feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_39_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 41
feat_summary_id: chapter 41
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 41", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim50.asp", "summary": "Cornelius's prediction soon comes true, for Jim arrives to see Brown early the next morning. He comes dressed in white  and unarmed. He is the picture of confidence. Brown immediately does not like Jim. He resents Jim's youth, self-assurance, and goodness; he also is jealous of the fact that Jim is loved and trusted by the natives. Jim asks Brown why he has come to Patusan. Brown answers that hunger has brought him there. Brown counter -questions Jim. When Jim flounders in coming up with an answer, Brown senses Jim's weakness and knows he can easily overcome him. Brown tells Jim that there must be no military encounter because lives and property would be lost. He knows that Jim will agree to this because Jim loves the natives. Throughout their talk, Brown, having seen Jim's weakness, makes insinuations about something shady in Jim's past. Brown comments that he is traveling to escape imprisonment. He asks Jim if he is afraid of imprisonment or anything else. The question forces Jim to think about the Patna incident.", "analysis": "Notes This chapter reveals the meeting between Brown and Jim. Brown immediately dislikes Jim, for he sees a complete opposite from himself in this young, self-assured man who is surrounded with love, security, and power. Jim's goodness is a sharp contrast to Brown's evil depravity. The chapter also shows that the past still haunts Jim. Brown does not know about the Patna incident, but senses Jim's weakness and hints about them both having a shady past. In Jim's mind, there is a common bond between him and Brown, because they both feel guilty. As a result, Jim fails to understand the villainy and depravity of this enemy, who quickly assesses Jim's vulnerability and immediately understands that he can do away with Jim. The setting of the chapter is significant, for it is the same place where Jim first landed in Patusan, which was his second big \"jump\" in the novel. As he and Brown talk face to face, Brown says that he himself is \"not the sort to jump out of trouble.\" Conrad is foreshadowing that Jim is about to take his third jump; this time he will not jump out of trouble, but leap into death."}
text: 
  
  'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a
  spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then
  Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced
  houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him;
  look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and
  crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours
  and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the
  knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and
  other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the
  forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal
  contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the
  desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other
  grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented
  it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of
  the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up
  on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group
  closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of
  them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till
  Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had
  nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet
  him on his side.
  
  '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 antagonism 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 flannel 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 condemned and flouted.
  
  '"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 whit better off really. I had
  a fellow up there who had a bead drawn 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 promise you we shall give you some sport before you've 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 miserable bed in
  that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant
  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 fiery
  utterance 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 skulking 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 bellies. 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 hazed
  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 touching 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 for
  the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and
  starve in my own way.' . . ."
  
  'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured,
  and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for
  him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and
  destitution 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 lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of
  every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate
  of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's
  face, he had spat 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, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that
  beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo
  mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth
  under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive
  agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling 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, hovering off an islet
  befringed with green upon 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!"'
feat_summary_name: Chapter 41
target: Cornelius's prediction soon comes true, for Jim arrives to see Brown early the next morning. He comes dressed in white  and unarmed. He is the picture of confidence. Brown immediately does not like Jim. He resents Jim's youth, self-assurance, and goodness; he also is jealous of the fact that Jim is loved and trusted by the natives. Jim asks Brown why he has come to Patusan. Brown answers that hunger has brought him there. Brown counter -questions Jim. When Jim flounders in coming up with an answer, Brown senses Jim's weakness and knows he can easily overcome him. Brown tells Jim that there must be no military encounter because lives and property would be lost. He knows that Jim will agree to this because Jim loves the natives. Throughout their talk, Brown, having seen Jim's weakness, makes insinuations about something shady in Jim's past. Brown comments that he is traveling to escape imprisonment. He asks Jim if he is afraid of imprisonment or anything else. The question forces Jim to think about the Patna incident.
feat_summary_analysis: Notes This chapter reveals the meeting between Brown and Jim. Brown immediately dislikes Jim, for he sees a complete opposite from himself in this young, self-assured man who is surrounded with love, security, and power. Jim's goodness is a sharp contrast to Brown's evil depravity. The chapter also shows that the past still haunts Jim. Brown does not know about the Patna incident, but senses Jim's weakness and hints about them both having a shady past. In Jim's mind, there is a common bond between him and Brown, because they both feel guilty. As a result, Jim fails to understand the villainy and depravity of this enemy, who quickly assesses Jim's vulnerability and immediately understands that he can do away with Jim. The setting of the chapter is significant, for it is the same place where Jim first landed in Patusan, which was his second big "jump" in the novel. As he and Brown talk face to face, Brown says that he himself is "not the sort to jump out of trouble." Conrad is foreshadowing that Jim is about to take his third jump; this time he will not jump out of trouble, but leap into death.