Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (797 page)

“Any squirming skunk can talk like that.  He was so busy with the drawers that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens.  He looks up and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in the lock) and Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce in the light of the burning papers.  His eyes were starting out of his head.  Thieving, he thunders at him.  A sailor!  An officer!  No!  A wretch like you deserves no better than to be left here to drown.

“This Stafford — on his death-bed — told the parson that when he heard these words he went crazy again.  He snatched his hand with the revolver in it out of the drawer, and fired without aiming.  Captain Harry fell right in with a crash like a stone on top of the burning papers, putting the blaze out.  All dark.  Not a sound.  He listened for a bit then dropped the revolver and scrambled out on deck like mad.”

The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.

“What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people the captain committed suicide.  Pah!  Captain Harry was a man that could face his Maker any time up there, and here below, too.  He wasn’t the sort to slink out of life.  Not he!  He was a good man down to the ground.  He gave me my first job as stevedore only three days after I got married.”

As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide seemed to be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively for his material.  And then it was not worth many thanks in any case.

For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo.  This story to be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South Seas.  But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the consumption of magazine readers.  So here it is raw, so to speak — just as it was told to me — but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port of London.

THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES

A FIND

This tale, episode, experience — call it how you will — was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time.  Sixty is not a bad age — unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings.  It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be.  I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves.  Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency.  And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but — so to speak — naked, stripped for a run.  The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.

I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder of his posterity.  It could not have been for his glory, because the experience was simply that of an abominable fright — terror he calls it.  You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines was in writing.

This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title.  The title itself is my own contrivance, (can’t call it invention), and has the merit of veracity.  We will be concerned with an inn here.  As to the witches that’s merely a conventional expression, and we must take our man’s word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last stage of decay.  As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I disbursed.  It might have been some premonition of that fact which made me say: “But I must have the box too.”  The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but faintly.  The close, neat, regular handwriting was not attractive at first sight.  But in one place the statement that in a.d. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye.  Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being weak and the power of imagination strong.

In another place the phrase: “At night we stood in again,” arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase.  “Let’s see what it is all about,” I thought, without excitement.

Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other line in their close-set and regular order.  It was like the drone of a monotonous voice.  A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance.  “In a.d. 1813, I was twenty-two years old,” he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry.  Don’t imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find.  Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art.  Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies.  Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

If this isn’t progress! . . . Why immense!  We have moved on, and so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance and simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch.  And of course no motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere, now.  This one, the one of the title, was situated in Spain.  That much I discovered only from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that relation were missing — perhaps not a great misfortune after all.  The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that coast — presumably the north coast of Spain.  His experience has nothing to do with the sea, though.  As far as I can make it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war.  There’s nothing strange in that.  At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of our men-of-war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of Spain — as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to perform.  A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be expected from our man, only, as I’ve said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity.  But it is to be seen clearly that communication with the shore and even the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of the province.  Something of the sort.  All this can be only inferred from the preserved scraps of his conscientious writing.

Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a member of the ship’s company, having the rating of the captain’s coxswain.  He was known on board as Cuba Tom; not because he was Cuban however; he was indeed the best type of a genuine British tar of that time, and a man-of-war’s man for years.  He came by the name on account of some wonderful adventures he had in that island in his young days, adventures which were the favourite subject of the yarns he was in the habit of spinning to his shipmates of an evening on the forecastle head.  He was intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage.  Incidentally we are told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length of any man in the Navy.  This appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy of some.

Our young officer dwells on the manly qualities of Cuba Tom with something like affection.  This sort of relation between officer and man was not then very rare.  A youngster on joining the service was put under the charge of a trustworthy seaman, who slung his first hammock for him and often later on became a sort of humble friend to the junior officer.  The narrator on joining the sloop had found this man on board after some years of separation.  There is something touching in the warm pleasure he remembers and records at this meeting with the professional mentor of his boyhood.

We discover then that, no Spaniard being forthcoming for the service, this worthy seaman with the unique pigtail and a very high character for courage and steadiness had been selected as messenger for one of these missions inland which have been mentioned.  His preparations were not elaborate.  One gloomy autumn morning the sloop ran close to a shallow cove where a landing could be made on that iron-bound shore.  A boat was lowered, and pulled in with Tom Corbin (Cuba Tom) perched in the bow, and our young man (Mr. Edgar Byrne was his name on this earth which knows him no more) sitting in the stern sheets.

A few inhabitants of a hamlet, whose grey stone houses could be seen a hundred yards or so up a deep ravine, had come down to the shore and watched the approach of the boat.  The two Englishmen leaped ashore.  Either from dullness or astonishment the peasants gave no greeting, and only fell back in silence.

Mr. Byrne had made up his mind to see Tom Corbin started fairly on his way.  He looked round at the heavy surprised faces.

“There isn’t much to get out of them,” he said.  “Let us walk up to the village.  There will be a wine shop for sure where we may find somebody more promising to talk to and get some information from.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom falling into step behind his officer.  “A bit of palaver as to courses and distances can do no harm; I crossed the broadest part of Cuba by the help of my tongue tho’ knowing far less Spanish than I do now.  As they say themselves it was ‘four words and no more’ with me, that time when I got left behind on shore by the Blanche, frigate.”

He made light of what was before him, which was but a day’s journey into the mountains.  It is true that there was a full day’s journey before striking the mountain path, but that was nothing for a man who had crossed the island of Cuba on his two legs, and with no more than four words of the language to begin with.

The officer and the man were walking now on a thick sodden bed of dead leaves, which the peasants thereabouts accumulate in the streets of their villages to rot during the winter for field manure.  Turning his head Mr. Byrne perceived that the whole male population of the hamlet was following them on the noiseless springy carpet.  Women stared from the doors of the houses and the children had apparently gone into hiding.  The village knew the ship by sight, afar off, but no stranger had landed on that spot perhaps for a hundred years or more.  The cocked hat of Mr. Byrne, the bushy whiskers and the enormous pigtail of the sailor, filled them with mute wonder.  They pressed behind the two Englishmen staring like those islanders discovered by Captain Cook in the South Seas.

It was then that Byrne had his first glimpse of the little cloaked man in a yellow hat.  Faded and dingy as it was, this covering for his head made him noticeable.

The entrance to the wine shop was like a rough hole in a wall of flints.  The owner was the only person who was not in the street, for he came out from the darkness at the back where the inflated forms of wine skins hung on nails could be vaguely distinguished.  He was a tall, one-eyed Asturian with scrubby, hollow cheeks; a grave expression of countenance contrasted enigmatically with the roaming restlessness of his solitary eye.  On learning that the matter in hand was the sending on his way of that English mariner toward a certain Gonzales in the mountains, he closed his good eye for a moment as if in meditation.  Then opened it, very lively again.

“Possibly, possibly.  It could be done.”

A friendly murmur arose in the group in the doorway at the name of Gonzales, the local leader against the French.  Inquiring as to the safety of the road Byrne was glad to learn that no troops of that nation had been seen in the neighbourhood for months.  Not the smallest little detachment of these impious polizones.  While giving these answers the owner of the wine-shop busied himself in drawing into an earthenware jug some wine which he set before the heretic English, pocketing with grave abstraction the small piece of money the officer threw upon the table in recognition of the unwritten law that none may enter a wine-shop without buying drink.  His eye was in constant motion as if it were trying to do the work of the two; but when Byrne made inquiries as to the possibility of hiring a mule, it became immovably fixed in the direction of the door which was closely besieged by the curious.  In front of them, just within the threshold, the little man in the large cloak and yellow hat had taken his stand.  He was a diminutive person, a mere homunculus, Byrne describes him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet assertive attitude, a corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over his left shoulder, muffling his chin and mouth; while the broad-brimmed yellow hat hung on a corner of his square little head.  He stood there taking snuff, repeatedly.