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-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.'