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_ 'The conquest of love, honour, men's confidence--the pride of
it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds
are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim's successes
there were no externals. Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the
sight of an indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along
the coast overpowered the voice of fame. The stream of civilisation,
as if divided on a headland a hundred miles north of Patusan, branches
east and south-east, leaving its plains and valleys, its old trees
and its old mankind, neglected and isolated, such as an insignificant
and crumbling islet between the two branches of a mighty, devouring
stream. You find the name of the country pretty often in collections
of old voyages. The seventeenth-century traders went there for
pepper, because the passion for pepper seemed to burn like a
flame of love in the breast of Dutch and English adventurers about
the time of James the First. Where wouldn't they go for pepper!
For a bag of pepper they would cut each other's throats without
hesitation, and would forswear their souls, of which they were so
careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them
defy death in a thousand shapes--the unknown seas, the loathsome
and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence, and
despair. It made them great! By heavens! it made them heroic; and
it made them pathetic too in their craving for trade with the
inflexible death levying its toll on young and old. It seems impossible to
believe that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of
purpose, to such a blind persistence in endeavour and sacrifice. And
indeed those who adventured their persons and lives risked all they
had for a slender reward. They left their bones to lie bleaching on
distant shores, so that wealth might flow to the living at home. To
us, their less tried successors, they appear magnified, not as agents
of trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into
the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating
in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and
it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful. They recorded
it complacently in their sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the
customs of strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers.
'In Patusan they had found lots of pepper, and had been
impressed by the magnificence and the wisdom of the Sultan; but
somehow, after a century of chequered intercourse, the country
seems to drop gradually out of the trade. Perhaps the pepper had
given out. Be it as it may, nobody cares for it now; the glory has
departed, the Sultan is an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his
left hand and an uncertain and beggarly revenue extorted from a
miserable population and stolen from him by his many uncles.
'This of course I have from Stein. He gave me their names and a
short sketch of the life and character of each. He was as full of
information about native states as an official report, but infinitely
more amusing. He _had_ to know. He traded in so many, and in some
districts--as in Patusan, for instance--his firm was the only one to
have an agency by special permit from the Dutch authorities. The
Government trusted his discretion, and it was understood that he
took all the risks. The men he employed understood that too, but
he made it worth their while apparently. He was perfectly frank
with me over the breakfast-table in the morning. As far as he was
aware (the last news was thirteen months old, he stated precisely),
utter insecurity for life and property was the normal condition.
There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one of them was
Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan's uncles, the governor of the
river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down
to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly
defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating--"For
indeed," as Stein remarked, "where could they go, and how could
they get away?" No doubt they did not even desire to get away.
The world (which is circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains)
has been given into the hand of the high-born, and _this_ Rajah they
knew: he was of their own royal house. I had the pleasure of meeting
the gentleman later on. He was a dirty, little, used-up old man with
evil eyes and a weak mouth, who swallowed an opium pill every
two hours, and in defiance of common decency wore his hair
uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about his wizened grimy
face. When giving audience he would clamber upon a sort of narrow
stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten bamboo
floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or fifteen
feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying
under the house. That is where and how he received us when,
accompanied by Jim, I paid him a visit of ceremony. There were
about forty people in the room, and perhaps three times as many
in the great courtyard below. There was constant movement, coming
and going, pushing and murmuring, at our backs. A few youths in gay
silks glared from the distance; the majority, slaves and humble
dependants, were half naked, in ragged sarongs, dirty with ashes
and mud-stains. I had never seen Jim look so grave, so self-possessed,
in an impenetrable, impressive way. In the midst of these dark-faced
men, his stalwart figure in white apparel, the gleaming clusters of
his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine that trickled
through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim hall, with
its walls of mats and a roof of thatch. He appeared like a creature
not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not seen
him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended
upon them from the clouds. He did, however, come in a crazy dug-out,
sitting (very still and with his knees together, for fear of overturning
the thing)--sitting on a tin box--which I had lent him--nursing on his
lap a revolver of the Navy pattern--presented by me on parting--which,
through an interposition of Providence, or through some wrong-headed
notion, that was just like him, or else from sheer instinctive sagacity,
he had decided to carry unloaded. That's how he ascended the Patusan
river. Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more
extravagantly casual, more lonely. Strange, this fatality that would
cast the complexion of a flight upon all his acts, of impulsive
unreflecting desertion of a jump into the unknown.
'It is precisely the casualness of it that strikes me most. Neither
Stein nor I had a clear conception of what might be on the other
side when we, metaphorically speaking, took him up and hove him
over the wall with scant ceremony. At the moment I merely wished
to achieve his disappearance; Stein characteristically enough had a
sentimental motive. He had a notion of paying off (in kind, I suppose)
the old debt he had never forgotten. Indeed he had been all his life
especially friendly to anybody from the British Isles. His late
benefactor, it is true, was a Scot--even to the length of being
called Alexander McNeil--and Jim came from a long way south of
the Tweed; but at the distance of six or seven thousand miles Great
Britain, though never diminished, looks foreshortened enough even
to its own children to rob such details of their importance. Stein
was excusable, and his hinted intentions were so generous that I
begged him most earnestly to keep them secret for a time. I felt
that no consideration of personal advantage should be allowed to
influence Jim; that not even the risk of such influence should be
run. We had to deal with another sort of reality. He wanted a refuge,
and a refuge at the cost of danger should be offered him--nothing
more.
'Upon every other point I was perfectly frank with him, and
I even (as I believed at the time) exaggerated the danger of the
undertaking. As a matter of fact I did not do it justice; his first day
in Patusan was nearly his last--would have been his last if he had
not been so reckless or so hard on himself and had condescended
to load that revolver. I remember, as I unfolded our precious
scheme for his retreat, how his stubborn but weary resignation was
gradually replaced by surprise, interest, wonder, and by boyish
eagerness. This was a chance he had been dreaming of. He couldn't
think how he merited that I . . . He would be shot if he could
see to what he owed . . .And it was Stein, Stein the merchant,
who . . .but of course it was me he had to . . . I cut him short. He
was not articulate, and his gratitude caused me inexplicable pain. I
told him that if he owed this chance to any one especially, it was to
an old Scot of whom he had never heard, who had died many years
ago, of whom little was remembered besides a roaring voice and a
rough sort of honesty. There was really no one to receive his thanks.
Stein was passing on to a young man the help he had received in
his own young days, and I had done no more than to mention his
name. Upon this he coloured, and, twisting a bit of paper in his
fingers, he remarked bashfully that I had always trusted him.
'I admitted that such was the case, and added after a pause that
I wished he had been able to follow my example. "You think I
don't?" he asked uneasily, and remarked in a mutter that one had
to get some sort of show first; then brightening up, and in a loud
voice he protested he would give me no occasion to regret my confidence,
which--which . . .
' "Do not misapprehend," I interrupted. "It is not in your power
to make me regret anything." There would be no regrets; but if
there were, it would be altogether my own affair: on the other hand,
I wished him to understand clearly that this arrangement, this--
this--experiment, was his own doing; he was responsible for it and
no one else. "Why? Why," he stammered, "this is the very thing
that I . . ." I begged him not to be dense, and he looked more
puzzled than ever. He was in a fair way to make life intolerable to
himself . . . "Do you think so?" he asked, disturbed; but in a
moment added confidently, "I was going on though. Was I not?"
It was impossible to be angry with him: I could not help a smile,
and told him that in the old days people who went on like this
were on the way of becoming hermits in a wilderness. "Hermits be
hanged!" he commented with engaging impulsiveness. Of course
he didn't mind a wilderness. . . . "I was glad of it," I said. That
was where he would be going to. He would find it lively enough, I
ventured to promise. "Yes, yes," he said, keenly. He had shown a
desire, I continued inflexibly, to go out and shut the door after
him. . . . "Did I?" he interrupted in a strange access of gloom that
seemed to envelop him from head to foot like the shadow of a
passing cloud. He was wonderfully expressive after all. Wonderfully!
"Did I?" he repeated bitterly. "You can't say I made much noise about it.
And I can keep it up, too--only, confound it! you show me a door." . . .
"Very well. Pass on," I struck in. I could make him a solemn promise
that it would be shut behind him with a vengeance. His fate, whatever
it was, would be ignored, because the country, for all its rotten
state, was not judged ripe for interference. Once he got in, it would
be for the outside world as though he had never existed. He would have
nothing but the soles of his two feet to stand upon, and he would have
first to find his ground at that. "Never existed--that's it, by
Jove," he murmured to himself. His eyes, fastened upon my lips,
sparkled. If he had thoroughly understood the conditions, I concluded,
he had better jump into the first gharry he could see and drive on to
Stein's house for his final instructions. He flung out of the room
before I had fairly finished speaking.' _
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