Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (125 page)

‘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.’ . . .”