Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (413 page)

As often happens after a grey daybreak the sun had risen in a warm and glorious splendour above the smooth immense gleam of the enlarged estuary.  Wisps of mist floated like trails of luminous dust, and in the dazzling reflections of water and vapour, the shores had the murky semi-transparent darkness of shadows cast mysteriously from below.  Powell, who had sailed out of London all his young seaman’s life, told me that it was then, in a moment of entranced vision an hour or so after sunrise, that the river was revealed to him for all time, like a fair face often seen before, which is suddenly perceived to be the expression of an inner and unsuspected beauty, of that something unique and only its own which rouses a passion of wonder and fidelity and an unappeasable memory of its charm.  The hull of the Ferndale, swung head to the eastward, caught the light, her tall spars and rigging steeped in a bath of red-gold, from the water-line full of glitter to the trucks slight and gleaming against the delicate expanse of the blue.

“Time we had a mouthful to eat,” said a voice at his side.  It was Mr. Franklin, the chief mate, with his head sunk between his shoulders, and melancholy eyes.  “Let the men have their breakfast, bo’sun,” he went on, “and have the fire out in the galley in half an hour at the latest, so that we can call these barges of explosives alongside.  Come along, young man.  I don’t know your name.  Haven’t seen the captain, to speak to, since yesterday afternoon when he rushed off to pick up a second mate somewhere.  How did he get you?”

Young Powell, a little shy notwithstanding the friendly disposition of the other, answered him smilingly, aware somehow that there was something marked in this inquisitiveness, natural, after all — something anxious.  His name was Powell, and he was put in the way of this berth by Mr. Powell, the shipping master.  He blushed.

“Ah, I see.  Well, you have been smart in getting ready.  The ship-keeper, before he went away, told me you joined at one o’clock.  I didn’t sleep on board last night.  Not I.  There was a time when I never cared to leave this ship for more than a couple of hours in the evening, even while in London, but now, since — ”

He checked himself with a roll of his prominent eyes towards that youngster, that stranger.  Meantime, he was leading the way across the quarter-deck under the poop into the long passage with the door of the saloon at the far end.  It was shut.  But Mr. Franklin did not go so far.  After passing the pantry he opened suddenly a door on the left of the passage, to Powell’s great surprise.

“Our mess-room,” he said, entering a small cabin painted white, bare, lighted from part of the foremost skylight, and furnished only with a table and two settees with movable backs.  “That surprises you?  Well, it isn’t usual.  And it wasn’t so in this ship either, before.  It’s only since — ”

He checked himself again.  “Yes.  Here we shall feed, you and I, facing each other for the next twelve months or more — God knows how much more!  The bo’sun keeps the deck at meal-times in fine weather.”

He talked not exactly wheezing, but like a man whose breath is somewhat short, and the spirit (young Powell could not help thinking) embittered by some mysterious grievance.

There was enough of the unusual there to be recognized even by Powell’s inexperience.  The officers kept out of the cabin against the custom of the service, and then this sort of accent in the mate’s talk.  Franklin did not seem to expect conversational ease from the new second mate.  He made several remarks about the old, deploring the accident.  Awkward.  Very awkward this thing to happen on the very eve of sailing.

“Collar-bone and arm broken,” he sighed.  “Sad, very sad.  Did you notice if the captain was at all affected?  Eh?  Must have been.”

Before this congested face, these globular eyes turned yearningly upon him, young Powell (one must keep in mind he was but a youngster then) who could not remember any signs of visible grief, confessed with an embarrassed laugh that, owing to the suddenness of this lucky chance coming to him, he was not in a condition to notice the state of other people.

“I was so pleased to get a ship at last,” he murmured, further disconcerted by the sort of pent-up gravity in Mr. Franklin’s aspect.

“One man’s food another man’s poison,” the mate remarked.  “That holds true beyond mere victuals.  I suppose it didn’t occur to you that it was a dam’ poor way for a good man to be knocked out.”

Mr. Powell admitted openly that he had not thought of that.  He was ready to admit that it was very reprehensible of him.  But Franklin had no intention apparently to moralize.  He did not fall silent either.  His further remarks were to the effect that there had been a time when Captain Anthony would have showed more than enough concern for the least thing happening to one of his officers.  Yes, there had been a time!

“And mind,” he went on, laying down suddenly a half-consumed piece of bread and butter and raising his voice, “poor Mathews was the second man the longest on board.  I was the first.  He joined a month later — about the same time as the steward by a few days.  The bo’sun and the carpenter came the voyage after.  Steady men.  Still here.  No good man need ever have thought of leaving the Ferndale unless he were a fool.  Some good men are fools.  Don’t know when they are well off.  I mean the best of good men; men that you would do anything for.  They go on for years, then all of a sudden — ”

Our young friend listened to the mate with a queer sense of discomfort growing on him.  For it was as though Mr. Franklin were thinking aloud, and putting him into the delicate position of an unwilling eavesdropper.  But there was in the mess-room another listener.  It was the steward, who had come in carrying a tin coffee-pot with a long handle, and stood quietly by: a man with a middle-aged, sallow face, long features, heavy eyelids, a soldierly grey moustache.  His body encased in a short black jacket with narrow sleeves, his long legs in very tight trousers, made up an agile, youthful, slender figure.  He moved forward suddenly, and interrupted the mate’s monologue.

“More coffee, Mr. Franklin?  Nice fresh lot.  Piping hot.  I am going to give breakfast to the saloon directly, and the cook is raking his fire out.  Now’s your chance.”

The mate who, on account of his peculiar build, could not turn his head freely, twisted his thick trunk slightly, and ran his black eyes in the corners towards the steward.

“And is the precious pair of them out?” he growled.

The steward, pouring out the coffee into the mate’s cup, muttered moodily but distinctly: “The lady wasn’t when I was laying the table.”

Powell’s ears were fine enough to detect something hostile in this reference to the captain’s wife.  For of what other person could they be speaking?  The steward added with a gloomy sort of fairness: “But she will be before I bring the dishes in.  She never gives that sort of trouble.  That she doesn’t.”

“No.  Not in that way,” Mr. Franklin agreed, and then both he and the steward, after glancing at Powell — the stranger to the ship — said nothing more.

But this had been enough to rouse his curiosity.  Curiosity is natural to man.  Of course it was not a malevolent curiosity which, if not exactly natural, is to be met fairly frequently in men and perhaps more frequently in women — especially if a woman be in question; and that woman under a cloud, in a manner of speaking.  For under a cloud Flora de Barral was fated to be even at sea.  Yes.  Even that sort of darkness which attends a woman for whom there is no clear place in the world hung over her.  Yes.  Even at sea!

* * * * *

And this is the pathos of being a woman.  A man can struggle to get a place for himself or perish.  But a woman’s part is passive, say what you like, and shuffle the facts of the world as you may, hinting at lack of energy, of wisdom, of courage.  As a matter of fact, almost all women have all that — of their own kind.  But they are not made for attack.  Wait they must.  I am speaking here of women who are really women.  And it’s no use talking of opportunities, either.  I know that some of them do talk of it.  But not the genuine women.  Those know better.  Nothing can beat a true woman for a clear vision of reality; I would say a cynical vision if I were not afraid of wounding your chivalrous feelings — for which, by the by, women are not so grateful as you may think, to fellows of your kind . . .

“Upon my word, Marlow,” I cried, “what are you flying out at me for like this?  I wouldn’t use an ill-sounding word about women, but what right have you to imagine that I am looking for gratitude?”

Marlow raised a soothing hand.

“There!  There!  I take back the ill-sounding word, with the remark, though, that cynicism seems to me a word invented by hypocrites.  But let that pass.  As to women, they know that the clamour for opportunities for them to become something which they cannot be is as reasonable as if mankind at large started asking for opportunities of winning immortality in this world, in which death is the very condition of life.  You must understand that I am not talking here of material existence.  That naturally is implied; but you won’t maintain that a woman who, say, enlisted, for instance (there have been cases) has conquered her place in the world.  She has only got her living in it — which is quite meritorious, but not quite the same thing.

All these reflections which arise from my picking up the thread of Flora de Barral’s existence did not, I am certain, present themselves to Mr. Powell — not the Mr. Powell we know taking solitary week-end cruises in the estuary of the Thames (with mysterious dashes into lonely creeks) but to the young Mr. Powell, the chance second officer of the ship Ferndale, commanded (and for the most part owned) by Roderick Anthony, the son of the poet — you know.  A Mr. Powell, much slenderer than our robust friend is now, with the bloom of innocence not quite rubbed off his smooth cheeks, and apt not only to be interested but also to be surprised by the experience life was holding in store for him.  This would account for his remembering so much of it with considerable vividness.  For instance, the impressions attending his first breakfast on board the Ferndale, both visual and mental, were as fresh to him as if received yesterday.

The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability to interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in itself) makes to our understanding and emotions.  For it is never more than that.  Our experience never gets into our blood and bones.  It always remains outside of us.  That’s why we look with wonder at the past.  And this persists even when from practice and through growing callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine — which our life is — nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more.  Not at the time, I mean.  If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such exclamation: ‘Well!  Well!  I’ll be hanged if I ever, . . . ‘ it is probably because this very thing that there should be a past to look back upon, other people’s, is very astounding in itself when one has the time, a fleeting and immense instant to think of it . . . “

I was on the point of interrupting Marlow when he stopped of himself, his eyes fixed on vacancy, or — perhaps — (I wouldn’t be too hard on him) on a vision.  He has the habit, or, say, the fault, of defective mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very fulness of the tick.  If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that perversity, you know how vexing it is — such a stoppage.  I was vexed with Marlow.  He was smiling faintly while I waited.  He even laughed a little.  And then I said acidly:

“Am I to understand that you have ferreted out something comic in the history of Flora de Barral?”

“Comic!” he exclaimed.  “No!  What makes you say?  . . . Oh, I laughed — did I?  But don’t you know that people laugh at absurdities that are very far from being comic?  Didn’t you read the latest books about laughter written by philosophers, psychologists?  There is a lot of them . . . “

“I dare say there has been a lot of nonsense written about laughter — and tears, too, for that matter,” I said impatiently.

“They say,” pursued the unabashed Marlow, “that we laugh from a sense of superiority.  Therefore, observe, simplicity, honesty, warmth of feeling, delicacy of heart and of conduct, self-confidence, magnanimity are laughed at, because the presence of these traits in a man’s character often puts him into difficult, cruel or absurd situations, and makes us, the majority who are fairly free as a rule from these peculiarities, feel pleasantly superior.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said.  “But have you discovered all these fine things in the story; or has Mr. Powell discovered them to you in his artless talk?  Have you two been having good healthy laughs together?  Come!  Are your sides aching yet, Marlow?”

Marlow took no offence at my banter.  He was quite serious.

“I should not like to say off-hand how much of that there was,” he pursued with amusing caution.  “But there was a situation, tense enough for the signs of it to give many surprises to Mr. Powell — neither of them shocking in itself, but with a cumulative effect which made the whole unforgettable in the detail of its progress.  And the first surprise came very soon, when the explosives (to which he owed his sudden chance of engagement) — dynamite in cases and blasting powder in barrels — taken on board, main hatch battened for sea, cook restored to his functions in the galley, anchor fished and the tug ahead, rounding the South Foreland, and with the sun sinking clear and red down the purple vista of the channel, he went on the poop, on duty, it is true, but with time to take the first freer breath in the busy day of departure.  The pilot was still on board, who gave him first a silent glance, and then passed an insignificant remark before resuming his lounging to and fro between the steering wheel and the binnacle.  Powell took his station modestly at the break of the poop.  He had noticed across the skylight a head in a grey cap.  But when, after a time, he crossed over to the other side of the deck he discovered that it was not the captain’s head at all.  He became aware of grey hairs curling over the nape of the neck.  How could he have made that mistake?  But on board ship away from the land one does not expect to come upon a stranger.