azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband.  The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning “Captain Brown to a better way of life.” . . .  “Bag Gentleman Brown for Glory”—­as a leery-eyed loafer expressed it once—­“just to let them see up above what a Western Pacific trading skipper looks like.”  And this was the man, too, who had run off with a dying woman, and had shed tears over her body.  “Carried on like a big baby,” his then mate was never tired of telling, “and where the fun came in may I be kicked to death by diseased Kanakas if I know.  Why, gents! she was too far gone when he brought her aboard to know him; she just lay there on her back in his bunk staring at the beam with awful shining eyes—­and then she died.  Dam’ bad sort of fever, I guess. . . .”  I remembered all these stories while, wiping his matted lump of a beard with a livid hand, he was telling me from his noisome couch how he got round, got in, got home, on that confounded, immaculate, don’t-you-touch-me sort of fellow.  He admitted that he couldn’t be scared, but there was a way, “as broad as a turnpike, to get in and shake his twopenny soul around and inside out and upside down—­by God!"’

CHAPTER 42

’I don’t think he could do more than perhaps look upon that straight path.  He seemed to have been puzzled by what he saw, for he interrupted himself in his narrative more than once to exclaim, “He nearly slipped from me there.  I could not make him out.  Who was he?” And after glaring at me wildly he would go on, jubilating and sneering.  To me the conversation of these two across the creek appears now as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on with her cold-eyed knowledge of the end.  No, he didn’t turn Jim’s soul inside out, but I am much mistaken if the spirit so utterly out of his reach had not been made to taste to the full the bitterness of that contest.  These were the emissaries with whom the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat—­white men from “out there” where he did not think himself good enough to live.  This was all that came to him—­a menace, a shock, a danger to his work.  I suppose it is this sad, half-resentful, half-resigned feeling, piercing through the few words Jim said now and then, that puzzled Brown so much in the reading of his character.  Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work; and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims.  He admitted to me that Jim wasn’t of the sort that can be got over by truckling, and accordingly he took care to show himself as a man confronting