Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (762 page)

I was a thousand miles from commercial affairs, when on the dark quarter-deck Mr. Burns positively rushed at me, stammering with excitement.  He had been pacing the deck distractedly for hours awaiting my arrival.  Just before sunset a lighter loaded with potatoes had come alongside with that fat ship-chandler himself sitting on the pile of sacks.  He was now stuck immovable in the cabin.  What was the meaning of it all?  Surely I did not —

“Yes, Mr. Burns, I did,” I cut him short.  He was beginning to make gestures of despair when I stopped that, too, by giving him the key of my desk and desiring him, in a tone which admitted of no argument, to go below at once, pay Mr. Jacobus’s bill, and send him out of the ship.

“I don’t want to see him,” I confessed frankly, climbing the poop-ladder.  I felt extremely tired.  Dropping on the seat of the skylight, I gave myself up to idle gazing at the lights about the quay and at the black mass of the mountain on the south side of the harbour.  I never heard Jacobus leave the ship with every single sovereign of my ready cash in his pocket.  I never heard anything till, a long time afterwards, Mr. Burns, unable to contain himself any longer, intruded upon me with his ridiculously angry lamentations at my weakness and good nature.

“Of course, there’s plenty of room in the after-hatch.  But they are sure to go rotten down there.  Well!  I never heard . . . seventeen tons!  I suppose I must hoist in that lot first thing to-morrow morning.”

“I suppose you must.  Unless you drop them overboard.  But I’m afraid you can’t do that.  I wouldn’t mind myself, but it’s forbidden to throw rubbish into the harbour, you know.”

“That is the truest word you have said for many a day, sir — rubbish.  That’s just what I expect they are.  Nearly eighty good gold sovereigns gone; a perfectly clean sweep of your drawer, sir.  Bless me if I understand!”

As it was impossible to throw the right light on this commercial transaction I left him to his lamentations and under the impression that I was a hopeless fool.  Next day I did not go ashore.  For one thing, I had no money to go ashore with — no, not enough to buy a cigarette.  Jacobus had made a clean sweep.  But that was not the only reason.  The Pearl of the Ocean had in a few short hours grown odious to me.  And I did not want to meet any one.  My reputation had suffered.  I knew I was the object of unkind and sarcastic comments.

The following morning at sunrise, just as our stern-fasts had been let go and the tug plucked us out from between the buoys, I saw Jacobus standing up in his boat.  The nigger was pulling hard; several baskets of provisions for ships were stowed between the thwarts.  The father of Alice was going his morning round.  His countenance was tranquil and friendly.  He raised his arm and shouted something with great heartiness.  But his voice was of the sort that doesn’t carry any distance; all I could catch faintly, or rather guess at, were the words “next time” and “quite correct.”  And it was only of these last that I was certain.  Raising my arm perfunctorily for all response, I turned away.  I rather resented the familiarity of the thing.  Hadn’t I settled accounts finally with him by means of that potato bargain?

This being a harbour story it is not my purpose to speak of our passage.  I was glad enough to be at sea, but not with the gladness of old days.  Formerly I had no memories to take away with me.  I shared in the blessed forgetfulness of sailors, that forgetfulness natural and invincible, which resembles innocence in so far that it prevents self-examination.  Now however I remembered the girl.  During the first few days I was for ever questioning myself as to the nature of facts and sensations connected with her person and with my conduct.

And I must say also that Mr. Burns’ intolerable fussing with those potatoes was not calculated to make me forget the part which I had played.  He looked upon it as a purely commercial transaction of a particularly foolish kind, and his devotion — if it was devotion and not mere cussedness as I came to regard it before long — inspired him with a zeal to minimise my loss as much as possible.  Oh, yes!  He took care of those infamous potatoes with a vengeance, as the saying goes.

Everlastingly, there was a tackle over the after-hatch and everlastingly the watch on deck were pulling up, spreading out, picking over, rebagging, and lowering down again, some part of that lot of potatoes.  My bargain with all its remotest associations, mental and visual — the garden of flowers and scents, the girl with her provoking contempt and her tragic loneliness of a hopeless castaway — was everlastingly dangled before my eyes, for thousands of miles along the open sea.  And as if by a satanic refinement of irony it was accompanied by a most awful smell.  Whiffs from decaying potatoes pursued me on the poop, they mingled with my thoughts, with my food, poisoned my very dreams.  They made an atmosphere of corruption for the ship.

I remonstrated with Mr. Burns about this excessive care.  I would have been well content to batten the hatch down and let them perish under the deck.

That perhaps would have been unsafe.  The horrid emanations might have flavoured the cargo of sugar.  They seemed strong enough to taint the very ironwork.  In addition Mr. Burns made it a personal matter.  He assured me he knew how to treat a cargo of potatoes at sea — had been in the trade as a boy, he said.  He meant to make my loss as small as possible.  What between his devotion — it must have been devotion — and his vanity, I positively dared not give him the order to throw my commercial-venture overboard.  I believe he would have refused point blank to obey my lawful command.  An unprecedented and comical situation would have been created with which I did not feel equal to deal.

I welcomed the coming of bad weather as no sailor had ever done.  When at last I hove the ship to, to pick up the pilot outside Port Philip Heads, the after-hatch had not been opened for more than a week and I might have believed that no such thing as a potato had ever been on board.

It was an abominable day, raw, blustering, with great squalls of wind and rain; the pilot, a cheery person, looked after the ship and chatted to me, streaming from head to foot; and the heavier the lash of the downpour the more pleased with himself and everything around him he seemed to be.  He rubbed his wet hands with a satisfaction, which to me, who had stood that kind of thing for several days and nights, seemed inconceivable in any non-aquatic creature.

“You seem to enjoy getting wet, Pilot,” I remarked.

He had a bit of land round his house in the suburbs and it was of his garden he was thinking.  At the sound of the word garden, unheard, unspoken for so many days, I had a vision of gorgeous colour, of sweet scents, of a girlish figure crouching in a chair.  Yes.  That was a distinct emotion breaking into the peace I had found in the sleepless anxieties of my responsibility during a week of dangerous bad weather.  The Colony, the pilot explained, had suffered from unparalleled drought.  This was the first decent drop of water they had had for seven months.  The root crops were lost.  And, trying to be casual, but with visible interest, he asked me if I had perchance any potatoes to spare.

Potatoes!  I had managed to forget them.  In a moment I felt plunged into corruption up to my neck.  Mr. Burns was making eyes at me behind the pilot’s back.

Finally, he obtained a ton, and paid ten pounds for it.  This was twice the price of my bargain with Jacobus.  The spirit of covetousness woke up in me.  That night, in harbour, before I slept, the Custom House galley came alongside.  While his underlings were putting seals on the storerooms, the officer in charge took me aside confidentially.  “I say, Captain, you don’t happen to have any potatoes to sell.”

Clearly there was a potato famine in the land.  I let him have a ton for twelve pounds and he went away joyfully.  That night I dreamt of a pile of gold in the form of a grave in which a girl was buried, and woke up callous with greed.  On calling at my ship-broker’s office, that man, after the usual business had been transacted, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead.

“I was thinking, Captain, that coming from the Pearl of the Ocean you may have some potatoes to sell.”

I said negligently: “Oh, yes, I could spare you a ton.  Fifteen pounds.”

He exclaimed: “I say!”  But after studying my face for a while accepted my terms with a faint grimace.  It seems that these people could not exist without potatoes.  I could.  I didn’t want to see a potato as long as I lived; but the demon of lucre had taken possession of me.  How the news got about I don’t know, but, returning on board rather late, I found a small group of men of the coster type hanging about the waist, while Mr. Burns walked to and fro the quarterdeck loftily, keeping a triumphant eye on them.  They had come to buy potatoes.

“These chaps have been waiting here in the sun for hours,” Burns whispered to me excitedly.  “They have drank the water-cask dry.  Don’t you throw away your chances, sir.  You are too good-natured.”

I selected a man with thick legs and a man with a cast in his eye to negotiate with; simply because they were easily distinguishable from the rest.  “You have the money on you?” I inquired, before taking them down into the cabin.

“Yes, sir,” they answered in one voice, slapping their pockets.  I liked their air of quiet determination.  Long before the end of the day all the potatoes were sold at about three times the price I had paid for them.  Mr. Burns, feverish and exulting, congratulated himself on his skilful care of my commercial venture, but hinted plainly that I ought to have made more of it.

That night I did not sleep very well.  I thought of Jacobus by fits and starts, between snatches of dreams concerned with castaways starving on a desert island covered with flowers.  It was extremely unpleasant.  In the morning, tired and unrefreshed, I sat down and wrote a long letter to my owners, giving them a carefully-thought-out scheme for the ship’s employment in the East and about the China Seas for the next two years.  I spent the day at that task and felt somewhat more at peace when it was done.

Their reply came in due course.  They were greatly struck with my project; but considering that, notwithstanding the unfortunate difficulty with the bags (which they trusted I would know how to guard against in the future), the voyage showed a very fair profit, they thought it would be better to keep the ship in the sugar trade — at least for the present.

I turned over the page and read on:

“We have had a letter from our good friend Mr. Jacobus.  We are pleased to see how well you have hit it off with him; for, not to speak of his assistance in the unfortunate matter of the bags, he writes us that should you, by using all possible dispatch, manage to bring the ship back early in the season he would be able to give us a good rate of freight.  We have no doubt that your best endeavours . . . etc. . . etc.”

I dropped the letter and sat motionless for a long time.  Then I wrote my answer (it was a short one) and went ashore myself to post it.  But I passed one letter-box, then another, and in the end found myself going up Collins Street with the letter still in my pocket — against my heart.  Collins Street at four o’clock in the afternoon is not exactly a desert solitude; but I had never felt more isolated from the rest of mankind as when I walked that day its crowded pavement, battling desperately with my thoughts and feeling already vanquished.

There came a moment when the awful tenacity of Jacobus, the man of one passion and of one idea, appeared to me almost heroic.  He had not given me up.  He had gone again to his odious brother.  And then he appeared to me odious himself.  Was it for his own sake or for the sake of the poor girl?  And on that last supposition the memory of the kiss which missed my lips appalled me; for whatever he had seen, or guessed at, or risked, he knew nothing of that.  Unless the girl had told him.  How could I go back to fan that fatal spark with my cold breath?  No, no, that unexpected kiss had to be paid for at its full price.

At the first letter-box I came to I stopped and reaching into my breast-pocket I took out the letter — it was as if I were plucking out my very heart — and dropped it through the slit.  Then I went straight on board.

I wondered what dreams I would have that night; but as it turned out I did not sleep at all.  At breakfast I informed Mr. Burns that I had resigned my command.

He dropped his knife and fork and looked at me with indignation.

“You have, sir!  I thought you loved the ship.”

“So I do, Burns,” I said.  “But the fact is that the Indian Ocean and everything that is in it has lost its charm for me.  I am going home as passenger by the Suez Canal.”

“Everything that is in it,” he repeated angrily.  “I’ve never heard anybody talk like this.  And to tell you the truth, sir, all the time we have been together I’ve never quite made you out.  What’s one ocean more than another?  Charm, indeed!”

He was really devoted to me, I believe.  But he cheered up when I told him that I had recommended him for my successor.

“Anyhow,” he remarked, “let people say what they like, this Jacobus has served your turn.  I must admit that this potato business has paid extremely well.  Of course, if only you had — ”

“Yes, Mr. Burns,” I interrupted.  “Quite a smile of fortune.”

But I could not tell him that it was driving me out of the ship I had learned to love.  And as I sat heavy-hearted at that parting, seeing all my plans destroyed, my modest future endangered — for this command was like a foot in the stirrup for a young man — he gave up completely for the first time his critical attitude.

“A wonderful piece of luck!” he said.

THE SECRET SHARER