‘I ordered my gig manned at once; but Jim’s rowers, under the impression that their lives hung on a thread while they had that madman in the boat, made such excellent time that before I had traversed half the distance between the two vessels I caught sight of him clambering over the rail, and of his box being passed up. All the brigantine’s canvas was loose, her mainsail was set, and the windlass was just beginning to clink as I stepped upon her deck: her master, a dapper little half-caste of forty or so, in a blue flannel suit, with lively eyes, his round face the colour of lemon-peel, and with a thin little black moustache drooping on each side of his thick, dark lips, came forward smirking. He turned out, notwithstanding his self-satisfied and cheery exterior, to be of a careworn temperament. In answer to a remark of mine (while Jim had gone below for a moment) he said, “Oh yes. Patusan.” He was going to carry the gentleman to the mouth of the river, but would “never ascend.” His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to “ascend,” he would have “reverentially” — (I think he wanted to say respectfully — but devil only knows) — “reverentially made objects for the safety of properties.” If disregarded, he would have presented “resignation to quit.” Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius “propitiated many offertories” to Mr. Rajah Allang and the “principal populations,” on conditions which made the trade “a snare and ashes in the mouth,” yet his ship had been fired upon from the woods by “irresponsive parties” all the way down the river; which causing his crew “from exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings,” the brigantine was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she “would have been perishable beyond the act of man.” The angry disgust at the recollection, the pride of his fluency, to which he turned an attentive ear, struggled for the possession of his broad simple face. He scowled and beamed at me, and watched with satisfaction the undeniable effect of his phraseology. Dark frowns ran swiftly over the placid sea, and the brigantine, with her fore-topsail to the mast and her main-boom amidships, seemed bewildered amongst the cat’s-paws. He told me further, gnashing his teeth, that the Rajah was a “laughable hyaena” (can’t imagine how he got hold of hyaenas); while somebody else was many times falser than the “weapons of a crocodile.” Keeping one eye on the movements of his crew forward, he let loose his volubility — comparing the place to a “cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence.” I fancy he meant impunity. He had no intention, he cried, to “exhibit himself to be made attached purposefully to robbery.” The long-drawn wails, giving the time for the pull of the men catting the anchor, came to an end, and he lowered his voice. “Plenty too much enough of Patusan,” he concluded, with energy.
‘I heard afterwards he had been so indiscreet as to get himself tied up by the neck with a rattan halter to a post planted in the middle of a mud-hole before the Rajah’s house. He spent the best part of a day and a whole night in that unwholesome situation, but there is every reason to believe the thing had been meant as a sort of joke. He brooded for a while over that horrid memory, I suppose, and then addressed in a quarrelsome tone the man coming aft to the helm. When he turned to me again it was to speak judicially, without passion. He would take the gentleman to the mouth of the river at Batu Kring (Patusan town “being situated internally,” he remarked, “thirty miles”). But in his eyes, he continued — a tone of bored, weary conviction replacing his previous voluble delivery — the gentleman was already “in the similitude of a corpse.” “What? What do you say?” I asked. He assumed a startlingly ferocious demeanour, and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from behind. “Already like the body of one deported,” he explained, with the insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they imagine a display of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim smiling silently at me, and with a raised hand checking the exclamation on my lips.
‘Then, while the half-caste, bursting with importance, shouted his orders, while the yards swung creaking and the heavy boom came surging over, Jim and I, alone as it were, to leeward of the mainsail, clasped each other’s hands and exchanged the last hurried words. My heart was freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with interest in his fate. The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein’s careful statements. On that occasion the sort of formality that had been always present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I called him “dear boy,” and he tacked on the words “old man” to some half-uttered expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There was a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth. He exerted himself to soothe me as though he had been the more mature of the two. “All right, all right,” he said rapidly and with feeling. “I promise to take care of myself. Yes; I won’t take any risks. Not a single blessed risk. Of course not. I mean to hang out. Don’t you worry. Jove! I feel as if nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck from the word Go. I wouldn’t spoil such a magnificent chance!” . . . A magnificent chance! Well, it was magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I to know? As he had said, even I— even I remembered — his — his misfortune against him. It was true. And the best thing for him was to go.
‘My gig had dropped in the wake of the brigantine, and I saw him aft detached upon the light of the westering sun, raising his cap high above his head. I heard an indistinct shout, “You — shall — hear — of — me.” Of me, or from me, I don’t know which. I think it must have been of me. My eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to see him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; but I can assure you no man could have appeared less “in the similitude of a corpse,” as that half-caste croaker had put it. I could see the little wretch’s face, the shape and colour of a ripe pumpkin, poked out somewhere under Jim’s elbow. He too raised his arm as if for a downward thrust. Absit omen!’
Chapter 24
‘The coast of Patusan (I saw it nearly two years afterwards) is straight and sombre, and faces a misty ocean. Red trails are seen like cataracts of rust streaming under the dark-green foliage of bushes and creepers clothing the low cliffs. Swampy plains open out at the mouth of rivers, with a view of jagged blue peaks beyond the vast forests. In the offing a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, stand out in the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a wall breached by the sea.
‘There is a village of fisher-folk at the mouth of the Batu Kring branch of the estuary. The river, which had been closed so long, was open then, and Stein’s little schooner, in which I had my passage, worked her way up in three tides without being exposed to a fusillade from “irresponsive parties.” Such a state of affairs belonged already to ancient history, if I could believe the elderly headman of the fishing village, who came on board to act as a sort of pilot. He talked to me (the second white man he had ever seen) with confidence, and most of his talk was about the first white man he had ever seen. He called him Tuan Jim and the tone of his references was made remarkable by a strange mixture of familiarity and awe. They, in the village, were under that lord’s special protection, which showed that Jim bore no grudge. If he had warned me that I would hear of him it was perfectly true. I was hearing of him. There was already a story that the tide had turned two hours before its time to help him on his journey up the river. The talkative old man himself had steered the canoe and had marvelled at the phenomenon.