'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life -- the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism9 must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this -and in a checked flannel10 shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face -- he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side -- possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life contemned11 and flouted12.
' "Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?"
' "The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind -- "The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit1 better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead13 drawn14 on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were -- well -- what they were -- men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d -- n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d -- d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps -- do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promi se you we shall give you some sport before you'v
e done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!' "
'He was terrible -- relating this to me -- this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable15 bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant16 triumph.
' "That's what I told him -- I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery17 utterance18 of his scorn. " 'We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead . Oh no! . . . ' 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking19 here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear? -- food to fill our bellies20. And what did you come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came....' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat -- and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d -- d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed21 about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived -- and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching22 the dirty earth. Well -- it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it -- if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine -- the privilege to beg f
or the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ."
'His debilitated23 body shook with an exultation24 so vehement25, so assured, and so malicious26 that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse27 of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution28 as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now -- and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid29 tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence30 to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise31 of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat32 on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all -- men, women, savages33, traders, ruffians, missionaries34 -- and Jim -- "that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge35 him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous36 illusion of having trampled37 all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid38 and repulsive39 agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling40 talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering41 off an islet befringed with green upon azure42, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore43, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable44 conversion45 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 d iseased Kanakas if I know. Why, gents! she was t
oo far gone when he brought her aboard to know him; she just lay there on her back in his bunk46 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 noisome47 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!" '
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1
whit
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| n.一点，丝毫 | |
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lustreless
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| adj.无光泽的，无光彩的，平淡乏味的 | |
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knoll
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| n.小山，小丘 | |
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binoculars
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| n.双筒望远镜 | |
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outwards
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| adj.外面的，公开的，向外的；adv.向外；n.外形 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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thorny
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| adj.多刺的，棘手的 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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flannel
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| n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服 | |
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contemned
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| v.侮辱，蔑视( contemn的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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flouted
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| v.藐视，轻视( flout的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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bead
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| n.念珠；(pl.)珠子项链；水珠 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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malignant
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| adj.恶性的，致命的；恶意的，恶毒的 | |
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fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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skulking
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| v.潜伏，偷偷摸摸地走动，鬼鬼祟祟地活动( skulk的现在分词 ) | |
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20
bellies
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| n.肚子( belly的名词复数 )；腹部；（物体的）圆形或凸起部份；腹部…形的 | |
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21
hazed
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| v.（使）笼罩在薄雾中( haze的过去式和过去分词 )；戏弄，欺凌（新生等，有时作为加入美国大学生联谊会的条件） | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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debilitated
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| adj.疲惫不堪的，操劳过度的v.使（人或人的身体）非常虚弱( debilitate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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exultation
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| n.狂喜，得意 | |
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vehement
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| adj.感情强烈的；热烈的；(人)有强烈感情的 | |
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malicious
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| adj.有恶意的，心怀恶意的 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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destitution
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| n.穷困，缺乏，贫穷 | |
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lurid
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| adj.可怕的；血红的；苍白的 | |
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pretence
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| n.假装，作假；借口，口实；虚伪；虚饰 | |
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guise
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| n.外表，伪装的姿态 | |
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spat
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| n.口角，掌击；v.发出呼噜呼噜声 | |
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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missionaries
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| n.传教士( missionary的名词复数 ) | |
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begrudge
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| vt.吝啬，羡慕 | |
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posthumous
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| adj.遗腹的；父亡后出生的；死后的，身后的 | |
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trampled
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| 踩( trample的过去式和过去分词 )； 践踏； 无视； 侵犯 | |
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sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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40
chuckling
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的现在分词 ) | |
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41
hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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42
azure
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| adj.天蓝色的，蔚蓝色的 | |
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ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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44
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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45
conversion
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| n.转化，转换，转变 | |
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46
bunk
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| n.(车、船等倚壁而设的)铺位；废话 | |
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47
noisome
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| adj.有害的，可厌的 | |
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