joking apart, had
it been three lives instead of three rotten brass pots it
would have been the same. . . ."
'Thus he illustrated the moral effect of his victory in
war. It was in truth immense. It had led him from strife to
peace, and through death into the innermost life of the
people; but the gloom of the land spread out under the
sunshine preserved its appearance of inscrutable, of secular
repose. The sound of his fresh young voice—it's
extraordinary how very few signs of wear he showed—floated
lightly, and passed away over the unchanged face of the
forests like the sound of the big guns on that cold dewy
morning when he had no other concern on earth but the proper
control of the chills in his body. With the first slant of
sun-rays along these immovable tree-tops the summit of one
hill wreathed itself, with heavy reports, in white clouds of
smoke, and the other burst into an amazing noise of yells,
war-cries, shouts of anger, of surprise, of dismay. Jim and
Dain Waris were the first to lay their hands on the stakes.
The popular story has it that Jim with a touch of one finger
had thrown down the gate. He was, of course, anxious to
disclaim this achievement. The whole stockade—he would
insist on explaining to you—was a poor affair (Sherif Ali
trusted mainly to the inaccessible position); and, anyway,
the thing had been already knocked to pieces and only hung
together by a miracle. He put his shoulder to it like a
little fool and went in head over heels. Jove! If it hadn't
been for Dain Waris, a pock-marked tattooed vagabond would
have pinned him with his spear to a baulk of timber like one
of Stein's beetles. The third man in, it seems, had been
Tamb' Itam, Jim's own servant. This was a Malay from the
north, a stranger who had wandered into Patusan, and had
been forcibly detained by Rajah Allang as paddler of one of
the state boats. He had made a bolt of it at the first
opportunity, and finding a precarious refuge (but very
little to eat) amongst the Bugis settlers, had attached
himself to Jim's person. His complexion was very dark, his
face flat, his eyes prominent and injected with bile. There
was something excessive, almost fanatical, in his devotion
to his "white lord." He was inseparable from Jim like a
morose shadow. On state occasions he would tread on his
master's heels, one hand on the haft of his kriss, keeping
the common people at a distance by his truculent brooding
glances. Jim had made him the headman of his establishment,
and all Patusan respected and courted him as a person of
much influence. At the taking of the stockade he had
distinguished himself greatly by the methodical ferocity of
his fighting. The storming party had come on so quick—Jim
said—that notwithstanding the panic of the garrison, there
was a "hot five minutes hand-to-hand inside that stockade,
till some bally ass set fire to the shelters of boughs and
dry grass, and we all had to clear out for dear life."
'The rout, it seems, had been complete. Doramin, waiting
immovably in his chair on the hillside, with the smoke of
the guns spreading slowly above his big head, received the
news with a deep grunt. When informed that his son was safe
and leading the pursuit, he, without another sound, made a
mighty effort to rise; his attendants hurried to his help,
and, held up reverently, he shuffled with great dignity into
a bit of shade, where he laid himself down to sleep, covered
entirely with a piece of white sheeting. In Patusan the
excitement was intense. Jim told me that from the hill,
turning his back on the stockade with its embers, black
ashes, and half-consumed corpses, he could see time after
time the open spaces between the houses on both sides of the
stream fill suddenly with a seething rush of people and get
empty in a moment. His ears caught feebly from below the
tremendous din of gongs and drums; the wild shouts of the
crowd reached him in bursts of faint roaring. A lot of
streamers made a flutter as of little white, red, yellow
birds amongst the brown ridges of roofs. "You must have
enjoyed it," I murmured, feeling the stir of sympathetic
emotion.
'"It was . . . it was immense! Immense!" he cried aloud,
flinging his arms open. The sudden movement startled me as
though I had seen him bare the secrets of his breast to the
sunshine, to the brooding forests, to the steely sea. Below
us the town reposed in easy curves upon the banks of a
stream whose current seemed to sleep. "Immense!" he repeated
for a third time, speaking in a whisper, for himself alone.
'Immense! No doubt it was immense; the seal of success
upon his words, the conquered ground for the soles of his
feet, the blind trust of men, the belief in himself snatched
from the fire, the solitude of his achievement. All this, as
I've warned you, gets dwarfed in the telling. I can't with
mere words convey to you the impression of his total and
utter isolation. I know, of course, he was in every sense
alone of his kind there, but the unsuspected qualities of
his nature had brought him in such close touch with his
surroundings that this isolation seemed only the effect of
his power. His loneliness added to his stature. There was
nothing within sight to compare him with, as though he had
been one of those exceptional men who can be only measured
by the greatness of their fame; and his fame, remember, was
the greatest thing around for many a day's journey. You
would have to paddle, pole, or track a long weary way
through the jungle before you passed beyond the reach of its
voice. Its voice was not the trumpeting of the disreputable
goddess we all know—not blatant—not brazen. It took its tone
from the stillness and gloom of the land without a past,
where his word was the one truth of every passing day. It
shared something of the nature of that silence through which
it accompanied you into unexplored depths, heard
continuously by your side, penetrating, far-reaching—tinged
with wonder and mystery on the lips of whispering men.'
CHAPTER 28
'The defeated Sherif Ali fled the country without making
another stand, and when the miserable hunted villagers began
to crawl out of the jungle back to their rotting houses, it
was Jim who, in consultation with Dain Waris, appointed the
headmen. Thus he became the virtual ruler of the land. As to
old Tunku Allang, his fears at first had known no bounds. It
is said that at the intelligence of the successful storming
of the hill he flung himself, face down, on the bamboo floor
of his audience-hall, and lay motionless for a whole night
and a whole day, uttering stifled sounds of such an
appalling nature that no man dared approach his prostrate
form nearer than a spear's length. Already he could see
himself driven ignominiously out of Patusan, wandering
abandoned, stripped, without opium, without his women,
without followers, a fair game for the first comer to kill.
After Sherif Ali his turn would come, and who could resist
an attack led by such a devil? And indeed he owed his life
and such authority as he still possessed at the time of my
visit to Jim's idea of what was fair alone. The Bugis had
been extremely anxious to pay off old scores, and the
impassive old Doramin cherished the hope of yet seeing his
son ruler of Patusan. During one of our interviews he
deliberately allowed me to get a glimpse of this secret
ambition. Nothing could be finer in its way than the
dignified wariness of his approaches. He himself—he began by
declaring—had used his strength in his young days, but now
he had grown old and tired. . . . With his imposing bulk and
haughty little eyes darting sagacious, inquisitive glances,
he reminded one irresistibly of a cunning old elephant; the
slow rise and fall of his vast breast went on powerful and
regular, like the heave of a calm sea. He too, as he
protested, had an unbounded confidence in Tuan Jim's wisdom.
If he could only obtain a promise! One word would be enough!
. . . His breathing silences, the low rumblings of his
voice, recalled the last efforts of a spent thunderstorm.
'I tried to put the subject aside. It was difficult, for
there could be no question that Jim had the power; in his
new sphere there did not seem to be anything that was not
his to hold or to give. But that, I repeat, was nothing in
comparison with the notion, which occurred to me, while I
listened with a show of attention, that he seemed to have
come very near at last to mastering his fate. Doramin was
anxious about the future of the country, and I was struck by
the turn he gave to the argument. The land remains where God
had put it; but white men—he said—they come to us and in a
little while they go. They go away. Those they leave behind
do not know when to look for their return. They go to their
own land, to their people, and so this white man too would.
. . . I don't know what induced me to commit myself at this
point by a vigorous "No, no." The whole extent of this
indiscretion became apparent when Doramin, turning full upon
me his face, whose expression, fixed in rugged deep folds,
remained unalterable, like a huge brown mask, said that this
was good news indeed, reflectively; and then wanted to know
why.
'His little, motherly witch of a wife sat on my other
hand, with her head covered and her feet tucked up, gazing
through the great shutter-hole. I could only see a straying
lock of grey hair, a high cheek-bone, the slight masticating
motion of the sharp chin. Without removing her eyes from the
vast prospect of forests stretching as far as the hills, she
asked me in a pitying voice why was it that he so young had
wandered from his home, coming so far, through so many
dangers? Had he no household there, no kinsmen in his own
country? Had he no old mother, who would always remember his
face? . . .
'I was completely unprepared for this. I could only
mutter and shake my head vaguely. Afterwards I am perfectly
aware I cut a very poor figure trying to extricate myself
out of this difficulty. From that moment, however, the old
nakhoda became taciturn. He was not very pleased, I fear,
and evidently I had given him food for thought. Strangely
enough, on the evening of that very day (which was my last
in Patusan) I was once more confronted with the same
question, with the unanswerable why of Jim's fate. And this
brings me to the story of his love.
'I suppose you think it is a story that you can imagine
for yourselves. We have heard so many such stories, and the
majority of us don't believe them to be stories of love at
all. For the most part we look upon them as stories of
opportunities: episodes of passion at best, or perhaps only
of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end,
even if they pass through the reality of tenderness and
regret. This view mostly is right, and perhaps in this case
too. . . . Yet I don't know. To tell this story is by no
means so easy as it should be—were the ordinary standpoint
adequate. Apparently it is a story very much like the
others: for me, however, there is visible in its background
the melancholy figure of a woman, the shadow of a cruel
wisdom buried in a lonely grave, looking on wistfully,
helplessly, with sealed lips. The grave itself, as I came
upon it during an early morning stroll, was a rather
shapeless brown mound, with an inlaid neat border of white
lumps of coral at the base, and enclosed within a circular
fence made of split saplings, with the bark left on. A
garland of leaves and flowers was woven about the heads of
the slender posts—and the flowers were fresh.
'Thus, whether the shadow is of my imagination or not, I
can at all events point out the significant fact of an
unforgotten grave. When I tell you besides that Jim with his
own hands had worked at the rustic fence, you will perceive
directly the difference, the individual side of the story.
There is in his espousal of memory and affection belonging
to another human being something characteristic of his
seriousness. He had a conscience, and it was a romantic
conscience. Through her whole life the wife of the
unspeakable Cornelius had no other companion, confidant, and
friend but her daughter. How the poor woman had come to
marry the awful little Malacca Portuguese—after the
separation from the father of her girl—and how that
separation had been brought about, whether by death, which
can be sometimes merciful, or by the merciless pressure of
conventions, is a mystery to me. From the little which Stein
(who knew so many stories) had let drop in my hearing, I am
convinced that she was no ordinary woman. Her own father had
been a white; a high official; one of the brilliantly
endowed men who are not dull enough to nurse a success, and
whose careers so often end under a cloud. I suppose she too
must have lacked the saving dullness—and her career ended in
Patusan. Our common fate . . . for where is the man—I mean a
real sentient man—who does not remember vaguely having been
deserted in the fullness of possession by some one or
something more precious than life? . . . our common fate
fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It does not
punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if
to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think
that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself
upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the
trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage
to put at times into their love an element just palpable
enough to give one a fright—an extra-terrestrial touch. I
ask myself with wonder—how the world can look to
them—whether it has the shape and substance we know,
the air we breathe! Sometimes I fancy it must be a
region of unreasonable sublimities seething with the
excitement of their adventurous souls, lighted by the glory
of all possible risks and renunciations. However, I suspect
there are very few women in the world, though of course I am
aware of the multitudes of mankind and of the equality of
sexes—in point of numbers, that is. But I am sure that the
mother was as much of a woman as the daughter seemed to be.
I cannot help picturing to myself these two, at first the
young woman and the child, then the old woman and the young
girl, the awful sameness and the swift passage of time, the
barrier of forest, the solitude and the turmoil round these
two lonely lives, and every word spoken between them
penetrated with sad meaning. There must have been
confidences, not so much of fact, I suppose, as of innermost
feelings—regrets—fears—warnings, no doubt: warnings that the
younger did not fully understand till the elder was dead—and
Jim came along. Then I am sure she understood much—not
everything—the fear mostly, it seems. Jim called her by a
word that means precious, in the sense of a precious
gem—jewel. Pretty, isn't it? But he was capable of anything.
He was equal to his fortune, as he—after all—must have been
equal to his misfortune. Jewel he called her; and he would
say this as he might have said "Jane," don't you know—with a
marital, homelike, peaceful effect. I heard the name for the
first time ten minutes after I had landed in his courtyard,
when, after nearly shaking my arm off, he darted up the
steps and began to make a joyous, boyish disturbance at the
door under the heavy eaves. "Jewel! O Jewel! Quick! Here's a
friend come," . . . and suddenly peering at me in the dim
verandah, he mumbled earnestly, "You know—this—no confounded
nonsense about it—can't tell you how much I owe to her—and
so—you understand—I—exactly as if . . ." His hurried,
anxious whispers were cut short by the flitting of a white
form within the house, a faint exclamation, and a child-like
but energetic little face with delicate features and a
profound, attentive glance peeped out of the inner gloom,
like a bird out of the recess of a nest. I was struck by the
name, of course; but it was not till later on that I
connected it with an astonishing rumour that had met me on
my journey, at a little place on the coast about 230 miles
south of Patusan River. Stein's schooner, in which I had my
passage, put in there, to collect some produce, and, going
ashore, I found to my great surprise that the wretched
locality could boast of a third-class deputy-assistant
resident, a big, fat, greasy, blinking fellow of mixed
descent, with turned-out, shiny lips. I found him lying
extended on his back in a cane chair, odiously unbuttoned,
with a large green leaf of some sort on the top of his
steaming head, and another in his hand which he used lazily
as a fan . . . Going to Patusan? Oh yes. Stein's Trading
Company. He knew. Had a permission? No business of his. It
was not so bad there now, he remarked negligently, and, he
went on drawling, "There's some sort of white vagabond has
got in there, I hear. . . . Eh? What you say? Friend of
yours? So! . . . Then it was true there was one of these
verdammte—What was he up to? Found his way in, the rascal.
Eh? I had not been sure. Patusan—they cut throats there—no
business of ours." He interrupted himself to groan. "Phoo!
Almighty! The heat! The heat! Well, then, there might be
something in the story too, after all, and . . ." He shut
one of his beastly glassy eyes (the eyelid went on
quivering) while he leered at me atrociously with the other.
"Look here," says he mysteriously, "if—do you understand?—if
he has really got hold of something fairly good—none of your
bits of green glass—understand?—I am a Government
official—you tell the rascal . . . Eh? What? Friend of
yours?" . . . He continued wallowing calmly in the chair . .
. "You said so; that's just it; and I am pleased to give you
the hint. I suppose you too would like to get something out
of it? Don't interrupt. You just tell him I've heard the
tale, but to my Government I have made no report. Not yet.
See? Why make a report? Eh? Tell him to come to me if they
let him get alive out of the country. He had better look out
for himself. Eh? I promise to ask no questions. On the
quiet—you understand? You too—you shall get something from
me. Small commission for the trouble. Don't interrupt. I am
a Government official, and make no report. That's business.
Understand? I know some good people that will buy anything
worth having, and can give him more money than the scoundrel
ever saw in his life. I know his sort." He fixed me
steadfastly with both his eyes open, while I stood over him
utterly amazed, and asking myself whether he was mad or
drunk. He perspired, puffed, moaning feebly, and scratching
himself with such horrible composure that I could not bear
the sight long enough to find out. Next day, talking
casually with the people of the little native court of the
place, I discovered that a story was travelling slowly down
the coast about a mysterious white man in Patusan who had
got hold of an extraordinary gem—namely, an emerald of an
enormous size, and altogether priceless. The emerald seems
to appeal more to the Eastern imagination than any other
precious stone. The white man had obtained it, I was told,
partly by the exercise of his wonderful strength and partly
by cunning, from the ruler of a distant country, whence he
had fled instantly, arriving in Patusan in utmost distress,
but frightening the people by his extreme ferocity, which
nothing seemed able to subdue. Most of my informants were of
the opinion that the stone was probably unlucky,—like the
famous stone of the Sultan of Succadana, which in the old
times had brought wars and untold calamities upon that
country. Perhaps it was the same stone—one couldn't say.
Indeed the story of a fabulously large emerald is as old as
the arrival of the first white men in the Archipelago; and
the belief in it is so persistent that less than forty years
ago there had been an official Dutch inquiry into the truth
of it. Such a jewel—it was explained to me by the old fellow
from whom I heard most of this amazing Jim-myth—a sort of
scribe to the wretched little Rajah of the place;—such a
jewel, he said, cocking his poor purblind eyes up at me (he
was sitting on the cabin floor out of respect), is best
preserved by being concealed about the person of a woman.
Yet it is not every woman that would do. She must be
young—he sighed deeply—and insensible to the seductions of
love. He shook his head sceptically. But such a woman seemed
to be actually in existence. He had been told of a tall
girl, whom the white man treated with great respect and
care, and who never went forth from the house unattended.
People said the white man could be seen with her almost any
day; they walked side by side, openly, he holding her arm
under his—pressed to his side—thus—in a most extraordinary
way. This might be a lie, he conceded, for it was indeed a
strange thing for any one to do: on the other hand, there
could be no doubt she wore the white man's jewel concealed
upon her bosom.'
CHAPTER 29
'This was the theory of Jim's marital evening walks. I
made a third on more than one occasion, unpleasantly aware
every time of Cornelius, who nursed the aggrieved sense of
his legal paternity, slinking in the neighbourhood with that
peculiar twist of his mouth as if he were perpetually on the
point of gnashing his teeth. But do you notice how, three
hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and
mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our
civilisation wither and die, to be replaced by pure
exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the
charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works
of art? Romance had singled Jim for its own—and that was the
true part of the story, which otherwise was all wrong. He
did not hide his jewel. In fact, he was extremely proud of
it.
'It comes to me now that I had, on the whole, seen very
little of her. What I remember best is the even, olive
pallor of her complexion, and the intense blue-black gleams
of her hair, flowing abundantly from under a small crimson
cap she wore far back on her shapely head. Her movements
were free, assured, and she blushed a dusky red. While Jim
and I were talking, she would come and go with rapid glances
at us, leaving on her passage an impression of grace and
charm and a distinct suggestion of watchfulness. Her manner
presented a curious combination of shyness and audacity.
Every pretty smile was succeeded swiftly by a look of
silent, repressed anxiety, as if put to flight by the
recollection of some abiding danger. At times she would sit
down with us and, with her soft cheek dimpled by the
knuckles of her little hand, she would listen to our talk;
her big clear eyes would remain fastened on our lips, as
though each pronounced word had a visible shape. Her mother
had taught her to read and write; she had learned a good bit
of English from Jim, and she spoke it most amusingly, with
his own clipping, boyish intonation. Her tenderness hovered
over him like a flutter of wings. She lived so completely in
his contemplation that she had acquired something of his
outward aspect, something that recalled him in her
movements, in the way she stretched her arm, turned her
head, directed her glances. Her vigilant affection had an
intensity that made it almost perceptible to the senses; it
seemed actually to exist in the ambient matter of space, to
envelop him like a peculiar fragrance, to dwell in the
sunshine like a tremulous, subdued, and impassioned note. I
suppose you think that I too am romantic, but it is a
mistake. I am relating to you the sober impressions of a bit
of youth, of a strange uneasy romance that had come in my
way. I observed with interest the work of his—well—good
fortune. He was jealously loved, but why she should be
jealous, and of what, I could not tell. The land, the
people, the forests were her accomplices, guarding him with
vigilant accord, with an air of seclusion, of mystery, of
invincible possession. There was no appeal, as it were; he
was imprisoned within the very freedom of his power, and
she, though ready to make a footstool of her head for his
feet, guarded her conquest inflexibly—as though he were hard
to keep. The very Tamb' Itam, marching on our journeys upon
the heels of his white lord, with his head thrown back,
truculent and be-weaponed like a janissary, with kriss,
chopper, and lance (besides carrying Jim's gun); even Tamb'
Itam allowed himself to put on the airs of uncompromising
guardianship, like a surly devoted jailer ready to lay down
his life for his captive. On the evenings when we sat up
late, his silent, indistinct form would pass and repass
under the verandah, with noiseless footsteps, or lifting my
head I would unexpectedly make him out standing rigidly
erect in the shadow. As a general rule he would vanish after
a time, without a sound; but when we rose he would spring up
close to us as if from the ground, ready for any orders Jim
might wish to give. The girl too, I believe, never went to
sleep till we had separated for the night. More than once I
saw her and Jim through the window of my room come out
together quietly and lean on the rough balustrade—two white
forms very close, his arm about her waist, her head on his
shoulder. Their soft murmurs reached me, penetrating,
tender, with a calm sad note in the stillness of the night,
like a self-communion of one being carried on in two tones.
Later on, tossing on my bed under the mosquito-net, I was
sure to hear slight creakings, faint breathing, a throat
cleared cautiously—and I would know that Tamb' Itam was
still on the prowl. Though he had (by the favour of the
white lord) a house in the compound, had "taken wife," and
had lately been blessed with a child, I believe that, during
my stay at all events, he slept on the verandah every night.
It was very difficult to make this faithful and grim
retainer talk. Even Jim himself was answered in jerky short
sentences, under protest as it were. Talking, he seemed to
imply, was no business of his. The longest speech I heard
him volunteer was one morning when, suddenly extending his
hand towards the courtyard, he pointed at Cornelius and
said, "Here comes the Nazarene." I don't think he was
addressing me, though I stood at his side; his object seemed
rather to awaken the indignant attention of the universe.
Some muttered allusions, which followed, to dogs and the
smell of roast-meat, struck me as singularly felicitous. The
courtyard, a large square space, was one torrid blaze of
sunshine, and, bathed in intense light, Cornelius was
creeping across in full view with an inexpressible effect of
stealthiness, of dark and secret slinking. He reminded one
of everything that is unsavoury. His slow laborious walk
resembled the creeping of a repulsive beetle, the legs alone
moving with horrid industry while the body glided evenly. I
suppose he made straight enough for the place where he
wanted to get to, but his progress with one shoulder carried
forward seemed oblique. He was often seen circling slowly
amongst the sheds, as if following a scent; passing before
the verandah with upward stealthy glances; disappearing
without haste round the corner of some hut. That he seemed
free of the place demonstrated Jim's absurd carelessness or
else his infinite disdain, for Cornelius had played a very
dubious part (to say the least of it) in a certain episode
which might have ended fatally for Jim. As a matter of fact,
it had redounded to his glory. But everything redounded to
his glory; and it was the irony of his good fortune that he,
who had been too careful of it once, seemed to bear a
charmed life.
'You must know he had left Doramin's place very soon
after his arrival—much too soon, in fact, for his safety,
and of course a long time before the war. In this he was
actuated by a sense of duty; he had to look after Stein's
business, he said. Hadn't he? To that end, with an utter
disregard of his personal safety, he crossed the river and
took up his quarters with Cornelius. How the latter had
managed to exist through the troubled times I can't say. As
Stein's agent, after all, he must have had Doramin's
protection in a measure; and in one way or another he had
managed to wriggle through all the deadly complications,
while I have no doubt that his conduct, whatever line he was
forced to take, was marked by that abjectness which was like
the stamp of the man. That was his characteristic; he was
fundamentally and outwardly abject, as other men are
markedly of a generous, distinguished, or venerable
appearance. It was the element of his nature which permeated
all his acts and passions and emotions; he raged abjectly,
smiled abjectly, was abjectly sad; his civilities and his
indignations were alike abject. I am sure his love would
have been the most abject of sentiments—but can one imagine
a loathsome insect in love? And his loathsomeness, too, was
abject, so that a simply disgusting person would have
appeared noble by his side. He has his place neither in the
background nor in the foreground of the story; he is simply
seen skulking on its outskirts, enigmatical and unclean,
tainting the fragrance of its youth and of its naiveness.
'His position in any case could not have been other than
extremely miserable, yet it may very well be that he found
some advantages in it. Jim told me he had been received at
first with an abject display of the most amicable
sentiments. "The fellow apparently couldn't contain himself
for joy," said Jim with disgust. "He flew at me every
morning to shake both my hands—confound him!—but I could
never tell whether there would be any breakfast. If I got
three meals in two days I considered myself jolly lucky, and
he made me sign a chit for ten dollars every week. Said he
was sure Mr. Stein did not mean him to keep me for nothing.
Well—he kept me on nothing as near as possible. Put it down
to the unsettled state of the country, and made as if to
tear his hair out, begging my pardon twenty times a day, so
that I had at last to entreat him not to worry. It made me
sick. Half the roof of his house had fallen in, and the
whole place had a mangy look, with wisps of dry grass
sticking out and the corners of broken mats flapping on
every wall. He did his best to make out that Mr. Stein owed
him money on the last three years' trading, but his books
were all torn, and some were missing. He tried to hint it
was his late wife's fault. Disgusting scoundrel! At last I
had to forbid him to mention his late wife at all. It made
Jewel cry. I couldn't discover what became of all the
trade-goods; there was nothing in the store but rats, having
a high old time amongst a litter of brown paper and old
sacking. I was assured on every hand that he had a lot of
money buried somewhere, but of course could get nothing out
of him. It was the most miserable existence I led there in
that wretched house. I tried to do my duty by Stein, but I
had also other matters to think of. When I escaped to
Doramin old Tunku Allang got frightened and returned all my
things. It was done in a roundabout way, and with no end of
mystery, through a Chinaman who keeps a small shop here; but
as soon as I left the Bugis quarter and went to live with
Cornelius it began to be said openly that the Rajah had made
up his mind to have me killed before long. Pleasant, wasn't
it? And I couldn't see what there was to prevent him if he
really had made up his mind. The worst of it was, I
couldn't help feeling I wasn't doing any good either for
Stein or for myself. Oh! it was beastly—the whole six weeks
of it."'
CHAPTER 30
'He told me further that he didn't know what made him
hang on—but of course we may guess. He sympathised deeply
with the defenceless girl, at the mercy of that "mean,
cowardly scoundrel." It appears Cornelius led her an awful
life, stopping only short of actual ill-usage, for which he
had not the pluck, I suppose. He insisted upon her calling
him father—"and with respect, too—with respect," he would
scream, shaking a little yellow fist in her face. "I am a
respectable man, and what are you? Tell me—what are you? You
think I am going to bring up somebody else's child and not
be treated with respect? You ought to be glad I let you.
Come—say Yes, father. . . . No? . . . You wait a bit."
Thereupon he would begin to abuse the dead woman, till the
girl would run off with her hands to her head. He pursued
her, dashing in and out and round the house and amongst the
sheds, would drive her into some corner, where she would
fall on her knees stopping her ears, and then he would stand
at a distance and declaim filthy denunciations at her back
for half an hour at a stretch. "Your mother was a devil, a
deceitful devil—and you too are a devil," he would shriek in
a final outburst, pick up a bit of dry earth or a handful of
mud (there was plenty of mud around the house), and fling it
into her hair. Sometimes, though, she would hold out full of
scorn, confronting him in silence, her face sombre and
contracted, and only now and then uttering a word or two
that would make the other jump and writhe with the sting.
Jim told me these scenes were terrible. It was indeed a
strange thing to come upon in a wilderness. The endlessness
of such a subtly cruel situation was appalling—if you think
of it. The respectable Cornelius (Inchi 'Nelyus the Malays
called him, with a grimace that meant many things) was a
much-disappointed man. I don't know what he had expected
would be done for him in consideration of his marriage; but
evidently the liberty to steal, and embezzle, and
appropriate to himself for many years and in any way that
suited him best, the goods of Stein's Trading Company (Stein
kept the supply up unfalteringly as long as he could get his
skippers to take it there) did not seem to him a fair
equivalent for the sacrifice of his honourable name. Jim
would have enjoyed exceedingly thrashing Cornelius within an
inch of his life; on the other hand, the scenes were of so
painful a character, so abominable, that his impulse would
be to get out of earshot, in order to spare the girl's
feelings. They left her agitated, speechless, clutching her
bosom now and then with a stony, desperate face, and then
Jim would lounge up and say unhappily,
"Now—come—really—what's the use—you must try to eat a bit,"
or give some such mark of sympathy. Cornelius would keep on
slinking through the doorways, across the verandah and back
again, as mute as a fish, and with malevolent, mistrustful,
underhand glances. "I can stop his game," Jim said to her
once. "Just say the word." And do you know what she
answered? She said—Jim told me impressively—that if she had
not been sure he was intensely wretched himself, she would
have found the courage to kill him with her own hands. "Just
fancy that! The poor devil of a girl, almost a child, being
driven to talk like that," he exclaimed in horror. It seemed
impossible to save her not only from that mean rascal but
even from herself! It wasn't that he pitied her so much, he
affirmed; it was more than pity; it was as if he had
something on his conscience, while that life went on. To
leave the house would have appeared a base desertion. He had
understood at last that there was nothing to expect from a
longer stay, neither accounts nor money, nor truth of any
sort, but he stayed on, exasperating Cornelius to the verge,
I won't say of insanity, but almost of courage. Meantime he
felt all sorts of dangers gathering obscurely about him.
Doramin had sent over twice a trusty servant to tell him
seriously that he could do nothing for his safety unless he
would recross the river again and live amongst the Bugis as
at first. People of every condition used to call, often in
the dead of night, in order to disclose to him plots for his
assassination. He was to be poisoned. He was to be stabbed
in the bath-house. Arrangements were being made to have him
shot from a boat on the river. Each of these informants
professed himself to be his very good friend. It was
enough—he told me—to spoil a fellow's rest for ever.
Something of the kind was extremely possible—nay,
probable—but the lying warnings gave him only the sense of
deadly scheming going on all around him, on all sides, in
the dark. Nothing more calculated to shake the best of
nerve. Finally, one night, Cornelius himself, with a great
apparatus of alarm and secrecy, unfolded in solemn wheedling
tones a little plan wherein for one hundred dollars—or even
for eighty; let's say eighty—he, Cornelius, would procure a
trustworthy man to smuggle Jim out of the river, all safe.
There was nothing else for it now—if Jim cared a pin for his
life. What's eighty dollars? A trifle. An insignificant sum.
While he, Cornelius, who had to remain behind, was
absolutely courting death by this proof of devotion to Mr.
Stein's young friend. The sight of his abject grimacing
was—Jim told me—very hard to bear: he clutched at his hair,
beat his breast, rocked himself to and fro with his hands
pressed to his stomach, and actually pretended to shed
tears. "Your blood be on your own head," he squeaked at
last, and rushed out. It is a curious question how far
Cornelius was sincere in that performance. Jim confessed to
me that he did not sleep a wink after the fellow had gone.
He lay on his back on a thin mat spread over the bamboo
flooring, trying idly to make out the bare rafters, and
listening to the rustlings in the torn thatch. A star
suddenly twinkled through a hole in the roof. His brain was
in a whirl; but, nevertheless, it was on that very night
that he matured his plan for overcoming Sherif Ali. It had
been the thought of all the moments he could spare from the
hopeless investigation into Stein's affairs, but the
notion—he says—came to him then all at once. He could see,
as it were, the guns mounted on the top of the hill. He got
very hot and excited lying there; sleep was out of the
question more than ever. He jumped up, and went out
barefooted on the verandah. Walking silently, he came upon
the girl, motionless against the wall, as if on the watch.
In his then state of mind it did not surprise him to see her
up, nor yet to hear her ask in an anxious whisper where
Cornelius could be. He simply said he did not know. She
moaned a little, and peered into the campong. Everything was
very quiet. He was possessed by his new idea, and so full of
it that he could not help telling the girl all about it at
once. She listened, clapped her hands lightly, whispered
softly her admiration, but was evidently on the alert all
the time. It seems he had been used to make a confidant of
her all along—and that she on her part could and did give
him a lot of useful hints as to Patusan affairs there is no
doubt. He assured me more than once that he had never found
himself the worse for her advice. At any rate, he was
proceeding to explain his plan fully to her there and then,
when she pressed his arm once, and vanished from his side.
Then Cornelius appeared from somewhere, and, perceiving Jim,
ducked sideways, as though he had been shot at, and
afterwards stood very still in the dusk. At last he came
forward prudently, like a suspicious cat. "There were some
fishermen there—with fish," he said in a shaky voice. "To
sell fish—you understand." . . . It must have been then two
o'clock in the morning—a likely time for anybody to hawk
fish about!
'Jim, however, let the statement pass, and did not give
it a single thought. Other matters occupied his mind, and
besides he had neither seen nor heard anything. He contented
himself by saying, "Oh!" absently, got a drink of water out
of a pitcher standing there, and leaving Cornelius a prey to
some inexplicable emotion—that made him embrace with both
arms the worm-eaten rail of the verandah as if his legs had
failed—went in again and lay down on his mat to think.
By-and-by he heard stealthy footsteps. They stopped. A voice
whispered tremulously through the wall, "Are you asleep?"
"No! What is it?" he answered briskly, and there was an
abrupt movement outside, and then all was still, as if the
whisperer had been startled. Extremely annoyed at this, Jim
came out impetuously, and Cornelius with a faint shriek fled
along the verandah as far as the steps, where he hung on to
the broken banister. Very puzzled, Jim called out to him
from the distance to know what the devil he meant. "Have you
given your consideration to what I spoke to you about?"
asked Cornelius, pronouncing the words with difficulty, like
a man in the cold fit of a fever. "No!" shouted Jim in a
passion. "I have not, and I don't intend to. I am going to
live here, in Patusan." "You shall d-d-die h-h-here,"
answered Cornelius, still shaking violently, and in a sort
of expiring voice. The whole performance was so absurd and
provoking that Jim didn't know whether he ought to be amused
or angry. "Not till I have seen you tucked away, you bet,"
he called out, exasperated yet ready to laugh. Half
seriously (being excited with his own thoughts, you know) he
went on shouting, "Nothing can touch me! You can do your
damnedest." Somehow the shadowy Cornelius far off there
seemed to be the hateful embodiment of all the annoyances
and difficulties he had found in his path. He let himself
go—his nerves had been over-wrought for days—and called him
many pretty names,—swindler, liar, sorry rascal: in fact,
carried on in an extraordinary way. He admits he passed all
bounds, that he was quite beside himself—defied all Patusan
to scare him away—declared he would make them all dance to
his own tune yet, and so on, in a menacing, boasting strain.
Perfectly bombastic and ridiculous, he said. His ears burned
at the bare recollection. Must have been off his chump in
some way. . . . The girl, who was sitting with us, nodded
her little head at me quickly, frowned faintly, and said, "I
heard him," with child-like solemnity. He laughed and
blushed. What stopped him at last, he said, was the silence,
the complete deathlike silence, of the indistinct figure far
over there, that seemed to hang collapsed, doubled over the
rail in a weird immobility. He came to his senses, and
ceasing suddenly, wondered greatly at himself. He watched
for a while. Not a stir, not a sound. "Exactly as if the
chap had died while I had been making all that noise," he
said. He was so ashamed of himself that he went indoors in a
hurry without another word, and flung himself down again.
The row seemed to have done him good though, because he went
to sleep for the rest of the night like a baby. Hadn't slept
like that for weeks. "But I didn't sleep," struck in
the girl, one elbow on the table and nursing her cheek. "I
watched." Her big eyes flashed, rolling a little, and then
she fixed them on my face intently.'
CHAPTER 31
'You may imagine with what interest I listened. All these
details were perceived to have some significance twenty-four
hours later. In the morning Cornelius made no allusion to
the events of the night. "I suppose you will come back to my
poor house," he muttered, surlily, slinking up just as Jim
was entering the canoe to go over to Doramin's campong. Jim
only nodded, without looking at him. "You find it good fun,
no doubt," muttered the other in a sour tone. Jim spent the
day with the old nakhoda, preaching the necessity of
vigorous action to the principal men of the Bugis community,
who had been summoned for a big talk. He remembered with
pleasure how very eloquent and persuasive he had been. "I
managed to put some backbone into them that time, and no
mistake," he said. Sherif Ali's last raid had swept the
outskirts of the settlement, and some women belonging to the
town had been carried off to the stockade. Sherif Ali's
emissaries had been seen in the market-place the day before,
strutting about haughtily in white cloaks, and boasting of
the Rajah's friendship for their master. One of them stood
forward in the shade of a tree, and, leaning on the long
barrel of a rifle, exhorted the people to prayer and
repentance, advising them to kill all the strangers in their
midst, some of whom, he said, were infidels and others even
worse—children of Satan in the guise of Moslems. It was
reported that several of the Rajah's people amongst the
listeners had loudly expressed their approbation. The terror
amongst the common people was intense. Jim, immensely
pleased with his day's work, crossed the river again before
sunset.
'As he had got the Bugis irretrievably committed to
action and had made himself responsible for success on his
own head, he was so elated that in the lightness of his
heart he absolutely tried to be civil with Cornelius. But
Cornelius became wildly jovial in response, and it was
almost more than he could stand, he says, to hear his little
squeaks of false laughter, to see him wriggle and blink, and
suddenly catch hold of his chin and crouch low over the
table with a distracted stare. The girl did not show
herself, and Jim retired early. When he rose to say
good-night, Cornelius jumped up, knocking his chair over,
and ducked out of sight as if to pick up something he had
dropped. His good-night came huskily from under the table.
Jim was amazed to see him emerge with a dropping jaw, and
staring, stupidly frightened eyes. He clutched the edge of
the table. "What's the matter? Are you unwell?" asked Jim.
"Yes, yes, yes. A great colic in my stomach," says the
other; and it is Jim's opinion that it was perfectly true.
If so, it was, in view of his contemplated action, an abject
sign of a still imperfect callousness for which he must be
given all due credit.
'Be it as it may, Jim's slumbers were disturbed by a
dream of heavens like brass resounding with a great voice,
which called upon him to Awake! Awake! so loud that,
notwithstanding his desperate determination to sleep on, he
did wake up in reality. The glare of a red spluttering
conflagration going on in mid-air fell on his eyes. Coils of
black thick smoke curved round the head of some apparition,
some unearthly being, all in white, with a severe, drawn,
anxious face. After a second or so he recognised the girl.
She was holding a dammar torch at arm's-length aloft, and in
a persistent, urgent monotone she was repeating, "Get up!
Get up! Get up!"
'Suddenly he leaped to his feet; at once she put into his
hand a revolver, his own revolver, which had been hanging on
a nail, but loaded this time. He gripped it in silence,
bewildered, blinking in the light. He wondered what he could
do for her.
'She asked rapidly and very low, "Can you face four men
with this?" He laughed while narrating this part at the
recollection of his polite alacrity. It seems he made a
great display of it. "Certainly—of course—certainly—command
me." He was not properly awake, and had a notion of being
very civil in these extraordinary circumstances, of showing
his unquestioning, devoted readiness. She left the room, and
he followed her; in the passage they disturbed an old hag
who did the casual cooking of the household, though she was
so decrepit as to be hardly able to understand human speech.
She got up and hobbled behind them, mumbling toothlessly. On
the verandah a hammock of sail-cloth, belonging to
Cornelius, swayed lightly to the touch of Jim's elbow. It
was empty.
'The Patusan establishment, like all the posts of Stein's
Trading Company, had originally consisted of four buildings.
Two of them were represented by two heaps of sticks, broken
bamboos, rotten thatch, over which the four corner-posts of
hardwood leaned sadly at different angles: the principal
storeroom, however, stood yet, facing the agent's house. It
was an oblong hut, built of mud and clay; it had at one end
a wide door of stout planking, which so far had not come off
the hinges, and in one of the side walls there was a square
aperture, a sort of window, with three wooden bars. Before
descending the few steps the girl turned her face over her
shoulder and said quickly, "You were to be set upon while
you slept." Jim tells me he experienced a sense of
deception. It was the old story. He was weary of these
attempts upon his life. He had had his fill of these alarms.
He was sick of them. He assured me he was angry with the
girl for deceiving him. He had followed her under the
impression that it was she who wanted his help, and now he
had half a mind to turn on his heel and go back in disgust.
"Do you know," he commented profoundly, "I rather think I
was not quite myself for whole weeks on end about that
time." "Oh yes. You were though," I couldn't help
contradicting.
'But she moved on swiftly, and he followed her into the
courtyard. All its fences had fallen in a long time ago; the
neighbours' buffaloes would pace in the morning across the
open space, snorting profoundly, without haste; the very
jungle was invading it already. Jim and the girl stopped in
the rank grass. The light in which they stood made a dense
blackness all round, and only above their heads there was an
opulent glitter of stars. He told me it was a beautiful
night—quite cool, with a little stir of breeze from the
river. It seems he noticed its friendly beauty. Remember
this is a love story I am telling you now. A lovely night
seemed to breathe on them a soft caress. The flame of the
torch streamed now and then with a fluttering noise like a
flag, and for a time this was the only sound. "They are in
the storeroom waiting," whispered the girl; "they are
waiting for the signal." "Who's to give it?" he asked. She
shook the torch, which blazed up after a shower of sparks.
"Only you have been sleeping so restlessly," she continued
in a murmur; "I watched your sleep, too." "You!" he
exclaimed, craning his neck to look about him. "You think I
watched on this night only!" she said, with a sort of
despairing indignation.
'He says it was as if he had received a blow on the
chest. He gasped. He thought he had been an awful brute
somehow, and he felt remorseful, touched, happy, elated.
This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see
it by the imbecility, not a repulsive imbecility, the
exalted imbecility of these proceedings, this station in
torchlight, as if they had come there on purpose to have it
out for the edification of concealed murderers. If Sherif
Ali's emissaries had been possessed—as Jim remarked—of a
pennyworth of spunk, this was the time to make a rush. His
heart was thumping—not with fear—but he seemed to hear the
grass rustle, and he stepped smartly out of the light.
Something dark, imperfectly seen, flitted rapidly out of
sight. He called out in a strong voice, "Cornelius! O
Cornelius!" A profound silence succeeded: his voice did not
seem to have carried twenty feet. Again the girl was by his
side. "Fly!" she said. The old woman was coming up; her
broken figure hovered in crippled little jumps on the edge
of the light; they heard her mumbling, and a light, moaning
sigh. "Fly!" repeated the girl excitedly. "They are
frightened now—this light—the voices. They know you are
awake now—they know you are big, strong, fearless . . ." "If
I am all that," he began; but she interrupted him:
"Yes—to-night! But what of to-morrow night? Of the next
night? Of the night after—of all the many, many nights? Can
I be always watching?" A sobbing catch of her breath
affected him beyond the power of words.
'He told me that he had never felt so small, so
powerless—and as to courage, what was the good of it? he
thought. He was so helpless that even flight seemed of no
use; and though she kept on whispering, "Go to Doramin, go
to Doramin," with feverish insistence, he realised that for
him there was no refuge from that loneliness which centupled
all his dangers except—in her. "I thought," he said to me,
"that if I went away from her it would be the end of
everything somehow." Only as they couldn't stop there for
ever in the middle of that courtyard, he made up his mind to
go and look into the storehouse. He let her follow him
without thinking of any protest, as if they had been
indissolubly united. "I am fearless—am I?" he muttered
through his teeth. She restrained his arm. "Wait till you
hear my voice," she said, and, torch in hand, ran lightly
round the corner. He remained alone in the darkness, his
face to the door: not a sound, not a breath came from the
other side. The old hag let out a dreary groan somewhere
behind his back. He heard a high-pitched almost screaming
call from the girl. "Now! Push!" He pushed violently; the
door swung with a creak and a clatter, disclosing to his
intense astonishment the low dungeon-like interior
illuminated by a lurid, wavering glare. A turmoil of smoke
eddied down upon an empty wooden crate in the middle of the
floor, a litter of rags and straw tried to soar, but only
stirred feebly in the draught. She had thrust the light
through the bars of the window. He saw her bare round arm
extended and rigid, holding up the torch with the steadiness
of an iron bracket. A conical ragged heap of old mats
cumbered a distant corner almost to the ceiling, and that
was all.
'He explained to me that he was bitterly disappointed at
this. His fortitude had been tried by so many warnings, he
had been for weeks surrounded by so many hints of danger,
that he wanted the relief of some reality, of something
tangible that he could meet. "It would have cleared the air
for a couple of hours at least, if you know what I mean," he
said to me. "Jove! I had been living for days with a stone
on my chest." Now at last he had thought he would get hold
of something, and—nothing! Not a trace, not a sign of
anybody. He had raised his weapon as the door flew open, but
now his arm fell. "Fire! Defend yourself," the girl outside
cried in an agonising voice. She, being in the dark and with
her arm thrust in to the shoulder through the small hole,
couldn't see what was going on, and she dared not withdraw
the torch now to run round. "There's nobody here!" yelled
Jim contemptuously, but his impulse to burst into a
resentful exasperated laugh died without a sound: he had
perceived in the very act of turning away that he was
exchanging glances with a pair of eyes in the heap of mats.
He saw a shifting gleam of whites. "Come out!" he cried in a
fury, a little doubtful, and a dark-faced head, a head
without a body, shaped itself in the rubbish, a strangely
detached head, that looked at him with a steady scowl. Next
moment the whole mound stirred, and with a low grunt a man
emerged swiftly, and bounded towards Jim. Behind him the
mats as it were jumped and flew, his right arm was raised
with a crooked elbow, and the dull blade of a kriss
protruded from his fist held off, a little above his head. A
cloth wound tight round his loins seemed dazzlingly white on
his bronze skin; his naked body glistened as if wet.
'Jim noted all this. He told me he was experiencing a
feeling of unutterable relief, of vengeful elation. He held
his shot, he says, deliberately. He held it for the tenth
part of a second, for three strides of the man—an
unconscionable time. He held it for the pleasure of saying
to himself, That's a dead man! He was absolutely positive
and certain. He let him come on because it did not matter. A
dead man, anyhow. He noticed the dilated nostrils, the wide
eyes, the intent, eager stillness of the face, and then he
fired.
'The explosion in that confined space was stunning. He
stepped back a pace. He saw the man jerk his head up, fling
his arms forward, and drop the kriss. He ascertained
afterwards that he had shot him through the mouth, a little
upwards, the bullet coming out high at the back of the
skull. With the impetus of his rush the man drove straight
on, his face suddenly gaping disfigured, with his hands open
before him gropingly, as though blinded, and landed with
terrific violence on his forehead, just short of Jim's bare
toes. Jim says he didn't lose the smallest detail of all
this. He found himself calm, appeased, without rancour,
without uneasiness, as if the death of that man had atoned
for everything. The place was getting very full of sooty
smoke from the torch, in which the unswaying flame burned
blood-red without a flicker. He walked in resolutely,
striding over the dead body, and covered with his revolver
another naked figure outlined vaguely at the other end. As
he was about to pull the trigger, the man threw away with
force a short heavy spear, and squatted submissively on his
hams, his back to the wall and his clasped hands between his
legs. "You want your life?" Jim said. The other made no
sound. "How many more of you?" asked Jim again. "Two more,
Tuan," said the man very softly, looking with big fascinated
eyes into the muzzle of the revolver. Accordingly two more
crawled from under the mats, holding out ostentatiously
their empty hands.'
CHAPTER 32
'Jim took up an advantageous position and shepherded them
out in a bunch through the doorway: all that time the torch
had remained vertical in the grip of a little hand, without
so much as a tremble. The three men obeyed him, perfectly
mute, moving automatically. He ranged them in a row. "Link
arms!" he ordered. They did so. "The first who withdraws his
arm or turns his head is a dead man," he said. "March!" They
stepped out together, rigidly; he followed, and at the side
the girl, in a trailing white gown, her black hair falling
as low as her waist, bore the light. Erect and swaying, she
seemed to glide without touching the earth; the only sound
was the silky swish and rustle of the long grass. "Stop!"
cried Jim.
'The river-bank was steep; a great freshness ascended,
the light fell on the edge of smooth dark water frothing
without a ripple; right and left the shapes of the houses
ran together below the sharp outlines of the roofs. "Take my
greetings to Sherif Ali—till I come myself," said Jim. Not
one head of the three budged. "Jump!" he thundered. The
three splashes made one splash, a shower flew up, black
heads bobbed convulsively, and disappeared; but a great
blowing and spluttering went on, growing faint, for they
were diving industriously in great fear of a parting shot.
Jim turned to the girl, who had been a silent and attentive
observer. His heart seemed suddenly to grow too big for his
breast and choke him in the hollow of his throat. This
probably made him speechless for so long, and after
returning his gaze she flung the burning torch with a wide
sweep of the arm into the river. The ruddy fiery glare,
taking a long flight through the night, sank with a vicious
hiss, and the calm soft starlight descended upon them,
unchecked.
'He did not tell me what it was he said when at last he
recovered his voice. I don't suppose he could be very
eloquent. The world was still, the night breathed on them,
one of those nights that seem created for the sheltering of
tenderness, and there are moments when our souls, as if
freed from their dark envelope, glow with an exquisite
sensibility that makes certain silences more lucid than
speeches. As to the girl, he told me, "She broke down a bit.
Excitement—don't you know. Reaction. Deucedly tired she must
have been—and all that kind of thing. And—and—hang it
all—she was fond of me, don't you see. . . . I too . . .
didn't know, of course . . . never entered my head . . ."
'Then he got up and began to walk about in some
agitation. "I—I love her dearly. More than I can tell. Of
course one cannot tell. You take a different view of your
actions when you come to understand, when you are made
to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you
see, absolutely necessary—to another person. I am made to
feel that. Wonderful! But only try to think what her life
has been. It is too extravagantly awful! Isn't it? And me
finding her here like this—as you may go out for a stroll
and come suddenly upon somebody drowning in a lonely dark
place. Jove! No time to lose. Well, it is a trust too . . .
I believe I am equal to it . . ."
'I must tell you the girl had left us to ourselves some
time before. He slapped his chest. "Yes! I feel that, but I
believe I am equal to all my luck!" He had the gift of
finding a special meaning in everything that happened to
him. This was the view he took of his love affair; it was
idyllic, a little solemn, and also true, since his belief
had all the unshakable seriousness of youth. Some time
after, on another occasion, he said to me, "I've been only
two years here, and now, upon my word, I can't conceive
being able to live anywhere else. The very thought of the
world outside is enough to give me a fright; because, don't
you see," he continued, with downcast eyes watching the
action of his boot busied in squashing thoroughly a tiny bit
of dried mud (we were strolling on the river-bank)—"because
I have not forgotten why I came here. Not yet!"
'I refrained from looking at him, but I think I heard a
short sigh; we took a turn or two in silence. "Upon my soul
and conscience," he began again, "if such a thing can be
forgotten, then I think I have a right to dismiss it from my
mind. Ask any man here" . . . his voice changed. "Is it not
strange," he went on in a gentle, almost yearning tone,
"that all these people, all these people who would do
anything for me, can never be made to understand? Never! If
you disbelieved me I could not call them up. It seems hard,
somehow. I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you
ask them who is brave—who is true—who is just—who is it they
would trust with their lives?—they would say, Tuan Jim. And
yet they can never know the real, real truth . . ."
'That's what he said to me on my last day with him. I did
not let a murmur escape me: I felt he was going to say more,
and come no nearer to the root of the matter. The sun, whose
concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of
dust, had sunk behind the forest, and the diffused light
from an opal sky seemed to cast upon a world without shadows
and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive
greatness. I don't know why, listening to him, I should have
noted so distinctly the gradual darkening of the river, of
the air; the irresistible slow work of the night settling
silently on all the visible forms, effacing the outlines,
burying the shapes deeper and deeper, like a steady fall of
impalpable black dust.
'"Jove!" he began abruptly, "there are days when a fellow
is too absurd for anything; only I know I can tell you what
I like. I talk about being done with it—with the bally thing
at the back of my head . . . Forgetting . . . Hang me if I
know! I can think of it quietly. After all, what has it
proved? Nothing. I suppose you don't think so . . ."
'I made a protesting murmur.
'"No matter," he said. "I am satisfied . . . nearly. I've
got to look only at the face of the first man that comes
along, to regain my confidence. They can't be made to
understand what is going on in me. What of that? Come! I
haven't done so badly."
'"Not so badly," I said.
'"But all the same, you wouldn't like to have me aboard
your own ship hey?"
'"Confound you!" I cried. "Stop this."
'"Aha! You see," he said, crowing, as it were, over me
placidly. "Only," he went on, "you just try to tell this to
any of them here. They would think you a fool, a liar, or
worse. And so I can stand it. I've done a thing or two for
them, but this is what they have done for me."
'"My dear chap," I cried, "you shall always remain for
them an insoluble mystery." Thereupon we were silent.
'"Mystery," he repeated, before looking up. "Well, then
let me always remain here."
'After the sun had set, the darkness seemed to drive upon
us, borne in every faint puff of the breeze. In the middle
of a hedged path I saw the arrested, gaunt, watchful, and
apparently one-legged silhouette of Tamb' Itam; and across
the dusky space my eye detected something white moving to
and fro behind the supports of the roof. As soon as Jim,
with Tamb' Itam at his heels, had started upon his evening
rounds, I went up to the house alone, and, unexpectedly,
found myself waylaid by the girl, who had been clearly
waiting for this opportunity.
'It is hard to tell you what it was precisely she wanted
to wrest from me. Obviously it would be something very
simple—the simplest impossibility in the world; as, for
instance, the exact description of the form of a cloud. She
wanted an assurance, a statement, a promise, an
explanation—I don't know how to call it: the thing has no
name. It was dark under the projecting roof, and all I could
see were the flowing lines of her gown, the pale small oval
of her face, with the white flash of her teeth, and, turned
towards me, the big sombre orbits of her eyes, where there
seemed to be a faint stir, such as you may fancy you can
detect when you plunge your gaze to the bottom of an
immensely deep well. What is it that moves there? you ask
yourself. Is it a blind monster or only a lost gleam from
the universe? It occurred to me—don't laugh—that all things
being dissimilar, she was more inscrutable in her childish
ignorance than the Sphinx propounding childish riddles to
wayfarers. She had been carried off to Patusan before her
eyes were open. She had grown up there; she had seen
nothing, she had known nothing, she had no conception of
anything. I ask myself whether she were sure that anything
else existed. What notions she may have formed of the
outside world is to me inconceivable: all that she knew of
its inhabitants were a betrayed woman and a sinister
pantaloon. Her lover also came to her from there, gifted
with irresistible seductions; but what would become of her
if he should return to these inconceivable regions that
seemed always to claim back their own? Her mother had warned
her of this with tears, before she died . . .
'She had caught hold of my arm firmly, and as soon as I
had stopped she had withdrawn her hand in haste. She was
audacious and shrinking. She feared nothing, but she was
checked by the profound incertitude and the extreme
strangeness—a brave person groping in the dark. I belonged
to this Unknown that might claim Jim for its own at any
moment. I was, as it were, in the secret of its nature and
of its intentions—the confidant of a threatening
mystery—armed with its power perhaps! I believe she supposed
I could with a word whisk Jim away out of her very arms; it
is my sober conviction she went through agonies of
apprehension during my long talks with Jim; through a real
and intolerable anguish that might have conceivably driven
her into plotting my murder, had the fierceness of her soul
been equal to the tremendous situation it had created. This
is my impression, and it is all I can give you: the whole
thing dawned gradually upon me, and as it got clearer and
clearer I was overwhelmed by a slow incredulous amazement.
She made me believe her, but there is no word that on my
lips could render the effect of the headlong and vehement
whisper, of the soft, passionate tones, of the sudden
breathless pause and the appealing movement of the white
arms extended swiftly. They fell; the ghostly figure swayed
like a slender tree in the wind, the pale oval of the face
drooped; it was impossible to distinguish her features, the
darkness of the eyes was unfathomable; two wide sleeves
uprose in the dark like unfolding wings, and she stood
silent, holding her head in her hands.'
CHAPTER 33
'I was immensely touched: her youth, her ignorance, her
pretty beauty, which had the simple charm and the delicate
vigour of a wild-flower, her pathetic pleading, her
helplessness, appealed to me with almost the strength of her
own unreasonable and natural fear. She feared the unknown as
we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely
vast. I stood for it, for myself, for you fellows, for all
the world that neither cared for Jim nor needed him in the
least. I would have been ready enough to answer for the
indifference of the teeming earth but for the reflection
that he too belonged to this mysterious unknown of her
fears, and that, however much I stood for, I did not stand
for him. This made me hesitate. A murmur of hopeless pain
unsealed my lips. I began by protesting that I at least had
come with no intention to take Jim away.
'Why did I come, then? After a slight movement she was as
still as a marble statue in the night. I tried to explain
briefly: friendship, business; if I had any wish in the
matter it was rather to see him stay. . . . "They always
leave us," she murmured. The breath of sad wisdom from the
grave which her piety wreathed with flowers seemed to pass
in a faint sigh. . . . Nothing, I said, could separate Jim
from her.
'It is my firm conviction now; it was my conviction at
the time; it was the only possible conclusion from the facts
of the case. It was not made more certain by her whispering
in a tone in which one speaks to oneself, "He swore this to
me." "Did you ask him?" I said.
'She made a step nearer. "No. Never!" She had asked him
only to go away. It was that night on the river-bank, after
he had killed the man—after she had flung the torch in the
water because he was looking at her so. There was too much
light, and the danger was over then—for a little time—for a
little time. He said then he would not abandon her to
Cornelius. She had insisted. She wanted him to leave her. He
said that he could not—that it was impossible. He trembled
while he said this. She had felt him tremble. . . . One does
not require much imagination to see the scene, almost to
hear their whispers. She was afraid for him too. I believe
that then she saw in him only a predestined victim of
dangers which she understood better than himself. Though by
nothing but his mere presence he had mastered her heart, had
filled all her thoughts, and had possessed himself of all
her affections, she underestimated his chances of success.
It is obvious that at about that time everybody was inclined
to underestimate his chances. Strictly speaking he didn't
seem to have any. I know this was Cornelius's view. He
confessed that much to me in extenuation of the shady part
he had played in Sherif Ali's plot to do away with the
infidel. Even Sherif Ali himself, as it seems certain now,
had nothing but contempt for the white man. Jim was to be
murdered mainly on religious grounds, I believe. A simple
act of piety (and so far infinitely meritorious), but
otherwise without much importance. In the last part of this
opinion Cornelius concurred. "Honourable sir," he argued
abjectly on the only occasion he managed to have me to
himself—"honourable sir, how was I to know? Who was he? What
could he do to make people believe him? What did Mr. Stein
mean sending a boy like that to talk big to an old servant?
I was ready to save him for eighty dollars. Only eighty
dollars. Why didn't the fool go? Was I to get stabbed myself
for the sake of a stranger?" He grovelled in spirit before
me, with his body doubled up insinuatingly and his hands
hovering about my knees, as though he were ready to embrace
my legs. "What's eighty dollars? An insignificant sum to
give to a defenceless old man ruined for life by a deceased
she-devil." Here he wept. But I anticipate. I didn't that
night chance upon Cornelius till I had had it out with the
girl.
'She was unselfish when she urged Jim to leave her, and
even to leave the country. It was his danger that was
foremost in her thoughts—even if she wanted to save herself
too—perhaps unconsciously: but then look at the warning she
had, look at the lesson that could be drawn from every
moment of the recently ended life in which all her memories
were centred. She fell at his feet—she told me so—there by
the river, in the discreet light of stars which showed
nothing except great masses of silent shadows, indefinite
open spaces, and trembling faintly upon the broad stream
made it appear as wide as the sea. He had lifted her up. He
lifted her up, and then she would struggle no more. Of
course not. Strong arms, a tender voice, a stalwart shoulder
to rest her poor lonely little head upon. The need—the
infinite need—of all this for the aching heart, for the
bewildered mind;—the promptings of youth—the necessity of
the moment. What would you have? One understands—unless one
is incapable of understanding anything under the sun. And so
she was content to be lifted up—and held. "You know—Jove!
this is serious—no nonsense in it!" as Jim had whispered
hurriedly with a troubled concerned face on the threshold of
his house. I don't know so much about nonsense, but there
was nothing light-hearted in their romance: they came
together under the shadow of a life's disaster, like knight
and maiden meeting to exchange vows amongst haunted ruins.
The starlight was good enough for that story, a light so
faint and remote that it cannot resolve shadows into shapes,
and show the other shore of a stream. I did look upon the
stream that night and from the very place; it rolled silent
and as black as Styx: the next day I went away, but I am not
likely to forget what it was she wanted to be saved from
when she entreated him to leave her while there was time.
She told me what it was, calmed—she was now too passionately
interested for mere excitement—in a voice as quiet in the
obscurity as her white half-lost figure. She told me, "I
didn't want to die weeping." I thought I had not heard
aright.
'"You did not want to die weeping?" I repeated after her.
"Like my mother," she added readily. The outlines of her
white shape did not stir in the least. "My mother had wept
bitterly before she died," she explained. An inconceivable
calmness seemed to have risen from the ground around us,
imperceptibly, like the still rise of a flood in the night,
obliterating the familiar landmarks of emotions. There came
upon me, as though I had felt myself losing my footing in
the midst of waters, a sudden dread, the dread of the
unknown depths. She went on explaining that, during the last
moments, being alone with her mother, she had to leave the
side of the couch to go and set her back against the door,
in order to keep Cornelius out. He desired to get in, and
kept on drumming with both fists, only desisting now and
again to shout huskily, "Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!"
In a far corner upon a few mats the moribund woman, already
speechless and unable to lift her arm, rolled her head over,
and with a feeble movement of her hand seemed to
command—"No! No!" and the obedient daughter, setting her
shoulders with all her strength against the door, was
looking on. "The tears fell from her eyes—and then she
died," concluded the girl in an imperturbable monotone,
which more than anything else, more than the white
statuesque immobility of her person, more than mere words
could do, troubled my mind profoundly with the passive,
irremediable horror of the scene. It had the power to drive
me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter
each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of
danger, as a tortoise withdraws within its shell. For a
moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast
and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to
our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of
small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive. But
still—it was only a moment: I went back into my shell
directly. One must—don't you know?—though I seemed to
have lost all my words in the chaos of dark thoughts I had
contemplated for a second or two beyond the pale. These came
back, too, very soon, for words also belong to the
sheltering conception of light and order which is our
refuge. I had them ready at my disposal before she whispered
softly, "He swore he would never leave me, when we stood
there alone! He swore to me!". . . "And it is possible that
you—you! do not believe him?" I asked, sincerely
reproachful, genuinely shocked. Why couldn't she believe?
Wherefore this craving for incertitude, this clinging to
fear, as if incertitude and fear had been the safeguards of
her love. It was monstrous. She should have made for herself
a shelter of inexpugnable peace out of that honest
affection. She had not the knowledge—not the skill perhaps.
The night had come on apace; it had grown pitch-dark where
we were, so that without stirring she had faded like the
intangible form of a wistful and perverse spirit. And
suddenly I heard her quiet whisper again, "Other men had
sworn the same thing." It was like a meditative comment on
some thoughts full of sadness, of awe. And she added, still
lower if possible, "My father did." She paused the time to
draw an inaudible breath. "Her father too." . . . These were
the things she knew! At once I said, "Ah! but he is not like
that." This, it seemed, she did not intend to dispute; but
after a time the strange still whisper wandering dreamily in
the air stole into my ears. "Why is he different? Is he
better? Is he . . ." "Upon my word of honour," I broke in,
"I believe he is." We subdued our tones to a mysterious
pitch. Amongst the huts of Jim's workmen (they were mostly
liberated slaves from the Sherif's stockade) somebody
started a shrill, drawling song. Across the river a big fire
(at Doramin's, I think) made a glowing ball, completely
isolated in the night. "Is he more true?" she murmured.
"Yes," I said. "More true than any other man," she repeated
in lingering accents. "Nobody here," I said, "would dream of
doubting his word—nobody would dare—except you."
'I think she made a movement at this. "More brave," she
went on in a changed tone. "Fear will never drive him away
from you," I said a little nervously. The song stopped short
on a shrill note, and was succeeded by several voices
talking in the distance. Jim's voice too. I was struck by
her silence. "What has he been telling you? He has been
telling you something?" I asked. There was no answer. "What
is it he told you?" I insisted.
'"Do you think I can tell you? How am I to know? How am I
to understand?" she cried at last. There was a stir. I
believe she was wringing her hands. "There is something he
can never forget."
'"So much the better for you," I said gloomily.
'"What is it? What is it?" She put an extraordinary force
of appeal into her supplicating tone. "He says he had been
afraid. How can I believe this? Am I a mad woman to believe
this? You all remember something! You all go back to it.
What is it? You tell me! What is this thing? Is it alive?—is
it dead? I hate it. It is cruel. Has it got a face and a
voice—this calamity? Will he see it—will he hear it? In his
sleep perhaps when he cannot see me—and then arise and go.
Ah! I shall never forgive him. My mother had forgiven—but I,
never! Will it be a sign—a call?"
'It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very
slumbers—and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus
a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might
have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret
of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul
astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground
on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so
simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our
unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before
the forlorn magicians that we are, then I—I alone of us
dwellers in the flesh—have shuddered in the hopeless chill
of such a task. A sign, a call! How telling in its
expression was her ignorance. A few words! How she came to
know them, how she came to pronounce them, I can't imagine.
Women find their inspiration in the stress of moments that
for us are merely awful, absurd, or futile. To discover that
she had a voice at all was enough to strike awe into the
heart. Had a spurned stone cried out in pain it could not
have appeared a greater and more pitiful miracle. These few
sounds wandering in the dark had made their two benighted
lives tragic to my mind. It was impossible to make her
understand. I chafed silently at my impotence. And Jim,
too—poor devil! Who would need him? Who would remember him?
He had what he wanted. His very existence probably had been
forgotten by this time. They had mastered their fates. They
were tragic.
'Her immobility before me was clearly expectant, and my
part was to speak for my brother from the realm of forgetful
shade. I was deeply moved at my responsibility and at her
distress. I would have given anything for the power to
soothe her frail soul, tormenting itself in its invincible
ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of
a cage. Nothing easier than to say, Have no fear! Nothing
more difficult. How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you
shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral
head, take it by its spectral throat? It is an enterprise
you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your
escape with wet hair and every limb shaking. The bullet is
not run, the blade not forged, the man not born; even the
winged words of truth drop at your feet like lumps of lead.
You require for such a desperate encounter an enchanted and
poisoned shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on
earth. An enterprise for a dream, my masters!
'I began my exorcism with a heavy heart, with a sort of
sullen anger in it too. Jim's voice, suddenly raised with a
stern intonation, carried across the courtyard, reproving
the carelessness of some dumb sinner by the river-side.
Nothing—I said, speaking in a distinct murmur—there could be
nothing, in that unknown world she fancied so eager to rob
her of her happiness, there was nothing, neither living nor
dead, there was no face, no voice, no power, that could tear
Jim from her side. I drew breath and she whispered softly,
"He told me so." "He told you the truth," I said. "Nothing,"
she sighed out, and abruptly turned upon me with a barely
audible intensity of tone: "Why did you come to us from out
there? He speaks of you too often. You make me afraid. Do
you—do you want him?" A sort of stealthy fierceness had
crept into our hurried mutters. "I shall never come again,"
I said bitterly. "And I don't want him. No one wants him."
"No one," she repeated in a tone of doubt. "No one," I
affirmed, feeling myself swayed by some strange excitement.
"You think him strong, wise, courageous, great—why not
believe him to be true too? I shall go to-morrow—and that is
the end. You shall never be troubled by a voice from there
again. This world you don't know is too big to miss him. You
understand? Too big. You've got his heart in your hand. You
must feel that. You must know that." "Yes, I know that," she
breathed out, hard and still, as a statue might whisper.
'I felt I had done nothing. And what is it that I had
wished to do? I am not sure now. At the time I was animated
by an inexplicable ardour, as if before some great and
necessary task—the influence of the moment upon my mental
and emotional state. There are in all our lives such
moments, such influences, coming from the outside, as it
were, irresistible, incomprehensible—as if brought about by
the mysterious conjunctions of the planets. She owned, as I
had put it to her, his heart. She had that and everything
else—if she could only believe it. What I had to tell her
was that in the whole world there was no one who ever would
need his heart, his mind, his hand. It was a common fate,
and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man. She
listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the
protest of an invincible unbelief. What need she care for
the world beyond the forests? I asked. From all the
multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there
would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a
call nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never!
Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness
I displayed. I had the illusion of having got the spectre by
the throat at last. Indeed the whole real thing has left
behind the detailed and amazing impression of a dream. Why
should she fear? She knew him to be strong, true, wise,
brave. He was all that. Certainly. He was more. He was
great—invincible—and the world did not want him, it had
forgotten him, it would not even know him.
'I stopped; the silence over Patusan was profound, and
the feeble dry sound of a paddle striking the side of a
canoe somewhere in the middle of the river seemed to make it
infinite. "Why?" she murmured. I felt that sort of rage one
feels during a hard tussle. The spectre was trying to slip
out of my grasp. "Why?" she repeated louder; "tell me!" And
as I remained confounded, she stamped with her foot like a
spoilt child. "Why? Speak." "You want to know?" I asked in a
fury. "Yes!" she cried. "Because he is not good enough," I
said brutally. During the moment's pause I noticed the fire
on the other shore blaze up, dilating the circle of its glow
like an amazed stare, and contract suddenly to a red
pin-point. I only knew how close to me she had been when I
felt the clutch of her fingers on my forearm. Without
raising her voice, she threw into it an infinity of scathing
contempt, bitterness, and despair.
'"This is the very thing he said. . . . You lie!"
'The last two words she cried at me in the native
dialect. "Hear me out!" I entreated; she caught her breath
tremulously, flung my arm away. "Nobody, nobody is good
enough," I began with the greatest earnestness. I could hear
the sobbing labour of her breath frightfully quickened. I
hung my head. What was the use? Footsteps were approaching;
I slipped away without another word. . . .'
CHAPTER 34
Marlow swung his legs out, got up quickly, and staggered
a little, as though he had been set down after a rush
through space. He leaned his back against the balustrade and
faced a disordered array of long cane chairs. The bodies
prone in them seemed startled out of their torpor by his
movement. One or two sat up as if alarmed; here and there a
cigar glowed yet; Marlow looked at them all with the eyes of
a man returning from the excessive remoteness of a dream. A
throat was cleared; a calm voice encouraged negligently,
'Well.'
'Nothing,' said Marlow with a slight start. 'He had told
her—that's all. She did not believe him—nothing more. As to
myself, I do not know whether it be just, proper, decent for
me to rejoice or to be sorry. For my part, I cannot say what
I believed—indeed I don't know to this day, and never shall
probably. But what did the poor devil believe himself? Truth
shall prevail—don't you know Magna est veritas el . . . Yes,
when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt—and likewise
a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not
Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard,
Fortune—the ally of patient Time—that holds an even and
scrupulous balance. Both of us had said the very same thing.
Did we both speak the truth—or one of us did—or neither? . .
.'
Marlow paused, crossed his arms on his breast, and in a
changed tone—
'She said we lied. Poor soul! Well—let's leave it to
Chance, whose ally is Time, that cannot be hurried, and
whose enemy is Death, that will not wait. I had retreated—a
little cowed, I must own. I had tried a fall with fear
itself and got thrown—of course. I had only succeeded in
adding to her anguish the hint of some mysterious collusion,
of an inexplicable and incomprehensible conspiracy to keep
her for ever in the dark. And it had come easily, naturally,
unavoidably, by his act, by her own act! It was as though I
had been shown the working of the implacable destiny of
which we are the victims—and the tools. It was appalling to
think of the girl whom I had left standing there motionless;
Jim's footsteps had a fateful sound as he tramped by,
without seeing me, in his heavy laced boots. "What? No
lights!" he said in a loud, surprised voice. "What are you
doing in the dark—you two?" Next moment he caught sight of
her, I suppose. "Hallo, girl!" he cried cheerily. "Hallo,
boy!" she answered at once, with amazing pluck.
'This was their usual greeting to each other, and the bit
of swagger she would put into her rather high but sweet
voice was very droll, pretty, and childlike. It delighted
Jim greatly. This was the last occasion on which I heard
them exchange this familiar hail, and it struck a chill into
my heart. There was the high sweet voice, the pretty effort,
the swagger; but it all seemed to die out prematurely, and
the playful call sounded like a moan. It was too
confoundedly awful. "What have you done with Marlow?" Jim
was asking; and then, "Gone down—has he? Funny I didn't meet
him. . . . You there, Marlow?"
'I didn't answer. I wasn't going in—not yet at any rate.
I really couldn't. While he was calling me I was engaged in
making my escape through a little gate leading out upon a
stretch of newly cleared ground. No; I couldn't face them
yet. I walked hastily with lowered head along a trodden
path. The ground rose gently, the few big trees had been
felled, the undergrowth had been cut down and the grass
fired. He had a mind to try a coffee-plantation there. The
big hill, rearing its double summit coal-black in the clear
yellow glow of the rising moon, seemed to cast its shadow
upon the ground prepared for that experiment. He was going
to try ever so many experiments; I had admired his energy,
his enterprise, and his shrewdness. Nothing on earth seemed
less real now than his plans, his energy, and his
enthusiasm; and raising my eyes, I saw part of the moon
glittering through the bushes at the bottom of the chasm.
For a moment it looked as though the smooth disc, falling
from its place in the sky upon the earth, had rolled to the
bottom of that precipice: its ascending movement was like a
leisurely rebound; it disengaged itself from the tangle of
twigs; the bare contorted limb of some tree, growing on the
slope, made a black crack right across its face. It threw
its level rays afar as if from a cavern, and in this
mournful eclipse-like light the stumps of felled trees
uprose very dark, the heavy shadows fell at my feet on all
sides, my own moving shadow, and across my path the shadow
of the solitary grave perpetually garlanded with flowers. In
the darkened moonlight the interlaced blossoms took on
shapes foreign to one's memory and colours indefinable to
the eye, as though they had been special flowers gathered by
no man, grown not in this world, and destined for the use of
the dead alone. Their powerful scent hung in the warm air,
making it thick and heavy like the fumes of incense. The
lumps of white coral shone round the dark mound like a
chaplet of bleached skulls, and everything around was so
quiet that when I stood still all sound and all movement in
the world seemed to come to an end.
'It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one
grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the
living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of
mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque
miseries. In its noble struggles too—who knows? The human
heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant
enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that
would cast it off?
'I suppose I must have fallen into a sentimental mood; I
only know that I stood there long enough for the sense of
utter solitude to get hold of me so completely that all I
had lately seen, all I had heard, and the very human speech
itself, seemed to have passed away out of existence, living
only for a while longer in my memory, as though I had been
the last of mankind. It was a strange and melancholy
illusion, evolved half-consciously like all our illusions,
which I suspect only to be visions of remote unattainable
truth, seen dimly. This was, indeed, one of the lost,
forgotten, unknown places of the earth; I had looked under
its obscure surface; and I felt that when to-morrow I had
left it for ever, it would slip out of existence, to live
only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion. I have
that feeling about me now; perhaps it is that feeling which
has incited me to tell you the story, to try to hand over to
you, as it were, its very existence, its reality—the truth
disclosed in a moment of illusion.
'Cornelius broke upon it. He bolted out, vermin-like,
from the long grass growing in a depression of the ground. I
believe his house was rotting somewhere near by, though I've
never seen it, not having been far enough in that direction.
He ran towards me upon the path; his feet, shod in dirty
white shoes, twinkled on the dark earth; he pulled himself
up, and began to whine and cringe under a tall stove-pipe
hat. His dried-up little carcass was swallowed up, totally
lost, in a suit of black broadcloth. That was his costume
for holidays and ceremonies, and it reminded me that this
was the fourth Sunday I had spent in Patusan. All the time
of my stay I had been vaguely aware of his desire to confide
in me, if he only could get me all to himself. He hung about
with an eager craving look on his sour yellow little face;
but his timidity had kept him back as much as my natural
reluctance to have anything to do with such an unsavoury
creature. He would have succeeded, nevertheless, had he not
been so ready to slink off as soon as you looked at him. He
would slink off before Jim's severe gaze, before my own,
which I tried to make indifferent, even before Tamb' Itam's
surly, superior glance. He was perpetually slinking away;
whenever seen he was seen moving off deviously, his face
over his shoulder, with either a mistrustful snarl or a
woe-begone, piteous, mute aspect; but no assumed expression
could conceal this innate irremediable abjectness of his
nature, any more than an arrangement of clothing can conceal
some monstrous deformity of the body.
'I don't know whether it was the demoralisation of my
utter defeat in my encounter with a spectre of fear less
than an hour ago, but I let him capture me without even a
show of resistance. I was doomed to be the recipient of
confidences, and to be confronted with unanswerable
questions. It was trying; but the contempt, the unreasoned
contempt, the man's appearance provoked, made it easier to
bear. He couldn't possibly matter. Nothing mattered, since I
had made up my mind that Jim, for whom alone I cared, had at
last mastered his fate. He had told me he was satisfied . .
. nearly. This is going further than most of us dare. I—who
have the right to think myself good enough—dare not. Neither
does any of you here, I suppose? . . .'
Marlow paused, as if expecting an answer. Nobody spoke.
'Quite right,' he began again. 'Let no soul know, since
the truth can be wrung out of us only by some cruel, little,
awful catastrophe. But he is one of us, and he could say he
was satisfied . . . nearly. Just fancy this! Nearly
satisfied. One could almost envy him his catastrophe. Nearly
satisfied. After this nothing could matter. It did not
matter who suspected him, who trusted him, who loved him,
who hated him—especially as it was Cornelius who hated him.
'Yet after all this was a kind of recognition. You shall
judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends, and
this enemy of Jim was such as no decent man would be ashamed
to own, without, however, making too much of him. This was
the view Jim took, and in which I shared; but Jim
disregarded him on general grounds. "My dear Marlow," he
said, "I feel that if I go straight nothing can touch me.
Indeed I do. Now you have been long enough here to have a
good look round—and, frankly, don't you think I am pretty
safe? It all depends upon me, and, by Jove! I have lots of
confidence in myself. The worst thing he could do would be
to kill me, I suppose. I don't think for a moment he would.
He couldn't, you know—not if I were myself to hand him a
loaded rifle for the purpose, and then turn my back on him.
That's the sort of thing he is. And suppose he would—suppose
he could? Well—what of that? I didn't come here flying for
my life—did I? I came here to set my back against the wall,
and I am going to stay here . . ."
'"Till you are quite satisfied," I struck in.
'We were sitting at the time under the roof in the stern
of his boat; twenty paddles flashed like one, ten on a side,
striking the water with a single splash, while behind our
backs Tamb' Itam dipped silently right and left, and stared
right down the river, attentive to keep the long canoe in
the greatest strength of the current. Jim bowed his head,
and our last talk seemed to flicker out for good. He was
seeing me off as far as the mouth of the river. The schooner
had left the day before, working down and drifting on the
ebb, while I had prolonged my stay overnight. And now he was
seeing me off.
'Jim had been a little angry with me for mentioning
Cornelius at all. I had not, in truth, said much. The man
was too insignificant to be dangerous, though he was as full
of hate as he could hold. He had called me "honourable sir"
at every second sentence, and had whined at my elbow as he
followed me from the grave of his "late wife" to the gate of
Jim's compound. He declared himself the most unhappy of men,
a victim, crushed like a worm; he entreated me to look at
him. I wouldn't turn my head to do so; but I could see out
of the corner of my eye his obsequious shadow gliding after
mine, while the moon, suspended on our right hand, seemed to
gloat serenely upon the spectacle. He tried to explain—as
I've told you—his share in the events of the memorable
night. It was a matter of expediency. How could he know who
was going to get the upper hand? "I would have saved him,
honourable sir! I would have saved him for eighty dollars,"
he protested in dulcet tones, keeping a pace behind me. "He
has saved himself," I said, "and he has forgiven you." I
heard a sort of tittering, and turned upon him; at once he
appeared ready to take to his heels. "What are you laughing
at?" I asked, standing still. "Don't be deceived, honourable
sir!" he shrieked, seemingly losing all control over his
feelings. "He save himself! He knows nothing,
honourable sir—nothing whatever. Who is he? What does he
want here—the big thief? What does he want here? He throws
dust into everybody's eyes; he throws dust into your eyes,
honourable sir; but he can't throw dust into my eyes. He is
a big fool, honourable sir." I laughed contemptuously, and,
turning on my heel, began to walk on again. He ran up to my
elbow and whispered forcibly, "He's no more than a little
child here—like a little child—a little child." Of course I
didn't take the slightest notice, and seeing the time
pressed, because we were approaching the bamboo fence that
glittered over the blackened ground of the clearing, he came
to the point. He commenced by being abjectly lachrymose. His
great misfortunes had affected his head. He hoped I would
kindly forget what nothing but his troubles made him say. He
didn't mean anything by it; only the honourable sir did not
know what it was to be ruined, broken down, trampled upon.
After this introduction he approached the matter near his
heart, but in such a rambling, ejaculatory, craven fashion,
that for a long time I couldn't make out what he was driving
at. He wanted me to intercede with Jim in his favour. It
seemed, too, to be some sort of money affair. I heard time
and again the words, "Moderate provision—suitable present."
He seemed to be claiming value for something, and he even
went the length of saying with some warmth that life was not
worth having if a man were to be robbed of everything. I did
not breathe a word, of course, but neither did I stop my
ears. The gist of the affair, which became clear to me
gradually, was in this, that he regarded himself as entitled
to some money in exchange for the girl. He had brought her
up. Somebody else's child. Great trouble and pains—old man
now—suitable present. If the honourable sir would say a
word. . . . I stood still to look at him with curiosity, and
fearful lest I should think him extortionate, I suppose, he
hastily brought himself to make a concession. In
consideration of a "suitable present" given at once, he
would, he declared, be willing to undertake the charge of
the girl, "without any other provision—when the time came
for the gentleman to go home." His little yellow face, all
crumpled as though it had been squeezed together, expressed
the most anxious, eager avarice. His voice whined coaxingly,
"No more trouble—natural guardian—a sum of money . . ."
'I stood there and marvelled. That kind of thing, with
him, was evidently a vocation. I discovered suddenly in his
cringing attitude a sort of assurance, as though he had been
all his life dealing in certitudes. He must have thought I
was dispassionately considering his proposal, because he
became as sweet as honey. "Every gentleman made a provision
when the time came to go home," he began insinuatingly. I
slammed the little gate. "In this case, Mr. Cornelius," I
said, "the time will never come." He took a few seconds to
gather this in. "What!" he fairly squealed. "Why," I
continued from my side of the gate, "haven't you heard him
say so himself? He will never go home." "Oh! this is too
much," he shouted. He would not address me as "honoured sir"
any more. He was very still for a time, and then without a
trace of humility began very low: "Never go—ah! He—he—he
comes here devil knows from where—comes here—devil knows
why—to trample on me till I die—ah—trample" (he stamped
softly with both feet), "trample like this—nobody knows
why—till I die. . . ." His voice became quite extinct; he
was bothered by a little cough; he came up close to the
fence and told me, dropping into a confidential and piteous
tone, that he would not be trampled upon.
"Patience—patience," he muttered, striking his breast. I had
done laughing at him, but unexpectedly he treated me to a
wild cracked burst of it. "Ha! ha! ha! We shall see! We
shall see! What! Steal from me! Steal from me everything!
Everything! Everything!" His head drooped on one shoulder,
his hands were hanging before him lightly clasped. One would
have thought he had cherished the girl with surpassing love,
that his spirit had been crushed and his heart broken by the
most cruel of spoliations. Suddenly he lifted his head and
shot out an infamous word. "Like her mother—she is like her
deceitful mother. Exactly. In her face, too. In her face.
The devil!" He leaned his forehead against the fence, and in
that position uttered threats and horrible blasphemies in
Portuguese in very weak ejaculations, mingled with miserable
plaints and groans, coming out with a heave of the shoulders
as though he had been overtaken by a deadly fit of sickness.
It was an inexpressibly grotesque and vile performance, and
I hastened away. He tried to shout something after me. Some
disparagement of Jim, I believe—not too loud though, we were
too near the house. All I heard distinctly was, "No more
than a little child—a little child."'
CHAPTER 35
'But next morning, at the first bend of the river
shutting off the houses of Patusan, all this dropped out of
my sight bodily, with its colour, its design, and its
meaning, like a picture created by fancy on a canvas, upon
which, after long contemplation, you turn your back for the
last time. It remains in the memory motionless, unfaded,
with its life arrested, in an unchanging light. There are
the ambitions, the fears, the hate, the hopes, and they
remain in my mind just as I had seen them—intense and as if
for ever suspended in their expression. I had turned away
from the picture and was going back to the world where
events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a
clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones. I
wasn't going to dive into it; I would have enough to do to
keep my head above the surface. But as to what I was leaving
behind, I cannot imagine any alteration. The immense and
magnanimous Doramin and his little motherly witch of a wife,
gazing together upon the land and nursing secretly their
dreams of parental ambition; Tunku Allang, wizened and
greatly perplexed; Dain Waris, intelligent and brave, with
his faith in Jim, with his firm glance and his ironic
friendliness; the girl, absorbed in her frightened,
suspicious adoration; Tamb' Itam, surly and faithful;
Cornelius, leaning his forehead against the fence under the
moonlight—I am certain of them. They exist as if under an
enchanter's wand. But the figure round which all these are
grouped—that one lives, and I am not certain of him. No
magician's wand can immobilise him under my eyes. He is one
of us.
'Jim, as I've told you, accompanied me on the first stage
of my journey back to the world he had renounced, and the
way at times seemed to lead through the very heart of
untouched wilderness. The empty reaches sparkled under the
high sun; between the high walls of vegetation the heat
drowsed upon the water, and the boat, impelled vigorously,
cut her way through the air that seemed to have settled
dense and warm under the shelter of lofty trees.
'The shadow of the impending separation had already put
an immense space between us, and when we spoke it was with
an effort, as if to force our low voices across a vast and
increasing distance. The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side
by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud,
of mush, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting
our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand
far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open un
immense portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky
above our heads widened, a far-off murmur reached our ears,
a freshness enveloped us, filled our lungs, quickened our
thoughts, our blood, our regrets—and, straight ahead, the
forests sank down against the dark-blue ridge of the sea.
'I breathed deeply, I revelled in the vastness of the
opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to
vibrate with the toil of life, with the energy of an
impeccable world. This sky and this sea were open to me. The
girl was right—there was a sign, a call in them—something to
which I responded with every fibre of my being. I let my
eyes roam through space, like a man released from bonds who
stretches his cramped limbs, runs, leaps, responds to the
inspiring elation of freedom. "This is glorious!" I cried,
and then I looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his
head sunk on his breast and said "Yes," without raising his
eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the
offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
'I remember the smallest details of that afternoon. We
landed on a bit of white beach. It was backed by a low cliff
wooded on the brow, draped in creepers to the very foot.
Below us the plain of the sea, of a serene and intense blue,
stretched with a slight upward tilt to the thread-like
horizon drawn at the height of our eyes. Great waves of
glitter blew lightly along the pitted dark surface, as swift
as feathers chased by the breeze. A chain of islands sat
broken and massive facing the wide estuary, displayed in a
sheet of pale glassy water reflecting faithfully the contour
of the shore. High in the colourless sunshine a solitary
bird, all black, hovered, dropping and soaring above the
same spot with a slight rocking motion of the wings. A
ragged, sooty bunch of flimsy mat hovels was perched over
its own inverted image upon a crooked multitude of high
piles the colour of ebony. A tiny black canoe put off from
amongst them with two tiny men, all black, who toiled
exceedingly, striking down at the pale water: and the canoe
seemed to slide painfully on a mirror. This bunch of
miserable hovels was the fishing village that boasted of the
white lord's especial protection, and the two men crossing
over were the old headman and his son-in-law. They landed
and walked up to us on the white sand, lean, dark-brown as
if dried in smoke, with ashy patches on the skin of their
naked shoulders and breasts. Their heads were bound in dirty
but carefully folded headkerchiefs, and the old man began at
once to state a complaint, voluble, stretching a lank arm,
screwing up at Jim his old bleared eyes confidently. The
Rajah's people would not leave them alone; there had been
some trouble about a lot of turtles' eggs his people had
collected on the islets there—and leaning at arm's-length
upon his paddle, he pointed with a brown skinny hand over
the sea. Jim listened for a time without looking up, and at
last told him gently to wait. He would hear him by-and-by.
They withdrew obediently to some little distance, and sat on
their heels, with their paddles lying before them on the
sand; the silvery gleams in their eyes followed our
movements patiently; and the immensity of the outspread sea,
the stillness of the coast, passing north and south beyond
the limits of my vision, made up one colossal Presence
watching us four dwarfs isolated on a strip of glistening
sand.
'"The trouble is," remarked Jim moodily, "that for
generations these beggars of fishermen in that village there
had been considered as the Rajah's personal slaves—and the
old rip can't get it into his head that . . ."
'He paused. "That you have changed all that," I said.
'"Yes I've changed all that," he muttered in a gloomy
voice.
'"You have had your opportunity," I pursued.
'"Have I?" he said. "Well, yes. I suppose so. Yes. I have
got back my confidence in myself—a good name—yet sometimes I
wish . . . No! I shall hold what I've got. Can't expect
anything more." He flung his arm out towards the sea. "Not
out there anyhow." He stamped his foot upon the sand. "This
is my limit, because nothing less will do."
'We continued pacing the beach. "Yes, I've changed all
that," he went on, with a sidelong glance at the two patient
squatting fishermen; "but only try to think what it would be
if I went away. Jove! can't you see it? Hell loose. No!
To-morrow I shall go and take my chance of drinking that
silly old Tunku Allang's coffee, and I shall make no end of
fuss over these rotten turtles' eggs. No. I can't
say—enough. Never. I must go on, go on for ever holding up
my end, to feel sure that nothing can touch me. I must stick
to their belief in me to feel safe and to—to" . . . He cast
about for a word, seemed to look for it on the sea . . . "to
keep in touch with" . . . His voice sank suddenly to a
murmur . . . "with those whom, perhaps, I shall never see
any more. With—with—you, for instance."
'I was profoundly humbled by his words. "For God's sake,"
I said, "don't set me up, my dear fellow; just look to
yourself." I felt a gratitude, an affection, for that
straggler whose eyes had singled me out, keeping my place in
the ranks of an insignificant multitude. How little that was
to boast of, after all! I turned my burning face away; under
the low sun, glowing, darkened and crimson, like un ember
snatched from the fire, the sea lay outspread, offering all
its immense stillness to the approach of the fiery orb.
Twice he was going to speak, but checked himself; at last,
as if he had found a formula—
'"I shall be faithful," he said quietly. "I shall be
faithful," he repeated, without looking at me, but for the
first time letting his eyes wander upon the waters, whose
blueness had changed to a gloomy purple under the fires of
sunset. Ah! he was romantic, romantic. I recalled some words
of Stein's. . . . "In the destructive element immerse! . . .
To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream—and
so—always—usque ad finem . . ." He was romantic, but none
the less true. Who could tell what forms, what visions, what
faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the
west! . . . A small boat, leaving the schooner, moved
slowly, with a regular beat of two oars, towards the
sandbank to take me off. "And then there's Jewel," he said,
out of the great silence of earth, sky, and sea, which had
mastered my very thoughts so that his voice made me start.
"There's Jewel." "Yes," I murmured. "I need not tell you
what she is to me," he pursued. "You've seen. In time she
will come to understand . . ." "I hope so," I interrupted.
"She trusts me, too," he mused, and then changed his tone.
"When shall we meet next, I wonder?" he said.
'"Never—unless you come out," I answered, avoiding his
glance. He didn't seem to be surprised; he kept very quiet
for a while.
'"Good-bye, then," he said, after a pause. "Perhaps it's
just as well."
'We shook hands, and I walked to the boat, which waited
with her nose on the beach. The schooner, her mainsail set
and jib-sheet to windward, curveted on the purple sea; there
was a rosy tinge on her sails. "Will you be going home again
soon?" asked Jim, just as I swung my leg over the gunwale.
"In a year or so if I live," I said. The forefoot grated on
the sand, the boat floated, the wet oars flashed and dipped
once, twice. Jim, at the water's edge, raised his voice.
"Tell them . . ." he began. I signed to the men to cease
rowing, and waited in wonder. Tell who? The half-submerged
sun faced him; I could see its red gleam in his eyes that
looked dumbly at me. . . . "No—nothing," he said, and with a
slight wave of his hand motioned the boat away. I did not
look again at the shore till I had clambered on board the
schooner.
'By that time the sun had set. The twilight lay over the
east, and the coast, turned black, extended infinitely its
sombre wall that seemed the very stronghold of the night;
the western horizon was one great blaze of gold and crimson
in which a big detached cloud floated dark and still,
casting a slaty shadow on the water beneath, and I saw Jim
on the beach watching the schooner fall off and gather
headway.
'The two half-naked fishermen had arisen as soon as I had
gone; they were no doubt pouring the plaint of their
trifling, miserable, oppressed lives into the ears of the
white lord, and no doubt he was listening to it, making it
his own, for was it not a part of his luck—the luck "from
the word Go"—the luck to which he had assured me he was so
completely equal? They, too, I should think, were in luck,
and I was sure their pertinacity would be equal to it. Their
dark-skinned bodies vanished on the dark background long
before I had lost sight of their protector. He was white
from head to foot, and remained persistently visible with
the stronghold of the night at his back, the sea at his
feet, the opportunity by his side—still veiled. What do you
say? Was it still veiled? I don't know. For me that white
figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at
the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast
from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk
already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a
child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to
catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And,
suddenly, I lost him. . . .
CHAPTER 36
With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his
audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract,
pensive gaze. Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone
without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the
last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness
itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made
discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them
seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away
with him like a secret; but there was only one man of all
these listeners who was ever to hear the last word of the
story. It came to him at home, more than two years later,
and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in
Marlow's upright and angular handwriting.
The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then,
laying it down, went to the window. His rooms were in the
highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance could
travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he
were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse. The slopes
of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded
each other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and
from the depths of the town under his feet ascended a
confused and unceasing mutter. The spires of churches,
numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons on a maze
of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with
the falling dusk of a winter's evening; and the booming of a
big clock on a tower, striking the hour, rolled past in
voluminous, austere bursts of sound, with a shrill vibrating
cry at the core. He drew the heavy curtains.
The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a
sheltered pool, his footfalls made no sound on the carpet,
his wandering days were over. No more horizons as boundless
as hope, no more twilights within the forests as solemn as
temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered Country
over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour
was striking! No more! No more!—but the opened packet under
the lamp brought back the sounds, the visions, the very
savour of the past—a multitude of fading faces, a tumult of
low voices, dying away upon the shores of distant seas under
a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He sighed and sat
down to read.
At first he saw three distinct enclosures. A good many
pages closely blackened and pinned together; a loose square
sheet of greyish paper with a few words traced in a
handwriting he had never seen before, and an explanatory
letter from Marlow. From this last fell another letter,
yellowed by time and frayed on the folds. He picked it up
and, laying it aside, turned to Marlow's message, ran
swiftly over the opening lines, and, checking himself,
thereafter read on deliberately, like one approaching with
slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered
country.
'. . . I don't suppose you've forgotten,' went on the
letter. 'You alone have showed an interest in him that
survived the telling of his story, though I remember well
you would not admit he had mastered his fate. You prophesied
for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with
acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love
sprung from pity and youth. You had said you knew so well
"that kind of thing," its illusory satisfaction, its
unavoidable deception. You said also—I call to mind—that
"giving your life up to them" (them meaning all of mankind
with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) "was like
selling your soul to a brute." You contended that "that kind
of thing" was only endurable and enduring when based on a
firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in
whose name are established the order, the morality of an
ethical progress. "We want its strength at our backs," you
had said. "We want a belief in its necessity and its
justice, to make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our
lives. Without it the sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the
way of offering is no better than the way to perdition." In
other words, you maintained that we must fight in the ranks
or our lives don't count. Possibly! You ought to know—be it
said without malice—you who have rushed into one or two
places single-handed and came out cleverly, without singeing
your wings. The point, however, is that of all mankind Jim
had no dealings but with himself, and the question is
whether at the last he had not confessed to a faith mightier
than the laws of order and progress.
'I affirm nothing. Perhaps you may pronounce—after you've
read. There is much truth—after all—in the common expression
"under a cloud." It is impossible to see him
clearly—especially as it is through the eyes of others that
we take our last look at him. I have no hesitation in
imparting to you all I know of the last episode that, as he
used to say, had "come to him." One wonders whether this was
perhaps that supreme opportunity, that last and satisfying
test for which I had always suspected him to be waiting,
before he could frame a message to the impeccable world. You
remember that when I was leaving him for the last time he
had asked whether I would be going home soon, and suddenly
cried after me, "Tell them . . ." I had waited—curious I'll
own, and hopeful too—only to hear him shout, "No—nothing."
That was all then—and there will be nothing more; there will
be no message, unless such as each of us can interpret for
himself from the language of facts, that are so often more
enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words. He made,
it is true, one more attempt to deliver himself; but that
too failed, as you may perceive if you look at the sheet of
greyish foolscap enclosed here. He had tried to write; do
you notice the commonplace hand? It is headed "The Fort,
Patusan." I suppose he had carried out his intention of
making out of his house a place of defence. It was an
excellent plan: a deep ditch, an earth wall topped by a
palisade, and at the angles guns mounted on platforms to
sweep each side of the square. Doramin had agreed to furnish
him the guns; and so each man of his party would know there
was a place of safety, upon which every faithful partisan
could rally in case of some sudden danger. All this showed
his judicious foresight, his faith in the future. What he
called "my own people"—the liberated captives of the
Sherif—were to make a distinct quarter of Patusan, with
their huts and little plots of ground under the walls of the
stronghold. Within he would be an invincible host in himself
"The Fort, Patusan." No date, as you observe. What is a
number and a name to a day of days? It is also impossible to
say whom he had in his mind when he seized the pen:
Stein—myself—the world at large—or was this only the aimless
startled cry of a solitary man confronted by his fate? "An
awful thing has happened," he wrote before he flung the pen
down for the first time; look at the ink blot resembling the
head of an arrow under these words. After a while he had
tried again, scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead,
another line. "I must now at once . . ." The pen had
spluttered, and that time he gave it up. There's nothing
more; he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice
could span. I can understand this. He was overwhelmed by the
inexplicable; he was overwhelmed by his own personality—the
gift of that destiny which he had done his best to master.
'I send you also an old letter—a very old letter. It was
found carefully preserved in his writing-case. It is from
his father, and by the date you can see he must have
received it a few days before he joined the Patna. Thus it
must be the last letter he ever had from home. He had
treasured it all these years. The good old parson fancied
his sailor son. I've looked in at a sentence here and there.
There is nothing in it except just affection. He tells his
"dear James" that the last long letter from him was very
"honest and entertaining." He would not have him "judge men
harshly or hastily." There are four pages of it, easy
morality and family news. Tom had "taken orders." Carrie's
husband had "money losses." The old chap goes on equably
trusting Providence and the established order of the
universe, but alive to its small dangers and its small
mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in
the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and
comfortable study, where for forty years he had
conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his
little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of
life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had
written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy,
over there, on the other side of the earth. But what of the
distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is
only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner
of dying. He hopes his "dear James" will never forget that
"who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant
hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin. Therefore
resolve fixedly never, through any possible motives, to do
anything which you believe to be wrong." There is also some
news of a favourite dog; and a pony, "which all you boys
used to ride," had gone blind from old age and had to be
shot. The old chap invokes Heaven's blessing; the mother and
all the girls then at home send their love. . . . No, there
is nothing much in that yellow frayed letter fluttering out
of his cherishing grasp after so many years. It was never
answered, but who can say what converse he may have held
with all these placid, colourless forms of men and women
peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger or
strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of
undisturbed rectitude. It seems amazing that he should
belong to it, he to whom so many things "had come." Nothing
ever came to them; they would never be taken unawares, and
never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they all
are, evoked by the mild gossip of the father, all these
brothers and sisters, bone of his bone and flesh of his
flesh, gazing with clear unconscious eyes, while I seem to
see him, returned at last, no longer a mere white speck at
the heart of an immense mystery, but of full stature,
standing disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes, with a
stern and romantic aspect, but always mute, dark—under a
cloud.
'The story of the last events you will find in the few
pages enclosed here. You must admit that it is romantic
beyond the wildest dreams of his boyhood, and yet there is
to my mind a sort of profound and terrifying logic in it, as
if it were our imagination alone that could set loose upon
us the might of an overwhelming destiny. The imprudence of
our thoughts recoils upon our heads; who toys with the sword
shall perish by the sword. This astounding adventure, of
which the most astounding part is that it is true, comes on
as an unavoidable consequence. Something of the sort had to
happen. You repeat this to yourself while you marvel that
such a thing could happen in the year of grace before last.
But it has happened—and there is no disputing its logic.
'I put it down here for you as though I had been an
eyewitness. My information was fragmentary, but I've fitted
the pieces together, and there is enough of them to make an
intelligible picture. I wonder how he would have related it
himself. He has confided so much in me that at times it
seems as though he must come in presently and tell the story
in his own words, in his careless yet feeling voice, with
his offhand manner, a little puzzled, a little bothered, a
little hurt, but now and then by a word or a phrase giving
one of these glimpses of his very own self that were never
any good for purposes of orientation. It's difficult to
believe he will never come. I shall never hear his voice
again, nor shall I see his smooth tan-and-pink face with a
white line on the forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened
by excitement to a profound, unfathomable blue.'
CHAPTER 37
'It all begins with a remarkable exploit of a man called
Brown, who stole with complete success a Spanish schooner
out of a small bay near Zamboanga. Till I discovered the
fellow my information was incomplete, but most unexpectedly
I did come upon him a few hours before he gave up his
arrogant ghost. Fortunately he was willing and able to talk
between the choking fits of asthma, and his racked body
writhed with malicious exultation at the bare thought of
Jim. He exulted thus at the idea that he had "paid out the
stuck-up beggar after all." He gloated over his action. I
had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes
if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much
certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from
intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to
pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body. The story
also reveals unsuspected depths of cunning in the wretched
Cornelius, whose abject and intense hate acts like a subtle
inspiration, pointing out an unerring way towards revenge.
'"I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of
a fool he was," gasped the dying Brown. "He a man! Hell! He
was a hollow sham. As if he couldn't have said straight out,
'Hands off my plunder!' blast him! That would have been like
a man! Rot his superior soul! He had me there—but he hadn't
devil enough in him to make an end of me. Not he! A thing
like that letting me off as if I wasn't worth a kick! . . ."
Brown struggled desperately for breath. . . . "Fraud. . . .
Letting me off. . . . And so I did make an end of him after
all. . . ." He choked again. . . . "I expect this thing'll
kill me, but I shall die easy now. You . . . you here . . .
I don't know your name—I would give you a five-pound note
if—if I had it—for the news—or my name's not Brown. . . ."
He grinned horribly. . . . "Gentleman Brown."
'He said all these things in profound gasps, staring at
me with his yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face;
he jerked his left arm; a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung
almost into his lap; a dirty ragged blanket covered his
legs. I had found him out in Bankok through that busybody
Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially,
directed me where to look. It appears that a sort of
loafing, fuddled vagabond—a white man living amongst the
natives with a Siamese woman—had considered it a great
privilege to give a shelter to the last days of the famous
Gentleman Brown. While he was talking to me in the wretched
hovel, and, as it were, fighting for every minute of his
life, the Siamese woman, with big bare legs and a stupid
coarse face, sat in a dark corner chewing betel stolidly.
Now and then she would get up for the purpose of shooing a
chicken away from the door. The whole hut shook when she
walked. An ugly yellow child, naked and pot-bellied like a
little heathen god, stood at the foot of the couch, finger
in mouth, lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the
dying man.
'He talked feverishly; but in the middle of a word,
perhaps, an invisible hand would take him by the throat, and
he would look at me dumbly with an expression of doubt and
anguish. He seemed to fear that I would get tired of waiting
and go away, leaving him with his tale untold, with his
exultation unexpressed. He died during the night, I believe,
but by that time I had nothing more to learn.
'So much as to Brown, for the present.
'Eight months before this, coming into Samarang, I went
as usual to see Stein. On the garden side of the house a
Malay on the verandah greeted me shyly, and I remembered
that I had seen him in Patusan, in Jim's house, amongst
other Bugis men who used to come in the evening to talk
interminably over their war reminiscences and to discuss
State affairs. Jim had pointed him out to me once as a
respectable petty trader owning a small seagoing native
craft, who had showed himself "one of the best at the taking
of the stockade." I was not very surprised to see him, since
any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would
naturally find his way to Stein's house. I returned his
greeting and passed on. At the door of Stein's room I came
upon another Malay in whom I recognised Tamb' Itam.
'I asked him at once what he was doing there; it occurred
to me that Jim might have come on a visit. I own I was
pleased and excited at the thought. Tamb' Itam looked as if
he did not know what to say. "Is Tuan Jim inside?" I asked
impatiently. "No," he mumbled, hanging his head for a
moment, and then with sudden earnestness, "He would not
fight. He would not fight," he repeated twice. As he seemed
unable to say anything else, I pushed him aside and went in.
'Stein, tall and stooping, stood alone in the middle of
the room between the rows of butterfly cases. "Ach! is it
you, my friend?" he said sadly, peering through his glasses.
A drab sack-coat of alpaca hung, unbuttoned, down to his
knees. He had a Panama hat on his head, and there were deep
furrows on his pale cheeks. "What's the matter now?" I asked
nervously. "There's Tamb' Itam there. . . ." "Come and see
the girl. Come and see the girl. She is here," he said, with
a half-hearted show of activity. I tried to detain him, but
with gentle obstinacy he would take no notice of my eager
questions. "She is here, she is here," he repeated, in great
perturbation. "They came here two days ago. An old man like
me, a stranger—sehen Sie—cannot do much. . . . Come this
way. . . . Young hearts are unforgiving. . . ." I could see
he was in utmost distress. . . . "The strength of life in
them, the cruel strength of life. . . ." He mumbled, leading
me round the house; I followed him, lost in dismal and angry
conjectures. At the door of the drawing-room he barred my
way. "He loved her very much," he said interrogatively, and
I only nodded, feeling so bitterly disappointed that I would
not trust myself to speak. "Very frightful," he murmured.
"She can't understand me. I am only a strange old man.
Perhaps you . . . she knows you. Talk to her. We can't leave
it like this. Tell her to forgive him. It was very
frightful." "No doubt," I said, exasperated at being in the
dark; "but have you forgiven him?" He looked at me queerly.
"You shall hear," he said, and opening the door, absolutely
pushed me in.
'You know Stein's big house and the two immense
reception-rooms, uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full
of solitude and of shining things that look as if never
beheld by the eye of man? They are cool on the hottest days,
and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave underground.
I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl
sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she
rested her head, the face hidden in her arms. The waxed
floor reflected her dimly as though it had been a sheet of
frozen water. The rattan screens were down, and through the
strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the trees
outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long
draperies of windows and doorways. Her white figure seemed
shaped in snow; the pendent crystals of a great chandelier
clicked above her head like glittering icicles. She looked
up and watched my approach. I was chilled as if these vast
apartments had been the cold abode of despair.
'She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped,
looking down at her: "He has left me," she said quietly;
"you always leave us—for your own ends." Her face was set.
All the heat of life seemed withdrawn within some
inaccessible spot in her breast. "It would have been easy to
die with him," she went on, and made a slight weary gesture
as if giving up the incomprehensible. "He would not! It was
like a blindness—and yet it was I who was speaking to him;
it was I who stood before his eyes; it was at me that he
looked all the time! Ah! you are hard, treacherous, without
truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is
it that you are all mad?"
'I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped
it, it hung down to the floor. That indifference, more awful
than tears, cries, and reproaches, seemed to defy time and
consolation. You felt that nothing you could say would reach
the seat of the still and benumbing pain.
'Stein had said, "You shall hear." I did hear. I heard it
all, listening with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her
inflexible weariness. She could not grasp the real sense of
what she was telling me, and her resentment filled me with
pity for her—for him too. I stood rooted to the spot after
she had finished. Leaning on her arm, she stared with hard
eyes, and the wind passed in gusts, the crystals kept on
clicking in the greenish gloom. She went on whispering to
herself: "And yet he was looking at me! He could see my
face, hear my voice, hear my grief! When I used to sit at
his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his hand on my
head, the curse of cruelty and madness was already within
him, waiting for the day. The day came! . . . and before the
sun had set he could not see me any more—he was made blind
and deaf and without pity, as you all are. He shall have no
tears from me. Never, never. Not one tear. I will not! He
went away from me as if I had been worse than death. He fled
as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen in
his sleep. . . ."
'Her steady eyes seemed to strain after the shape of a
man torn out of her arms by the strength of a dream. She
made no sign to my silent bow. I was glad to escape.
'I saw her once again, the same afternoon. On leaving her
I had gone in search of Stein, whom I could not find
indoors; and I wandered out, pursued by distressful
thoughts, into the gardens, those famous gardens of Stein,
in which you can find every plant and tree of tropical
lowlands. I followed the course of the canalised stream, and
sat for a long time on a shaded bench near the ornamental
pond, where some waterfowl with clipped wings were diving
and splashing noisily. The branches of casuarina trees
behind me swayed lightly, incessantly, reminding me of the
soughing of fir trees at home.
'This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment
to my meditations. She had said he had been driven away from
her by a dream,—and there was no answer one could make
her—there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a
transgression. And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its
blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power
upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive
devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
'When I rose to get back to the house I caught sight of
Stein's drab coat through a gap in the foliage, and very
soon at a turn of the path I came upon him walking with the
girl. Her little hand rested on his forearm, and under the
broad, flat rim of his Panama hat he bent over her,
grey-haired, paternal, with compassionate and chivalrous
deference. I stood aside, but they stopped, facing me. His
gaze was bent on the ground at his feet; the girl, erect and
slight on his arm, stared sombrely beyond my shoulder with
black, clear, motionless eyes. "Schrecklich," he murmured.
"Terrible! Terrible! What can one do?" He seemed to be
appealing to me, but her youth, the length of the days
suspended over her head, appealed to me more; and suddenly,
even as I realised that nothing could be said, I found
myself pleading his cause for her sake. "You must forgive
him," I concluded, and my own voice seemed to me muffled,
lost in un irresponsive deaf immensity. "We all want to be
forgiven," I added after a while.
'"What have I done?" she asked with her lips only.
'"You always mistrusted him," I said.
'"He was like the others," she pronounced slowly.
'"Not like the others," I protested, but she continued
evenly, without any feeling—
'"He was false." And suddenly Stein broke in. "No! no!
no! My poor child! . . ." He patted her hand lying passively
on his sleeve. "No! no! Not false! True! True! True!" He
tried to look into her stony face. "You don't understand.
Ach! Why you do not understand? . . . Terrible," he said to
me. "Some day she shall understand."
'"Will you explain?" I asked, looking hard at him. They
moved on.
'I watched them. Her gown trailed on the path, her black
hair fell loose. She walked upright and light by the side of
the tall man, whose long shapeless coat hung in
perpendicular folds from the stooping shoulders, whose feet
moved slowly. They disappeared beyond that spinney (you may
remember) where sixteen different kinds of bamboo grow
together, all distinguishable to the learned eye. For my
part, I was fascinated by the exquisite grace and beauty of
that fluted grove, crowned with pointed leaves and feathery
heads, the lightness, the vigour, the charm as distinct as a
voice of that unperplexed luxuriating life. I remember
staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger
within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly
grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the
tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other
shores, of other faces.
'I drove back to town the same afternoon, taking with me
Tamb' Itam and the other Malay, in whose seagoing craft they
had escaped in the bewilderment, fear, and gloom of the
disaster. The shock of it seemed to have changed their
natures. It had turned her passion into stone, and it made
the surly taciturn Tamb' Itam almost loquacious. His
surliness, too, was subdued into puzzled humility, as though
he had seen the failure of a potent charm in a supreme
moment. The Bugis trader, a shy hesitating man, was very
clear in the little he had to say. Both were evidently
over-awed by a sense of deep inexpressible wonder, by the
touch of an inscrutable mystery.'
There with Marlow's signature the letter proper ended.
The privileged reader screwed up his lamp, and solitary
above the billowy roofs of the town, like a
lighthouse-keeper above the sea, he turned to the pages of
the story.
CHAPTER 38
'It all begins, as I've told you, with the man called
Brown,' ran the opening sentence of Marlow's narrative. 'You
who have knocked about the Western Pacific must have heard
of him. He was the show ruffian on the Australian coast—not
that he was often to be seen there, but because he was
always trotted out in the stories of lawless life a visitor
from home is treated to; and the mildest of these stories
which were told about him from Cape York to Eden Bay was
more than enough to hang a man if told in the right place.
They never failed to let you know, too, that he was supposed
to be the son of a baronet. Be it as it may, it is certain
he had deserted from a home ship in the early gold-digging
days, and in a few years became talked about as the terror
of this or that group of islands in Polynesia. He would
kidnap natives, he would strip some lonely white trader to
the very pyjamas he stood in, and after he had robbed the
poor devil, he would as likely as not invite him to fight a
duel with shot-guns on the beach—which would have been fair
enough as these things go, if the other man hadn't been by
that time already half-dead with fright. Brown was a
latter-day buccaneer, sorry enough, like his more celebrated
prototypes; but what distinguished him from his contemporary
brother ruffians, like Bully Hayes or the mellifluous Pease,
or that perfumed, Dundreary-whiskered, dandified scoundrel
known as Dirty Dick, was the arrogant temper of his misdeeds
and a vehement scorn for mankind at large and for his
victims in particular. The others were merely vulgar and
greedy brutes, but he seemed moved by some complex
intention. He would rob a man as if only to demonstrate his
poor opinion of the creature, and he would bring to the
shooting or maiming of some quiet, unoffending stranger a
savage and vengeful earnestness fit to terrify the most
reckless of desperadoes. In the days of his greatest glory
he owned an armed barque, manned by a mixed crew of Kanakas
and runaway whalers, and boasted, I don't know with what
truth, of being financed on the quiet by a most respectable
firm of copra merchants. Later on he ran off—it was
reported—with the wife of a missionary, a very young girl
from Clapham way, who had married the mild, flat-footed
fellow in a moment of enthusiasm, and, suddenly transplanted
to Melanesia, lost her bearings somehow. It was a dark
story. She was ill at the time he carried her off, and died
on board his ship. It is said—as the most wonderful put of
the tale—that over her body he gave way to an outburst of
sombre and violent grief. His luck left him, too, very soon
after. He lost his ship on some rocks off Malaita, and
disappeared for a time as though he had gone down with her.
He is heard of next at Nuka-Hiva, where he bought an old
French schooner out of Government service. What creditable
enterprise he might have had in view when he made that
purchase I can't say, but it is evident that what with High
Commissioners, consuls, men-of-war, and international
control, the South Seas were getting too hot to hold
gentlemen of his kidney. Clearly he must have shifted the
scene of his operations farther west, because a year later
he plays an incredibly audacious, but not a very profitable
part, in a serio-comic business in Manila Bay, in which a
peculating governor and an absconding treasurer are the
principal figures; thereafter he seems to have hung around
the Philippines in his rotten schooner battling with un
adverse fortune, till at last, running his appointed course,
he sails into Jim's history, a blind accomplice of the Dark
Powers.
'His tale goes that when a Spanish patrol cutter captured
him he was simply trying to run a few guns for the
insurgents. If so, then I can't understand what he was doing
off the south coast of Mindanao. My belief, however, is that
he was blackmailing the native villages along the coast. The
principal thing is that the cutter, throwing a guard on
board, made him sail in company towards Zamboanga. On the
way, for some reason or other, both vessels had to call at
one of these new Spanish settlements—which never came to
anything in the end—where there was not only a civil
official in charge on shore, but a good stout coasting
schooner lying at anchor in the little bay; and this craft,
in every way much better than his own, Brown made up his
mind to steal.
'He was down on his luck—as he told me himself. The world
he had bullied for twenty years with fierce, aggressive
disdain, had yielded him nothing in the way of material
advantage except a small bag of silver dollars, which was
concealed in his cabin so that "the devil himself couldn't
smell it out." And that was all—absolutely all. He was tired
of his life, and not afraid of death. But this man, who
would stake his existence on a whim with a bitter and
jeering recklessness, stood in mortal fear of imprisonment.
He had an unreasoning cold-sweat, nerve-shaking,
blood-to-water-turning sort of horror at the bare
possibility of being locked up—the sort of terror a
superstitious man would feel at the thought of being
embraced by a spectre. Therefore the civil official who came
on board to make a preliminary investigation into the
capture, investigated arduously all day long, and only went
ashore after dark, muffled up in a cloak, and taking great
care not to let Brown's little all clink in its bag.
Afterwards, being a man of his word, he contrived (the very
next evening, I believe) to send off the Government cutter
on some urgent bit of special service. As her commander
could not spare a prize crew, he contented himself by taking
away before he left all the sails of Brown's schooner to the
very last rag, and took good care to tow his two boats on to
the beach a couple of miles off.
'But in Brown's crew there was a Solomon Islander,
kidnapped in his youth and devoted to Brown, who was the
best man of the whole gang. That fellow swam off to the
coaster—five hundred yards or so—with the end of a warp made
up of all the running gear unrove for the purpose. The water
was smooth, and the bay dark, "like the inside of a cow," as
Brown described it. The Solomon Islander clambered over the
bulwarks with the end of the rope in his teeth. The crew of
the coaster—all Tagals—were ashore having a jollification in
the native village. The two shipkeepers left on board woke
up suddenly and saw the devil. It had glittering eyes and
leaped quick as lightning about the deck. They fell on their
knees, paralysed with fear, crossing themselves and mumbling
prayers. With a long knife he found in the caboose the
Solomon Islander, without interrupting their orisons,
stabbed first one, then the other; with the same knife he
set to sawing patiently at the coir cable till suddenly it
parted under the blade with a splash. Then in the silence of
the bay he let out a cautious shout, and Brown's gang, who
meantime had been peering and straining their hopeful ears
in the darkness, began to pull gently at their end of the
warp. In less than five minutes the two schooners came
together with a slight shock and a creak of spars.
'Brown's crowd transferred themselves without losing an
instant, taking with them their firearms and a large supply
of ammunition. They were sixteen in all: two runaway
blue-jackets, a lanky deserter from a Yankee man-of-war, a
couple of simple, blond Scandinavians, a mulatto of sorts,
one bland Chinaman who cooked—and the rest of the
nondescript spawn of the South Seas. None of them cared;
Brown bent them to his will, and Brown, indifferent to
gallows, was running away from the spectre of a Spanish
prison. He didn't give them the time to trans-ship enough
provisions; the weather was calm, the air was charged with
dew, and when they cast off the ropes and set sail to a
faint off-shore draught there was no flutter in the damp
canvas; their old schooner seemed to detach itself gently
from the stolen craft and slip away silently, together with
the black mass of the coast, into the night.
'They got clear away. Brown related to me in detail their
passage down the Straits of Macassar. It is a harrowing and
desperate story. They were short of food and water; they
boarded several native craft and got a little from each.
With a stolen ship Brown did not dare to put into any port,
of course. He had no money to buy anything, no papers to
show, and no lie plausible enough to get him out again. An
Arab barque, under the Dutch flag, surprised one night at
anchor off Poulo Laut, yielded a little dirty rice, a bunch
of bananas, and a cask of water; three days of squally,
misty weather from the north-east shot the schooner across
the Java Sea. The yellow muddy waves drenched that
collection of hungry ruffians. They sighted mail-boats
moving on their appointed routes; passed well-found home
ships with rusty iron sides anchored in the shallow sea
waiting for a change of weather or the turn of the tide; an
English gunboat, white and trim, with two slim masts,
crossed their bows one day in the distance; and on another
occasion a Dutch corvette, black and heavily sparred, loomed
up on their quarter, steaming dead slow in the mist. They
slipped through unseen or disregarded, a wan, sallow-faced
band of utter outcasts, enraged with hunger and hunted by
fear. Brown's idea was to make for Madagascar, where he
expected, on grounds not altogether illusory, to sell the
schooner in Tamatave, and no questions asked, or perhaps
obtain some more or less forged papers for her. Yet before
he could face the long passage across the Indian Ocean food
was wanted—water too.
'Perhaps he had heard of Patusan—or perhaps he just only
happened to see the name written in small letters on the
chart—probably that of a largish village up a river in a
native state, perfectly defenceless, far from the beaten
tracks of the sea and from the ends of submarine cables. He
had done that kind of thing before—in the way of business;
and this now was an absolute necessity, a question of life
and death—or rather of liberty. Of liberty! He was sure to
get provisions—bullocks—rice—sweet-potatoes. The sorry gang
licked their chops. A cargo of produce for the schooner
perhaps could be extorted—and, who knows?—some real ringing
coined money! Some of these chiefs and village headmen can
be made to part freely. He told me he would have roasted
their toes rather than be baulked. I believe him. His men
believed him too. They didn't cheer aloud, being a dumb
pack, but made ready wolfishly.
'Luck served him as to weather. A few days of calm would
have brought unmentionable horrors on board that schooner,
but with the help of land and sea breezes, in less than a
week after clearing the Sunda Straits, he anchored off the
Batu Kring mouth within a pistol-shot of the fishing
village.
'Fourteen of them packed into the schooner's long-boat
(which was big, having been used for cargo-work) and started
up the river, while two remained in charge of the schooner
with food enough to keep starvation off for ten days. The
tide and wind helped, and early one afternoon the big white
boat under a ragged sail shouldered its way before the sea
breeze into Patusan Reach, manned by fourteen assorted
scarecrows glaring hungrily ahead, and fingering the
breech-blocks of cheap rifles. Brown calculated upon the
terrifying surprise of his appearance. They sailed in with
the last of the flood; the Rajah's stockade gave no sign;
the first houses on both sides of the stream seemed
deserted. A few canoes were seen up the reach in full
flight. Brown was astonished at the size of the place. A
profound silence reigned. The wind dropped between the
houses; two oars were got out and the boat held on
up-stream, the idea being to effect a lodgment in the centre
of the town before the inhabitants could think of
resistance.
'It seems, however, that the headman of the fishing
village at Batu Kring had managed to send off a timely
warning. When the long-boat came abreast of the mosque
(which Doramin had built: a structure with gables and roof
finials of carved coral) the open space before it was full
of people. A shout went up, and was followed by a clash of
gongs all up the river. From a point above two little brass
6-pounders were discharged, and the round-shot came skipping
down the empty reach, spurting glittering jets of water in
the sunshine. In front of the mosque a shouting lot of men
began firing in volleys that whipped athwart the current of
the river; an irregular, rolling fusillade was opened on the
boat from both banks, and Brown's men replied with a wild,
rapid fire. The oars had been got in.
'The turn of the tide at high water comes on very quickly
in that river, and the boat in mid-stream, nearly hidden in
smoke, began to drift back stern foremost. Along both shores
the smoke thickened also, lying below the roofs in a level
streak as you may see a long cloud cutting the slope of a
mountain. A tumult of war-cries, the vibrating clang of
gongs, the deep snoring of drums, yells of rage, crashes of
volley-firing, made an awful din, in which Brown sat
confounded but steady at the tiller, working himself into a
fury of hate and rage against those people who dared to
defend themselves. Two of his men had been wounded, and he
saw his retreat cut off below the town by some boats that
had put off from Tunku Allang's stockade. There were six of
them, full of men. While he was thus beset he perceived the
entrance of the narrow creek (the same which Jim had jumped
at low water). It was then brim full. Steering the long-boat
in, they landed, and, to make a long story short, they
established themselves on a little knoll about 900 yards
from the stockade, which, in fact, they commanded from that
position. The slopes of the knoll were bare, but there were
a few trees on the summit. They went to work cutting these
down for a breastwork, and were fairly intrenched before
dark; meantime the Rajah's boats remained in the river with
curious neutrality. When the sun set the glue of many
brushwood blazes lighted on the river-front, and between the
double line of houses on the land side threw into black
relief the roofs, the groups of slender palms, the heavy
clumps of fruit trees. Brown ordered the grass round his
position to be fired; a low ring of thin flames under the
slow ascending smoke wriggled rapidly down the slopes of the
knoll; here and there a dry bush caught with a tall, vicious
roar. The conflagration made a clear zone of fire for the
rifles of the small party, and expired smouldering on the
edge of the forests and along the muddy bank of the creek. A
strip of jungle luxuriating in a damp hollow between the
knoll and the Rajah's stockade stopped it on that side with
a great crackling and detonations of bursting bamboo stems.
The sky was sombre, velvety, and swarming with stars. The
blackened ground smoked quietly with low creeping wisps,
till a little breeze came on and blew everything away. Brown
expected an attack to be delivered as soon as the tide had
flowed enough again to enable the war-boats which had cut
off his retreat to enter the creek. At any rate he was sure
there would be an attempt to carry off his long-boat, which
lay below the hill, a dark high lump on the feeble sheen of
a wet mud-flat. But no move of any sort was made by the
boats in the river. Over the stockade and the Rajah's
buildings Brown saw their lights on the water. They seemed
to be anchored across the stream. Other lights afloat were
moving in the reach, crossing and recrossing from side to
side. There were also lights twinkling motionless upon the
long walls of houses up the reach, as far as the bend, and
more still beyond, others isolated inland. The loom of the
big fires disclosed buildings, roofs, black piles as far as
he could see. It was an immense place. The fourteen
desperate invaders lying flat behind the felled trees raised
their chins to look over at the stir of that town that
seemed to extend up-river for miles and swarm with thousands
of angry men. They did not speak to each other. Now and then
they would hear a loud yell, or a single shot rang out,
fired very far somewhere. But round their position
everything was still, dark, silent. They seemed to be
forgotten, as if the excitement keeping awake all the
population had nothing to do with them, as if they had been
dead already.'
CHAPTER 39
'All the events of that night have a great importance,
since they brought about a situation which remained
unchanged till Jim's return. Jim had been away in the
interior for more than a week, and it was Dain Waris who had
directed the first repulse. That brave and intelligent youth
("who knew how to fight after the manner of white men")
wished to settle the business off-hand, but his people were
too much for him. He had not Jim's racial prestige and the
reputation of invincible, supernatural power. He was not the
visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of
unfailing victory. Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was,
he was still one of them, while Jim was one of us.
Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was
invulnerable, while Dain Waris could be killed. Those
unexpressed thoughts guided the opinions of the chief men of
the town, who elected to assemble in Jim's fort for
deliberation upon the emergency, as if expecting to find
wisdom and courage in the dwelling of the absent white man.
The shooting of Brown's ruffians was so far good, or lucky,
that there had been half-a-dozen casualties amongst the
defenders. The wounded were lying on the verandah tended by
their women-folk. The women and children from the lower part
of the town had been sent into the fort at the first alarm.
There Jewel was in command, very efficient and
high-spirited, obeyed by Jim's "own people," who, quitting
in a body their little settlement under the stockade, had
gone in to form the garrison. The refugees crowded round
her; and through the whole affair, to the very disastrous
last, she showed an extraordinary martial ardour. It was to
her that Dain Waris had gone at once at the first
intelligence of danger, for you must know that Jim was the
only one in Patusan who possessed a store of gunpowder.
Stein, with whom he had kept up intimate relations by
letters, had obtained from the Dutch Government a special
authorisation to export five hundred kegs of it to Patusan.
The powder-magazine was a small hut of rough logs covered
entirely with earth, and in Jim's absence the girl had the
key. In the council, held at eleven o'clock in the evening
in Jim's dining-room, she backed up Waris's advice for
immediate and vigorous action. I am told that she stood up
by the side of Jim's empty chair at the head of the long
table and made a warlike impassioned speech, which for the
moment extorted murmurs of approbation from the assembled
headmen. Old Doramin, who had not showed himself outside his
own gate for more than a year, had been brought across with
great difficulty. He was, of course, the chief man there.
The temper of the council was very unforgiving, and the old
man's word would have been decisive; but it is my opinion
that, well aware of his son's fiery courage, he dared not
pronounce the word. More dilatory counsels prevailed. A
certain Haji Saman pointed out at great length that "these
tyrannical and ferocious men had delivered themselves to a
certain death in any case. They would stand fast on their
hill and starve, or they would try to regain their boat and
be shot from ambushes across the creek, or they would break
and fly into the forest and perish singly there." He argued
that by the use of proper stratagems these evil-minded
strangers could be destroyed without the risk of a battle,
and his words had a great weight, especially with the
Patusan men proper. What unsettled the minds of the
townsfolk was the failure of the Rajah's boats to act at the
decisive moment. It was the diplomatic Kassim who
represented the Rajah at the council. He spoke very little,
listened smilingly, very friendly and impenetrable. During
the sitting messengers kept arriving every few minutes
almost, with reports of the invaders' proceedings. Wild and
exaggerated rumours were flying: there was a large ship at
the mouth of the river with big guns and many more men—some
white, others with black skins and of bloodthirsty
appearance. They were coming with many more boats to
exterminate every living thing. A sense of near,
incomprehensible danger affected the common people. At one
moment there was a panic in the courtyard amongst the women;
shrieking; a rush; children crying—Haji Sunan went out to
quiet them. Then a fort sentry fired at something moving on
the river, and nearly killed a villager bringing in his
women-folk in a canoe together with the best of his domestic
utensils and a dozen fowls. This caused more confusion.
Meantime the palaver inside Jim's house went on in the
presence of the girl. Doramin sat fierce-faced, heavy,
looking at the speakers in turn, and breathing slow like a
bull. He didn't speak till the last, after Kassim had
declared that the Rajah's boats would be called in because
the men were required to defend his master's stockade. Dain
Waris in his father's presence would offer no opinion,
though the girl entreated him in Jim's name to speak out.
She offered him Jim's own men in her anxiety to have these
intruders driven out at once. He only shook his head, after
a glance or two at Doramin. Finally, when the council broke
up it had been decided that the houses nearest the creek
should be strongly occupied to obtain the command of the
enemy's boat. The boat itself was not to be interfered with
openly, so that the robbers on the hill should be tempted to
embark, when a well-directed fire would kill most of them,
no doubt. To cut off the escape of those who might survive,
and to prevent more of them coming up, Dain Waris was
ordered by Doramin to take an armed party of Bugis down the
river to a certain spot ten miles below Patusan, and there
form a camp on the shore and blockade the stream with the
canoes. I don't believe for a moment that Doramin feared the
arrival of fresh forces. My opinion is that his conduct was
guided solely by his wish to keep his son out of harm's way.
To prevent a rush being made into the town the construction
of a stockade was to be commenced at daylight at the end of
the street on the left bank. The old nakhoda declared his
intention to command there himself. A distribution of
powder, bullets, and percussion-caps was made immediately
under the girl's supervision. Several messengers were to be
dispatched in different directions after Jim, whose exact
whereabouts were unknown. These men started at dawn, but
before that time Kassim had managed to open communications
with the besieged Brown.
'That accomplished diplomatist and confidant of the
Rajah, on leaving the fort to go back to his master, took
into his boat Cornelius, whom he found slinking mutely
amongst the people in the courtyard. Kassim had a little
plan of his own and wanted him for an interpreter. Thus it
came about that towards morning Brown, reflecting upon the
desperate nature of his position, heard from the marshy
overgrown hollow an amicable, quavering, strained voice
crying—in English—for permission to come up, under a promise
of personal safety and on a very important errand. He was
overjoyed. If he was spoken to he was no longer a hunted
wild beast. These friendly sounds took off at once the awful
stress of vigilant watchfulness as of so many blind men not
knowing whence the deathblow might come. He pretended a
great reluctance. The voice declared itself "a white man—a
poor, ruined, old man who had been living here for years." A
mist, wet and chilly, lay on the slopes of the hill, and
after some more shouting from one to the other, Brown called
out, "Come on, then, but alone, mind!" As a matter of
fact—he told me, writhing with rage at the recollection of
his helplessness—it made no difference. They couldn't see
more than a few yards before them, and no treachery could
make their position worse. By-and-by Cornelius, in his
week-day attire of a ragged dirty shirt and pants,
barefooted, with a broken-rimmed pith hat on his head, was
made out vaguely, sidling up to the defences, hesitating,
stopping to listen in a peering posture. "Come along! You
are safe," yelled Brown, while his men stared. All their
hopes of life became suddenly centered in that dilapidated,
mean newcomer, who in profound silence clambered clumsily
over a felled tree-trunk, and shivering, with his sour,
mistrustful face, looked about at the knot of bearded,
anxious, sleepless desperadoes.
'Half an hour's confidential talk with Cornelius opened
Brown's eyes as to the home affairs of Patusan. He was on
the alert at once. There were possibilities, immense
possibilities; but before he would talk over Cornelius's
proposals he demanded that some food should be sent up as a
guarantee of good faith. Cornelius went off, creeping
sluggishly down the hill on the side of the Rajah's palace,
and after some delay a few of Tunku Allang's men came up,
bringing a scanty supply of rice, chillies, and dried fish.
This was immeasurably better than nothing. Later on
Cornelius returned accompanying Kassim, who stepped out with
an air of perfect good-humoured trustfulness, in sandals,
and muffled up from neck to ankles in dark-blue sheeting. He
shook hands with Brown discreetly, and the three drew aside
for a conference. Brown's men, recovering their confidence,
were slapping each other on the back, and cast knowing
glances at their captain while they busied themselves with
preparations for cooking.
'Kassim disliked Doramin and his Bugis very much, but he
hated the new order of things still more. It had occurred to
him that these whites, together with the Rajah's followers,
could attack and defeat the Bugis before Jim's return. Then,
he reasoned, general defection of the townsfolk was sure to
follow, and the reign of the white man who protected poor
people would be over. Afterwards the new allies could be
dealt with. They would have no friends. The fellow was
perfectly able to perceive the difference of character, and
had seen enough of white men to know that these newcomers
were outcasts, men without country. Brown preserved a stern
and inscrutable demeanour. When he first heard Cornelius's
voice demanding admittance, it brought merely the hope of a
loophole for escape. In less than an hour other thoughts
were seething in his head. Urged by an extreme necessity, he
had come there to steal food, a few tons of rubber or gum
may be, perhaps a handful of dollars, and had found himself
enmeshed by deadly dangers. Now in consequence of these
overtures from Kassim he began to think of stealing the
whole country. Some confounded fellow had apparently
accomplished something of the kind—single-handed at that.
Couldn't have done it very well though. Perhaps they could
work together—squeeze everything dry and then go out
quietly. In the course of his negotiations with Kassim he
became aware that he was supposed to have a big ship with
plenty of men outside. Kassim begged him earnestly to have
this big ship with his many guns and men brought up the
river without delay for the Rajah's service. Brown professed
himself willing, and on this basis the negotiation was
carried on with mutual distrust. Three times in the course
of the morning the courteous and active Kassim went down to
consult the Rajah and came up busily with his long stride.
Brown, while bargaining, had a sort of grim enjoyment in
thinking of his wretched schooner, with nothing but a heap
of dirt in her hold, that stood for an armed ship, and a
Chinaman and a lame ex-beachcomber of Levuka on board, who
represented all his many men. In the afternoon he obtained
further doles of food, a promise of some money, and a supply
of mats for his men to make shelters for themselves. They
lay down and snored, protected from the burning sunshine;
but Brown, sitting fully exposed on one of the felled trees,
feasted his eyes upon the view of the town and the river.
There was much loot there. Cornelius, who had made himself
at home in the camp, talked at his elbow, pointing out the
localities, imparting advice, giving his own version of
Jim's character, and commenting in his own fashion upon the
events of the last three years. Brown, who, apparently
indifferent and gazing away, listened with attention to
every word, could not make out clearly what sort of man this
Jim could be. "What's his name? Jim! Jim! That's not enough
for a man's name." "They call him," said Cornelius
scornfully, "Tuan Jim here. As you may say Lord Jim." "What
is he? Where does he come from?" inquired Brown. "What sort
of man is he? Is he an Englishman?" "Yes, yes, he's an
Englishman. I am an Englishman too. From Malacca. He is a
fool. All you have to do is to kill him and then you are
king here. Everything belongs to him," explained Cornelius.
"It strikes me he may be made to share with somebody before
very long," commented Brown half aloud. "No, no. The proper
way is to kill him the first chance you get, and then you
can do what you like," Cornelius would insist earnestly. "I
have lived for many years here, and I am giving you a
friend's advice."
'In such converse and in gloating over the view of
Patusan, which he had determined in his mind should become
his prey, Brown whiled away most of the afternoon, his men,
meantime, resting. On that day Dain Waris's fleet of canoes
stole one by one under the shore farthest from the creek,
and went down to close the river against his retreat. Of
this Brown was not aware, and Kassim, who came up the knoll
an hour before sunset, took good care not to enlighten him.
He wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and
this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very
pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the
same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he
explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the
river and deliver the "order" on board. After some
reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of
his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting
on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by
Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was
rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the
schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the
Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What
became of him afterwards Brown did not say.'
CHAPTER 40
'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's
diplomacy. 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.
Everything 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. Meantime 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 ferocity
which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by
failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by
the desperate position 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 himself 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, leathery 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-dealing answered his purpose, which
was to keep the Bugis forces divided 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 ammunition 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
sadness 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,
proclaimed 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 name, 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 and 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 afterwards 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 man 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 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.
'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.
'"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, 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!'"
'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
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 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!"'
CHAPTER 42
'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.
'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."
'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 yellow 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 bewilderment 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 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.
'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 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."'
CHAPTER 43
'Tamb' Itam behind his chair was thunderstruck. The
declaration 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 faithfulness 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
separation. 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
sea—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
hesitation.
'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-shouldered, 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
commanded 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
mission 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 Cornelius 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 Cornelius
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 coming 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 muffled out of
the fog. Not one of the many attentive listeners understood
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?" Cornelius 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 departing night. All at once a big bough
covered with leaves appeared above his head, and ends of
twigs, dripping and still, curved slenderly close alongside.
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 summits 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 incontinently 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 answer 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 deathbed 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 skeletons 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 expiring 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 expressive 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 frightened
hen till he felt the point; then he was still, and lay
staring at me while his life went out of his eyes."
'This done, Tamb' Itam did not tarry. He understood the
importance 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 looking 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 stammer.
"What?" cried his master aloud, looking 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 robbers 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 nakhoda 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
Samarang 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 thunder." 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 and 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 doorway, 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 patiently 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 apparently 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
menacingly, "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
Doramin 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 himself 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.
