Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (418 page)

“Is anything going to happen?  What is it?”

“It’s all over now,” he whispered back.

He remained bent low, his head inside the cover staring at that white ghostly oval.  He wondered she had not rushed out on deck.  She had remained quietly there.  This was pluck.  Wonderful self-restraint.  And it was not stupidity on her part.  She knew there was imminent danger and probably had some notion of its nature.

“You stayed here waiting for what would come,” he murmured admiringly.

“Wasn’t that the best thing to do?” she asked.

He didn’t know.  Perhaps.  He confessed he could not have done it.  Not he.  His flesh and blood could not have stood it.  He would have felt he must see what was coming.  Then he remembered that the flare might have scorched her face, and expressed his concern.

“A bit.  Nothing to hurt.  Smell the singed hair?”

There was a sort of gaiety in her tone.  She might have been frightened but she certainly was not overcome and suffered from no reaction.  This confirmed and augmented if possible Mr. Powell’s good opinion of her as a “jolly girl,” though it seemed to him positively monstrous to refer in such terms to one’s captain’s wife.  “But she doesn’t look it,” he thought in extenuation and was going to say something more to her about the lighting of that flare when another voice was heard in the companion, saying some indistinct words.  Its tone was contemptuous; it came from below, from the bottom of the stairs.  It was a voice in the cabin.  And the only other voice which could be heard in the main cabin at this time of the evening was the voice of Mrs. Anthony’s father.  The indistinct white oval sank from Mr. Powell’s sight so swiftly as to take him by surprise.  For a moment he hung at the opening of the companion and now that her slight form was no longer obstructing the narrow and winding staircase the voices came up louder but the words were still indistinct.  The old gentleman was excited about something and Mrs. Anthony was “managing him” as Powell expressed it.  They moved away from the bottom of the stairs and Powell went away from the companion.  Yet he fancied he had heard the words “Lost to me” before he withdrew his head.  They had been uttered by Mr. Smith.

Captain Anthony had not moved away from the taffrail.  He remained in the very position he took up to watch the other ship go by rolling and swinging all shadowy in the uproar of the following seas.  He stirred not; and Powell keeping near by did not dare speak to him, so enigmatical in its contemplation of the night did his figure appear to his young eyes: indistinct — and in its immobility staring into gloom, the prey of some incomprehensible grief, longing or regret.

Why is it that the stillness of a human being is often so impressive, so suggestive of evil — as if our proper fate were a ceaseless agitation?  The stillness of Captain Anthony became almost intolerable to his second officer.  Mr. Powell loitering about the skylight wanted his captain off the deck now.  “Why doesn’t he go below?” he asked himself impatiently.  He ventured a cough.

Whether the effect of the cough or not Captain Anthony spoke.  He did not move the least bit.  With his back remaining turned to the whole length of the ship he asked Mr. Powell with some brusqueness if the chief mate had neglected to instruct him that the captain was to be found on the port side.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Powell approaching his back.  “The mate told me to stamp on the port side when I wanted you; but I didn’t remember at the moment.”

“You should remember,” the captain uttered with an effort.  Then added mumbling “I don’t want Mrs. Anthony frightened.  Don’t you see? . . .”

“She wasn’t this time,” Powell said innocently: “She lighted the flare-up for me, sir.”

“This time,” Captain Anthony exclaimed and turned round.  “Mrs. Anthony lighted the flare?  Mrs. Anthony! . . . “  Powell explained that she was in the companion all the time.

“All the time,” repeated the captain.  It seemed queer to Powell that instead of going himself to see the captain should ask him:

“Is she there now?”

Powell said that she had gone below after the ship had passed clear of the Ferndale.  Captain Anthony made a movement towards the companion himself, when Powell added the information.  “Mr. Smith called to Mrs. Anthony from the saloon, sir.  I believe they are talking there now.”

He was surprised to see the captain give up the idea of going below after all.

He began to walk the poop instead regardless of the cold, of the damp wind and of the sprays.  And yet he had nothing on but his sleeping suit and slippers.  Powell placing himself on the break of the poop kept a look-out.  When after some time he turned his head to steal a glance at his eccentric captain he could not see his active and shadowy figure swinging to and fro.  The second mate of the Ferndale walked aft peering about and addressed the seaman who steered.

“Captain gone below?”

“Yes, sir,” said the fellow who with a quid of tobacco bulging out his left cheek kept his eyes on the compass card.  “This minute.  He laughed.”

“Laughed,” repeated Powell incredulously.  “Do you mean the captain did?  You must be mistaken.  What would he want to laugh for?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

The elderly sailor displayed a profound indifference towards human emotions.  However, after a longish pause he conceded a few words more to the second officer’s weakness.  “Yes.  He was walking the deck as usual when suddenly he laughed a little and made for the companion.  Thought of something funny all at once.”

Something funny!  That Mr. Powell could not believe.  He did not ask himself why, at the time.  Funny thoughts come to men, though, in all sorts of situations; they come to all sorts of men.  Nevertheless Mr. Powell was shocked to learn that Captain Anthony had laughed without visible cause on a certain night.  The impression for some reason was disagreeable.  And it was then, while finishing his watch, with the chilly gusts of wind sweeping at him out of the darkness where the short sea of the soundings growled spitefully all round the ship, that it occurred to his unsophisticated mind that perhaps things are not what they are confidently expected to be; that it was possible that Captain Anthony was not a happy man . . . In so far you will perceive he was to a certain extent prepared for the apoplectic and sensitive Franklin’s lamentations about his captain.  And though he treated them with a contempt which was in a great measure sincere, yet he admitted to me that deep down within him an inexplicable and uneasy suspicion that all was not well in that cabin, so unusually cut off from the rest of the ship, came into being and grew against his will.

CHAPTER FOUR — ANTHONY AND FLORA

Marlow emerged out of the shadow of the book-case to get himself a cigar from a box which stood on a little table by my side.  In the full light of the room I saw in his eyes that slightly mocking expression with which he habitually covers up his sympathetic impulses of mirth and pity before the unreasonable complications the idealism of mankind puts into the simple but poignant problem of conduct on this earth.

He selected and lit the cigar with affected care, then turned upon me, I had been looking at him silently.

“I suppose,” he said, the mockery of his eyes giving a pellucid quality to his tone, “that you think it’s high time I told you something definite.  I mean something about that psychological cabin mystery of discomfort (for it’s obvious that it must be psychological) which affected so profoundly Mr. Franklin the chief mate, and had even disturbed the serene innocence of Mr. Powell, the second of the ship Ferndale, commanded by Roderick Anthony — the son of the poet, you know.”

“You are going to confess now that you have failed to find it out,” I said in pretended indignation.

“It would serve you right if I told you that I have.  But I won’t.  I haven’t failed.  I own though that for a time, I was puzzled.  However, I have now seen our Powell many times under the most favourable conditions — and besides I came upon a most unexpected source of information . . . But never mind that.  The means don’t concern you except in so far as they belong to the story.  I’ll admit that for some time the old-maiden-lady-like occupation of putting two and two together failed to procure a coherent theory.  I am speaking now as an investigator — a man of deductions.  With what we know of Roderick Anthony and Flora de Barral I could not deduct an ordinary marital quarrel beautifully matured in less than a year — could I?  If you ask me what is an ordinary marital quarrel I will tell you, that it is a difference about nothing; I mean, these nothings which, as Mr. Powell told us when we first met him, shore people are so prone to start a row about, and nurse into hatred from an idle sense of wrong, from perverted ambition, for spectacular reasons too.  There are on earth no actors too humble and obscure not to have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms the play by stealthy jeers, counsels of anger, amused comments or words of perfidious compassion.  However, the Anthonys were free from all demoralizing influences.  At sea, you know, there is no gallery.  You hear no tormenting echoes of your own littleness there, where either a great elemental voice roars defiantly under the sky or else an elemental silence seems to be part of the infinite stillness of the universe.

Remembering Flora de Barral in the depths of moral misery, and Roderick Anthony carried away by a gust of tempestuous tenderness, I asked myself, Is it all forgotten already?  What could they have found to estrange them from each other with this rapidity and this thoroughness so far from all temptations, in the peace of the sea and in an isolation so complete that if it had not been the jealous devotion of the sentimental Franklin stimulating the attention of Powell, there would have been no record, no evidence of it at all.

I must confess at once that it was Flora de Barral whom I suspected.  In this world as at present organized women are the suspected half of the population.  There are good reasons for that.  These reasons are so discoverable with a little reflection that it is not worth my while to set them out for you.  I will only mention this: that the part falling to women’s share being all “influence” has an air of occult and mysterious action, something not altogether trustworthy like all natural forces which, for us, work in the dark because of our imperfect comprehension.

If women were not a force of nature, blind in its strength and capricious in its power, they would not be mistrusted.  As it is one can’t help it.  You will say that this force having been in the person of Flora de Barral captured by Anthony . . . Why yes.  He had dealt with her masterfully.  But man has captured electricity too.  It lights him on his way, it warms his home, it will even cook his dinner for him — very much like a woman.  But what sort of conquest would you call it?  He knows nothing of it.  He has got to be mighty careful what he is about with his captive.  And the greater the demand he makes on it in the exultation of his pride the more likely it is to turn on him and burn him to a cinder . . . “

“A far-fetched enough parallel,” I observed coldly to Marlow.  He had returned to the arm-chair in the shadow of the bookcase.  “But accepting the meaning you have in your mind it reduces itself to the knowledge of how to use it.  And if you mean that this ravenous Anthony — ”

“Ravenous is good,” interrupted Marlow.  “He was a-hungering and a-thirsting for femininity to enter his life in a way no mere feminist could have the slightest conception of.  I reckon that this accounts for much of Fyne’s disgust with him.  Good little Fyne.  You have no idea what infernal mischief he had worked during his call at the hotel.  But then who could have suspected Anthony of being a heroic creature.  There are several kinds of heroism and one of them at least is idiotic.  It is the one which wears the aspect of sublime delicacy.  It is apparently the one of which the son of the delicate poet was capable.

He certainly resembled his father, who, by the way, wore out two women without any satisfaction to himself, because they did not come up to his supra-refined standard of the delicacy which is so perceptible in his verses.  That’s your poet.  He demands too much from others.  The inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself with that need for embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion, the impulses the poet puts into arrangements of verses, which are dearer to him than his own self — and may make his own self appear sublime in the eyes of other people, and even in his own eyes.

Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes?  I should not like to make that charge; though indeed there are other, less noble, ambitions at which the world does not dare to smile.  But I don’t think so; I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations.  Looked at abstractedly (the way in which truth is often seen in its real shape) his life had been a life of solitude and silence — and desire.

Chance had thrown that girl in his way; and if we may smile at his violent conquest of Flora de Barral we must admit also that this eager appropriation was truly the act of a man of solitude and desire; a man also, who, unless a complete imbecile, must have been a man of long and ardent reveries wherein the faculty of sincere passion matures slowly in the unexplored recesses of the heart.  And I know also that a passion, dominating or tyrannical, invading the whole man and subjugating all his faculties to its own unique end, may conduct him whom it spurs and drives, into all sorts of adventures, to the brink of unfathomable dangers, to the limits of folly, and madness, and death.

To the man then of a silence made only more impressive by the inarticulate thunders and mutters of the great seas, an utter stranger to the clatter of tongues, there comes the muscular little Fyne, the most marked representative of that mankind whose voice is so strange to him, the husband of his sister, a personality standing out from the misty and remote multitude.  He comes and throws at him more talk than he had ever heard boomed out in an hour, and certainly touching the deepest things Anthony had ever discovered in himself, and flings words like “unfair” whose very sound is abhorrent to him.  Unfair!  Undue advantage!  He!  Unfair to that girl?  Cruel to her!