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<h2> CHAPTER 25 </h2>
<p>‘“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 of 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.”</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>did</i>
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.”</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
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