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-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 ***, 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
***, 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.'