feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/sparknotes/Lord Jim/section_9_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapters 37-38
feat_summary_id: chapters 37-38
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapters 37 and 38", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210126121516/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/section10/", "summary": "Marlow's narrative begins by describing an encounter with a dying pirate, Gentleman Brown. Marlow tells us that Brown's story will fill in the gaps of a narrative he has gotten from a visit to Stein's many months before. Arriving at Stein's, Marlow recognizes a Bugis whom he had occasionally seen at Jim's. Entering Stein's house, Marlow finds Tamb'Itam, and asks him if Jim is there. Tamb'Itam looks distraught and says, cryptically, \"He would not fight.\" Stein takes Marlow to see Jewel, who is also at his house. The people from Patusan arrived two days ago, according to their host. Jewel, quietly and calmly, reminds Marlow that she had predicted that Jim would leave her, as all men do. She gives Marlow a brief sketch of events, an account that is not shared with the reader. She is too distraught to talk more, and, when Marlow encounters her later in the day, he upsets her still further by pointing out that her distrust of Jim probably contributed to whatever has happened. Stein reassures her that Jim was true, and tells her he will try to explain it to her someday. Marlow leaves Stein's house in the company of Tamb'Itam, who completes Jewel's narrative . Marlow begins to tell the story of Jim's final fate by relating the history of Gentleman Brown, a successful pirate who has become the representative ruffian of the area. Brown is dying, sheltered in the hovel of a dissolute white man in Bangkok who worships Brown's legend and feels privileged to let him die in his home. Brown tells Marlow that he had a run of bad luck, beginning with his capture at the hands of a Spanish patrol boat while smuggling guns. He managed to bribe his way into an escape, stealing another ship to replace his, which had been disabled by his captors. Unfortunately, the stolen ship had very little in the way of fresh water or provisions on board, and Brown feared entering port in a stolen vessel. Dying of hunger, he recalls hearing of the remote territory of Patusan. He and his crew anchor off the fishing village and make their way upriver in a boat from their ship. The fishermen have managed to get a warning to the people of Patusan, though, and Brown and his crew are attacked the moment they land. They are forced to retreat to a small hilltop, where they dig in.", "analysis": "Commentary Marlow's interview with Gentleman Brown is similar in structure to his interview with the alcoholic second engineer of the Patna. These two morally, mentally, and physically corrupted men serve as conduits for parts of Jim's story. Brown is another figure who can be viewed as an alternate to Jim. His life is patterned on romantic tales and abstract ideas of heroics, albeit rather immoral ones. He, too, is largely motivated by fear of being held responsible for his earlier actions, as the next chapters will show. But there is a realism to Brown's struggle to realize his mental image of himself, a realism that Jim's story lacks. Brown is a small-time bandit, a blackmailer of poor villagers; his mistress dies almost immediately after he steals her away from her missionary husband; he himself is constantly subjected to the exigencies of everyday life--thirst, hunger, illness; and he dies horribly, choking to death in a Bangkok slum. Brown's fate is an important contrast to Jim's, which will become clear in a few chapters. Brown represents the real-life version of romantic tales. His life story is the generic bastard child that occurs when romance tries to become reality. Jim's story will end tragically, but aesthetically. Jim's attempt to make heroic tales come to life is not as successful as Brown's, though. Brown has always been a man of action, while Jim is still marked by his failure to act heroically aboard the Patna. Perhaps this accounts for the differing fates of their stories: Brown becomes the very type of the South Pacific ruffian, known even to those back \"home\" in Europe, while Jim is only of interest to a coterie of sympathetic individuals, who must struggle to piece together the final chapter of his history, and who still find his tale essentially indecipherable. Jewel's reaction to Marlow and his comments to her compromise his claim to Jim's memory. Marlow has often been cruel to Jim in their conversations, but his harshness in the face of Jewel's grief seems extreme. Jewel predicted Jim's eventual infidelity based on her own life experience and that of her mother. She seems intelligent and credible, and in the end she turns out to be right: Jim does abandon her in favor of something else, something he perceives to be better, an ideal. Stein immediately aligns himself with Marlow in his interpretation of Jim's actions . Jewel suggests that there is an alternative story here, one in which the worst thing may not be the failure to realize a heroic ideal but instead may be the betrayal of the people closest to one. Her take on the situation finds the actions that will be detailed in the succeeding chapters selfish rather than unselfishly honest, and her version of the story, if it were told, would consider Dain Waris's fate, not Jim's, to be the tragic outcome. That Marlow privileges the account he gets from Gentleman Brown rather than the versions from Jewel or Tamb'Itam is suggestive. On the other hand, Marlow, again, is the only person in the novel who has known Jim both in his moment of greatest failure and at his time of greatest triumph, so perhaps he is the only individual who has the necessary perspective to judge Jim truly."}
text: 'It all begins with a remarkable exploit of a man called Brown, who
  stole with complete success a Spanish schooner out of a small bay near
  Zamboanga. Till I discovered the fellow my information was incomplete,
  but most unexpectedly I did come upon him a few hours before he gave up
  his arrogant ghost. Fortunately he was willing and able to talk between
  the choking fits of asthma, and his racked body writhed with malicious
  exultation at the bare thought of Jim. He exulted thus at the idea that
  he had "paid out the stuck-up beggar after all." He gloated over his
  action. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if
  I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms
  of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by
  resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to
  the body. The story also reveals unsuspected depths of cunning in the
  wretched Cornelius, whose abject and intense hate acts like a subtle
  inspiration, pointing out an unerring way towards revenge.
  
  '"I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of a fool he was,"
  gasped the dying Brown. "He a man! Hell! He was a hollow sham. As if he
  couldn't have said straight out, 'Hands off my plunder!' blast him! That
  would have been like a man! Rot his superior soul! He had me there--but
  he hadn't devil enough in him to make an end of me. Not he! A thing like
  that letting me off as if I wasn't worth a kick! . . ." Brown struggled
  desperately for breath. . . . "Fraud. . . . Letting me off. . . . And
  so I did make an end of him after all. . . ." He choked again. . . . "I
  expect this thing'll kill me, but I shall die easy now. You . . . you
  here . . . I don't know your name--I would give you a five-pound note
  if--if I had it--for the news--or my name's not Brown. . . ." He grinned
  horribly. . . . "Gentleman Brown."
  
  'He said all these things in profound gasps, staring at me with his
  yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face; he jerked his left arm;
  a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung almost into his lap; a dirty ragged
  blanket covered his legs. I had found him out in Bankok through that
  busybody Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially, directed
  me where to look. It appears that a sort of loafing, fuddled vagabond--a
  white man living amongst the natives with a Siamese woman--had
  considered it a great privilege to give a shelter to the last days of
  the famous Gentleman Brown. While he was talking to me in the wretched
  hovel, and, as it were, fighting for every minute of his life, the
  Siamese woman, with big bare legs and a stupid coarse face, sat in a
  dark corner chewing betel stolidly. Now and then she would get up for
  the purpose of shooing a chicken away from the door. The whole hut shook
  when she walked. An ugly yellow child, naked and pot-bellied like a
  little heathen god, stood at the foot of the couch, finger in mouth,
  lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the dying man.
  
  'He talked feverishly; but in the middle of a word, perhaps, an
  invisible hand would take him by the throat, and he would look at me
  dumbly with an expression of doubt and anguish. He seemed to fear that
  I would get tired of waiting and go away, leaving him with his tale
  untold, with his exultation unexpressed. He died during the night, I
  believe, but by that time I had nothing more to learn.
  
  'So much as to Brown, for the present.
  
  'Eight months before this, coming into Samarang, I went as usual to see
  Stein. On the garden side of the house a Malay on the verandah greeted
  me shyly, and I remembered that I had seen him in Patusan, in Jim's
  house, amongst other Bugis men who used to come in the evening to talk
  interminably over their war reminiscences and to discuss State affairs.
  Jim had pointed him out to me once as a respectable petty trader owning
  a small seagoing native craft, who had showed himself "one of the best
  at the taking of the stockade." I was not very surprised to see him,
  since any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would naturally
  find his way to Stein's house. I returned his greeting and passed on. At
  the door of Stein's room I came upon another Malay in whom I recognised
  Tamb' Itam.
  
  'I asked him at once what he was doing there; it occurred to me that
  Jim might have come on a visit. I own I was pleased and excited at the
  thought. Tamb' Itam looked as if he did not know what to say. "Is Tuan
  Jim inside?" I asked impatiently. "No," he mumbled, hanging his head
  for a moment, and then with sudden earnestness, "He would not fight. He
  would not fight," he repeated twice. As he seemed unable to say anything
  else, I pushed him aside and went in.
  
  'Stein, tall and stooping, stood alone in the middle of the room between
  the rows of butterfly cases. "Ach! is it you, my friend?" he said
  sadly, peering through his glasses. A drab sack-coat of alpaca hung,
  unbuttoned, down to his knees. He had a Panama hat on his head, and
  there were deep furrows on his pale cheeks. "What's the matter now?"
  I asked nervously. "There's Tamb' Itam there. . . ." "Come and see the
  girl. Come and see the girl. She is here," he said, with a half-hearted
  show of activity. I tried to detain him, but with gentle obstinacy he
  would take no notice of my eager questions. "She is here, she is here,"
  he repeated, in great perturbation. "They came here two days ago. An old
  man like me, a stranger--sehen Sie--cannot do much. . . . Come this way.
  . . . Young hearts are unforgiving. . . ." I could see he was in utmost
  distress. . . . "The strength of life in them, the cruel strength of
  life. . . ." He mumbled, leading me round the house; I followed him,
  lost in dismal and angry conjectures. At the door of the drawing-room he
  barred my way. "He loved her very much," he said interrogatively, and
  I only nodded, feeling so bitterly disappointed that I would not trust
  myself to speak. "Very frightful," he murmured. "She can't understand
  me. I am only a strange old man. Perhaps you . . . she knows you. Talk
  to her. We can't leave it like this. Tell her to forgive him. It was
  very frightful." "No doubt," I said, exasperated at being in the dark;
  "but have you forgiven him?" He looked at me queerly. "You shall hear,"
  he said, and opening the door, absolutely pushed me in.
  
  'You know Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms,
  uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining
  things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool
  on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave
  underground. I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl
  sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she rested her
  head, the face hidden in her arms. The waxed floor reflected her dimly
  as though it had been a sheet of frozen water. The rattan screens were
  down, and through the strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the
  trees outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long draperies
  of windows and doorways. Her white figure seemed shaped in snow; the
  pendent crystals of a great chandelier clicked above her head like
  glittering icicles. She looked up and watched my approach. I was chilled
  as if these vast apartments had been the cold abode of despair.
  
  'She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down
  at her: "He has left me," she said quietly; "you always leave us--for
  your own ends." Her face was set. All the heat of life seemed withdrawn
  within some inaccessible spot in her breast. "It would have been easy to
  die with him," she went on, and made a slight weary gesture as if giving
  up the incomprehensible. "He would not! It was like a blindness--and yet
  it was I who was speaking to him; it was I who stood before his eyes;
  it was at me that he looked all the time! Ah! you are hard, treacherous,
  without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it
  that you are all mad?"
  
  'I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped it, it hung
  down to the floor. That indifference, more awful than tears, cries, and
  reproaches, seemed to defy time and consolation. You felt that nothing
  you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain.
  
  'Stein had said, "You shall hear." I did hear. I heard it all, listening
  with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness.
  She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her
  resentment filled me with pity for her--for him too. I stood rooted to
  the spot after she had finished. Leaning on her arm, she stared with
  hard eyes, and the wind passed in gusts, the crystals kept on clicking
  in the greenish gloom. She went on whispering to herself: "And yet he
  was looking at me! He could see my face, hear my voice, hear my grief!
  When I used to sit at his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his
  hand on my head, the curse of cruelty and madness was already within
  him, waiting for the day. The day came! . . . and before the sun had
  set he could not see me any more--he was made blind and deaf and without
  pity, as you all are. He shall have no tears from me. Never, never. Not
  one tear. I will not! He went away from me as if I had been worse than
  death. He fled as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen
  in his sleep. . . ."
  
  'Her steady eyes seemed to strain after the shape of a man torn out of
  her arms by the strength of a dream. She made no sign to my silent bow.
  I was glad to escape.
  
  'I saw her once again, the same afternoon. On leaving her I had gone
  in search of Stein, whom I could not find indoors; and I wandered out,
  pursued by distressful thoughts, into the gardens, those famous gardens
  of Stein, in which you can find every plant and tree of tropical
  lowlands. I followed the course of the canalised stream, and sat for
  a long time on a shaded bench near the ornamental pond, where some
  waterfowl with clipped wings were diving and splashing noisily. The
  branches of casuarina trees behind me swayed lightly, incessantly,
  reminding me of the soughing of fir trees at home.
  
  'This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my
  meditations. She had said he had been driven away from her by a
  dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be
  no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself,
  pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and
  its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive
  devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
  
  'When I rose to get back to the house I caught sight of Stein's drab
  coat through a gap in the foliage, and very soon at a turn of the path
  I came upon him walking with the girl. Her little hand rested on his
  forearm, and under the broad, flat rim of his Panama hat he bent over
  her, grey-haired, paternal, with compassionate and chivalrous deference.
  I stood aside, but they stopped, facing me. His gaze was bent on the
  ground at his feet; the girl, erect and slight on his arm, stared
  sombrely beyond my shoulder with black, clear, motionless eyes.
  "Schrecklich," he murmured. "Terrible! Terrible! What can one do?" He
  seemed to be appealing to me, but her youth, the length of the days
  suspended over her head, appealed to me more; and suddenly, even as I
  realised that nothing could be said, I found myself pleading his cause
  for her sake. "You must forgive him," I concluded, and my own voice
  seemed to me muffled, lost in un irresponsive deaf immensity. "We all
  want to be forgiven," I added after a while.
  
  '"What have I done?" she asked with her lips only.
  
  '"You always mistrusted him," I said.
  
  '"He was like the others," she pronounced slowly.
  
  '"Not like the others," I protested, but she continued evenly, without
  any feeling--
  
  '"He was false." And suddenly Stein broke in. "No! no! no! My poor
  child! . . ." He patted her hand lying passively on his sleeve. "No! no!
  Not false! True! True! True!" He tried to look into her stony face. "You
  don't understand. Ach! Why you do not understand? . . . Terrible," he
  said to me. "Some day she _shall_ understand."
  
  '"Will you explain?" I asked, looking hard at him. They moved on.
  
  'I watched them. Her gown trailed on the path, her black hair fell
  loose. She walked upright and light by the side of the tall man, whose
  long shapeless coat hung in perpendicular folds from the stooping
  shoulders, whose feet moved slowly. They disappeared beyond that
  spinney (you may remember) where sixteen different kinds of bamboo grow
  together, all distinguishable to the learned eye. For my part, I was
  fascinated by the exquisite grace and beauty of that fluted grove,
  crowned with pointed leaves and feathery heads, the lightness, the
  vigour, the charm as distinct as a voice of that unperplexed luxuriating
  life. I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would
  linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It
  was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories
  crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
  
  'I drove back to town the same afternoon, taking with me Tamb' Itam
  and the other Malay, in whose seagoing craft they had escaped in the
  bewilderment, fear, and gloom of the disaster. The shock of it seemed to
  have changed their natures. It had turned her passion into stone, and
  it made the surly taciturn Tamb' Itam almost loquacious. His surliness,
  too, was subdued into puzzled humility, as though he had seen the
  failure of a potent charm in a supreme moment. The Bugis trader, a shy
  hesitating man, was very clear in the little he had to say. Both were
  evidently over-awed by a sense of deep inexpressible wonder, by the
  touch of an inscrutable mystery.'
  
  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.
  
  '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 gone down with her.
  He is heard of next at Nuka-Hiva, where he bought an old French schooner
  out of Government service. What creditable enterprise he might have had
  in view when he made that purchase I can't say, but it is evident that
  what with High Commissioners, consuls, men-of-war, and international
  control, the South Seas were getting too hot to hold gentlemen of his
  kidney. Clearly he must have shifted the scene of his operations farther
  west, because a year later he plays an incredibly audacious, but not a
  very profitable part, in a serio-comic business in Manila Bay, in which
  a peculating governor and an absconding treasurer are the principal
  figures; thereafter he seems to have hung around the Philippines in his
  rotten schooner battling with un adverse fortune, till at last, running
  his appointed course, he sails into Jim's history, a blind accomplice of
  the Dark Powers.
  
  'His tale goes that when a Spanish patrol cutter captured him he was
  simply trying to run a few guns for the insurgents. If so, then I can't
  understand what he was doing off the south coast of Mindanao. My belief,
  however, is that he was blackmailing the native villages along the
  coast. The principal thing is that the cutter, throwing a guard on
  board, made him sail in company towards Zamboanga. On the way, for some
  reason or other, both vessels had to call at one of these new Spanish
  settlements--which never came to anything in the end--where there was
  not only a civil official in charge on shore, but a good stout coasting
  schooner lying at anchor in the little bay; and this craft, in every way
  much better than his own, Brown made up his mind to steal.
  
  'He was down on his luck--as he told me himself. The world he had
  bullied for twenty years with fierce, aggressive disdain, had yielded
  him nothing in the way of material advantage except a small bag of
  silver dollars, which was concealed in his cabin so that "the devil
  himself couldn't smell it out." And that was all--absolutely all. He
  was tired of his life, and not afraid of death. But this man, who would
  stake his existence on a whim with a bitter and jeering recklessness,
  stood in mortal fear of imprisonment. He had an unreasoning cold-sweat,
  nerve-shaking, blood-to-water-turning sort of horror at the bare
  possibility of being locked up--the sort of terror a superstitious man
  would feel at the thought of being embraced by a spectre. Therefore the
  civil official who came on board to make a preliminary investigation
  into the capture, investigated arduously all day long, and only went
  ashore after dark, muffled up in a cloak, and taking great care not to
  let Brown's little all clink in its bag. Afterwards, being a man of his
  word, he contrived (the very next evening, I believe) to send off
  the Government cutter on some urgent bit of special service. As her
  commander could not spare a prize crew, he contented himself by taking
  away before he left all the sails of Brown's schooner to the very last
  rag, and took good care to tow his two boats on to the beach a couple of
  miles off.
  
  'But in Brown's crew there was a Solomon Islander, kidnapped in his
  youth and devoted to Brown, who was the best man of the whole gang. That
  fellow swam off to the coaster--five hundred yards or so--with the end
  of a warp made up of all the running gear unrove for the purpose. The
  water was smooth, and the bay dark, "like the inside of a cow," as Brown
  described it. The Solomon Islander clambered over the bulwarks with the
  end of the rope in his teeth. The crew of the coaster--all Tagals--were
  ashore having a jollification in the native village. The two shipkeepers
  left on board woke up suddenly and saw the devil. It had glittering eyes
  and leaped quick as lightning about the deck. They fell on their knees,
  paralysed with fear, crossing themselves and mumbling prayers. With
  a long knife he found in the caboose the Solomon Islander, without
  interrupting their orisons, stabbed first one, then the other; with the
  same knife he set to sawing patiently at the coir cable till suddenly it
  parted under the blade with a splash. Then in the silence of the bay
  he let out a cautious shout, and Brown's gang, who meantime had been
  peering and straining their hopeful ears in the darkness, began to
  pull gently at their end of the warp. In less than five minutes the two
  schooners came together with a slight shock and a creak of spars.
  
  'Brown's crowd transferred themselves without losing an instant, taking
  with them their firearms and a large supply of ammunition. They were
  sixteen in all: two runaway blue-jackets, a lanky deserter from a Yankee
  man-of-war, a couple of simple, blond Scandinavians, a mulatto of sorts,
  one bland Chinaman who cooked--and the rest of the nondescript spawn
  of the South Seas. None of them cared; Brown bent them to his will, and
  Brown, indifferent to gallows, was running away from the spectre of
  a Spanish prison. He didn't give them the time to trans-ship enough
  provisions; the weather was calm, the air was charged with dew, and when
  they cast off the ropes and set sail to a faint off-shore draught there
  was no flutter in the damp canvas; their old schooner seemed to detach
  itself gently from the stolen craft and slip away silently, together
  with the black mass of the coast, into the night.
  
  'They got clear away. Brown related to me in detail their passage down
  the Straits of Macassar. It is a harrowing and desperate story. They
  were short of food and water; they boarded several native craft and got
  a little from each. With a stolen ship Brown did not dare to put into
  any port, of course. He had no money to buy anything, no papers to show,
  and no lie plausible enough to get him out again. An Arab barque, under
  the Dutch flag, surprised one night at anchor off Poulo Laut, yielded a
  little dirty rice, a bunch of bananas, and a cask of water; three days
  of squally, misty weather from the north-east shot the schooner across
  the Java Sea. The yellow muddy waves drenched that collection of hungry
  ruffians. They sighted mail-boats moving on their appointed routes;
  passed well-found home ships with rusty iron sides anchored in the
  shallow sea waiting for a change of weather or the turn of the tide; an
  English gunboat, white and trim, with two slim masts, crossed their bows
  one day in the distance; and on another occasion a Dutch corvette, black
  and heavily sparred, loomed up on their quarter, steaming dead slow
  in the mist. They slipped through unseen or disregarded, a wan,
  sallow-faced band of utter outcasts, enraged with hunger and hunted by
  fear. Brown's idea was to make for Madagascar, where he expected, on
  grounds not altogether illusory, to sell the schooner in Tamatave, and
  no questions asked, or perhaps obtain some more or less forged papers
  for her. Yet before he could face the long passage across the Indian
  Ocean food was wanted--water too.
  
  'Perhaps he had heard of Patusan--or perhaps he just only happened to
  see the name written in small letters on the chart--probably that of a
  largish village up a river in a native state, perfectly defenceless, far
  from the beaten tracks of the sea and from the ends of submarine cables.
  He had done that kind of thing before--in the way of business;
  and this now was an absolute necessity, a question of life and
  death--or rather of liberty. Of liberty! He was sure to get
  provisions--bullocks--rice--sweet-potatoes. The sorry gang licked
  their chops. A cargo of produce for the schooner perhaps could be
  extorted--and, who knows?--some real ringing coined money! Some of these
  chiefs and village headmen can be made to part freely. He told me he
  would have roasted their toes rather than be baulked. I believe him. His
  men believed him too. They didn't cheer aloud, being a dumb pack, but
  made ready wolfishly.
  
  'Luck served him as to weather. A few days of calm would have brought
  unmentionable horrors on board that schooner, but with the help of land
  and sea breezes, in less than a week after clearing the Sunda Straits,
  he anchored off the Batu Kring mouth within a pistol-shot of the fishing
  village.
  
  'Fourteen of them packed into the schooner's long-boat (which was big,
  having been used for cargo-work) and started up the river, while two
  remained in charge of the schooner with food enough to keep starvation
  off for ten days. The tide and wind helped, and early one afternoon the
  big white boat under a ragged sail shouldered its way before the sea
  breeze into Patusan Reach, manned by fourteen assorted scarecrows
  glaring hungrily ahead, and fingering the breech-blocks of cheap rifles.
  Brown calculated upon the terrifying surprise of his appearance. They
  sailed in with the last of the flood; the Rajah's stockade gave no sign;
  the first houses on both sides of the stream seemed deserted. A few
  canoes were seen up the reach in full flight. Brown was astonished at
  the size of the place. A profound silence reigned. The wind dropped
  between the houses; two oars were got out and the boat held on
  up-stream, the idea being to effect a lodgment in the centre of the town
  before the inhabitants could think of resistance.
  
  'It seems, however, that the headman of the fishing village at Batu
  Kring had managed to send off a timely warning. When the long-boat came
  abreast of the mosque (which Doramin had built: a structure with gables
  and roof finials of carved coral) the open space before it was full of
  people. A shout went up, and was followed by a clash of gongs all up the
  river. From a point above two little brass 6-pounders were discharged,
  and the round-shot came skipping down the empty reach, spurting
  glittering jets of water in the sunshine. In front of the mosque a
  shouting lot of men began firing in volleys that whipped athwart the
  current of the river; an irregular, rolling fusillade was opened on the
  boat from both banks, and Brown's men replied with a wild, rapid fire.
  The oars had been got in.
  
  'The turn of the tide at high water comes on very quickly in that river,
  and the boat in mid-stream, nearly hidden in smoke, began to drift back
  stern foremost. Along both shores the smoke thickened also, lying below
  the roofs in a level streak as you may see a long cloud cutting the
  slope of a mountain. A tumult of war-cries, the vibrating clang
  of gongs, the deep snoring of drums, yells of rage, crashes of
  volley-firing, made an awful din, in which Brown sat confounded but
  steady at the tiller, working himself into a fury of hate and rage
  against those people who dared to defend themselves. Two of his men
  had been wounded, and he saw his retreat cut off below the town by some
  boats that had put off from Tunku Allang's stockade. There were six of
  them, full of men. While he was thus beset he perceived the entrance of
  the narrow creek (the same which Jim had jumped at low water). It was
  then brim full. Steering the long-boat in, they landed, and, to make a
  long story short, they established themselves on a little knoll about
  900 yards from the stockade, which, in fact, they commanded from that
  position. The slopes of the knoll were bare, but there were a few trees
  on the summit. They went to work cutting these down for a breastwork,
  and were fairly intrenched before dark; meantime the Rajah's boats
  remained in the river with curious neutrality. When the sun set the glue
  of many brushwood blazes lighted on the river-front, and between the
  double line of houses on the land side threw into black relief the
  roofs, the groups of slender palms, the heavy clumps of fruit trees.
  Brown ordered the grass round his position to be fired; a low ring of
  thin flames under the slow ascending smoke wriggled rapidly down the
  slopes of the knoll; here and there a dry bush caught with a tall,
  vicious roar. The conflagration made a clear zone of fire for the rifles
  of the small party, and expired smouldering on the edge of the forests
  and along the muddy bank of the creek. A strip of jungle luxuriating in
  a damp hollow between the knoll and the Rajah's stockade stopped it
  on that side with a great crackling and detonations of bursting bamboo
  stems. The sky was sombre, velvety, and swarming with stars. The
  blackened ground smoked quietly with low creeping wisps, till a little
  breeze came on and blew everything away. Brown expected an attack to
  be delivered as soon as the tide had flowed enough again to enable the
  war-boats which had cut off his retreat to enter the creek. At any rate
  he was sure there would be an attempt to carry off his long-boat,
  which lay below the hill, a dark high lump on the feeble sheen of a wet
  mud-flat. But no move of any sort was made by the boats in the river.
  Over the stockade and the Rajah's buildings Brown saw their lights on
  the water. They seemed to be anchored across the stream. Other lights
  afloat were moving in the reach, crossing and recrossing from side to
  side. There were also lights twinkling motionless upon the long walls of
  houses up the reach, as far as the bend, and more still beyond, others
  isolated inland. The loom of the big fires disclosed buildings, roofs,
  black piles as far as he could see. It was an immense place. The
  fourteen desperate invaders lying flat behind the felled trees raised
  their chins to look over at the stir of that town that seemed to extend
  up-river for miles and swarm with thousands of angry men. They did not
  speak to each other. Now and then they would hear a loud yell, or a
  single shot rang out, fired very far somewhere. But round their position
  everything was still, dark, silent. They seemed to be forgotten, as if
  the excitement keeping awake all the population had nothing to do with
  them, as if they had been dead already.'
  
feat_summary_name: Chapters 37 and 38
target: Marlow's narrative begins by describing an encounter with a dying pirate, Gentleman Brown. Marlow tells us that Brown's story will fill in the gaps of a narrative he has gotten from a visit to Stein's many months before. Arriving at Stein's, Marlow recognizes a Bugis whom he had occasionally seen at Jim's. Entering Stein's house, Marlow finds Tamb'Itam, and asks him if Jim is there. Tamb'Itam looks distraught and says, cryptically, "He would not fight." Stein takes Marlow to see Jewel, who is also at his house. The people from Patusan arrived two days ago, according to their host. Jewel, quietly and calmly, reminds Marlow that she had predicted that Jim would leave her, as all men do. She gives Marlow a brief sketch of events, an account that is not shared with the reader. She is too distraught to talk more, and, when Marlow encounters her later in the day, he upsets her still further by pointing out that her distrust of Jim probably contributed to whatever has happened. Stein reassures her that Jim was true, and tells her he will try to explain it to her someday. Marlow leaves Stein's house in the company of Tamb'Itam, who completes Jewel's narrative . Marlow begins to tell the story of Jim's final fate by relating the history of Gentleman Brown, a successful pirate who has become the representative ruffian of the area. Brown is dying, sheltered in the hovel of a dissolute white man in Bangkok who worships Brown's legend and feels privileged to let him die in his home. Brown tells Marlow that he had a run of bad luck, beginning with his capture at the hands of a Spanish patrol boat while smuggling guns. He managed to bribe his way into an escape, stealing another ship to replace his, which had been disabled by his captors. Unfortunately, the stolen ship had very little in the way of fresh water or provisions on board, and Brown feared entering port in a stolen vessel. Dying of hunger, he recalls hearing of the remote territory of Patusan. He and his crew anchor off the fishing village and make their way upriver in a boat from their ship. The fishermen have managed to get a warning to the people of Patusan, though, and Brown and his crew are attacked the moment they land. They are forced to retreat to a small hilltop, where they dig in.
feat_summary_analysis: Commentary Marlow's interview with Gentleman Brown is similar in structure to his interview with the alcoholic second engineer of the Patna. These two morally, mentally, and physically corrupted men serve as conduits for parts of Jim's story. Brown is another figure who can be viewed as an alternate to Jim. His life is patterned on romantic tales and abstract ideas of heroics, albeit rather immoral ones. He, too, is largely motivated by fear of being held responsible for his earlier actions, as the next chapters will show. But there is a realism to Brown's struggle to realize his mental image of himself, a realism that Jim's story lacks. Brown is a small-time bandit, a blackmailer of poor villagers; his mistress dies almost immediately after he steals her away from her missionary husband; he himself is constantly subjected to the exigencies of everyday life--thirst, hunger, illness; and he dies horribly, choking to death in a Bangkok slum. Brown's fate is an important contrast to Jim's, which will become clear in a few chapters. Brown represents the real-life version of romantic tales. His life story is the generic bastard child that occurs when romance tries to become reality. Jim's story will end tragically, but aesthetically. Jim's attempt to make heroic tales come to life is not as successful as Brown's, though. Brown has always been a man of action, while Jim is still marked by his failure to act heroically aboard the Patna. Perhaps this accounts for the differing fates of their stories: Brown becomes the very type of the South Pacific ruffian, known even to those back "home" in Europe, while Jim is only of interest to a coterie of sympathetic individuals, who must struggle to piece together the final chapter of his history, and who still find his tale essentially indecipherable. Jewel's reaction to Marlow and his comments to her compromise his claim to Jim's memory. Marlow has often been cruel to Jim in their conversations, but his harshness in the face of Jewel's grief seems extreme. Jewel predicted Jim's eventual infidelity based on her own life experience and that of her mother. She seems intelligent and credible, and in the end she turns out to be right: Jim does abandon her in favor of something else, something he perceives to be better, an ideal. Stein immediately aligns himself with Marlow in his interpretation of Jim's actions . Jewel suggests that there is an alternative story here, one in which the worst thing may not be the failure to realize a heroic ideal but instead may be the betrayal of the people closest to one. Her take on the situation finds the actions that will be detailed in the succeeding chapters selfish rather than unselfishly honest, and her version of the story, if it were told, would consider Dain Waris's fate, not Jim's, to be the tragic outcome. That Marlow privileges the account he gets from Gentleman Brown rather than the versions from Jewel or Tamb'Itam is suggestive. On the other hand, Marlow, again, is the only person in the novel who has known Jim both in his moment of greatest failure and at his time of greatest triumph, so perhaps he is the only individual who has the necessary perspective to judge Jim truly.