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.
CHAPTER 38
‘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
