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-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 *** 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 ***, 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 ***.'