Lord Jim
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