Chapter Chapter 25 · ‘“This is where I was prisoner for three days,” he murmured to me (it

. ‘“This is where I was prisoner for three days,” he murmured to me (it

was on the occasion of our visit to the Rajah), while we were making our

way slowly through a kind of awestruck riot of dependants across Tunku

Allang’s courtyard. “Filthy place, isn’t it? And I couldn’t get anything

to eat either, unless I made a row about it, and then it was only

a small plate of rice and a fried fish not much bigger than a

stickleback--confound them! Jove! I’ve been hungry prowling inside this

stinking enclosure with some of these vagabonds shoving their mugs right

under my nose. I had given up that famous revolver of yours at the first

demand. Glad to get rid of the bally thing. Look like a fool walking

about with an empty shooting-iron in my hand.” At that moment we came

into the presence, and he became unflinchingly grave and complimentary

with his late captor. Oh! magnificent! I want to laugh when I think of

it. But I was impressed, too. The old disreputable Tunku Allang could

not help showing his fear (he was no hero, for all the tales of his hot

youth he was fond of telling); and at the same time there was a wistful

confidence in his manner towards his late prisoner. Note! Even where he

would be most hated he was still trusted. Jim--as far as I could follow

the conversation--was improving the occasion by the delivery of a

lecture. Some poor villagers had been waylaid and robbed while on their

way to Doramin’s house with a few pieces of gum or beeswax which they

wished to exchange for rice. “It was Doramin who was a thief,” burst

out the Rajah. A shaking fury seemed to enter that old frail body.

He writhed weirdly on his mat, gesticulating with his hands and feet,

tossing the tangled strings of his mop--an impotent incarnation of rage.

There were staring eyes and dropping jaws all around us. Jim began to

speak. Resolutely, coolly, and for some time he enlarged upon the text

that no man should be prevented from getting his food and his children’s

food honestly. The other sat like a tailor at his board, one palm on

each knee, his head low, and fixing Jim through the grey hair that

fell over his very eyes. When Jim had done there was a great stillness.

Nobody seemed to breathe even; no one made a sound till the old Rajah

sighed faintly, and looking up, with a toss of his head, said quickly,

“You hear, my people! No more of these little games.” This decree

was received in profound silence. A rather heavy man, evidently in a

position of confidence, with intelligent eyes, a bony, broad, very dark

face, and a cheerily officious manner (I learned later on he was the

executioner), presented to us two cups of coffee on a brass tray, which

he took from the hands of an inferior attendant. “You needn’t drink,”

muttered Jim very rapidly. I didn’t perceive the meaning at first, and

only looked at him. He took a good sip and sat composedly, holding the

saucer in his left hand. In a moment I felt excessively annoyed. “Why

the devil,” I whispered, smiling at him amiably, “do you expose me to

such a stupid risk?” I drank, of course, there was nothing for it, while

he gave no sign, and almost immediately afterwards we took our leave.

While we were going down the courtyard to our boat, escorted by the

intelligent and cheery executioner, Jim said he was very sorry. It was

the barest chance, of course. Personally he thought nothing of poison.

The remotest chance. He was--he assured me--considered to be infinitely

more useful than dangerous, and so . . . “But the Rajah is afraid of

you abominably. Anybody can see that,” I argued with, I own, a certain

peevishness, and all the time watching anxiously for the first twist of

some sort of ghastly colic. I was awfully disgusted. “If I am to do any

good here and preserve my position,” he said, taking his seat by my

side in the boat, “I must stand the risk: I take it once every month, at

least. Many people trust me to do that--for them. Afraid of me! That’s

just it. Most likely he is afraid of me because I am not afraid of his

coffee.” Then showing me a place on the north front of the stockade

where the pointed tops of several stakes were broken, “This is where

I leaped over on my third day in Patusan. They haven’t put new stakes

there yet. Good leap, eh?” A moment later we passed the mouth of a muddy

creek. “This is my second leap. I had a bit of a run and took this one

flying, but fell short. Thought I would leave my skin there. Lost my

shoes struggling. And all the time I was thinking to myself how beastly

it would be to get a jab with a bally long spear while sticking in the

mud like this. I remember how sick I felt wriggling in that slime. I

mean really sick--as if I had bitten something rotten.”

‘That’s how it was--and the opportunity ran by his side, leaped over the

gap, floundered in the mud . . . still veiled. The unexpectedness of his

coming was the only thing, you understand, that saved him from being at

once dispatched with krisses and flung into the river. They had him, but

it was like getting hold of an apparition, a wraith, a portent. What did

it mean? What to do with it? Was it too late to conciliate him? Hadn’t

he better be killed without more delay? But what would happen then?

Wretched old Allang went nearly mad with apprehension and through the

difficulty of making up his mind. Several times the council was broken

up, and the advisers made a break helter-skelter for the door and out

on to the verandah. One--it is said--even jumped down to the

ground--fifteen feet, I should judge--and broke his leg. The royal

governor of Patusan had bizarre mannerisms, and one of them was to

introduce boastful rhapsodies into every arduous discussion, when,

getting gradually excited, he would end by flying off his perch with a

kriss in his hand. But, barring such interruptions, the deliberations

upon Jim’s fate went on night and day.

‘Meanwhile he wandered about the courtyard, shunned by some, glared at

by others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy of the first

casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took possession of a

small tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of filth and rotten

matter incommoded him greatly: it seems he had not lost his appetite

though, because--he told me--he had been hungry all the blessed time.

Now and again “some fussy ass” deputed from the council-room would

come out running to him, and in honeyed tones would administer amazing

interrogatories: “Were the Dutch coming to take the country? Would the

white man like to go back down the river? What was the object of coming

to such a miserable country? The Rajah wanted to know whether the white

man could repair a watch?” They did actually bring out to him a nickel

clock of New England make, and out of sheer unbearable boredom he busied

himself in trying to get the alarum to work. It was apparently when

thus occupied in his shed that the true perception of his extreme peril

dawned upon him. He dropped the thing--he says--“like a hot potato,”

and walked out hastily, without the slightest idea of what he would,

or indeed could, do. He only knew that the position was intolerable. He

strolled aimlessly beyond a sort of ramshackle little granary on posts,

and his eyes fell on the broken stakes of the palisade; and then--he

says--at once, without any mental process as it were, without any stir

of emotion, he set about his escape as if executing a plan matured for a

month. He walked off carelessly to give himself a good run, and when he

faced about there was some dignitary, with two spearmen in attendance,

close at his elbow ready with a question. He started off “from under his

very nose,” went over “like a bird,” and landed on the other side with

a fall that jarred all his bones and seemed to split his head. He picked

himself up instantly. He never thought of anything at the time; all he

could remember--he said--was a great yell; the first houses of Patusan

were before him four hundred yards away; he saw the creek, and as it

were mechanically put on more pace. The earth seemed fairly to fly

backwards under his feet. He took off from the last dry spot, felt

himself flying through the air, felt himself, without any shock, planted

upright in an extremely soft and sticky mudbank. It was only when he

tried to move his legs and found he couldn’t that, in his own words,

“he came to himself.” He began to think of the “bally long spears.” As

a matter of fact, considering that the people inside the stockade had to

run to the gate, then get down to the landing-place, get into boats,

and pull round a point of land, he had more advance than he imagined.

Besides, it being low water, the creek was without water--you couldn’t

call it dry--and practically he was safe for a time from everything but

a very long shot perhaps. The higher firm ground was about six feet in

front of him. “I thought I would have to die there all the same,”

he said. He reached and grabbed desperately with his hands, and only

succeeded in gathering a horrible cold shiny heap of slime against his

breast--up to his very chin. It seemed to him he was burying himself

alive, and then he struck out madly, scattering the mud with his fists.

It fell on his head, on his face, over his eyes, into his mouth. He told

me that he remembered suddenly the courtyard, as you remember a place

where you had been very happy years ago. He longed--so he said--to be

back there again, mending the clock. Mending the clock--that was the

idea. He made efforts, tremendous sobbing, gasping efforts, efforts that

seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him blind, and

culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness to crack the

earth asunder, to throw it off his limbs--and he felt himself creeping

feebly up the bank. He lay full length on the firm ground and saw the

light, the sky. Then as a sort of happy thought the notion came to him

that he would go to sleep. He will have it that he _did_ actually go to

sleep; that he slept--perhaps for a minute, perhaps for twenty seconds,

or only for one second, but he recollects distinctly the violent

convulsive start of awakening. He remained lying still for a while, and

then he arose muddy from head to foot and stood there, thinking he

was alone of his kind for hundreds of miles, alone, with no help, no

sympathy, no pity to expect from any one, like a hunted animal. The

first houses were not more than twenty yards from him; and it was the

desperate screaming of a frightened woman trying to carry off a child

that started him again. He pelted straight on in his socks, beplastered

with filth out of all semblance to a human being. He traversed more

than half the length of the settlement. The nimbler women fled right and

left, the slower men just dropped whatever they had in their hands, and

remained petrified with dropping jaws. He was a flying terror. He says

he noticed the little children trying to run for life, falling on their

little stomachs and kicking. He swerved between two houses up a slope,

clambered in desperation over a barricade of felled trees (there wasn’t

a week without some fight in Patusan at that time), burst through a

fence into a maize-patch, where a scared boy flung a stick at him,

blundered upon a path, and ran all at once into the arms of several

startled men. He just had breath enough to gasp out, “Doramin! Doramin!”

He remembers being half-carried, half-rushed to the top of the slope,

and in a vast enclosure with palms and fruit trees being run up to a

large man sitting massively in a chair in the midst of the greatest

possible commotion and excitement. He fumbled in mud and clothes to

produce the ring, and, finding himself suddenly on his back, wondered

who had knocked him down. They had simply let him go--don’t you

know?--but he couldn’t stand. At the foot of the slope random shots were

fired, and above the roofs of the settlement there rose a dull roar of

amazement. But he was safe. Doramin’s people were barricading the gate

and pouring water down his throat; Doramin’s old wife, full of business

and commiseration, was issuing shrill orders to her girls. “The old

woman,” he said softly, “made a to-do over me as if I had been her own

son. They put me into an immense bed--her state bed--and she ran in

and out wiping her eyes to give me pats on the back. I must have been a

pitiful object. I just lay there like a log for I don’t know how long.”

‘He seemed to have a great liking for Doramin’s old wife. She on her

side had taken a motherly fancy to him. She had a round, nut-brown,

soft face, all fine wrinkles, large, bright red lips (she chewed

betel assiduously), and screwed up, winking, benevolent eyes. She was

constantly in movement, scolding busily and ordering unceasingly a troop

of young women with clear brown faces and big grave eyes, her daughters,

her servants, her slave-girls. You know how it is in these households:

it’s generally impossible to tell the difference. She was very spare,

and even her ample outer garment, fastened in front with jewelled

clasps, had somehow a skimpy effect. Her dark bare feet were thrust into

yellow straw slippers of Chinese make. I have seen her myself flitting

about with her extremely thick, long, grey hair falling about her

shoulders. She uttered homely shrewd sayings, was of noble birth, and

was eccentric and arbitrary. In the afternoon she would sit in a very

roomy arm-chair, opposite her husband, gazing steadily through a wide

opening in the wall which gave an extensive view of the settlement and

the river.

‘She invariably tucked up her feet under her, but old Doramin sat

squarely, sat imposingly as a mountain sits on a plain. He was only

of the nakhoda or merchant class, but the respect shown to him and

the dignity of his bearing were very striking. He was the chief of

the second power in Patusan. The immigrants from Celebes (about sixty

families that, with dependants and so on, could muster some two hundred

men “wearing the kriss”) had elected him years ago for their head. The

men of that race are intelligent, enterprising, revengeful, but with a

more frank courage than the other Malays, and restless under oppression.

They formed the party opposed to the Rajah. Of course the quarrels were

for trade. This was the primary cause of faction fights, of the sudden

outbreaks that would fill this or that part of the settlement with

smoke, flame, the noise of shots and shrieks. Villages were burnt, men

were dragged into the Rajah’s stockade to be killed or tortured for the

crime of trading with anybody else but himself. Only a day or two before

Jim’s arrival several heads of households in the very fishing village

that was afterwards taken under his especial protection had been driven

over the cliffs by a party of the Rajah’s spearmen, on suspicion of

having been collecting edible birds’ nests for a Celebes trader. Rajah

Allang pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the penalty

for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of trading was

indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery. His cruelty and

rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and he was afraid of

the organised power of the Celebes men, only--till Jim came--he was not

afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them through his subjects, and

thought himself pathetically in the right. The situation was complicated

by a wandering stranger, an Arab half-breed, who, I believe, on

purely religious grounds, had incited the tribes in the interior (the

bush-folk, as Jim himself called them) to rise, and had established

himself in a fortified camp on the summit of one of the twin hills. He

hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he

devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their

blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into

the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a

curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation

stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were

not sure which one this partisan most desired to plunder. The Rajah

intrigued with him feebly. Some of the Bugis settlers, weary with

endless insecurity, were half inclined to call him in. The younger

spirits amongst them, chaffing, advised to “get Sherif Ali with his wild

men and drive the Rajah Allang out of the country.” Doramin restrained

them with difficulty. He was growing old, and, though his influence had

not diminished, the situation was getting beyond him. This was the state

of affairs when Jim, bolting from the Rajah’s stockade, appeared before

the chief of the Bugis, produced the ring, and was received, in a manner

of speaking, into the heart of the community.’