Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (416 page)

Young Powell recognized the expression of a true sentiment, a thing so rare in this world where there are so many mutes and so many excellent reasons even at sea for an articulate man not to give himself away, that he felt something like respect for this outburst.  It was not loud.  The grotesque squat shape, with the knob of the head as if rammed down between the square shoulders by a blow from a club, moved vaguely in a circumscribed space limited by the two harness-casks lashed to the front rail of the poop, without gestures, hands in the pockets of the jacket, elbows pressed closely to its side; and the voice without resonance, passed from anger to dismay and back again without a single louder word in the hurried delivery, interrupted only by slight gasps for air as if the speaker were being choked by the suppressed passion of his grief.

Mr. Powell, though moved to a certain extent, was by no means carried away.  And just as he thought that it was all over, the other, fidgeting in the darkness, was heard again explosive, bewildered but not very loud in the silence of the ship and the great empty peace of the sea.

“They have done something to him!  What is it?  What can it be?  Can’t you guess?  Don’t you know?”

“Good heavens!” Young Powell was astounded on discovering that this was an appeal addressed to him.  “How on earth can I know?”

“You do talk to that white-faced, black-eyed . . . I’ve seen you talking to her more than a dozen times.”

Young Powell, his sympathy suddenly chilled, remarked in a disdainful tone that Mrs. Anthony’s eyes were not black.

“I wish to God she had never set them on the captain, whatever colour they are,” retorted Franklin.  “She and that old chap with the scraped jaws who sits over her and stares down at her dead-white face with his yellow eyes — confound them!  Perhaps you will tell us that his eyes are not yellow?”

Powell, not interested in the colour of Mr. Smith’s eyes, made a vague gesture.  Yellow or not yellow, it was all one to him.

The mate murmured to himself.  “No.  He can’t know.  No!  No more than a baby.  It would take an older head.”

“I don’t even understand what you mean,” observed Mr. Powell coldly.

“And even the best head would be puzzled by such devil-work,” the mate continued, muttering.  “Well, I have heard tell of women doing for a man in one way or another when they got him fairly ashore.  But to bring their devilry to sea and fasten on such a man! . . . It’s something I can’t understand.  But I can watch.  Let them look out — I say!”

His short figure, unable to stoop, without flexibility, could not express dejection.  He was very tired suddenly; he dragged his feet going off the poop.  Before he left it with nearly an hour of his watch below sacrificed, he addressed himself once more to our young man who stood abreast of the mizzen rigging in an unreceptive mood expressed by silence and immobility.  He did not regret, he said, having spoken openly on this very serious matter.

“I don’t know about its seriousness, sir,” was Mr. Powell’s frank answer.  “But if you think you have been telling me something very new you are mistaken.  You can’t keep that matter out of your speeches.  It’s the sort of thing I’ve been hearing more or less ever since I came on board.”

Mr. Powell, speaking truthfully, did not mean to speak offensively.  He had instincts of wisdom; he felt that this was a serious affair, for it had nothing to do with reason.  He did not want to raise an enemy for himself in the mate.  And Mr. Franklin did not take offence.  To Mr. Powell’s truthful statement he answered with equal truth and simplicity that it was very likely, very likely.  With a thing like that (next door to witchcraft almost) weighing on his mind, the wonder was that he could think of anything else.  The poor man must have found in the restlessness of his thoughts the illusion of being engaged in an active contest with some power of evil; for his last words as he went lingeringly down the poop ladder expressed the quaint hope that he would get him, Powell, “on our side yet.”

Mr. Powell — just imagine a straightforward youngster assailed in this fashion on the high seas — answered merely by an embarrassed and uneasy laugh which reflected exactly the state of his innocent soul.  The apoplectic mate, already half-way down, went up again three steps of the poop ladder.  Why, yes.  A proper young fellow, the mate expected, wouldn’t stand by and see a man, a good sailor and his own skipper, in trouble without taking his part against a couple of shore people who — Mr. Powell interrupted him impatiently, asking what was the trouble?

“What is it you are hinting at?” he cried with an inexplicable irritation.

“I don’t like to think of him all alone down there with these two,” Franklin whispered impressively.  “Upon my word I don’t.  God only knows what may be going on there . . . Don’t laugh . . . It was bad enough last voyage when Mrs. Brown had a cabin aft; but now it’s worse.  It frightens me.  I can’t sleep sometimes for thinking of him all alone there, shut off from us all.”

Mrs. Brown was the steward’s wife.  You must understand that shortly after his visit to the Fyne cottage (with all its consequences), Anthony had got an offer to go to the Western Islands, and bring home the cargo of some ship which, damaged in a collision or a stranding, took refuge in St. Michael, and was condemned there.  Roderick Anthony had connections which would put such paying jobs in his way.  So Flora de Barral had but a five months’ voyage, a mere excursion, for her first trial of sea-life.  And Anthony, dearly trying to be most attentive, had induced this Mrs. Brown, the wife of his faithful steward, to come along as maid to his bride.  But for some reason or other this arrangement was not continued.  And the mate, tormented by indefinite alarms and forebodings, regretted it.  He regretted that Jane Brown was no longer on board — as a sort of representative of Captain Anthony’s faithful servants, to watch quietly what went on in that part of the ship this fatal marriage had closed to their vigilance.  That had been excellent.  For she was a dependable woman.

Powell did not detect any particular excellence in what seemed a spying employment.  But in his simplicity he said that he should have thought Mrs. Anthony would have been glad anyhow to have another woman on board.  He was thinking of the white-faced girlish personality which it seemed to him ought to have been cared for.  The innocent young man always looked upon the girl as immature; something of a child yet.

“She! glad!  Why it was she who had her fired out.  She didn’t want anybody around the cabin.  Mrs. Brown is certain of it.  She told her husband so.  You ask the steward and hear what he has to say about it.  That’s why I don’t like it.  A capable woman who knew her place.  But no.  Out she must go.  For no fault, mind you.  The captain was ashamed to send her away.  But that wife of his — aye the precious pair of them have got hold of him.  I can’t speak to him for a minute on the poop without that thimble-rigging coon coming gliding up.  I’ll tell you what.  I overheard once — God knows I didn’t try to — only he forgot I was on the other side of the skylight with my sextant — I overheard him — you know how he sits hanging over her chair and talking away without properly opening his mouth — yes I caught the word right enough.  He was alluding to the captain as “the jailer.”  The jail . . . !”

Franklin broke off with a profane execration.  A silence reigned for a long time and the slight, very gentle rolling of the ship slipping before the N.E. trade-wind seemed to be a soothing device for lulling to sleep the suspicions of men who trust themselves to the sea.

A deep sigh was heard followed by the mate’s voice asking dismally if that was the way one would speak of a man to whom one wished well?  No better proof of something wrong was needed.  Therefore he hoped, as he vanished at last, that Mr. Powell would be on their side.  And this time Mr. Powell did not answer this hope with an embarrassed laugh.

That young officer was more and more surprised at the nature of the incongruous revelations coming to him in the surroundings and in the atmosphere of the open sea.  It is difficult for us to understand the extent, the completeness, the comprehensiveness of his inexperience, for us who didn’t go to sea out of a small private school at the age of fourteen years and nine months.  Leaning on his elbow in the mizzen rigging and so still that the helmsman over there at the other end of the poop might have (and he probably did) suspect him of being criminally asleep on duty, he tried to “get hold of that thing” by some side which would fit in with his simple notions of psychology.  “What the deuce are they worrying about?” he asked himself in a dazed and contemptuous impatience.  But all the same “jailer” was a funny name to give a man; unkind, unfriendly, nasty.  He was sorry that Mr. Smith was guilty in that matter because, the truth must be told, he had been to a certain extent sensible of having been noticed in a quiet manner by the father of Mrs. Anthony.  Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer.  Mr. Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck.  His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical.

He was doubtless an eccentric old gent.  But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his back was a long step.

And Mr. Powell marvelled . . . “

“While he was telling me all this,” — Marlow changed his tone — ”I marvelled even more.  It was as if misfortune marked its victims on the forehead for the dislike of the crowd.  I am not thinking here of numbers.  Two men may behave like a crowd, three certainly will when their emotions are engaged.  It was as if the forehead of Flora de Barral were marked.  Was the girl born to be a victim; to be always disliked and crushed as if she were too fine for this world?  Or too luckless — since that also is often counted as sin.

Yes, I marvelled more since I knew more of the girl than Mr. Powell — if only her true name; and more of Captain Anthony — if only the fact that he was the son of a delicate erotic poet of a markedly refined and autocratic temperament.  Yes, I knew their joint stories which Mr. Powell did not know.  The chapter in it he was opening to me, the sea-chapter, with such new personages as the sentimental and apoplectic chief-mate and the morose steward, however astounding to him in its detached condition was much more so to me as a member of a series, following the chapter outside the Eastern Hotel in which I myself had played my part.  In view of her declarations and my sage remarks it was very unexpected.  She had meant well, and I had certainly meant well too.  Captain Anthony — as far as I could gather from little Fyne — had meant well.  As far as such lofty words may be applied to the obscure personages of this story we were all filled with the noblest sentiments and intentions.  The sea was there to give them the shelter of its solitude free from the earth’s petty suggestions.  I could well marvel in myself, as to what had happened.

I hope that if he saw it, Mr. Powell forgave me the smile of which I was guilty at that moment.  The light in the cabin of his little cutter was dim.  And the smile was dim too.  Dim and fleeting.  The girl’s life had presented itself to me as a tragi-comical adventure, the saddest thing on earth, slipping between frank laughter and unabashed tears.  Yes, the saddest facts and the most common, and, being common perhaps the most worthy of our unreserved pity.

The purely human reality is capable of lyrism but not of abstraction.  Nothing will serve for its understanding but the evidence of rational linking up of characters and facts.  And beginning with Flora de Barral, in the light of my memories I was certain that she at least must have been passive; for that is of necessity the part of women, this waiting on fate which some of them, and not the most intelligent, cover up by the vain appearances of agitation.  Flora de Barral was not exceptionally intelligent but she was thoroughly feminine.  She would be passive (and that does not mean inanimate) in the circumstances, where the mere fact of being a woman was enough to give her an occult and supreme significance.  And she would be enduring which is the essence of woman’s visible, tangible power.  Of that I was certain.  Had she not endured already?  Yet it is so true that the germ of destruction lies in wait for us mortals, even at the very source of our strength, that one may die of too much endurance as well as of too little of it.

Such was my train of thought.  And I was mindful also of my first view of her — toying or perhaps communing in earnest with the possibilities of a precipice.  But I did not ask Mr. Powell anxiously what had happened to Mrs. Anthony in the end.  I let him go on in his own way feeling that no matter what strange facts he would have to disclose, I was certain to know much more of them than he ever did know or could possibly guess . . . “

Marlow paused for quite a long time.  He seemed uncertain as though he had advanced something beyond my grasp.  Purposely I made no sign.  “You understand?” he asked.

“Perfectly,” I said.  “You are the expert in the psychological wilderness.  This is like one of those Red-skin stories where the noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinket dropped by the way.  I have always liked such stories.  Go on.”

Marlow smiled indulgently at my jesting.  “It is not exactly a story for boys,” he said.  “I go on then.  The sign, as you call it, was not very plentiful but very much to the purpose, and when Mr. Powell heard (at a certain moment I felt bound to tell him) when he heard that I had known Mrs. Anthony before her marriage, that, to a certain extent, I was her confidant . . . For you can’t deny that to a certain extent . . . Well let us say that I had a look in . . . A young girl, you know, is something like a temple.  You pass by and wonder what mysterious rites are going on in there, what prayers, what visions?  The privileged men, the lover, the husband, who are given the key of the sanctuary do not always know how to use it.  For myself, without claim, without merit, simply by chance I had been allowed to look through the half-opened door and I had seen the saddest possible desecration, the withered brightness of youth, a spirit neither made cringing nor yet dulled but as if bewildered in quivering hopelessness by gratuitous cruelty; self-confidence destroyed and, instead, a resigned recklessness, a mournful callousness (and all this simple, almost naïve) — before the material and moral difficulties of the situation.  The passive anguish of the luckless!