feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_21_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 22
feat_summary_id: chapter 22
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 22", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim31.asp", "summary": "The chapter opens with Marlow describing Patusan, which is truly a wild and remote island. It is the place where the seventeenth century spice traders went to obtain pepper and adventure; many lost their lives in the process. Since pepper is no longer a valued treasure, the island is not presently an important trading post. Currently, the hills are inhabited by two different factions of Malays. The Sultan of the island is an \"imbecile youth\" whose uncles are constantly at war. The most evil of the uncles is Raja Tungku Allang, a man who lives by terrorizing all those who have to use the river. After the opening descriptions, Marlow flashes back to the time when he first told Jim about Patusan. At first the young sailor was unexcited about the opportunity, but the more he thought about the remote island, the more excited he grew. His excitement blossomed into joy, for he soon realized that Patusan offered him the chance he had been seeking. No one there would know his past history. He would be judged only by what he could perform. Marlow take Jim to Stein's house for further instructions about Patusan. While there, Jim is given a ring that Stein wants him to take to Doramin.", "analysis": "Notes Jim is delighted with the Patusan opportunity, for he thinks it will allow him to start afresh. Because of its remote location, the island will offer him a refuge; Jim can pretend that the world outside does not exist. Since he is a romantic, Jim is not the least bit fearful about the strange island or concerned about whether he will be successful there. He considers himself superior to ordinary men and is eager for the chance to prove his worth. Marlow takes Jim to introduce him to Stein, who gives the young man further instructions about his responsibilities in Patusan. Stein's romantic nature is again emphasized. The ring that he gives Jim to take to Doramin has great significance and plays a very important role at the end of the novel."}
text: 
  'The conquest of love, honour, men's confidence--the pride of it, the
  power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are
  struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim's successes there
  were no externals. Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of
  an indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along the coast
  overpowered the voice of fame. The stream of civilisation, as if divided
  on a headland a hundred miles north of Patusan, branches east and
  south-east, leaving its plains and valleys, its old trees and its old
  mankind, neglected and isolated, such as an insignificant and crumbling
  islet between the two branches of a mighty, devouring stream. You find
  the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages. The
  seventeenth-century traders went there for pepper, because the passion
  for pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of Dutch
  and English adventurers about the time of James the First. Where
  wouldn't they go for pepper! For a bag of pepper they would cut each
  other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls,
  of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that
  desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes--the unknown seas, the
  loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence,
  and despair. It made them great! By heavens! it made them heroic; and
  it made them pathetic too in their craving for trade with the inflexible
  death levying its toll on young and old. It seems impossible to believe
  that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of purpose, to
  such a blind persistence in endeavour and sacrifice. And indeed those
  who adventured their persons and lives risked all they had for a slender
  reward. They left their bones to lie bleaching on distant shores, so
  that wealth might flow to the living at home. To us, their less tried
  successors, they appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as
  instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in
  obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a
  dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they
  were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their
  sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange
  nations, in the glory of splendid rulers.
  
  'In Patusan they had found lots of pepper, and had been impressed by the
  magnificence and the wisdom of the Sultan; but somehow, after a century
  of chequered intercourse, the country seems to drop gradually out of the
  trade. Perhaps the pepper had given out. Be it as it may, nobody cares
  for it now; the glory has departed, the Sultan is an imbecile youth
  with two thumbs on his left hand and an uncertain and beggarly revenue
  extorted from a miserable population and stolen from him by his many
  uncles.
  
  'This of course I have from Stein. He gave me their names and a short
  sketch of the life and character of each. He was as full of information
  about native states as an official report, but infinitely more amusing.
  He _had_ to know. He traded in so many, and in some districts--as in
  Patusan, for instance--his firm was the only one to have an agency by
  special permit from the Dutch authorities. The Government trusted his
  discretion, and it was understood that he took all the risks. The men
  he employed understood that too, but he made it worth their while
  apparently. He was perfectly frank with me over the breakfast-table in
  the morning. As far as he was aware (the last news was thirteen months
  old, he stated precisely), utter insecurity for life and property was
  the normal condition. There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one
  of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan's uncles, the governor
  of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down
  to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly
  defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating--"For indeed," as
  Stein remarked, "where could they go, and how could they get away?"
  No doubt they did not even desire to get away. The world (which is
  circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains) has been given into the
  hand of the high-born, and _this_ Rajah they knew: he was of their own
  royal house. I had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman later on. He
  was a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth,
  who swallowed an opium pill every two hours, and in defiance of common
  decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about
  his wizened grimy face. When giving audience he would clamber upon a
  sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten
  bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or
  fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying
  under the house. That is where and how he received us when, accompanied
  by Jim, I paid him a visit of ceremony. There were about forty people in
  the room, and perhaps three times as many in the great courtyard below.
  There was constant movement, coming and going, pushing and murmuring,
  at our backs. A few youths in gay silks glared from the distance; the
  majority, slaves and humble dependants, were half naked, in ragged
  sarongs, dirty with ashes and mud-stains. I had never seen Jim look so
  grave, so self-possessed, in an impenetrable, impressive way. In the
  midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart figure in white apparel,
  the gleaming clusters of his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine
  that trickled through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim
  hall, with its walls of mats and a roof of thatch. He appeared like a
  creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not
  seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended
  upon them from the clouds. He did, however, come in a crazy dug-out,
  sitting (very still and with his knees together, for fear of overturning
  the thing)--sitting on a tin box--which I had lent him--nursing on his
  lap a revolver of the Navy pattern--presented by me on parting--which,
  through an interposition of Providence, or through some wrong-headed
  notion, that was just like him, or else from sheer instinctive sagacity,
  he had decided to carry unloaded. That's how he ascended the Patusan
  river. Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more
  extravagantly casual, more lonely. Strange, this fatality that would
  cast the complexion of a flight upon all his acts, of impulsive
  unreflecting desertion of a jump into the unknown.
  
  'It is precisely the casualness of it that strikes me most. Neither
  Stein nor I had a clear conception of what might be on the other side
  when we, metaphorically speaking, took him up and hove him over the
  wall with scant ceremony. At the moment I merely wished to achieve his
  disappearance; Stein characteristically enough had a sentimental motive.
  He had a notion of paying off (in kind, I suppose) the old debt he had
  never forgotten. Indeed he had been all his life especially friendly to
  anybody from the British Isles. His late benefactor, it is true, was a
  Scot--even to the length of being called Alexander McNeil--and Jim came
  from a long way south of the Tweed; but at the distance of six or
  seven thousand miles Great Britain, though never diminished, looks
  foreshortened enough even to its own children to rob such details of
  their importance. Stein was excusable, and his hinted intentions were
  so generous that I begged him most earnestly to keep them secret for
  a time. I felt that no consideration of personal advantage should be
  allowed to influence Jim; that not even the risk of such influence
  should be run. We had to deal with another sort of reality. He wanted
  a refuge, and a refuge at the cost of danger should be offered
  him--nothing more.
  
  'Upon every other point I was perfectly frank with him, and I even (as
  I believed at the time) exaggerated the danger of the undertaking. As
  a matter of fact I did not do it justice; his first day in Patusan was
  nearly his last--would have been his last if he had not been so reckless
  or so hard on himself and had condescended to load that revolver. I
  remember, as I unfolded our precious scheme for his retreat, how his
  stubborn but weary resignation was gradually replaced by surprise,
  interest, wonder, and by boyish eagerness. This was a chance he had been
  dreaming of. He couldn't think how he merited that I . . . He would be
  shot if he could see to what he owed . . . And it was Stein, Stein the
  merchant, who . . . but of course it was me he had to . . . I cut him
  short. He was not articulate, and his gratitude caused me inexplicable
  pain. I told him that if he owed this chance to any one especially, it
  was to an old Scot of whom he had never heard, who had died many years
  ago, of whom little was remembered besides a roaring voice and a rough
  sort of honesty. There was really no one to receive his thanks. Stein
  was passing on to a young man the help he had received in his own young
  days, and I had done no more than to mention his name. Upon this he
  coloured, and, twisting a bit of paper in his fingers, he remarked
  bashfully that I had always trusted him.
  
  'I admitted that such was the case, and added after a pause that I
  wished he had been able to follow my example. "You think I don't?" he
  asked uneasily, and remarked in a mutter that one had to get some sort
  of show first; then brightening up, and in a loud voice he protested he
  would give me no occasion to regret my confidence, which--which . . .
  
  '"Do not misapprehend," I interrupted. "It is not in your power to make
  me regret anything." There would be no regrets; but if there were, it
  would be altogether my own affair: on the other hand, I wished him to
  understand clearly that this arrangement, this--this--experiment, was
  his own doing; he was responsible for it and no one else. "Why? Why," he
  stammered, "this is the very thing that I . . ." I begged him not to
  be dense, and he looked more puzzled than ever. He was in a fair way
  to make life intolerable to himself . . . "Do you think so?" he asked,
  disturbed; but in a moment added confidently, "I was going on though.
  Was I not?" It was impossible to be angry with him: I could not help a
  smile, and told him that in the old days people who went on like
  this were on the way of becoming hermits in a wilderness. "Hermits be
  hanged!" he commented with engaging impulsiveness. Of course he didn't
  mind a wilderness. . . . "I was glad of it," I said. That was where
  he would be going to. He would find it lively enough, I ventured to
  promise. "Yes, yes," he said, keenly. He had shown a desire, I continued
  inflexibly, to go out and shut the door after him. . . . "Did I?" he
  interrupted in a strange access of gloom that seemed to envelop him
  from head to foot like the shadow of a passing cloud. He was wonderfully
  expressive after all. Wonderfully! "Did I?" he repeated bitterly. "You
  can't say I made much noise about it. And I can keep it up, too--only,
  confound it! you show me a door." . . . "Very well. Pass on," I struck
  in. I could make him a solemn promise that it would be shut behind him
  with a vengeance. His fate, whatever it was, would be ignored,
  because the country, for all its rotten state, was not judged ripe
  for interference. Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as
  though he had never existed. He would have nothing but the soles of his
  two feet to stand upon, and he would have first to find his ground at
  that. "Never existed--that's it, by Jove," he murmured to himself. His
  eyes, fastened upon my lips, sparkled. If he had thoroughly understood
  the conditions, I concluded, he had better jump into the first gharry he
  could see and drive on to Stein's house for his final instructions. He
  flung out of the room before I had fairly finished speaking.'
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 22
target: The chapter opens with Marlow describing Patusan, which is truly a wild and remote island. It is the place where the seventeenth century spice traders went to obtain pepper and adventure; many lost their lives in the process. Since pepper is no longer a valued treasure, the island is not presently an important trading post. Currently, the hills are inhabited by two different factions of Malays. The Sultan of the island is an "imbecile youth" whose uncles are constantly at war. The most evil of the uncles is Raja Tungku Allang, a man who lives by terrorizing all those who have to use the river. After the opening descriptions, Marlow flashes back to the time when he first told Jim about Patusan. At first the young sailor was unexcited about the opportunity, but the more he thought about the remote island, the more excited he grew. His excitement blossomed into joy, for he soon realized that Patusan offered him the chance he had been seeking. No one there would know his past history. He would be judged only by what he could perform. Marlow take Jim to Stein's house for further instructions about Patusan. While there, Jim is given a ring that Stein wants him to take to Doramin.
feat_summary_analysis: Notes Jim is delighted with the Patusan opportunity, for he thinks it will allow him to start afresh. Because of its remote location, the island will offer him a refuge; Jim can pretend that the world outside does not exist. Since he is a romantic, Jim is not the least bit fearful about the strange island or concerned about whether he will be successful there. He considers himself superior to ordinary men and is eager for the chance to prove his worth. Marlow takes Jim to introduce him to Stein, who gives the young man further instructions about his responsibilities in Patusan. Stein's romantic nature is again emphasized. The ring that he gives Jim to take to Doramin has great significance and plays a very important role at the end of the novel.