Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (822 page)

To see! to see! — this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity.  To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.  I have heard a reserved, silent man, with no nerves to speak of, after three days of hard running in thick south-westerly weather, burst out passionately: “I wish to God we could get sight of something!”

We had just gone down below for a moment to commune in a battened-down cabin, with a large white chart lying limp and damp upon a cold and clammy table under the light of a smoky lamp.  Sprawling over that seaman’s silent and trusted adviser, with one elbow upon the coast of Africa and the other planted in the neighbourhood of Cape Hatteras (it was a general track-chart of the North Atlantic), my skipper lifted his rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a half-exasperated, half-appealing way.  We have seen no sun, moon, or stars for something like seven days.  By the effect of the West Wind’s wrath the celestial bodies had gone into hiding for a week or more, and the last three days had seen the force of a south-west gale grow from fresh, through strong, to heavy, as the entries in my log-book could testify.  Then we separated, he to go on deck again, in obedience to that mysterious call that seems to sound for ever in a shipmaster’s ears, I to stagger into my cabin with some vague notion of putting down the words “Very heavy weather” in a log-book not quite written up-to-date.  But I gave it up, and crawled into my bunk instead, boots and hat on, all standing (it did not matter; everything was soaking wet, a heavy sea having burst the poop skylights the night before), to remain in a nightmarish state between waking and sleeping for a couple of hours of so-called rest.

The south-westerly mood of the West Wind is an enemy of sleep, and even of a recumbent position, in the responsible officers of a ship.  After two hours of futile, light-headed, inconsequent thinking upon all things under heaven in that dark, dank, wet and devastated cabin, I arose suddenly and staggered up on deck.  The autocrat of the North Atlantic was still oppressing his kingdom and its outlying dependencies, even as far as the Bay of Biscay, in the dismal secrecy of thick, very thick, weather.  The force of the wind, though we were running before it at the rate of some ten knots an hour, was so great that it drove me with a steady push to the front of the poop, where my commander was holding on.

“What do you think of it?” he addressed me in an interrogative yell.

What I really thought was that we both had had just about enough of it.  The manner in which the great West Wind chooses at times to administer his possessions does not commend itself to a person of peaceful and law-abiding disposition, inclined to draw distinctions between right and wrong in the face of natural forces, whose standard, naturally, is that of might alone.  But, of course, I said nothing.  For a man caught, as it were, between his skipper and the great West Wind silence is the safest sort of diplomacy.  Moreover, I knew my skipper.  He did not want to know what I thought.  Shipmasters hanging on a breath before the thrones of the winds ruling the seas have their psychology, whose workings are as important to the ship and those on board of her as the changing moods of the weather.  The man, as a matter of fact, under no circumstances, ever cared a brass farthing for what I or anybody else in his ship thought.  He had had just about enough of it, I guessed, and what he was at really was a process of fishing for a suggestion.  It was the pride of his life that he had never wasted a chance, no matter how boisterous, threatening, and dangerous, of a fair wind.  Like men racing blindfold for a gap in a hedge, we were finishing a splendidly quick passage from the Antipodes, with a tremendous rush for the Channel in as thick a weather as any I can remember, but his psychology did not permit him to bring the ship to with a fair wind blowing — at least not on his own initiative.  And yet he felt that very soon indeed something would have to be done.  He wanted the suggestion to come from me, so that later on, when the trouble was over, he could argue this point with his own uncompromising spirit, laying the blame upon my shoulders.  I must render him the justice that this sort of pride was his only weakness.

But he got no suggestion from me.  I understood his psychology.  Besides, I had my own stock of weaknesses at the time (it is a different one now), and amongst them was the conceit of being remarkably well up in the psychology of the Westerly weather.  I believed — not to mince matters — that I had a genius for reading the mind of the great ruler of high latitudes.  I fancied I could discern already the coming of a change in his royal mood.  And all I said was:

“The weather’s bound to clear up with the shift of wind.”

“Anybody knows that much!” he snapped at me, at the highest pitch of his voice.

“I mean before dark!” I cried.

This was all the opening he ever got from me.  The eagerness with which he seized upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety he had been labouring under.

“Very well,” he shouted, with an affectation of impatience, as if giving way to long entreaties.  “All right.  If we don’t get a shift by then we’ll take that foresail off her and put her head under her wing for the night.”

I was struck by the picturesque character of the phrase as applied to a ship brought-to in order to ride out a gale with wave after wave passing under her breast.  I could see her resting in the tumult of the elements like a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather upon the raging waters with its head tucked under its wing.  In imaginative precision, in true feeling, this is one of the most expressive sentences I have ever heard on human lips.  But as to taking the foresail off that ship before we put her head under her wing, I had my grave doubts.  They were justified.  That long enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrary decree of the West Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances of their hands within the limits of his kingdom.  With the sound of a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout substance not so much as one solitary strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for, say, a wounded elephant.  Torn out of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by the shift of wind.  For the shift of wind had come.  The unveiled, low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a confused and tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast.  We recognised the headland, and looked at each other in the silence of dumb wonder.  Without knowing it in the least, we had run up alongside the Isle of Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint evening red in the salt wind-haze, was the lighthouse on St. Catherine’s Point.

My skipper recovered first from his astonishment.  His bulging eyes sank back gradually into their orbits.  His psychology, taking it all round, was really very creditable for an average sailor.  He had been spared the humiliation of laying his ship to with a fair wind; and at once that man, of an open and truthful nature, spoke up in perfect good faith, rubbing together his brown, hairy hands — the hands of a master-craftsman upon the sea:

“Humph! that’s just about where I reckoned we had got to.”

The transparency and ingenuousness, in a way, of that delusion, the airy tone, the hint of already growing pride, were perfectly delicious.  But, in truth, this was one of the greatest surprises ever sprung by the clearing up mood of the West Wind upon one of the most accomplished of his courtiers.

XXVIII.

The winds of North and South are, as I have said, but small princes amongst the powers of the sea.  They have no territory of their own; they are not reigning winds anywhere.  Yet it is from their houses that the reigning dynasties which have shared between them the waters of the earth are sprung.  All the weather of the world is based upon the contest of the Polar and Equatorial strains of that tyrannous race.  The West Wind is the greatest king.  The East rules between the Tropics.  They have shared each ocean between them.  Each has his genius of supreme rule.  The King of the West never intrudes upon the recognised dominion of his kingly brother.  He is a barbarian, of a northern type.  Violent without craftiness, and furious without malice, one may imagine him seated masterfully with a double-edged sword on his knees upon the painted and gilt clouds of the sunset, bowing his shock head of golden locks, a flaming beard over his breast, imposing, colossal, mighty-limbed, with a thundering voice, distended cheeks and fierce blue eyes, urging the speed of his gales.  The other, the East king, the king of blood-red sunrises, I represent to myself as a spare Southerner with clear-cut features, black-browed and dark-eyed, gray-robed, upright in sunshine, resting a smooth-shaven cheek in the palm of his hand, impenetrable, secret, full of wiles, fine-drawn, keen — meditating aggressions.

The West Wind keeps faith with his brother, the King of the Easterly weather.  “What we have divided we have divided,” he seems to say in his gruff voice, this ruler without guile, who hurls as if in sport enormous masses of cloud across the sky, and flings the great waves of the Atlantic clear across from the shores of the New World upon the hoary headlands of Old Europe, which harbours more kings and rulers upon its seamed and furrowed body than all the oceans of the world together.  “What we have divided we have divided; and if no rest and peace in this world have fallen to my share, leave me alone.  Let me play at quoits with cyclonic gales, flinging the discs of spinning cloud and whirling air from one end of my dismal kingdom to the other: over the Great Banks or along the edges of pack-ice — this one with true aim right into the bight of the Bay of Biscay, that other upon the fiords of Norway, across the North Sea where the fishermen of many nations look watchfully into my angry eye.  This is the time of kingly sport.”

And the royal master of high latitudes sighs mightily, with the sinking sun upon his breast and the double-edged sword upon his knees, as if wearied by the innumerable centuries of a strenuous rule and saddened by the unchangeable aspect of the ocean under his feet — by the endless vista of future ages where the work of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind shall go on and on till his realm of living waters becomes a frozen and motionless ocean.  But the other, crafty and unmoved, nursing his shaven chin between the thumb and forefinger of his slim and treacherous hand, thinks deep within his heart full of guile: “Aha! our brother of the West has fallen into the mood of kingly melancholy.  He is tired of playing with circular gales, and blowing great guns, and unrolling thick streamers of fog in wanton sport at the cost of his own poor, miserable subjects.  Their fate is most pitiful.  Let us make a foray upon the dominions of that noisy barbarian, a great raid from Finisterre to Hatteras, catching his fishermen unawares, baffling the fleets that trust to his power, and shooting sly arrows into the livers of men who court his good graces.  He is, indeed, a worthless fellow.”  And forthwith, while the West Wind meditates upon the vanity of his irresistible might, the thing is done, and the Easterly weather sets in upon the North Atlantic.

The prevailing weather of the North Atlantic is typical of the way in which the West Wind rules his realm on which the sun never sets.  North Atlantic is the heart of a great empire.  It is the part of the West Wind’s dominions most thickly populated with generations of fine ships and hardy men.  Heroic deeds and adventurous exploits have been performed there, within the very stronghold of his sway.  The best sailors in the world have been born and bred under the shadow of his sceptre, learning to manage their ships with skill and audacity before the steps of his stormy throne.  Reckless adventurers, toiling fishermen, admirals as wise and brave as the world has ever known, have waited upon the signs of his westerly sky.  Fleets of victorious ships have hung upon his breath.  He has tossed in his hand squadrons of war-scarred three-deckers, and shredded out in mere sport the bunting of flags hallowed in the traditions of honour and glory.  He is a good friend and a dangerous enemy, without mercy to unseaworthy ships and faint-hearted seamen.  In his kingly way he has taken but little account of lives sacrificed to his impulsive policy; he is a king with a double-edged sword bared in his right hand.  The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.

In his forays into the North Atlantic the East Wind behaves like a subtle and cruel adventurer without a notion of honour or fair play.  Veiling his clear-cut, lean face in a thin layer of a hard, high cloud, I have seen him, like a wizened robber sheik of the sea, hold up large caravans of ships to the number of three hundred or more at the very gates of the English Channel.  And the worst of it was that there was no ransom that we could pay to satisfy his avidity; for whatever evil is wrought by the raiding East Wind, it is done only to spite his kingly brother of the West.  We gazed helplessly at the systematic, cold, gray-eyed obstinacy of the Easterly weather, while short rations became the order of the day, and the pinch of hunger under the breast-bone grew familiar to every sailor in that held-up fleet.  Every day added to our numbers.  In knots and groups and straggling parties we flung to and fro before the closed gate.  And meantime the outward-bound ships passed, running through our humiliated ranks under all the canvas they could show.  It is my idea that the Easterly Wind helps the ships away from home in the wicked hope that they shall all come to an untimely end and be heard of no more.  For six weeks did the robber sheik hold the trade route of the earth, while our liege lord, the West Wind, slept profoundly like a tired Titan, or else remained lost in a mood of idle sadness known only to frank natures.  All was still to the westward; we looked in vain towards his stronghold: the King slumbered on so deeply that he let his foraging brother steal the very mantle of gold-lined purple clouds from his bowed shoulders.  What had become of the dazzling hoard of royal jewels exhibited at every close of day?  Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried off without leaving a single gold band or the flash of a single sunbeam in the evening sky!  Day after day through a cold streak of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would slink shamefacedly, without pomp or show, to hide in haste under the waters.  And still the King slept on, or mourned the vanity of his might and his power, while the thin-lipped intruder put the impress of his cold and implacable spirit upon the sky and sea.  With every daybreak the rising sun had to wade through a crimson stream, luminous and sinister, like the spilt blood of celestial bodies murdered during the night.