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 42
’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
