With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had
broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off
the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering
a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its
incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made
discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry
away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but
there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the
last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years
later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow's
upright and angular handwriting.

The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down,
went to the window. His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty
building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of
glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse.
The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each
other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of
the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter. The
spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons
on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with the
falling dusk of a winter's evening; and the booming of a big clock on a
tower, striking the hour, rolled past in voluminous, austere bursts
of sound, with a shrill vibrating cry at the core. He drew the heavy
curtains.

The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his
footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over. No
more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests
as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered
Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour
was striking! No more! No more!--but the opened packet under the lamp
brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savour of the past--a
multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the
shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He
sighed and sat down to read.

At first he saw three distinct enclosures. A good many pages closely
blackened and pinned together; a loose square sheet of greyish paper
with a few words traced in a handwriting he had never seen before, and
an explanatory letter from Marlow. From this last fell another letter,
yellowed by time and frayed on the folds. He picked it up and, laying it
aside, turned to Marlow's message, ran swiftly over the opening lines,
and, checking himself, thereafter read on deliberately, like one
approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered
country.

'. . . I don't suppose you've forgotten,' went on the letter. 'You alone
have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story,
though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate.
You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with
acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from
pity and youth. You had said you knew so well "that kind of thing," its
illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception. You said also--I call
to mind--that "giving your life up to them" (them meaning all of mankind
with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) "was like selling your
soul to a brute." You contended that "that kind of thing" was only
endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of
ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the
morality of an ethical progress. "We want its strength at our backs,"
you had said. "We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to
make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without it the
sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offering is no better than
the way to perdition." In other words, you maintained that we must fight
in the ranks or our lives don't count. Possibly! You ought to know--be
it said without malice--you who have rushed into one or two places
single-handed and came out cleverly, without singeing your wings. The
point, however, is that of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with
himself, and the question is whether at the last he had not confessed to
a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress.

'I affirm nothing. Perhaps you may pronounce--after you've read. There
is much truth--after all--in the common expression "under a cloud." It
is impossible to see him clearly--especially as it is through the eyes
of others that we take our last look at him. I have no hesitation in
imparting to you all I know of the last episode that, as he used to say,
had "come to him." One wonders whether this was perhaps that supreme
opportunity, that last and satisfying test for which I had always
suspected him to be waiting, before he could frame a message to the
impeccable world. You remember that when I was leaving him for the last
time he had asked whether I would be going home soon, and suddenly cried
after me, "Tell them . . ." I had waited--curious I'll own, and hopeful
too--only to hear him shout, "No--nothing." That was all then--and there
will be nothing more; there will be no message, unless such as each of
us can interpret for himself from the language of facts, that are so
often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words. He made,
it is true, one more attempt to deliver himself; but that too failed, as
you may perceive if you look at the sheet of greyish foolscap enclosed
here. He had tried to write; do you notice the commonplace hand? It is
headed "The Fort, Patusan." I suppose he had carried out his intention
of making out of his house a place of defence. It was an excellent plan:
a deep ditch, an earth wall topped by a palisade, and at the angles
guns mounted on platforms to sweep each side of the square. Doramin had
agreed to furnish him the guns; and so each man of his party would know
there was a place of safety, upon which every faithful partisan could
rally in case of some sudden danger. All this showed his judicious
foresight, his faith in the future. What he called "my own people"--the
liberated captives of the Sherif--were to make a distinct quarter of
Patusan, with their huts and little plots of ground under the walls of
the stronghold. Within he would be an invincible host in himself "The
Fort, Patusan." No date, as you observe. What is a number and a name to
a day of days? It is also impossible to say whom he had in his mind when
he seized the pen: Stein--myself--the world at large--or was this only
the aimless startled cry of a solitary man confronted by his fate? "An
awful thing has happened," he wrote before he flung the pen down for the
first time; look at the ink blot resembling the head of an arrow under
these words. After a while he had tried again, scrawling heavily, as if
with a hand of lead, another line. "I must now at once . . ." The pen
had spluttered, and that time he gave it up. There's nothing more;
he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span. I
can understand this. He was overwhelmed by the inexplicable; he was
overwhelmed by his own personality--the gift of that destiny which he
had done his best to master.

'I send you also an old letter--a very old letter. It was found
carefully preserved in his writing-case. It is from his father, and
by the date you can see he must have received it a few days before he
joined the Patna. Thus it must be the last letter he ever had from home.
He had treasured it all these years. The good old parson fancied his
sailor son. I've looked in at a sentence here and there. There is
nothing in it except just affection. He tells his "dear James" that the
last long letter from him was very "honest and entertaining." He would
not have him "judge men harshly or hastily." There are four pages of it,
easy morality and family news. Tom had "taken orders." Carrie's husband
had "money losses." The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and
the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers
and its small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in
the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study,
where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again
the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the
conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had
written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there,
on the other side of the earth. But what of the distance? Virtue is one
all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct
of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his "dear James" will never
forget that "who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant
hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin. Therefore resolve
fixedly never, through any possible motives, to do anything which you
believe to be wrong." There is also some news of a favourite dog; and a
pony, "which all you boys used to ride," had gone blind from old age and
had to be shot. The old chap invokes Heaven's blessing; the mother and
all the girls then at home send their love. . . . No, there is nothing
much in that yellow frayed letter fluttering out of his cherishing
grasp after so many years. It was never answered, but who can say what
converse he may have held with all these placid, colourless forms of men
and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger
or strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed
rectitude. It seems amazing that he should belong to it, he to whom so
many things "had come." Nothing ever came to them; they would never be
taken unawares, and never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they
all are, evoked by the mild gossip of the father, all these brothers
and sisters, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, gazing with clear
unconscious eyes, while I seem to see him, returned at last, no longer
a mere white speck at the heart of an immense mystery, but of full
stature, standing disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes, with a
stern and romantic aspect, but always mute, dark--under a cloud.

'The story of the last events you will find in the few pages enclosed
here. You must admit that it is romantic beyond the wildest dreams
of his boyhood, and yet there is to my mind a sort of profound and
terrifying logic in it, as if it were our imagination alone that could
set loose upon us the might of an overwhelming destiny. The imprudence
of our thoughts recoils upon our heads; who toys with the sword shall
perish by the sword. This astounding adventure, of which the most
astounding part is that it is true, comes on as an unavoidable
consequence. Something of the sort had to happen. You repeat this to
yourself while you marvel that such a thing could happen in the year of
grace before last. But it has happened--and there is no disputing its
logic.

'I put it down here for you as though I had been an eyewitness. My
information was fragmentary, but I've fitted the pieces together, and
there is enough of them to make an intelligible picture. I wonder how
he would have related it himself. He has confided so much in me that at
times it seems as though he must come in presently and tell the story
in his own words, in his careless yet feeling voice, with his offhand
manner, a little puzzled, a little bothered, a little hurt, but now and
then by a word or a phrase giving one of these glimpses of his very
own self that were never any good for purposes of orientation. It's
difficult to believe he will never come. I shall never hear his voice
again, nor shall I see his smooth tan-and-pink face with a white line
on the forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened by excitement to a
profound, unfathomable blue.'

Two years later, one of the people who listened to Marlow's epic story on the verandah gets some snail mail. It's a package of letters from Marlow. In one of the letters, Marlow explains that the enclosed documents do what they can to piece together the last part of Jim's story. We're all ears.


'It all begins with a remarkable exploit of a man called Brown, who
stole with complete success a Spanish schooner out of a small bay near
Zamboanga. Till I discovered the fellow my information was incomplete,
but most unexpectedly I did come upon him a few hours before he gave up
his arrogant ghost. Fortunately he was willing and able to talk between
the choking fits of asthma, and his racked body writhed with malicious
exultation at the bare thought of Jim. He exulted thus at the idea that
he had "paid out the stuck-up beggar after all." He gloated over his
action. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if
I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms
of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by
resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to
the body. The story also reveals unsuspected depths of cunning in the
wretched Cornelius, whose abject and intense hate acts like a subtle
inspiration, pointing out an unerring way towards revenge.

'"I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of a fool he was,"
gasped the dying Brown. "He a man! Hell! He was a hollow sham. As if he
couldn't have said straight out, 'Hands off my plunder!' blast him! That
would have been like a man! Rot his superior soul! He had me there--but
he hadn't devil enough in him to make an end of me. Not he! A thing like
that letting me off as if I wasn't worth a kick! . . ." Brown struggled
desperately for breath. . . . "Fraud. . . . Letting me off. . . . And
so I did make an end of him after all. . . ." He choked again. . . . "I
expect this thing'll kill me, but I shall die easy now. You . . . you
here . . . I don't know your name--I would give you a five-pound note
if--if I had it--for the news--or my name's not Brown. . . ." He grinned
horribly. . . . "Gentleman Brown."

'He said all these things in profound gasps, staring at me with his
yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face; he jerked his left arm;
a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung almost into his lap; a dirty ragged
blanket covered his legs. I had found him out in Bankok through that
busybody Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially, directed
me where to look. It appears that a sort of loafing, fuddled vagabond--a
white man living amongst the natives with a Siamese woman--had
considered it a great privilege to give a shelter to the last days of
the famous Gentleman Brown. While he was talking to me in the wretched
hovel, and, as it were, fighting for every minute of his life, the
Siamese woman, with big bare legs and a stupid coarse face, sat in a
dark corner chewing betel stolidly. Now and then she would get up for
the purpose of shooing a chicken away from the door. The whole hut shook
when she walked. An ugly yellow child, naked and pot-bellied like a
little heathen god, stood at the foot of the couch, finger in mouth,
lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the dying man.

'He talked feverishly; but in the middle of a word, perhaps, an
invisible hand would take him by the throat, and he would look at me
dumbly with an expression of doubt and anguish. He seemed to fear that
I would get tired of waiting and go away, leaving him with his tale
untold, with his exultation unexpressed. He died during the night, I
believe, but by that time I had nothing more to learn.

'So much as to Brown, for the present.

'Eight months before this, coming into Samarang, I went as usual to see
Stein. On the garden side of the house a Malay on the verandah greeted
me shyly, and I remembered that I had seen him in Patusan, in Jim's
house, amongst other Bugis men who used to come in the evening to talk
interminably over their war reminiscences and to discuss State affairs.
Jim had pointed him out to me once as a respectable petty trader owning
a small seagoing native craft, who had showed himself "one of the best
at the taking of the stockade." I was not very surprised to see him,
since any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would naturally
find his way to Stein's house. I returned his greeting and passed on. At
the door of Stein's room I came upon another Malay in whom I recognised
Tamb' Itam.

'I asked him at once what he was doing there; it occurred to me that
Jim might have come on a visit. I own I was pleased and excited at the
thought. Tamb' Itam looked as if he did not know what to say. "Is Tuan
Jim inside?" I asked impatiently. "No," he mumbled, hanging his head
for a moment, and then with sudden earnestness, "He would not fight. He
would not fight," he repeated twice. As he seemed unable to say anything
else, I pushed him aside and went in.

'Stein, tall and stooping, stood alone in the middle of the room between
the rows of butterfly cases. "Ach! is it you, my friend?" he said
sadly, peering through his glasses. A drab sack-coat of alpaca hung,
unbuttoned, down to his knees. He had a Panama hat on his head, and
there were deep furrows on his pale cheeks. "What's the matter now?"
I asked nervously. "There's Tamb' Itam there. . . ." "Come and see the
girl. Come and see the girl. She is here," he said, with a half-hearted
show of activity. I tried to detain him, but with gentle obstinacy he
would take no notice of my eager questions. "She is here, she is here,"
he repeated, in great perturbation. "They came here two days ago. An old
man like me, a stranger--sehen Sie--cannot do much. . . . Come this way.
. . . Young hearts are unforgiving. . . ." I could see he was in utmost
distress. . . . "The strength of life in them, the cruel strength of
life. . . ." He mumbled, leading me round the house; I followed him,
lost in dismal and angry conjectures. At the door of the drawing-room he
barred my way. "He loved her very much," he said interrogatively, and
I only nodded, feeling so bitterly disappointed that I would not trust
myself to speak. "Very frightful," he murmured. "She can't understand
me. I am only a strange old man. Perhaps you . . . she knows you. Talk
to her. We can't leave it like this. Tell her to forgive him. It was
very frightful." "No doubt," I said, exasperated at being in the dark;
"but have you forgiven him?" He looked at me queerly. "You shall hear,"
he said, and opening the door, absolutely pushed me in.

'You know Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms,
uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining
things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool
on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave
underground. I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl
sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she rested her
head, the face hidden in her arms. The waxed floor reflected her dimly
as though it had been a sheet of frozen water. The rattan screens were
down, and through the strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the
trees outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long draperies
of windows and doorways. Her white figure seemed shaped in snow; the
pendent crystals of a great chandelier clicked above her head like
glittering icicles. She looked up and watched my approach. I was chilled
as if these vast apartments had been the cold abode of despair.

'She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down
at her: "He has left me," she said quietly; "you always leave us--for
your own ends." Her face was set. All the heat of life seemed withdrawn
within some inaccessible spot in her breast. "It would have been easy to
die with him," she went on, and made a slight weary gesture as if giving
up the incomprehensible. "He would not! It was like a blindness--and yet
it was I who was speaking to him; it was I who stood before his eyes;
it was at me that he looked all the time! Ah! you are hard, treacherous,
without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it
that you are all mad?"

'I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped it, it hung
down to the floor. That indifference, more awful than tears, cries, and
reproaches, seemed to defy time and consolation. You felt that nothing
you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain.

'Stein had said, "You shall hear." I did hear. I heard it all, listening
with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness.
She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her
resentment filled me with pity for her--for him too. I stood rooted to
the spot after she had finished. Leaning on her arm, she stared with
hard eyes, and the wind passed in gusts, the crystals kept on clicking
in the greenish gloom. She went on whispering to herself: "And yet he
was looking at me! He could see my face, hear my voice, hear my grief!
When I used to sit at his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his
hand on my head, the curse of cruelty and madness was already within
him, waiting for the day. The day came! . . . and before the sun had
set he could not see me any more--he was made blind and deaf and without
pity, as you all are. He shall have no tears from me. Never, never. Not
one tear. I will not! He went away from me as if I had been worse than
death. He fled as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen
in his sleep. . . ."

'Her steady eyes seemed to strain after the shape of a man torn out of
her arms by the strength of a dream. She made no sign to my silent bow.
I was glad to escape.

'I saw her once again, the same afternoon. On leaving her I had gone
in search of Stein, whom I could not find indoors; and I wandered out,
pursued by distressful thoughts, into the gardens, those famous gardens
of Stein, in which you can find every plant and tree of tropical
lowlands. I followed the course of the canalised stream, and sat for
a long time on a shaded bench near the ornamental pond, where some
waterfowl with clipped wings were diving and splashing noisily. The
branches of casuarina trees behind me swayed lightly, incessantly,
reminding me of the soughing of fir trees at home.

'This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my
meditations. She had said he had been driven away from her by a
dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be
no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself,
pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and
its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive
devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?

'When I rose to get back to the house I caught sight of Stein's drab
coat through a gap in the foliage, and very soon at a turn of the path
I came upon him walking with the girl. Her little hand rested on his
forearm, and under the broad, flat rim of his Panama hat he bent over
her, grey-haired, paternal, with compassionate and chivalrous deference.
I stood aside, but they stopped, facing me. His gaze was bent on the
ground at his feet; the girl, erect and slight on his arm, stared
sombrely beyond my shoulder with black, clear, motionless eyes.
"Schrecklich," he murmured. "Terrible! Terrible! What can one do?" He
seemed to be appealing to me, but her youth, the length of the days
suspended over her head, appealed to me more; and suddenly, even as I
realised that nothing could be said, I found myself pleading his cause
for her sake. "You must forgive him," I concluded, and my own voice
seemed to me muffled, lost in un irresponsive deaf immensity. "We all
want to be forgiven," I added after a while.

'"What have I done?" she asked with her lips only.

'"You always mistrusted him," I said.

'"He was like the others," she pronounced slowly.

'"Not like the others," I protested, but she continued evenly, without
any feeling--

'"He was false." And suddenly Stein broke in. "No! no! no! My poor
child! . . ." He patted her hand lying passively on his sleeve. "No! no!
Not false! True! True! True!" He tried to look into her stony face. "You
don't understand. Ach! Why you do not understand? . . . Terrible," he
said to me. "Some day she _shall_ understand."

'"Will you explain?" I asked, looking hard at him. They moved on.

'I watched them. Her gown trailed on the path, her black hair fell
loose. She walked upright and light by the side of the tall man, whose
long shapeless coat hung in perpendicular folds from the stooping
shoulders, whose feet moved slowly. They disappeared beyond that
spinney (you may remember) where sixteen different kinds of bamboo grow
together, all distinguishable to the learned eye. For my part, I was
fascinated by the exquisite grace and beauty of that fluted grove,
crowned with pointed leaves and feathery heads, the lightness, the
vigour, the charm as distinct as a voice of that unperplexed luxuriating
life. I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would
linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It
was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories
crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.

'I drove back to town the same afternoon, taking with me Tamb' Itam
and the other Malay, in whose seagoing craft they had escaped in the
bewilderment, fear, and gloom of the disaster. The shock of it seemed to
have changed their natures. It had turned her passion into stone, and
it made the surly taciturn Tamb' Itam almost loquacious. His surliness,
too, was subdued into puzzled humility, as though he had seen the
failure of a potent charm in a supreme moment. The Bugis trader, a shy
hesitating man, was very clear in the little he had to say. Both were
evidently over-awed by a sense of deep inexpressible wonder, by the
touch of an inscrutable mystery.'

There with Marlow's signature the letter proper ended. The privileged
reader screwed up his lamp, and solitary above the billowy roofs of the
town, like a lighthouse-keeper above the sea, he turned to the pages of
the story.

If you thought we were done with Marlow's storytelling, we hate to break it to you. We've got another round coming. In the letters, Marlow describes an encounter he has with a dying pirate named Gentleman Brown. According to Marlow, Brown's story will help fill in the gaps at the end of Jim's story. Marlow then jumps back in time to when he first learned of this story at Stein's house. He was there visiting Stein, and ran into Jewel and Tamb' Itam. Tamb' Itam said that Jim wouldn't fight, and Jewel woodenly said that Jim left her. We're not quite sure what they're talking about, but we have a bad feeling about this.


'It all begins, as I've told you, with the man called Brown,' ran the
opening sentence of Marlow's narrative. 'You who have knocked about the
Western Pacific must have heard of him. He was the show ruffian on the
Australian coast--not that he was often to be seen there, but because
he was always trotted out in the stories of lawless life a visitor from
home is treated to; and the mildest of these stories which were told
about him from Cape York to Eden Bay was more than enough to hang a man
if told in the right place. They never failed to let you know, too,
that he was supposed to be the son of a baronet. Be it as it may, it is
certain he had deserted from a home ship in the early gold-digging days,
and in a few years became talked about as the terror of this or that
group of islands in Polynesia. He would kidnap natives, he would strip
some lonely white trader to the very pyjamas he stood in, and after he
had robbed the poor devil, he would as likely as not invite him to fight
a duel with shot-guns on the beach--which would have been fair enough
as these things go, if the other man hadn't been by that time already
half-dead with fright. Brown was a latter-day buccaneer, sorry enough,
like his more celebrated prototypes; but what distinguished him from
his contemporary brother ruffians, like Bully Hayes or the mellifluous
Pease, or that perfumed, Dundreary-whiskered, dandified scoundrel known
as Dirty Dick, was the arrogant temper of his misdeeds and a vehement
scorn for mankind at large and for his victims in particular. The
others were merely vulgar and greedy brutes, but he seemed moved by some
complex intention. He would rob a man as if only to demonstrate his poor
opinion of the creature, and he would bring to the shooting or maiming
of some quiet, unoffending stranger a savage and vengeful earnestness
fit to terrify the most reckless of desperadoes. In the days of his
greatest glory he owned an armed barque, manned by a mixed crew of
Kanakas and runaway whalers, and boasted, I don't know with what truth,
of being financed on the quiet by a most respectable firm of copra
merchants. Later on he ran off--it was reported--with the wife of a
missionary, a very young girl from Clapham way, who had married the
mild, flat-footed fellow in a moment of enthusiasm, and, suddenly
transplanted to Melanesia, lost her bearings somehow. It was a dark
story. She was ill at the time he carried her off, and died on board his
ship. It is said--as the most wonderful put of the tale--that over her
body he gave way to an outburst of sombre and violent grief. His luck
left him, too, very soon after. He lost his ship on some rocks off
Malaita, and disappeared for a time as though he had gone down with her.
He is heard of next at Nuka-Hiva, where he bought an old French schooner
out of Government service. What creditable enterprise he might have had
in view when he made that purchase I can't say, but it is evident that
what with High Commissioners, consuls, men-of-war, and international
control, the South Seas were getting too hot to hold gentlemen of his
kidney. Clearly he must have shifted the scene of his operations farther
west, because a year later he plays an incredibly audacious, but not a
very profitable part, in a serio-comic business in Manila Bay, in which
a peculating governor and an absconding treasurer are the principal
figures; thereafter he seems to have hung around the Philippines in his
rotten schooner battling with un adverse fortune, till at last, running
his appointed course, he sails into Jim's history, a blind accomplice of
the Dark Powers.

'His tale goes that when a Spanish patrol cutter captured him he was
simply trying to run a few guns for the insurgents. If so, then I can't
understand what he was doing off the south coast of Mindanao. My belief,
however, is that he was blackmailing the native villages along the
coast. The principal thing is that the cutter, throwing a guard on
board, made him sail in company towards Zamboanga. On the way, for some
reason or other, both vessels had to call at one of these new Spanish
settlements--which never came to anything in the end--where there was
not only a civil official in charge on shore, but a good stout coasting
schooner lying at anchor in the little bay; and this craft, in every way
much better than his own, Brown made up his mind to steal.

'He was down on his luck--as he told me himself. The world he had
bullied for twenty years with fierce, aggressive disdain, had yielded
him nothing in the way of material advantage except a small bag of
silver dollars, which was concealed in his cabin so that "the devil
himself couldn't smell it out." And that was all--absolutely all. He
was tired of his life, and not afraid of death. But this man, who would
stake his existence on a whim with a bitter and jeering recklessness,
stood in mortal fear of imprisonment. He had an unreasoning cold-sweat,
nerve-shaking, blood-to-water-turning sort of horror at the bare
possibility of being locked up--the sort of terror a superstitious man
would feel at the thought of being embraced by a spectre. Therefore the
civil official who came on board to make a preliminary investigation
into the capture, investigated arduously all day long, and only went
ashore after dark, muffled up in a cloak, and taking great care not to
let Brown's little all clink in its bag. Afterwards, being a man of his
word, he contrived (the very next evening, I believe) to send off
the Government cutter on some urgent bit of special service. As her
commander could not spare a prize crew, he contented himself by taking
away before he left all the sails of Brown's schooner to the very last
rag, and took good care to tow his two boats on to the beach a couple of
miles off.

'But in Brown's crew there was a Solomon Islander, kidnapped in his
youth and devoted to Brown, who was the best man of the whole gang. That
fellow swam off to the coaster--five hundred yards or so--with the end
of a warp made up of all the running gear unrove for the purpose. The
water was smooth, and the bay dark, "like the inside of a cow," as Brown
described it. The Solomon Islander clambered over the bulwarks with the
end of the rope in his teeth. The crew of the coaster--all Tagals--were
ashore having a jollification in the native village. The two shipkeepers
left on board woke up suddenly and saw the devil. It had glittering eyes
and leaped quick as lightning about the deck. They fell on their knees,
paralysed with fear, crossing themselves and mumbling prayers. With
a long knife he found in the caboose the Solomon Islander, without
interrupting their orisons, stabbed first one, then the other; with the
same knife he set to sawing patiently at the coir cable till suddenly it
parted under the blade with a splash. Then in the silence of the bay
he let out a cautious shout, and Brown's gang, who meantime had been
peering and straining their hopeful ears in the darkness, began to
pull gently at their end of the warp. In less than five minutes the two
schooners came together with a slight shock and a creak of spars.

'Brown's crowd transferred themselves without losing an instant, taking
with them their firearms and a large supply of ammunition. They were
sixteen in all: two runaway blue-jackets, a lanky deserter from a Yankee
man-of-war, a couple of simple, blond Scandinavians, a mulatto of sorts,
one bland Chinaman who cooked--and the rest of the nondescript spawn
of the South Seas. None of them cared; Brown bent them to his will, and
Brown, indifferent to gallows, was running away from the spectre of
a Spanish prison. He didn't give them the time to trans-ship enough
provisions; the weather was calm, the air was charged with dew, and when
they cast off the ropes and set sail to a faint off-shore draught there
was no flutter in the damp canvas; their old schooner seemed to detach
itself gently from the stolen craft and slip away silently, together
with the black mass of the coast, into the night.

'They got clear away. Brown related to me in detail their passage down
the Straits of Macassar. It is a harrowing and desperate story. They
were short of food and water; they boarded several native craft and got
a little from each. With a stolen ship Brown did not dare to put into
any port, of course. He had no money to buy anything, no papers to show,
and no lie plausible enough to get him out again. An Arab barque, under
the Dutch flag, surprised one night at anchor off Poulo Laut, yielded a
little dirty rice, a bunch of bananas, and a cask of water; three days
of squally, misty weather from the north-east shot the schooner across
the Java Sea. The yellow muddy waves drenched that collection of hungry
ruffians. They sighted mail-boats moving on their appointed routes;
passed well-found home ships with rusty iron sides anchored in the
shallow sea waiting for a change of weather or the turn of the tide; an
English gunboat, white and trim, with two slim masts, crossed their bows
one day in the distance; and on another occasion a Dutch corvette, black
and heavily sparred, loomed up on their quarter, steaming dead slow
in the mist. They slipped through unseen or disregarded, a wan,
sallow-faced band of utter outcasts, enraged with hunger and hunted by
fear. Brown's idea was to make for Madagascar, where he expected, on
grounds not altogether illusory, to sell the schooner in Tamatave, and
no questions asked, or perhaps obtain some more or less forged papers
for her. Yet before he could face the long passage across the Indian
Ocean food was wanted--water too.

'Perhaps he had heard of Patusan--or perhaps he just only happened to
see the name written in small letters on the chart--probably that of a
largish village up a river in a native state, perfectly defenceless, far
from the beaten tracks of the sea and from the ends of submarine cables.
He had done that kind of thing before--in the way of business;
and this now was an absolute necessity, a question of life and
death--or rather of liberty. Of liberty! He was sure to get
provisions--bullocks--rice--sweet-potatoes. The sorry gang licked
their chops. A cargo of produce for the schooner perhaps could be
extorted--and, who knows?--some real ringing coined money! Some of these
chiefs and village headmen can be made to part freely. He told me he
would have roasted their toes rather than be baulked. I believe him. His
men believed him too. They didn't cheer aloud, being a dumb pack, but
made ready wolfishly.

'Luck served him as to weather. A few days of calm would have brought
unmentionable horrors on board that schooner, but with the help of land
and sea breezes, in less than a week after clearing the Sunda Straits,
he anchored off the Batu Kring mouth within a pistol-shot of the fishing
village.

'Fourteen of them packed into the schooner's long-boat (which was big,
having been used for cargo-work) and started up the river, while two
remained in charge of the schooner with food enough to keep starvation
off for ten days. The tide and wind helped, and early one afternoon the
big white boat under a ragged sail shouldered its way before the sea
breeze into Patusan Reach, manned by fourteen assorted scarecrows
glaring hungrily ahead, and fingering the breech-blocks of cheap rifles.
Brown calculated upon the terrifying surprise of his appearance. They
sailed in with the last of the flood; the Rajah's stockade gave no sign;
the first houses on both sides of the stream seemed deserted. A few
canoes were seen up the reach in full flight. Brown was astonished at
the size of the place. A profound silence reigned. The wind dropped
between the houses; two oars were got out and the boat held on
up-stream, the idea being to effect a lodgment in the centre of the town
before the inhabitants could think of resistance.

'It seems, however, that the headman of the fishing village at Batu
Kring had managed to send off a timely warning. When the long-boat came
abreast of the mosque (which Doramin had built: a structure with gables
and roof finials of carved coral) the open space before it was full of
people. A shout went up, and was followed by a clash of gongs all up the
river. From a point above two little brass 6-pounders were discharged,
and the round-shot came skipping down the empty reach, spurting
glittering jets of water in the sunshine. In front of the mosque a
shouting lot of men began firing in volleys that whipped athwart the
current of the river; an irregular, rolling fusillade was opened on the
boat from both banks, and Brown's men replied with a wild, rapid fire.
The oars had been got in.

'The turn of the tide at high water comes on very quickly in that river,
and the boat in mid-stream, nearly hidden in smoke, began to drift back
stern foremost. Along both shores the smoke thickened also, lying below
the roofs in a level streak as you may see a long cloud cutting the
slope of a mountain. A tumult of war-cries, the vibrating clang
of gongs, the deep snoring of drums, yells of rage, crashes of
volley-firing, made an awful din, in which Brown sat confounded but
steady at the tiller, working himself into a fury of hate and rage
against those people who dared to defend themselves. Two of his men
had been wounded, and he saw his retreat cut off below the town by some
boats that had put off from Tunku Allang's stockade. There were six of
them, full of men. While he was thus beset he perceived the entrance of
the narrow creek (the same which Jim had jumped at low water). It was
then brim full. Steering the long-boat in, they landed, and, to make a
long story short, they established themselves on a little knoll about
900 yards from the stockade, which, in fact, they commanded from that
position. The slopes of the knoll were bare, but there were a few trees
on the summit. They went to work cutting these down for a breastwork,
and were fairly intrenched before dark; meantime the Rajah's boats
remained in the river with curious neutrality. When the sun set the glue
of many brushwood blazes lighted on the river-front, and between the
double line of houses on the land side threw into black relief the
roofs, the groups of slender palms, the heavy clumps of fruit trees.
Brown ordered the grass round his position to be fired; a low ring of
thin flames under the slow ascending smoke wriggled rapidly down the
slopes of the knoll; here and there a dry bush caught with a tall,
vicious roar. The conflagration made a clear zone of fire for the rifles
of the small party, and expired smouldering on the edge of the forests
and along the muddy bank of the creek. A strip of jungle luxuriating in
a damp hollow between the knoll and the Rajah's stockade stopped it
on that side with a great crackling and detonations of bursting bamboo
stems. The sky was sombre, velvety, and swarming with stars. The
blackened ground smoked quietly with low creeping wisps, till a little
breeze came on and blew everything away. Brown expected an attack to
be delivered as soon as the tide had flowed enough again to enable the
war-boats which had cut off his retreat to enter the creek. At any rate
he was sure there would be an attempt to carry off his long-boat,
which lay below the hill, a dark high lump on the feeble sheen of a wet
mud-flat. But no move of any sort was made by the boats in the river.
Over the stockade and the Rajah's buildings Brown saw their lights on
the water. They seemed to be anchored across the stream. Other lights
afloat were moving in the reach, crossing and recrossing from side to
side. There were also lights twinkling motionless upon the long walls of
houses up the reach, as far as the bend, and more still beyond, others
isolated inland. The loom of the big fires disclosed buildings, roofs,
black piles as far as he could see. It was an immense place. The
fourteen desperate invaders lying flat behind the felled trees raised
their chins to look over at the stir of that town that seemed to extend
up-river for miles and swarm with thousands of angry men. They did not
speak to each other. Now and then they would hear a loud yell, or a
single shot rang out, fired very far somewhere. But round their position
everything was still, dark, silent. They seemed to be forgotten, as if
the excitement keeping awake all the population had nothing to do with
them, as if they had been dead already.'

Here's Gentleman Brown's story. A pirate, with some serious bad luck, Brown heads to Patusan, which he has heard is easy pickings. Some island locals raise the alarm about his arrival, and the Patusan natives are lying in wait to attack him. They sure know how to welcome visitors over in Patusan, don't they? To avoid a fight, Brown and his crew retreat to a hilltop.

Marlow continues his narrative with a description of Brown, who comes to Patusan and brings an end to the peaceful life there. People fear this Australian ruffian, almost like a devil, for he is an arrogant scoundrel with a vile temper and an immoral lifestyle. In Australia, where he had been a smuggler, he was known for killing people for no apparent reason. It is reported that he fell in love with the wife of a missionary with whom he eloped. She fell ill and died soon after, leaving him grief-stricken. Brown was caught in his illegal activities by a Spanish patrol cutter near Mindanao. They intended to take him to prison in Zamboanga, but when they stopped at one of the Spanish settlements, Brown stole a ship and escaped. While sailing towards Zanzibar, where he planned to sell the ship, he noticed the island of Patusan on his map. It struck him that he could live safely there since the island was cut off from the rest of the world. When Brown and his men landed, they armed themselves, went ashore, and found a village, where they were greeted with a burst of cannon fire. Brown's men counter-fired. Soon, however, the invaders were surrounded by Raja Allang's men. They made a barricade, but since their position was not secure and there were only fourteen of them, they were easy targets.

Notes The chapter serves two important purposes. It contrasts the deliberate and continuous evil acts of Brown with the honest character of Jim. Since Brown does not value life, as evidenced in his murdering people for no reason, he is not afraid to die himself; this makes him a difficult and dangerous adversary. The chapter also gives an idea about the geographical location of Patusan. The fictitious island is probably located among the Sunda Islands, somewhere near the coast of Sumatra.


'All the events of that night have a great importance, since they
brought about a situation which remained unchanged till Jim's return.
Jim had been away in the interior for more than a week, and it was Dain
Waris who had directed the first repulse. That brave and intelligent
youth ("who knew how to fight after the manner of white men") wished to
settle the business off-hand, but his people were too much for him.
He had not Jim's racial prestige and the reputation of invincible,
supernatural power. He was not the visible, tangible incarnation of
unfailing truth and of unfailing victory. Beloved, trusted, and
admired as he was, he was still one of _them_, while Jim was one of
us. Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was
invulnerable, while Dain Waris could be killed. Those unexpressed
thoughts guided the opinions of the chief men of the town, who elected
to assemble in Jim's fort for deliberation upon the emergency, as if
expecting to find wisdom and courage in the dwelling of the absent white
man. The shooting of Brown's ruffians was so far good, or lucky, that
there had been half-a-dozen casualties amongst the defenders. The
wounded were lying on the verandah tended by their women-folk. The women
and children from the lower part of the town had been sent into the
fort at the first alarm. There Jewel was in command, very efficient and
high-spirited, obeyed by Jim's "own people," who, quitting in a body
their little settlement under the stockade, had gone in to form the
garrison. The refugees crowded round her; and through the whole affair,
to the very disastrous last, she showed an extraordinary martial ardour.
It was to her that Dain Waris had gone at once at the first intelligence
of danger, for you must know that Jim was the only one in Patusan who
possessed a store of gunpowder. Stein, with whom he had kept up intimate
relations by letters, had obtained from the Dutch Government a special
authorisation to export five hundred kegs of it to Patusan. The
powder-magazine was a small hut of rough logs covered entirely with
earth, and in Jim's absence the girl had the key. In the council, held
at eleven o'clock in the evening in Jim's dining-room, she backed up
Waris's advice for immediate and vigorous action. I am told that she
stood up by the side of Jim's empty chair at the head of the long table
and made a warlike impassioned speech, which for the moment extorted
murmurs of approbation from the assembled headmen. Old Doramin, who had
not showed himself outside his own gate for more than a year, had been
brought across with great difficulty. He was, of course, the chief man
there. The temper of the council was very unforgiving, and the old man's
word would have been decisive; but it is my opinion that, well aware of
his son's fiery courage, he dared not pronounce the word. More dilatory
counsels prevailed. A certain Haji Saman pointed out at great length
that "these tyrannical and ferocious men had delivered themselves to
a certain death in any case. They would stand fast on their hill and
starve, or they would try to regain their boat and be shot from ambushes
across the creek, or they would break and fly into the forest and perish
singly there." He argued that by the use of proper stratagems these
evil-minded strangers could be destroyed without the risk of a battle,
and his words had a great weight, especially with the Patusan men
proper. What unsettled the minds of the townsfolk was the failure of
the Rajah's boats to act at the decisive moment. It was the diplomatic
Kassim who represented the Rajah at the council. He spoke very little,
listened smilingly, very friendly and impenetrable. During the sitting
messengers kept arriving every few minutes almost, with reports of the
invaders' proceedings. Wild and exaggerated rumours were flying: there
was a large ship at the mouth of the river with big guns and many more
men--some white, others with black skins and of bloodthirsty appearance.
They were coming with many more boats to exterminate every living thing.
A sense of near, incomprehensible danger affected the common people.
At one moment there was a panic in the courtyard amongst the women;
shrieking; a rush; children crying--Haji Sunan went out to quiet them.
Then a fort sentry fired at something moving on the river, and nearly
killed a villager bringing in his women-folk in a canoe together with
the best of his domestic utensils and a dozen fowls. This caused more
confusion. Meantime the palaver inside Jim's house went on in the
presence of the girl. Doramin sat fierce-faced, heavy, looking at the
speakers in turn, and breathing slow like a bull. He didn't speak till
the last, after Kassim had declared that the Rajah's boats would be
called in because the men were required to defend his master's stockade.
Dain Waris in his father's presence would offer no opinion, though the
girl entreated him in Jim's name to speak out. She offered him Jim's own
men in her anxiety to have these intruders driven out at once. He only
shook his head, after a glance or two at Doramin. Finally, when the
council broke up it had been decided that the houses nearest the creek
should be strongly occupied to obtain the command of the enemy's boat.
The boat itself was not to be interfered with openly, so that the
robbers on the hill should be tempted to embark, when a well-directed
fire would kill most of them, no doubt. To cut off the escape of those
who might survive, and to prevent more of them coming up, Dain Waris was
ordered by Doramin to take an armed party of Bugis down the river to a
certain spot ten miles below Patusan, and there form a camp on the shore
and blockade the stream with the canoes. I don't believe for a moment
that Doramin feared the arrival of fresh forces. My opinion is that his
conduct was guided solely by his wish to keep his son out of harm's
way. To prevent a rush being made into the town the construction of a
stockade was to be commenced at daylight at the end of the street on
the left bank. The old nakhoda declared his intention to command there
himself. A distribution of powder, bullets, and percussion-caps was made
immediately under the girl's supervision. Several messengers were to be
dispatched in different directions after Jim, whose exact whereabouts
were unknown. These men started at dawn, but before that time Kassim had
managed to open communications with the besieged Brown.

'That accomplished diplomatist and confidant of the Rajah, on leaving
the fort to go back to his master, took into his boat Cornelius, whom he
found slinking mutely amongst the people in the courtyard. Kassim had a
little plan of his own and wanted him for an interpreter. Thus it came
about that towards morning Brown, reflecting upon the desperate nature
of his position, heard from the marshy overgrown hollow an amicable,
quavering, strained voice crying--in English--for permission to come up,
under a promise of personal safety and on a very important errand. He
was overjoyed. If he was spoken to he was no longer a hunted wild beast.
These friendly sounds took off at once the awful stress of vigilant
watchfulness as of so many blind men not knowing whence the deathblow
might come. He pretended a great reluctance. The voice declared itself
"a white man--a poor, ruined, old man who had been living here for
years." A mist, wet and chilly, lay on the slopes of the hill, and after
some more shouting from one to the other, Brown called out, "Come on,
then, but alone, mind!" As a matter of fact--he told me, writhing with
rage at the recollection of his helplessness--it made no difference.
They couldn't see more than a few yards before them, and no treachery
could make their position worse. By-and-by Cornelius, in his
week-day attire of a ragged dirty shirt and pants, barefooted, with a
broken-rimmed pith hat on his head, was made out vaguely, sidling up to
the defences, hesitating, stopping to listen in a peering posture. "Come
along! You are safe," yelled Brown, while his men stared. All their
hopes of life became suddenly centered in that dilapidated, mean
newcomer, who in profound silence clambered clumsily over a felled
tree-trunk, and shivering, with his sour, mistrustful face, looked about
at the knot of bearded, anxious, sleepless desperadoes.

'Half an hour's confidential talk with Cornelius opened Brown's eyes as
to the home affairs of Patusan. He was on the alert at once. There were
possibilities, immense possibilities; but before he would talk over
Cornelius's proposals he demanded that some food should be sent up as
a guarantee of good faith. Cornelius went off, creeping sluggishly down
the hill on the side of the Rajah's palace, and after some delay a
few of Tunku Allang's men came up, bringing a scanty supply of rice,
chillies, and dried fish. This was immeasurably better than nothing.
Later on Cornelius returned accompanying Kassim, who stepped out with
an air of perfect good-humoured trustfulness, in sandals, and muffled
up from neck to ankles in dark-blue sheeting. He shook hands with Brown
discreetly, and the three drew aside for a conference. Brown's men,
recovering their confidence, were slapping each other on the back, and
cast knowing glances at their captain while they busied themselves with
preparations for cooking.

'Kassim disliked Doramin and his Bugis very much, but he hated the new
order of things still more. It had occurred to him that these whites,
together with the Rajah's followers, could attack and defeat the
Bugis before Jim's return. Then, he reasoned, general defection of
the townsfolk was sure to follow, and the reign of the white man who
protected poor people would be over. Afterwards the new allies could be
dealt with. They would have no friends. The fellow was perfectly able to
perceive the difference of character, and had seen enough of white men
to know that these newcomers were outcasts, men without country.
Brown preserved a stern and inscrutable demeanour. When he first heard
Cornelius's voice demanding admittance, it brought merely the hope of a
loophole for escape. In less than an hour other thoughts were seething
in his head. Urged by an extreme necessity, he had come there to steal
food, a few tons of rubber or gum may be, perhaps a handful of dollars,
and had found himself enmeshed by deadly dangers. Now in consequence
of these overtures from Kassim he began to think of stealing the whole
country. Some confounded fellow had apparently accomplished something of
the kind--single-handed at that. Couldn't have done it very well though.
Perhaps they could work together--squeeze everything dry and then go out
quietly. In the course of his negotiations with Kassim he became aware
that he was supposed to have a big ship with plenty of men outside.
Kassim begged him earnestly to have this big ship with his many guns and
men brought up the river without delay for the Rajah's service. Brown
professed himself willing, and on this basis the negotiation was carried
on with mutual distrust. Three times in the course of the morning the
courteous and active Kassim went down to consult the Rajah and came up
busily with his long stride. Brown, while bargaining, had a sort of grim
enjoyment in thinking of his wretched schooner, with nothing but a heap
of dirt in her hold, that stood for an armed ship, and a Chinaman and
a lame ex-beachcomber of Levuka on board, who represented all his many
men. In the afternoon he obtained further doles of food, a promise
of some money, and a supply of mats for his men to make shelters
for themselves. They lay down and snored, protected from the burning
sunshine; but Brown, sitting fully exposed on one of the felled trees,
feasted his eyes upon the view of the town and the river. There was much
loot there. Cornelius, who had made himself at home in the camp, talked
at his elbow, pointing out the localities, imparting advice, giving his
own version of Jim's character, and commenting in his own fashion upon
the events of the last three years. Brown, who, apparently indifferent
and gazing away, listened with attention to every word, could not make
out clearly what sort of man this Jim could be. "What's his name?
Jim! Jim! That's not enough for a man's name." "They call him," said
Cornelius scornfully, "Tuan Jim here. As you may say Lord Jim." "What is
he? Where does he come from?" inquired Brown. "What sort of man is he?
Is he an Englishman?" "Yes, yes, he's an Englishman. I am an Englishman
too. From Malacca. He is a fool. All you have to do is to kill him and
then you are king here. Everything belongs to him," explained Cornelius.
"It strikes me he may be made to share with somebody before very long,"
commented Brown half aloud. "No, no. The proper way is to kill him the
first chance you get, and then you can do what you like," Cornelius
would insist earnestly. "I have lived for many years here, and I am
giving you a friend's advice."

'In such converse and in gloating over the view of Patusan, which he had
determined in his mind should become his prey, Brown whiled away most
of the afternoon, his men, meantime, resting. On that day Dain Waris's
fleet of canoes stole one by one under the shore farthest from the
creek, and went down to close the river against his retreat. Of this
Brown was not aware, and Kassim, who came up the knoll an hour before
sunset, took good care not to enlighten him. He wanted the white
man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be
discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order,"
offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy
(as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river
and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged
it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply
wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth
selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was
rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty
hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to
put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.'

Dain Waris, son of Doramin, leads the first attack against Brown, but can't defeat him entirely. Meanwhile, Jim is away in the countryside while all this is going on. The Patusanians hold a council of war, at which everyone has competing plans and interests. It's clear that Jim's leadership is needed. Rajah Allang, who is playing both sides, decides to team up with Brown to defeat Jim, so he sends his advisor, Kassin, to meet with Brown. Kassim brings along Cornelius to act as an interpreter. The two of them make their pitch to Brown, who decides that Patusan sounds all right, and that he should take the island entirely for himself. While the double-crossers all have a powwow, Dain Waris quietly sends canoes downstream to trap Brown. Sneaky.

The arrival of Brown and his men in Patusan create a stir amongst the natives, who try to overcome the invaders. Unfortunately, Jim is away in the interior, and Dain Waris has to mastermind the attack. Though they love and respect him, the Bugis do not believe that he has supernatural powers like Jim. They think that Dain Waris will be defeated; therefore, they refuse to fight and wait for Jim to return, crowding into the fort that he has built. They send messengers out to look for Jim. Jewel, who has the key to the supply room, takes command at the fort. She urges Dain Waris to attack, but Doramin goes against her. He is afraid for his son. Doramin tells Dain Waris to go down the river and cut off the robbers' retreat. Kassim, Raja Tungku Allang's spokesman, has a desire to become the ruler of Patusan. To gain his end, he thinks it may be wise to side with Brown. He seeks out the villain and opens communication with him by using Cornelius as an interpreter. Cornelius tells Brown that he can become lord of Patusan if he kills Jim. Kassim is trying to manipulate Brown to murder Jim and clear a path for himself. He has no intention of allowing Brown to become the lord of the island.

Notes The novelist has set the stage for the final catastrophe. The intrigues and counter-intrigues between different groups of people in Patusan are realistic and graphic, for Conrad had full knowledge about the intrigues and double-dealings of Malay communities. Tungku Allang, Doramin, Kassim, and Cornelius are all depicted as scoundrels with their own agendas. Tungku Allan wants to seize power once again on the island; Doramin wants to protect his son, Dain Waris, so he can rule the island; and Kassim wants to become ruler of Patusan himself. Cornelius just wants to rid himself of Jim. It is important to note that the Bugis will not fight against Brown and his men because Jim is not present. It is ironic that they trust him so fully that they will not protect themselves if he is not there to give the order. Even though Dain Waris and Jewel urge them to battle, they ignore their pleas and simply send out messengers to search for Jim. There is even greater irony in the fact that when Jim returns he does not order the death of Brown, a fact that leads to several deaths, including his own.


'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For
doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man
was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must
be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like
that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow,
cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible
line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him
the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear
understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a
fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this
from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He
would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no
fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time
came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim
impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now.
The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw
away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and
for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat
from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that
Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him
with shots. The lust of battle was upon him.

'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of
course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the
broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts
with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness
of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a
blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind,
something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of
wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God.
No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such
a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent
privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found
himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he
planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the
fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner
with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost
in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had
defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames.
Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must
have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder
and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect,
though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the
alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with
small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with
trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled
out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark,
lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had
fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of
domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance
from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up
hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends.
He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the
Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky,
loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle
lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and
conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his
sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He
dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the
unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look.
The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step
forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and
knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the
dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this
there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends
any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body
in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a
multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face
down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown
to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we
wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to
think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long
shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with
his eyes hanging out of his head."

'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin
foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . .
strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes
were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with
skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways
like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and
awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are
sights one never forgets.

'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as
might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the
Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a
spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came
back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere.
"There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked
the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased
too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a
message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's
ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river.
He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This
double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces
divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in
the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town,
assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his
messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It
was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or
so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall.
The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the
minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said.
There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for
many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man
was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that
evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer
folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many
of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the
Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost
out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence
or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they
departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen
together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair
behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled
rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours.

'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.'

Brown, Kassim, and Cornelius bide their time as they prepare for all out war. Unfortunately, this calm before the storm is interrupted when one of Brown's people shoots a villager. It seems that Brown is hoping to stir up fear and unrest among the native Patusan people to make conquering them easier. That night one of Brown's own men gets shot in retaliation. Brown refuses to let anyone go down to get the dying man, because he doesn't want anyone else to get killed. Cornelius and Brown chat more about their plans. When they hear drums, Cornelius explains that this probably means that Jim has returned, which doesn't bode well for their plans. He suggests that Brown shoot Jim on sight tomorrow.

Brown is eager to meet Jim and wants to learn how Jim has won the confidence of the natives. His plan is to learn Jim's strategy from him, kill him, and make himself the lord of Patusan. The double-dealing of Kassim and Cornelius gives him ample time for planing. He decides to terrorize the natives with violence and begins by having a Patusan man shot to death for no reason. Kassim witnesses the killing and sends word to Dain Waris to warn him about Brown. He also sends messages to the fort, requesting gun powder for Raja's men. Brown knows that he and his men are totally outnumbered, and escape seems impossible. One of his men is shot when he tries to go into town. Immediately there is firing from both sides. Brown orders his men to stop fighting. Later that night Brown hears the sound of yelling and shouting from the village. Cornelius tells him that the natives are welcoming Jim home. Cornelius also says that Jim, whom he calls a fool, will soon come to meet Brown.

Notes In this chapter, Cornelius describes Jim. He feels that Jim's honesty and fair dealings are signs of weakness and stupidity. He calls Jim a fool and tells Brown that the naive leader will soon come to call on Brown, trying to make peace. Brown is also described and shown in greater detail and he becomes a totally despicable character. As he waits for Jim to return, he has a native murdered for no reason; Brown just likes to spread terror wherever he goes. His plan is to learn what he can from Jim and then dispose of him. He will then make himself ruler of Patusan and squeeze the island of its wealth.


'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.' . . ."

'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured,
and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for
him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and
destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say
how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself
always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of
every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate
of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's
face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn
and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men,
women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that
beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo
mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth
under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive
agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the
time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman
Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet
befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house
on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells
over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving
hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time
or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain
Brown to a better way of life." . . . "Bag Gentleman Brown for
Glory"--as a leery-eyed loafer expressed it once--"just to let them see
up above what a Western Pacific trading skipper looks like." And this
was the man, too, who had run off with a dying woman, and had shed tears
over her body. "Carried on like a big baby," his then mate was never
tired of telling, "and where the fun came in may I be kicked to death by
diseased Kanakas if _I_ know. Why, gents! she was too far gone when he
brought her aboard to know him; she just lay there on her back in his
bunk staring at the beam with awful shining eyes--and then she died.
Dam' bad sort of fever, I guess. . . ." I remembered all these stories
while, wiping his matted lump of a beard with a livid hand, he was
telling me from his noisome couch how he got round, got in, got home,
on that confounded, immaculate, don't-you-touch-me sort of fellow. He
admitted that he couldn't be scared, but there was a way, "as broad as
a turnpike, to get in and shake his twopenny soul around and inside out
and upside down--by God!"'

A bit more cautious than Cornelius, Brown opts to talk with Jim before shooting him. The two chat nervously about their situation and what they want from each other. Brown explains that he came to Patusan out of hunger and fear of being imprisoned. Jim, for one, can totally relate. Brown is hitting all the right buttons.

Cornelius's prediction soon comes true, for Jim arrives to see Brown early the next morning. He comes dressed in white  and unarmed. He is the picture of confidence. Brown immediately does not like Jim. He resents Jim's youth, self-assurance, and goodness; he also is jealous of the fact that Jim is loved and trusted by the natives. Jim asks Brown why he has come to Patusan. Brown answers that hunger has brought him there. Brown counter-questions Jim. When Jim flounders in coming up with an answer, Brown senses Jim's weakness and knows he can easily overcome him. Brown tells Jim that there must be no military encounter because lives and property would be lost. He knows that Jim will agree to this because Jim loves the natives. Throughout their talk, Brown, having seen Jim's weakness, makes insinuations about something shady in Jim's past. Brown comments that he is traveling to escape imprisonment. He asks Jim if he is afraid of imprisonment or anything else. The question forces Jim to think about the Patna incident.

Notes This chapter reveals the meeting between Brown and Jim. Brown immediately dislikes Jim, for he sees a complete opposite from himself in this young, self-assured man who is surrounded with love, security, and power. Jim's goodness is a sharp contrast to Brown's evil depravity. The chapter also shows that the past still haunts Jim. Brown does not know about the Patna incident, but senses Jim's weakness and hints about them both having a shady past. In Jim's mind, there is a common bond between him and Brown, because they both feel guilty. As a result, Jim fails to understand the villainy and depravity of this enemy, who quickly assesses Jim's vulnerability and immediately understands that he can do away with Jim. The setting of the chapter is significant, for it is the same place where Jim first landed in Patusan, which was his second big "jump" in the novel. As he and Brown talk face to face, Brown says that he himself is "not the sort to jump out of trouble." Conrad is foreshadowing that Jim is about to take his third jump; this time he will not jump out of trouble, but leap into death.