________________________________________________
_ ' "This is where I was prisoner for three days," he murmured to
me (it was on the occasion of our visit to the Rajah), while we
were making our way slowly through a kind of awestruck riot of
dependants across Tunku Allang's courtyard. "Filthy place, isn't
it? And I couldn't get anything to eat either, unless I made a row
about it, and then it was only a small plate of rice and a fried fish
not much bigger than a stickleback--confound them! Jove! I've
been hungry prowling inside this stinking enclosure with some of
these vagabonds shoving their mugs right under my nose. I had
given up that famous revolver of yours at the first demand. Glad to
get rid of the bally thing. Look like a fool walking about with an
empty shooting-iron in my hand." At that moment we came into
the presence, and he became unflinchingly grave and complimentary
with his late captor. Oh! magnificent! I want to laugh when I
think of it. But I was impressed, too. The old disreputable Tunku
Allang could not help showing his fear (he was no hero, for all the
tales of his hot youth he was fond of telling); and at the same time
there was a wistful confidence in his manner towards his late
prisoner. Note! Even where he would be most hated he was still trusted.
Jim--as far as I could follow the conversation--was improving the
occasion by the delivery of a lecture. Some poor villagers had been
waylaid and robbed while on their way to Doramin's house with a
few pieces of gum or beeswax which they wished to exchange for
rice. "It was Doramin who was a thief," burst out the Rajah. A
shaking fury seemed to enter that old frail body. He writhed weirdly
on his mat, gesticulating with his hands and feet, tossing the tangled
strings of his mop--an impotent incarnation of rage. There were
staring eyes and dropping jaws all around us. Jim began to speak.
Resolutely, coolly, and for some time he enlarged upon the text that
no man should be prevented from getting his food and his children's
food honestly. The other sat like a tailor at his board, one palm on
each knee, his head low, and fixing Jim through the grey hair that
fell over his very eyes. When Jim had done there was a great
stillness. Nobody seemed to breathe even; no one made a sound till the
old Rajah sighed faintly, and looking up, with a toss of his head,
said quickly, "You hear, my people! No more of these little
games." This decree was received in profound silence. A rather
heavy man, evidently in a position of confidence, with intelligent
eyes, a bony, broad, very dark face, and a cheerily of officious manner
(I learned later on he was the executioner), presented to us two cups
of coffee on a brass tray, which he took from the hands of an inferior
attendant. "You needn't drink," muttered Jim very rapidly. I
didn't perceive the meaning at first, and only looked at him. He
took a good sip and sat composedly, holding the saucer in his left
hand. In a moment I felt excessively annoyed. "Why the devil," I
whispered, smiling at him amiably, "do you expose me to such a
stupid risk?" I drank, of course, there was nothing for it, while he
gave no sign, and almost immediately afterwards we took our leave.
While we were going down the courtyard to our boat, escorted by
the intelligent and cheery executioner, Jim said he was very sorry.
It was the barest chance, of course. Personally he thought nothing
of poison. The remotest chance. He was--he assured me--considered
to be infinitely more useful than dangerous, and so . . . "But the
Rajah is afraid of you abominably. Anybody can see that," I argued
with, I own, a certain peevishness, and all the time watching
anxiously for the first twist of some sort of ghastly colic. I was
awfully disgusted. "If I am to do any good here and preserve my
position," he said, taking his seat by my side in the boat, "I must
stand the risk: I take it once every month, at least. Many people
trust me to do that--for them. Afraid of me! That's just it. Most
likely he is afraid of me because I am not afraid of his coffee." Then
showing me a place on the north front of the stockade where the
pointed tops of several stakes were broken, "This is where I leaped
over on my third day in Patusan. They haven't put new stakes there
yet. Good leap, eh?" A moment later we passed the mouth of a
muddy creek. "This is my second leap. I had a bit of a run and
took this one flying, but fell short. Thought I would leave my skin
there. Lost my shoes struggling. And all the time I was thinking to
myself how beastly it would be to get a jab with a bally long spear
while sticking in the mud like this. I remember how sick I felt
wriggling in that slime. I mean really sick--as if I had bitten
something rotten."
'That's how it was--and the opportunity ran by his side, leaped over
the gap, floundered in the mud . . . still veiled. The unexpectedness
of his coming was the only thing, you understand, that saved
him from being at once dispatched with krisses and flung into the
river. They had him, but it was like getting hold of an apparition,
a wraith, a portent. What did it mean? What to do with it? Was it
too late to conciliate him? Hadn't he better be killed without more
delay? But what would happen then? Wretched old Allang went
nearly mad with apprehension and through the difficulty of making
up his mind. Several times the council was broken up, and the
advisers made a break helter-skelter for the door and out on to the
verandah. One--it is said--even jumped down to the ground--fifteen
feet, I should judge--and broke his leg. The royal governor of
Patusan had bizarre mannerisms, and one of them was to introduce
boastful rhapsodies into every arduous discussion, when, getting
gradually excited, he would end by flying off his perch with a
kriss in his hand. But, barring such interruptions, the deliberations
upon Jim's fate went on night and day.
'Meanwhile he wandered about the courtyard, shunned by some,
glared at by others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy
of the first casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took
possession of a small tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of
filth and rotten matter incommoded him greatly: it seems he had
not lost his appetite though, because--he told me--he had been
hungry all the blessed time. Now and again "some fussy ass"
deputed from the council-room would come out running to him,
and in honeyed tones would administer amazing interrogatories:
"Were the Dutch coming to take the country? Would the white
man like to go back down the river? What was the object of coming
to such a miserable country? The Rajah wanted to know whether
the white man could repair a watch?" They did actually bring out
to him a nickel clock of New England make, and out of sheer
unbearable boredom he busied himself in trying to get the alarum
to work. It was apparently when thus occupied in his shed that the
true perception of his extreme peril dawned upon him. He dropped
the thing--he says--"like a hot potato," and walked out hastily,
without the slightest idea of what he would, or indeed could, do. He
only knew that the position was intolerable. He strolled aimlessly
beyond a sort of ramshackle little granary on posts, and his eyes fell
on the broken stakes of the palisade; and then--he says--at once,
without any mental process as it were, without any stir of emotion,
he set about his escape as if executing a plan matured for a month.
He walked off carelessly to give himself a good run, and when
he faced about there was some dignitary, with two spearmen in
attendance, close at his elbow ready with a question. He started off
"from under his very nose," went over "like a bird," and landed
on the other side with a fall that jarred all his bones and seemed to
split his head. He picked himself up instantly. He never thought of
anything at the time; all he could remember--he said--was a great
yell; the first houses of Patusan were before him four hundred yards
away; he saw the creek, and as it were mechanically put on more
pace. The earth seemed fairly to fly backwards under his feet. He
took off from the last dry spot, felt himself flying through the air,
felt himself, without any shock, planted upright in an extremely
soft and sticky mudbank. It was only when he tried to move his
legs and found he couldn't that, in his own words, "he came to
himself." He began to think of the "bally long spears." As a matter
of fact, considering that the people inside the stockade had to run
to the gate, then get down to the landing-place, get into boats, and
pull round a point of land, he had more advance than he imagined.
Besides, it being low water, the creek was without water--you
couldn't call it dry--and practically he was safe for a time from
everything but a very long shot perhaps. The higher firm ground
was about six feet in front of him. "I thought I would have to die
there all the same," he said. He reached and grabbed desperately
with his hands, and only succeeded in gathering a horrible cold
shiny heap of slime against his breast--up to his very chin. It seemed
to him he was burying himself alive, and then he struck out madly,
scattering the mud with his fists. It fell on his head, on his face,
over his eyes, into his mouth. He told me that he remembered
suddenly the courtyard, as you remember a place where you had
been very happy years ago. He longed--so he said--to be back
there again, mending the clock. Mending the clock--that was the
idea. He made efforts, tremendous sobbing, gasping efforts, efforts
that seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him
blind, and culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness
to crack the earth asunder, to throw it off his limbs--and he
felt himself creeping feebly up the bank. He lay full length on the
firm ground and saw the light, the sky. Then as a sort of happy
thought the notion came to him that he would go to sleep. He will
have it that he _did_ actually go to sleep; that he slept--perhaps for a
minute, perhaps for twenty seconds, or only for one second, but he
recollects distinctly the violent convulsive start of awakening. He
remained lying still for a while, and then he arose muddy from
head to foot and stood there, thinking he was alone of his kind for
hundreds of miles, alone, with no help, no sympathy, no pity to
expect from any one, like a hunted animal. The first houses were
not more than twenty yards from him; and it was the desperate
screaming of a frightened woman trying to carry off a child that
started him again. He pelted straight on in his socks, beplastered
with filth out of all semblance to a human being. He traversed more
than half the length of the settlement. The nimbler women fled
right and left, the slower men just dropped whatever they had in
their hands, and remained petrified with dropping jaws. He was a
flying terror. He says he noticed the little children trying to run for
life, falling on their little stomachs and kicking. He swerved
between two houses up a slope, clambered in desperation over a
barricade of felled trees (there wasn't a week without some fight in
Patusan at that time), burst through a fence into a maize-patch,
where a scared boy flung a stick at him, blundered upon a path,
and ran all at once into the arms of several startled men. He just had
breath enough to gasp out, "Doramin! Doramin!" He remembers
being half-carried, half-rushed to the top of the slope, and in a vast
enclosure with palms and fruit trees being run up to a large man
sitting massively in a chair in the midst of the greatest possible
commotion and excitement. He fumbled in mud and clothes to
produce the ring, and, finding himself suddenly on his back, wondered
who had knocked him down. They had simply let him go--don't you
know?--but he couldn't stand. At the foot of the slope random shots
were fired, and above the roofs of the settlement there rose a dull
roar of amazement. But he was safe. Doramin's people were barricading
the gate and pouring water down his throat; Doramin's old wife, full
of business and commiseration, was issuing shrill orders to her girls.
"The old woman," he said softly, "made a to-do over me as if I had
been her own son. They put me into an immense bed--her state bed--and
she ran in and out wiping her eyes to give me pats on the back. I must
have been a pitiful object. I just lay there like a log for I don't
know how long."
'He seemed to have a great liking for Doramin's old wife. She on her
side had taken a motherly fancy to him. She had a round, nut-brown,
soft face, all fine wrinkles, large, bright red lips (she chewed
betel assiduously), and screwed up, winking, benevolent eyes. She
was constantly in movement, scolding busily and ordering unceasingly
a troop of young women with clear brown faces and big grave eyes,
her daughters, her servants, her slave-girls. You know how it
is in these households: it's generally impossible to tell the difference.
She was very spare, and even her ample outer garment, fastened in
front with jewelled clasps, had somehow a skimpy effect. Her dark
bare feet were thrust into yellow straw slippers of Chinese make.
I have seen her myself flitting about with her extremely thick,
long, grey hair falling about her shoulders. She uttered homely
shrewd sayings, was of noble birth, and was eccentric and arbitrary.
In the afternoon she would sit in a very roomy arm-chair, opposite
her husband, gazing steadily through a wide opening in the wall
which gave an extensive view of the settlement and the river.
'She invariably tucked up her feet under her, but old Doramin
sat squarely, sat imposingly as a mountain sits on a plain. He was
only of the nakhoda or merchant class, but the respect shown to
him and the dignity of his bearing were very striking. He was the
chief of the second power in Patusan. The immigrants from Celebes
(about sixty families that, with dependants and so on, could muster
some two hundred men "wearing the kriss") had elected him years
ago for their head. The men of that race are intelligent, enterprising,
revengeful, but with a more frank courage than the other Malays,
and restless under oppression. They formed the party opposed to
the Rajah. Of course the quarrels were for trade. This was the
primary cause of faction fights, of the sudden outbreaks that would
fill this or that part of the settlement with smoke, flame, the noise
of shots and shrieks. Villages were burnt, men were dragged into
the Rajah's stockade to be killed or tortured for the crime of trading
with anybody else but himself. Only a day or two before Jim's
arrival several heads of households in the very fishing village that
was afterwards taken under his especial protection had been driven
over the cliffs by a party of the Rajah's spearmen, on suspicion of
having been collecting edible birds' nests for a Celebes trader. Rajah
Allang pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the
penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of
trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery.
His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and
he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only--till
Jim came--he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them
through his subjects, and thought himself pathetically in the right.
The situation was complicated by a wandering stranger, an Arab
half-breed, who, I believe, on purely religious grounds, had incited
the tribes in the interior (the bush-folk, as Jim himself called them)
to rise, and had established himself in a fortified camp on the summit
of one of the twin hills. He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk
over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages,
deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear
streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls,
the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay
as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its
very root. The two parties in Patusan were not sure which one this
partisan most desired to plunder. The Rajah intrigued with him feebly.
Some of the Bugis settlers, weary with endless insecurity, were half
inclined to call him in. The younger spirits amongst them, chaffing,
advised to "get Sherif Ali with his wild men and drive the Rajah Allang
out of the country." Doramin restrained them with difficulty. He was
growing old, and, though his influence had not diminished, the
situation was getting beyond him. This was the state of affairs when
Jim, bolting from the Rajah's stockade, appeared before the chief
of the Bugis, produced the ring, and was received, in a manner of
speaking, into the heart of the community.' _
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