Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (809 page)

“Another long pause ensued before, with a great effort, he whispered hoarsely: ‘Isn’t this enough to move a heart of stone? Am I to go on my knees to you?’

“Again a deep silence fell upon the three of us. Then the French officer flung his last word of anger at Tomassov.

“‘Milksop!’

“Not a feature of the poor fellow moved. I made up my mind to go and fetch a couple of our troopers to lead that miserable prisoner away to the village. There was nothing else for it. I had not moved six paces towards the group of horses and orderlies in front of our squadron when... but you have guessed it. Of course. And I, too, I guessed it, for I give you my word that the report of Tomassov’s pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable. The snow certainly does absorb sound. It was a mere feeble pop. Of the orderlies holding our horses I don’t think one turned his head round.

“Yes. Tomassov had done it. Destiny had led that De Castel to the man who could understand him perfectly. But it was poor Tomassov’s lot to be the predestined victim. You know what the world’s justice and mankind’s judgment are like. They fell heavily on him with a sort of inverted hypocrisy. Why! That brute of an adjutant, himself, was the first to set going horrified allusions to the shooting of a prisoner in cold blood! Tomassov was not dismissed from the service of course. But after the siege of Dantzig he asked for permission to resign from the army, and went away to bury himself in the depths of his province, where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.

“Yes. He had done it. And what was it? One warrior’s soul paying its debt a hundredfold to another warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death — the loss of all faith and courage. You may look on it in that way. I don’t know. And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know himself. But I was the first to approach that appalling dark group on the snow: the Frenchman extended rigidly on his back, Tomassov kneeling on one knee rather nearer to the feet than to the Frenchman’s head. He had taken his cap off and his hair shone like gold in the light drift of flakes that had begun to fall. He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly contemplative attitude. And his young, ingenuous face, with lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror — but was set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent, meditation.”

THE TALE

Outside the large single window the crepuscular light was dying out slowly in a great square gleam without colour, framed rigidly in the gathering shades of the room.

It was a long room. The irresistible tide of the night ran into the most distant part of it, where the whispering of a man’s voice, passionately interrupted and passionately renewed, seemed to plead against the answering murmurs of infinite sadness.

At last no answering murmur came. His movement when he rose slowly from his knees by the side of the deep, shadowy couch holding the shadowy suggestion of a reclining woman revealed him tall under the low ceiling, and sombre all over except for the crude discord of the white collar under the shape of his head and the faint, minute spark of a brass button here and there on his uniform.

He stood over her a moment, masculine and mysterious in his immobility, before he sat down on a chair near by. He could see only the faint oval of her upturned face and, extended on her black dress, her pale hands, a moment before abandoned to his kisses and now as if too weary to move.

He dared not make a sound, shrinking as a man would do from the prosaic necessities of existence. As usual, it was the woman who had the courage. Her voice was heard first — almost conventional while her being vibrated yet with conflicting emotions.

“Tell me something,” she said.

The darkness hid his surprise and then his smile. Had he not just said to her everything worth saying in the world — and that not for the first time!

“What am I to tell you?” he asked, in a voice creditably steady. He was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone which had eased the strain.

“Why not tell me a tale?”

“A tale!” He was really amazed.

“Yes. Why not?”

These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved woman’s capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels itself to to be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to elude.

“Why not?” he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he had been asked to give her the moon. But now he was feeling a little angry with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion as easily as out of a splendid gown.

He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly’s flight:

“You used to tell — your — your simple and — and professional — tales very well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a — a sort of art — in the days — the days before the war.”

“Really?” he said, with involuntary gloom. “But now, you see, the war is going on,” he continued in such a dead, equable tone that she felt a slight chill fall over her shoulders. And yet she persisted. For there’s nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman’s caprice.

“It could be a tale not of this world,” she explained.

“You want a tale of the other, the better world?” he asked, with a matter-of-fact surprise. “You must evoke for that task those who have already gone there.”

“No. I don’t mean that. I mean another — some other — world. In the universe — not in heaven.”

“I am relieved. But you forget that I have only five days’ leave.”

“Yes. And I’ve also taken a five days’ leave from — from my duties.”

“I like that word.”

“What word?”

“Duty.”

“It is horrible — sometimes.”

“Oh, that’s because you think it’s narrow. But it isn’t. It contains infinities, and — and so —  —  — ”

“What is this jargon?”

He disregarded the interjected scorn. “An infinity of absolution, for instance,” he continued. “But as to this another world’ — who’s going to look for it and for the tale that is in it?”

“You,” she said, with a strange, almost rough, sweetness of assertion.

He made a shadowy movement of assent in his chair, the irony of which not even the gathered darkness could render mysterious.

“As you will. In that world, then, there was once upon a time a Commanding Officer and a Northman. Put in the capitals, please, because they had no other names. It was a world of seas and continents and islands —  —  — ”

“Like the earth,” she murmured, bitterly.

“Yes. What else could you expect from sending a man made of our common, tormented clay on a voyage of discovery? What else could he find? What else could you understand or care for, or feel the existence of even? There was comedy in it, and slaughter.”

“Always like the earth,” she murmured. “Always. And since I could find in the universe only what was deeply rooted in the fibres of my being there was love in it, too. But we won’t talk of that.”

“No. We won’t,” she said, in a neutral tone which concealed perfectly her relief — or her disappointment. Then after a pause she added: “It’s going to be a comic story.”

“Well —  —  — ” he paused, too. “Yes. In a way. In a very grim way. It will be human, and, as you know, comedy is but a matter of the visual angle. And it won’t be a noisy story. All the long guns in it will be dumb — as dumb as so many telescopes.”

“Ah, there are guns in it, then! And may I ask — where?”

“Afloat. You remember that the world of which we speak had its seas. A war was going on in it. It was a funny work! and terribly in earnest. Its war was being carried on over the land, over the water, under the water, up in the air, and even under the ground. And many young men in it, mostly in wardrooms and mess-rooms, used to say to each other — pardon the unparliamentary word — they used to say, ‘It’s a damned bad war, but it’s better than no war at all.’ Sounds flippant, doesn’t it.”

He heard a nervous, impatient sigh in the depths of the couch while he went on without a pause.

“And yet there is more in it than meets the eye. I mean more wisdom. Flippancy, like comedy, is but a matter of visual first impression. That world was not very wise. But there was in it a certain amount of common working sagacity. That, however, was mostly worked by the neutrals in diverse ways, public and private, which had to be watched; watched by acute minds and also by actual sharp eyes. They had to be very sharp indeed, too, I assure you.”

“I can imagine,” she murmured, appreciatively.

“What is there that you can’t imagine?” he pronounced, soberly. “You have the world in you. But let us go back to our commanding officer, who, of course, commanded a ship of a sort. My tales if often professional (as you remarked just now) have never been technical. So I’ll just tell you that the ship was of a very ornamental sort once, with lots of grace and elegance and luxury about her. Yes, once! She was like a pretty woman who had suddenly put on a suit of sackcloth and stuck revolvers in her belt. But she floated lightly, she moved nimbly, she was quite good enough.”

“That was the opinion of the commanding officer?” said the voice from the couch.

“It was. He used to be sent out with her along certain coasts to see — what he could see. Just that. And sometimes he had some preliminary information to help him, and sometimes he had not. And it was all one, really. It was about as useful as information trying to convey the locality and intentions of a cloud, of a phantom taking shape here and there and impossible to seize, would have been.

“It was in the early days of the war. What at first used to amaze the commanding officer was the unchanged face of the waters, with its familiar expression, neither more friendly nor more hostile. On fine days the sun strikes sparks upon the blue; here and there a peaceful smudge of smoke hangs in the distance, and it is impossible to believe that the familiar clear horizon traces the limit of one great circular ambush.

“Yes, it is impossible to believe, till some day you see a ship not your own ship (that isn’t so impressive), but some ship in company, blow up all of a sudden and plop under almost before you know what has happened to her. Then you begin to believe. Henceforth you go out for the work to see — what you can see, and you keep on at it with the conviction that some day you will die from something you have not seen. One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands, looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it — the taste of primitive passion — the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one’s hand — the direct call and the straight response. Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matter with the world.”

She interrupted, stirring a little.

“Oh, yes. Sincerity — frankness — passion — three words of your gospel. Don’t I know them!”

“Think! Isn’t it ours — believed in common?” he asked, anxiously, yet without expecting an answer, and went on at once: “Such were the feelings of the commanding officer. When the night came trailing over the sea, hiding what looked like the hypocrisy of an old friend, it was a relief. The night blinds you frankly — and there are circumstances when the sunlight may grow as odious to one as falsehood itself. Night is all right.

“At night the commanding officer could let his thoughts get away — I won’t tell you where. Somewhere where there was no choice but between truth and death. But thick weather, though it blinded one, brought no such relief. Mist is deceitful, the dead luminosity of the fog is irritating. It seems that you ought to see.

“One gloomy, nasty day the ship was steaming along her beat in sight of a rocky, dangerous coast that stood out intensely black like an India-ink drawing on gray paper. Presently the second in command spoke to his chief. He thought he saw something on the water, to seaward. Small wreckage, perhaps.

“‘But there shouldn’t be any wreckage here, sir,’ he remarked.

“‘No,’ said the commanding officer. ‘The last reported submarined ships were sunk a long way to the westward. But one never knows. There may have been others since then not reported nor seen. Gone with all hands.’

“That was how it began. The ship’s course was altered to pass the object close; for it was necessary to have a good look at what one could see. Close, but without touching; for it was not advisable to come in contact with objects of any form whatever floating casually about. Close, but without stopping or even diminishing speed; for in those times it was not prudent to linger on any particular spot, even for a moment. I may tell you at once that the object was not dangerous in itself. No use in describing it. It may have been nothing more remarkable than, say, a barrel of a certain shape and colour. But it was significant.

“The smooth bow-wave hove it up as if for a closer inspection, and then the ship, brought again to her course, turned her back on it with indifference, while twenty pairs of eyes on her deck stared in all directions trying to see — what they could see.