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.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!‹«Chapter Forty-Two»I don't think he could do more than perhaps look upon that straight path.He seemed to have been puzzled by what he saw, for he interrupted himself in his narrative more than once to exclaim, ›He nearly slipped from me there.I could not make him out.Who was he?‹ And after glaring at me wildly he would go on, jubilating and sneering.To me the conversation of these two across the creek appears now as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on with her cold-eyed knowledge of the end.No, he didn't turn Jim's soul inside out, but I am much mistaken if the spirit so utterly out of his reach had not been made to taste to the full the bitterness of that contest.These were the emissaries with whom the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat – white men from ›out there‹ where he did not think himself good enough to live.This was all that came to him – a menace, a shock, a danger to his work.I suppose it is this sad, half-resentful, half-resigned feeling, piercing through the few words Jim said now and then, that puzzled Brown so much in the reading of his character.Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work, and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims.He admitted to me that Jim wasn't of the sort that can be got over by truckling, and accordingly he took care to show himself as a man confronting without dismay ill-luck, censure, and disaster.The smuggling of a few guns was no great crime, he pointed out.As to coming to Patusan, who had the right to say he hadn't come to beg? The infernal people here let loose at him from both banks without staying to ask questions.He made the point brazenly, for, in truth, Dain Waris's energetic action had prevented the greatest calamities; because Brown told me distinctly that, perceiving the size of the place, he had resolved instantly in his mind that as soon as he had gained a footing he would set fire right and left, and begin by shooting down everything living in sight, in order to cow and terrify the population.The disproportion of forces was so great that this was the only way giving him the slightest chance of attaining his ends – he argued in a fit of coughing.But he didn't tell Jim this.As to the hardships and starvation they had gone through, these had been very real; it was enough to look at his band.He made, at the sound of a shrill whistle, all his men appear standing in a row on the logs in full view, so that Jim could see them.For the killing of the man, it had been done – well, it had – but was not this war, bloody war – in a corner? and the fellow had been killed cleanly, shot through the chest, not like that poor devil of his lying now in the creek.They had to listen to him dying for six hours, with his entrails torn with slugs.At any rate this was a life for a life.And all this was said with the weariness, with the recklessness of a man spurred on and on by ill-luck till he cares not where he runs [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]