Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (869 page)

There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night — or a night of hate (it isn’t for nothing that the North Sea is also called the German Ocean) — when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable manner.  There were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good and true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time moved in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon.  The whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses than the green overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.

“That’s a very nice gentleman.”  This information, together with the fact that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship, was communicated to me suddenly by our captain.  At intervals through the day he would pop out of the chart-room and offer me short snatches of conversation.  He owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind, and he was without malice and, I believe, quite unconsciously, a warm Germanophil.  And no wonder!  As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that run, and spent almost as much of his life in Hamburg as in Harwich.

“Wonderful people they are,” he repeated from time to time, without entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy.  What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and small merchants, most likely.  But I had observed long before that German genius has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted minds.  There is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised mediocrity.  Had it not hypnotised half Europe?  My man was very much under the spell of German excellence.  On the other hand, his contempt for France was equally general and unbounded.  I tried to advance some arguments against this position, but I only succeeded in making him hostile.  “I believe you are a Frenchman yourself,” he snarled at last, giving me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.

Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their colouring and texture.  Evening was coming on over the North Sea.  Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the Eastern board: tops of islands fringing the German shore.  While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves — and for all their solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light — another passenger came out on deck.  This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap.  The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed his chest.  His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it determined the whole character of his physiognomy.  Indeed nothing else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself.  His disposition, unlike the widower’s, appeared to be mild and humane.  He offered me the loan of his glasses.  He had a wife and some small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were.  His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.

“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone.  He spoke English with the accent of our captain’s “wonderful people,” and proceeded to give me the history of the family’s crossing the Atlantic in a White Star liner.  They remained in England just the time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich.  His people (those in the depths of the ship) were naturally a little tired.

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation.  “Hurrah,” he cried under his breath.  “The first German light!  Hurrah!”

And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness.  The shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.

I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights.  The great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me.  I had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers.  They went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits.  Singly, and in small companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below the grey curve of the earth.  Cargo steam vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one.  These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous.  Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.

When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out to sea.  Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds.

I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so overlighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board.  I fear that the oar, as a working implement, will become presently as obsolete as the sail.  The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy.  More and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels.  Progress!  Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits.  And readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man.

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.  Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe lightship floated all dark and silent under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights.

Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace ready for flight away from the luckless shores of Europe.  Our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over there, that the Elbe lightship has been towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do.  And obviously it must be so.

Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping along cautiously with the unlighted, war-blighted black coast close on one hand, and sudden death on the other.  For all the space we steamed through that Sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy importance.  Mines; Submarines.  The last word in sea-warfare!  Progress — impressively disclosed by this war.

There have been other wars!  Wars not inferior in the greatness of the stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings.  During that one which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the English Fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself, offered to the Maritime Prefect of the port and to the French Admiral, an invention which would sink all the unsuspecting English ships one after another — or, at any rate most of them.  The offer was not even taken into consideration; and the Prefect ends his report to the Minister in Paris with a fine phrase of indignation: “It is not the sort of death one would deal to brave men.”

And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those self-denying words.  Mankind has been demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances.  Its spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance.  It has become the intoxicated slave of its own detestable ingenuity.  It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic time another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and held out to the world.

IV.

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look for in Germany.  I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses.  An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment.  Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom.  I believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.

I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without sights, without sounds.  No whispers of the war reached my voluntary abstraction.  And perhaps not so very voluntary after all!  Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons.  Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation.  We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way.  By watching.

We arrived in Cracow late at night.  After a scrambly supper, I said to my eldest boy, “I can’t go to bed.  I am going out for a look round.  Coming?”

He was ready enough.  For him, all this was part of the interesting adventure of the whole journey.  We stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight.  I was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon.  I felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise.

The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square of the town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life.  We could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space.  At the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves which made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.

The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight.  The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool.  I noticed with infinite satisfaction that the unnecessary trees the Municipality insisted upon sticking between the stones had been steadily refusing to grow.  They were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I could remember.  Also, the paving operations seemed to be exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years before.  There were the dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery sea.  Who was it that said that Time works wonders?  What an exploded superstition!  As far as these trees and these paving stones were concerned, it had worked nothing.  The suspicion of the unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably strengthened within me.

“We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.

It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical relics.  The common citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it seriously.  He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the Schools.  We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy.  Even as I uttered it to my boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation.  And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an inscription in raised black letters, thus: “Line A.B.”  Heavens!  The name had been adopted officially!  Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B.  It had become a mere name in a directory.  I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things.  Time could work wonders, and no mistake.  A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast-iron.

I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste.  And this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked that change.  There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted to look at, I explained to my companion.