feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_38_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 40
feat_summary_id: chapter 40
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 40", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim49.asp", "summary": "Brown is eager to meet Jim and wants to learn how Jim has won the confidence of the natives. His plan is to learn Jim's strategy from him, kill him, and make himself the lord of Patusan. The double-dealing of Kassim and Cornelius gives him ample time for planing. He decides to terrorize the natives with violence and begins by having a Patusan man shot to death for no reason. Kassim witnesses the killing and sends word to Dain Waris to warn him about Brown. He also sends messages to the fort, requesting gun powder for Raja's men. Brown knows that he and his men are totally outnumbered, and escape seems impossible. One of his men is shot when he tries to go into town. Immediately there is firing from both sides. Brown orders his men to stop fighting. Later that night Brown hears the sound of yelling and shouting from the village. Cornelius tells him that the natives are welcoming Jim home. Cornelius also says that Jim, whom he calls a fool, will soon come to meet Brown.", "analysis": "Notes In this chapter, Cornelius describes Jim. He feels that Jim's honesty and fair dealings are signs of weakness and stupidity. He calls Jim a fool and tells Brown that the naive leader will soon come to call on Brown, trying to make peace. Brown is also described and shown in greater detail and he becomes a totally despicable character. As he waits for Jim to return, he has a native murdered for no reason; Brown just likes to spread terror wherever he goes. His plan is to learn what he can from Jim and then dispose of him. He will then make himself ruler of Patusan and squeeze the island of its wealth."}
text: 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For
  doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man
  was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must
  be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like
  that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow,
  cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible
  line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him
  the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear
  understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a
  fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this
  from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He
  would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no
  fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time
  came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim
  impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now.
  The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw
  away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and
  for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat
  from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that
  Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him
  with shots. The lust of battle was upon him.
  
  'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of
  course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the
  broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts
  with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness
  of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a
  blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind,
  something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of
  wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God.
  No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such
  a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent
  privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found
  himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he
  planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the
  fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner
  with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost
  in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had
  defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames.
  Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must
  have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder
  and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect,
  though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the
  alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with
  small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with
  trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled
  out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark,
  lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had
  fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of
  domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance
  from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up
  hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends.
  He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the
  Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky,
  loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle
  lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and
  conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his
  sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He
  dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the
  unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look.
  The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step
  forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and
  knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the
  dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this
  there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends
  any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body
  in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a
  multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face
  down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown
  to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we
  wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to
  think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long
  shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with
  his eyes hanging out of his head."
  
  'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin
  foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . .
  strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes
  were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with
  skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways
  like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and
  awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are
  sights one never forgets.
  
  'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as
  might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the
  Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a
  spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came
  back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere.
  "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked
  the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased
  too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a
  message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's
  ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river.
  He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This
  double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces
  divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in
  the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town,
  assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his
  messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It
  was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or
  so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall.
  The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the
  minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said.
  There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for
  many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man
  was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that
  evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer
  folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many
  of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the
  Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost
  out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence
  or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they
  departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen
  together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair
  behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled
  rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours.
  
  'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left
  lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the
  revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to
  a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again,
  in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street,
  revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling
  straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in
  confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the
  vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of
  dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker
  tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A
  great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without
  noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the
  other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the
  river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor
  that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of
  many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was
  then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat
  looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith
  in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head
  against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed
  he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase
  down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he
  would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For
  another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town,
  but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the
  lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses.
  They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round
  two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and
  roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat
  amongst them dozing sulkily.
  
  'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in
  the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander,
  said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off
  their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you,"
  scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek
  in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A
  moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering
  out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of
  the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am
  hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire
  and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and
  the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a
  profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint
  whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood
  cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct
  incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire,"
  shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill?
  Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius
  translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we
  hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a
  herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land,
  proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan
  and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no
  faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard
  volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly
  grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below
  the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on
  complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the
  slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough.
  It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and
  jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and
  dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that
  place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other
  bank.
  
  'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation
  of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed
  appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down,
  in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they
  seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage.
  That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the
  stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that
  the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message,
  alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated
  to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when
  Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his
  shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the
  trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's
  stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead,
  while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his
  right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double,
  dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways,
  lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed,
  having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not
  willingly allow to die.
  
  'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers
  go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with
  compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He
  was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a
  strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again,
  after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a
  long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease.
  
  '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who
  had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so,"
  assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement
  for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the
  others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the
  wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went
  off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to
  himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing."
  
  'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain,
  and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of
  his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a
  mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away
  in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about
  him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over
  the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and
  droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the
  town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and
  prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are
  you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What
  are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted
  Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more
  than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they
  know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?"
  "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean?
  Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the
  dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like
  a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You
  shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not
  afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people
  alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child.
  He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little
  skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with
  ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot
  him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that
  you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go
  away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with
  impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him,
  could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew,
  sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard,
  cowed, and in rags.'
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 40
target: Brown is eager to meet Jim and wants to learn how Jim has won the confidence of the natives. His plan is to learn Jim's strategy from him, kill him, and make himself the lord of Patusan. The double-dealing of Kassim and Cornelius gives him ample time for planing. He decides to terrorize the natives with violence and begins by having a Patusan man shot to death for no reason. Kassim witnesses the killing and sends word to Dain Waris to warn him about Brown. He also sends messages to the fort, requesting gun powder for Raja's men. Brown knows that he and his men are totally outnumbered, and escape seems impossible. One of his men is shot when he tries to go into town. Immediately there is firing from both sides. Brown orders his men to stop fighting. Later that night Brown hears the sound of yelling and shouting from the village. Cornelius tells him that the natives are welcoming Jim home. Cornelius also says that Jim, whom he calls a fool, will soon come to meet Brown.
feat_summary_analysis: Notes In this chapter, Cornelius describes Jim. He feels that Jim's honesty and fair dealings are signs of weakness and stupidity. He calls Jim a fool and tells Brown that the naive leader will soon come to call on Brown, trying to make peace. Brown is also described and shown in greater detail and he becomes a totally despicable character. As he waits for Jim to return, he has a native murdered for no reason; Brown just likes to spread terror wherever he goes. His plan is to learn what he can from Jim and then dispose of him. He will then make himself ruler of Patusan and squeeze the island of its wealth.