Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (754 page)

The latter asked under his breath for another cup of coffee, and nibbled ascetically at a piece of very hard ship’s biscuit.  I don’t think he consumed a square inch in the end; but meantime he gave me, casually as it were, a complete account of the sugar crop, of the local business houses, of the state of the freight market.  All that talk was interspersed with hints as to personalities, amounting to veiled warnings, but his pale, fleshy face remained equable, without a gleam, as if ignorant of his voice.  As you may imagine I opened my ears very wide.  Every word was precious.  My ideas as to the value of business friendship were being favourably modified.  He gave me the names of all the disponible ships together with their tonnage and the names of their commanders.  From that, which was still commercial information, he condescended to mere harbour gossip.  The Hilda had unaccountably lost her figurehead in the Bay of Bengal, and her captain was greatly affected by this.  He and the ship had been getting on in years together and the old gentleman imagined this strange event to be the forerunner of his own early dissolution.  The Stella had experienced awful weather off the Cape — had her decks swept, and the chief officer washed overboard.  And only a few hours before reaching port the baby died.

Poor Captain H- and his wife were terribly cut up.  If they had only been able to bring it into port alive it could have been probably saved; but the wind failed them for the last week or so, light breezes, and . . . the baby was going to be buried this afternoon.  He supposed I would attend —

“Do you think I ought to?” I asked, shrinkingly.

He thought so, decidedly.  It would be greatly appreciated.  All the captains in the harbour were going to attend.  Poor Mrs. H- was quite prostrated.  Pretty hard on H- altogether.

“And you, Captain — you are not married I suppose?”

“No, I am not married,” I said.  “Neither married nor even engaged.”

Mentally I thanked my stars; and while he smiled in a musing, dreamy fashion, I expressed my acknowledgments for his visit and for the interesting business information he had been good enough to impart to me.  But I said nothing of my wonder thereat.

“Of course, I would have made a point of calling on you in a day or two,” I concluded.

He raised his eyelids distinctly at me, and somehow managed to look rather more sleepy than before.

“In accordance with my owners’ instructions,” I explained.  “You have had their letter, of course?”

By that time he had raised his eyebrows too but without any particular emotion.  On the contrary he struck me then as absolutely imperturbable.

“Oh!  You must be thinking of my brother.”

It was for me, then, to say “Oh!”  But I hope that no more than civil surprise appeared in my voice when I asked him to what, then, I owed the pleasure. . . . He was reaching for an inside pocket leisurely.

“My brother’s a very different person.  But I am well known in this part of the world.  You’ve probably heard — ”

I took a card he extended to me.  A thick business card, as I lived!  Alfred Jacobus — the other was Ernest — dealer in every description of ship’s stores!  Provisions salt and fresh, oils, paints, rope, canvas, etc., etc.  Ships in harbour victualled by contract on moderate terms —

“I’ve never heard of you,” I said brusquely.

His low-pitched assurance did not abandon him.

“You will be very well satisfied,” he breathed out quietly.

I was not placated.  I had the sense of having been circumvented somehow.  Yet I had deceived myself — if there was any deception.  But the confounded cheek of inviting himself to breakfast was enough to deceive any one.  And the thought struck me: Why!  The fellow had provided all these eatables himself in the way of business.  I said:

“You must have got up mighty early this morning.”

He admitted with simplicity that he was on the quay before six o’clock waiting for my ship to come in.  He gave me the impression that it would be impossible to get rid of him now.

“If you think we are going to live on that scale,” I said, looking at the table with an irritated eye, “you are jolly well mistaken.”

“You’ll find it all right, Captain.  I quite understand.”

Nothing could disturb his equanimity.  I felt dissatisfied, but I could not very well fly out at him.  He had told me many useful things — and besides he was the brother of that wealthy merchant.  That seemed queer enough.

I rose and told him curtly that I must now go ashore.  At once he offered the use of his boat for all the time of my stay in port.

“I only make a nominal charge,” he continued equably.  “My man remains all day at the landing-steps.  You have only to blow a whistle when you want the boat.”

And, standing aside at every doorway to let me go through first, he carried me off in his custody after all.  As we crossed the quarter-deck two shabby individuals stepped forward and in mournful silence offered me business cards which I took from them without a word under his heavy eye.  It was a useless and gloomy ceremony.  They were the touts of the other ship-chandlers, and he placid at my back, ignored their existence.

We parted on the quay, after he had expressed quietly the hope of seeing me often “at the store.”  He had a smoking-room for captains there, with newspapers and a box of “rather decent cigars.”  I left him very unceremoniously.

My consignees received me with the usual business heartiness, but their account of the state of the freight-market was by no means so favourable as the talk of the wrong Jacobus had led me to expect.  Naturally I became inclined now to put my trust in his version, rather.  As I closed the door of the private office behind me I thought to myself: “H’m.  A lot of lies.  Commercial diplomacy.  That’s the sort of thing a man coming from sea has got to expect.  They would try to charter the ship under the market rate.”

In the big, outer room, full of desks, the chief clerk, a tall, lean, shaved person in immaculate white clothes and with a shiny, closely-cropped black head on which silvery gleams came and went, rose from his place and detained me affably.  Anything they could do for me, they would be most happy.  Was I likely to call again in the afternoon?  What?  Going to a funeral?  Oh, yes, poor Captain H-.

He pulled a long, sympathetic face for a moment, then, dismissing from this workaday world the baby, which had got ill in a tempest and had died from too much calm at sea, he asked me with a dental, shark-like smile — if sharks had false teeth — whether I had yet made my little arrangements for the ship’s stay in port.

“Yes, with Jacobus,” I answered carelessly.  “I understand he’s the brother of Mr. Ernest Jacobus to whom I have an introduction from my owners.”

I was not sorry to let him know I was not altogether helpless in the hands of his firm.  He screwed his thin lips dubiously.

“Why,” I cried, “isn’t he the brother?”

“Oh, yes. . . . They haven’t spoken to each other for eighteen years,” he added impressively after a pause.

“Indeed!  What’s the quarrel about?”

“Oh, nothing!  Nothing that one would care to mention,” he protested primly.  “He’s got quite a large business.  The best ship-chandler here, without a doubt.  Business is all very well, but there is such a thing as personal character, too, isn’t there?  Good-morning, Captain.”

He went away mincingly to his desk.  He amused me.  He resembled an old maid, a commercial old maid, shocked by some impropriety.  Was it a commercial impropriety?  Commercial impropriety is a serious matter, for it aims at one’s pocket.  Or was he only a purist in conduct who disapproved of Jacobus doing his own touting?  It was certainly undignified.  I wondered how the merchant brother liked it.  But then different countries, different customs.  In a community so isolated and so exclusively “trading” social standards have their own scale.

CHAPTER II

I would have gladly dispensed with the mournful opportunity of becoming acquainted by sight with all my fellow-captains at once.  However I found my way to the cemetery.  We made a considerable group of bareheaded men in sombre garments.  I noticed that those of our company most approaching to the now obsolete sea-dog type were the most moved — perhaps because they had less “manner” than the new generation.  The old sea-dog, away from his natural element, was a simple and sentimental animal.  I noticed one — he was facing me across the grave — who was dropping tears.  They trickled down his weather-beaten face like drops of rain on an old rugged wall.  I learned afterwards that he was looked upon as the terror of sailors, a hard man; that he had never had wife or chick of his own, and that, engaged from his tenderest years in deep-sea voyages, he knew women and children merely by sight.

Perhaps he was dropping those tears over his lost opportunities, from sheer envy of paternity and in strange jealousy of a sorrow which he could never know.  Man, and even the sea-man, is a capricious animal, the creature and the victim of lost opportunities.  But he made me feel ashamed of my callousness.  I had no tears.

I listened with horribly critical detachment to that service I had had to read myself, once or twice, over childlike men who had died at sea.  The words of hope and defiance, the winged words so inspiring in the free immensity of water and sky, seemed to fall wearily into the little grave.  What was the use of asking Death where her sting was, before that small, dark hole in the ground?  And then my thoughts escaped me altogether — away into matters of life — and no very high matters at that — ships, freights, business.  In the instability of his emotions man resembles deplorably a monkey.  I was disgusted with my thoughts — and I thought: Shall I be able to get a charter soon?  Time’s money. . . . Will that Jacobus really put good business in my way?  I must go and see him in a day or two.

Don’t imagine that I pursued these thoughts with any precision.  They pursued me rather: vague, shadowy, restless, shamefaced.  Theirs was a callous, abominable, almost revolting, pertinacity.  And it was the presence of that pertinacious ship-chandler which had started them.  He stood mournfully amongst our little band of men from the sea, and I was angry at his presence, which, suggesting his brother the merchant, had caused me to become outrageous to myself.  For indeed I had preserved some decency of feeling.  It was only the mind which —

It was over at last.  The poor father — a man of forty with black, bushy side-whiskers and a pathetic gash on his freshly-shaved chin — thanked us all, swallowing his tears.  But for some reason, either because I lingered at the gate of the cemetery being somewhat hazy as to my way back, or because I was the youngest, or ascribing my moodiness caused by remorse to some more worthy and appropriate sentiment, or simply because I was even more of a stranger to him than the others — he singled me out.  Keeping at my side, he renewed his thanks, which I listened to in a gloomy, conscience-stricken silence.  Suddenly he slipped one hand under my arm and waved the other after a tall, stout figure walking away by itself down a street in a flutter of thin, grey garments:

“That’s a good fellow — a real good fellow” — he swallowed down a belated sob — ”this Jacobus.”

And he told me in a low voice that Jacobus was the first man to board his ship on arrival, and, learning of their misfortune, had taken charge of everything, volunteered to attend to all routine business, carried off the ship’s papers on shore, arranged for the funeral —

“A good fellow.  I was knocked over.  I had been looking at my wife for ten days.  And helpless.  Just you think of that!  The dear little chap died the very day we made the land.  How I managed to take the ship in God alone knows!  I couldn’t see anything; I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t. . . . You’ve heard, perhaps, that we lost our mate overboard on the passage?  There was no one to do it for me.  And the poor woman nearly crazy down below there all alone with the . . . By the Lord!  It isn’t fair.”

We walked in silence together.  I did not know how to part from him.  On the quay he let go my arm and struck fiercely his fist into the palm of his other hand.

“By God, it isn’t fair!” he cried again.  “Don’t you ever marry unless you can chuck the sea first. . . . It isn’t fair.”

I had no intention to “chuck the sea,” and when he left me to go aboard his ship I felt convinced that I would never marry.  While I was waiting at the steps for Jacobus’s boatman, who had gone off somewhere, the captain of the Hilda joined me, a slender silk umbrella in his hand and the sharp points of his archaic, Gladstonian shirt-collar framing a small, clean-shaved, ruddy face.  It was wonderfully fresh for his age, beautifully modelled and lit up by remarkably clear blue eyes.  A lot of white hair, glossy like spun glass, curled upwards slightly under the brim of his valuable, ancient, panama hat with a broad black ribbon.  In the aspect of that vivacious, neat, little old man there was something quaintly angelic and also boyish.

He accosted me, as though he had been in the habit of seeing me every day of his life from my earliest childhood, with a whimsical remark on the appearance of a stout negro woman who was sitting upon a stool near the edge of the quay.  Presently he observed amiably that I had a very pretty little barque.

I returned this civil speech by saying readily:

“Not so pretty as the Hilda.”

At once the corners of his clear-cut, sensitive mouth dropped dismally.

“Oh, dear!  I can hardly bear to look at her now.”

Did I know, he asked anxiously, that he had lost the figurehead of his ship; a woman in a blue tunic edged with gold, the face perhaps not so very, very pretty, but her bare white arms beautifully shaped and extended as if she were swimming?  Did I?  Who would have expected such a things . . . After twenty years too!

Nobody could have guessed from his tone that the woman was made of wood; his trembling voice, his agitated manner gave to his lamentations a ludicrously scandalous flavour. . . . Disappeared at night — a clear fine night with just a slight swell — in the gulf of Bengal.  Went off without a splash; no one in the ship could tell why, how, at what hour — after twenty years last October. . . . Did I ever hear! . . .