Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (779 page)

Then, at the end of the bulky, kindly-meant epistle, dealing with the island news of half a year at least, my friend wrote: “A couple of months ago old Nelson turned up here, arriving by the mail-boat from Java.  Came to see Mesman, it seems.  A rather mysterious visit, and extraordinarily short, after coming all that way.  He stayed just four days at the Orange House, with apparently nothing in particular to do, and then caught the south-going steamer for the Straits.  I remember people saying at one time that Allen was rather sweet on old Nelson’s daughter, the girl that was brought up by Mrs. Harley and then went to live with him at the Seven Isles group.  Surely you remember old Nelson — ”

Remember old Nelson!  Rather!

The letter went on to inform me further that old Nelson, at least, remembered me, since some time after his flying visit to Makassar he had written to the Mesmans asking for my address in London.

That old Nelson (or Nielsen), the note of whose personality was a profound, echoless irresponsiveness to everything around him, should wish to write, or find anything to write about to anybody, was in itself a cause for no small wonder.  And to me, of all people!  I waited with uneasy impatience for whatever disclosure could come from that naturally benighted intelligence, but my impatience had time to wear out before my eyes beheld old Nelson’s trembling, painfully-formed handwriting, senile and childish at the same time, on an envelope bearing a penny stamp and the postal mark of the Notting Hill office.  I delayed opening it in order to pay the tribute of astonishment due to the event by flinging my hands above my head.  So he had come home to England, to be definitely Nelson; or else was on his way home to Denmark, where he would revert for ever to his original Nielsen!  But old Nelson (or Nielsen) out of the tropics seemed unthinkable.  And yet he was there, asking me to call.

His address was at a boarding-house in one of those Bayswater squares, once of leisure, which nowadays are reduced to earning their living.  Somebody had recommended him there.  I started to call on him on one of those January days in London, one of those wintry days composed of the four devilish elements, cold, wet, mud, and grime, combined with a particular stickiness of atmosphere that clings like an unclean garment to one’s very soul.  Yet on approaching his abode I saw, like a flicker far behind the soiled veil of the four elements, the wearisome and splendid glitter of a blue sea with the Seven Islets like minute specks swimming in my eye, the high red roof of the bungalow crowning the very smallest of them all.  This visual reminiscence was profoundly disturbing.  I knocked at the door with a faltering hand.

Old Nelson (or Nielsen) got up from the table at which he was sitting with a shabby pocket-book full of papers before him.  He took off his spectacles before shaking hands.  For a moment neither of us said a word; then, noticing me looking round somewhat expectantly, he murmured some words, of which I caught only “daughter” and “Hong Kong,” cast his eyes down, and sighed.

His moustache, sticking all ways out, as of yore, was quite white now.  His old cheeks were softly rounded, with some colour in them; strangely enough, that something childlike always noticeable in the general contour of his physiognomy had become much more marked.  Like his handwriting, he looked childish and senile.  He showed his age most in his unintelligently furrowed, anxious forehead and in his round, innocent eyes, which appeared to me weak and blinking and watery; or was it that they were full of tears? . . .

To discover old Nelson fully informed upon any matter whatever was a new experience.  And after the first awkwardness had worn off he talked freely, with, now and then, a question to start him going whenever he lapsed into silence, which he would do suddenly, clasping his hands on his waistcoat in an attitude which would recall to me the east verandah, where he used to sit talking quietly and puffing out his cheeks in what seemed now old, very old days.  He talked in a reasonable somewhat anxious tone.

“No, no.  We did not know anything for weeks.  Out of the way like that, we couldn’t, of course.  No mail service to the Seven Isles.  But one day I ran over to Banka in my big sailing-boat to see whether there were any letters, and saw a Dutch paper.  But it looked only like a bit of marine news: English brig Bonito gone ashore outside Makassar roads.  That was all.  I took the paper home with me and showed it to her.  ‘I will never forgive him!’ she cries with her old spirit.  ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you are a sensible girl.  The best man may lose a ship.  But what about your health?’  I was beginning to be frightened at her looks.  She would not let me talk even of going to Singapore before.  But, really, such a sensible girl couldn’t keep on objecting for ever.  ‘Do what you like, papa,’ she says.  Rather a job, that.  Had to catch a steamer at sea, but I got her over all right.  There, doctors, of course.  Fever.  Anaemia.  Put her to bed.  Two or three women very kind to her.  Naturally in our papers the whole story came out before long.  She reads it to the end, lying on the couch; then hands the newspaper back to me, whispers ‘Heemskirk,’ and goes off into a faint.”

He blinked at me for quite a long time, his eyes running full of tears again.

“Next day,” he began, without any emotion in his voice, “she felt stronger, and we had a long talk.  She told me everything.”

Here old Nelson, with his eyes cast down, gave me the whole story of the Heemskirk episode in Freya’s words; then went on in his rather jerky utterance, and looking up innocently:

“‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you have behaved in the main like a sensible girl.’  ‘I have been horrid,’ she cries, ‘and he is breaking his heart over there.’  Well, she was too sensible not to see she wasn’t in a state to travel.  But I went.  She told me to go.  She was being looked after very well.  Anaemia.  Getting better, they said.”

He paused.

“You did see him?” I murmured.

“Oh, yes; I did see him,” he started again, talking in that reasonable voice as though he were arguing a point.  “I did see him.  I came upon him.  Eyes sunk an inch into his head; nothing but skin on the bones of his face, a skeleton in dirty white clothes.  That’s what he looked like.  How Freya . . . But she never did — not really.  He was sitting there, the only live thing for miles along that coast, on a drift-log washed up on the shore.  They had clipped his hair in the hospital, and it had not grown again.  He stared, holding his chin in his hand, and with nothing on the sea between him and the sky but that wreck.  When I came up to him he just moved his head a bit.  ‘Is that you, old man?’ says he — like that.

“If you had seen him you would have understood at once how impossible it was for Freya to have ever loved that man.  Well, well.  I don’t say.  She might have — something.  She was lonely, you know.  But really to go away with him!  Never!  Madness.  She was too sensible . . . I began to reproach him gently.  And by and by he turns on me.  ‘Write to you!  What about?  Come to her!  What with?  If I had been a man I would have carried her off, but she made a child, a happy child, of me.  Tell her that the day the only thing I had belonging to me in the world perished on this reef I discovered that I had no power over her. . . Has she come here with you?’ he shouts, blazing at me suddenly with his hollow eyes.  I shook my head.  Come with me, indeed!  Anaemia!  ‘Aha!  You see?  Go away, then, old man, and leave me alone here with that ghost,’ he says, jerking his head at the wreck of his brig.

“Mad!  It was getting dusk.  I did not care to stop any longer all by myself with that man in that lonely place.  I was not going to tell him of Freya’s illness.  Anaemia!  What was the good?  Mad!  And what sort of husband would he have made, anyhow, for a sensible girl like Freya?  Why, even my little property I could not have left them.  The Dutch authorities would never have allowed an Englishman to settle there.  It was not sold then.  My man Mahmat, you know, was looking after it for me.  Later on I let it go for a tenth of its value to a Dutch half-caste.  But never mind.  It was nothing to me then.  Yes; I went away from him.  I caught the return mail-boat.  I told everything to Freya.  ‘He’s mad,’ I said; ‘and, my dear, the only thing he loved was his brig.’

“‘Perhaps,’ she says to herself, looking straight away — her eyes were nearly as hollow as his — ’perhaps it is true.  Yes!  I would never allow him any power over me.’”

Old Nelson paused.  I sat fascinated, and feeling a little cold in that room with a blazing fire.

“So you see,” he continued, “she never really cared for him.  Much too sensible.  I took her away to Hong Kong.  Change of climate, they said.  Oh, these doctors!  My God!  Winter time!  There came ten days of cold mists and wind and rain.  Pneumonia.  But look here!  We talked a lot together.  Days and evenings.  Who else had she? . . . She talked a lot to me, my own girl.  Sometimes she would laugh a little.  Look at me and laugh a little — ”

I shuddered.  He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled moodiness.

“She would say: ‘I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to you, papa.’  And I would say: ‘Of course, my dear.  You could not have meant it.’  She would lie quiet and then say: ‘I wonder?’  And sometimes, ‘I’ve been really a coward,’ she would tell me.  You know, sick people they say things.  And so she would say too: ‘I’ve been conceited, headstrong, capricious.  I sought my own gratification.  I was selfish or afraid.’ . . . But sick people, you know, they say anything.  And once, after lying silent almost all day, she said: ‘Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would not have gone.  Perhaps!  I don’t know,’ she cried.  ‘Draw the curtain, papa.  Shut the sea out.  It reproaches me with my folly.’”  He gasped and paused.

“So you see,” he went on in a murmur.  “Very ill, very ill indeed.  Pneumonia.  Very sudden.”  He pointed his finger at the carpet, while the thought of the poor girl, vanquished in her struggle with three men’s absurdities, and coming at last to doubt her own self, held me in a very anguish of pity.

“You see yourself,” he began again in a downcast manner.  “She could not have really . . . She mentioned you several times.  Good friend.  Sensible man.  So I wanted to tell you myself — let you know the truth.  A fellow like that!  How could it be?  She was lonely.  And perhaps for a while . . . Mere nothing.  There could never have been a question of love for my Freya — such a sensible girl — ”

“Man!” I cried, rising upon him wrathfully, “don’t you see that she died of it?”

He got up too.  “No! no!” he stammered, as if angry.  “The doctors!  Pneumonia.  Low state.  The inflammation of the . . . They told me.  Pneu — ”

He did not finish the word.  It ended in a sob.  He flung his arms out in a gesture of despair, giving up his ghastly pretence with a low, heartrending cry:

“And I thought that she was so sensible!”

PRINCE ROMAN

“Events which happened seventy years ago are perhaps rather too far off to be dragged aptly into a mere conversation. Of course the year 1831 is for us an historical date, one of these fatal years when in the presence of the world’s passive indignation and eloquent sympathies we had once more to murmur ‘
Vo Victis
’ and count the cost in sorrow. Not that we were ever very good at calculating, either, in prosperity or in adversity. That’s a lesson we could never learn, to the great exasperation of our enemies who have bestowed upon us the epithet of Incorrigible....”

The speaker was of Polish nationality, that nationality not so much alive as surviving, which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking, hoping, and suffering in its grave, railed in by a million of bayonets and triple-sealed with the seals of three great empires.

The conversation was about aristocracy. How did this, nowadays discredited, subject come up? It is some years ago now and the precise recollection has faded. But I remember that it was not considered practically as an ingredient in the social mixture; and I verily believed that we arrived at that subject through some exchange of ideas about patriotism — a somewhat discredited sentiment, because the delicacy of our humanitarians regards it as a relic of barbarism. Yet neither the great Florentine painter who closed his eyes in death thinking of his city, nor St. Francis blessing with his last breath the town of Assisi, were barbarians. It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret patriotism worthily — or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and men.

The aristocracy we were talking about was the very highest, the great families of Europe, not impoverished, not converted, not liberalized, the most distinctive and specialized class of all classes, for which even ambition itself does not exist among the usual incentives to activity and regulators of conduct.

The undisputed right of leadership having passed away from them, we judged that their great fortunes, their cosmopolitanism brought about by wide alliances, their elevated station, in which there is so little to gain and so much to lose, must make their position difficult in times of political commotion or national upheaval. No longer born to command — which is the very essence of aristocracy — it becomes difficult for them to do aught else but hold aloof from the great movements of popular passion.