Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (868 page)

London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky — with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion House went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace.  It was the hour of the boat-trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places.  The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces.  There was nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of my existence.  For this was the station at which, thirty-seven years before, I arrived on my first visit to London.  Not the same building, but the same spot.  At nineteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft — my first long railway journey in England — to “sign on” for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship.  Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness.  No explorer could have been more lonely.  I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets.  I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one’s feelings are simple.  I was elated.  I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge.  Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort.  How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first time.

From that point of view — Youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct — it was certainly a year of grace.  All the help I had to get in touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than the palm of my hand — in which I held it — torn out of a larger plan of London for the greater facility of reference.  It had been the object of careful study for some days past.  The fact that I could take a conveyance at the station never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street, and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand hansoms.  A strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one’s life by means of a hired carriage?  Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding.  And indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.

Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of an obscure shipping agent, was in my pocket.  And I needed not to take it out.  That address was as if graven deep in my brain.  I muttered its words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from anyone.  Youth is the time of rash pledges.  Had I taken a wrong turning I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel district, as it had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush.  But I walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, some of that faculty to absorb and make my own the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground.  The place I was bound to was not easy to find.  It was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost among the thick growth of houses like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the magic of his understanding love.  And the office I entered was Dickensian too.  The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy.  By the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth.  He had a grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders.  His curly white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the
barocco
style of Italian art.  Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.

Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid,
barocco
apostle’s face with an expression of inquiry.

I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech, for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once. — ”Oh, it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”

I had written to him from Lowestoft.  I can’t remember a single word of that letter now.  It was my very first composition in the English language.  And he had understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers.  But he gathered that this was not my object.  I did not desire to be apprenticed.  Was that the case?

It was.  He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a gentleman.  But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible.  Is that it?”

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this.  There was an Act of Parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors.  “An Act-of-Parliament.  A law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament!  What a hopeless adventure!  However, the
barocco
apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit.  Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen; and in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine.  For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me.  For many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling.  It isn’t such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament.  And I am glad to say that its seventies have never been applied to me.

In the year 1878, the year of “Peace with Honour,” I had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care.  And now, in the year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendships secured.  It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle.

All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.

I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound to take me away from daily life’s actualities at every step.  I felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship’s passengers.  That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name.  It had been for some time the schoolroom of my trade.  On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English.  A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow-water academy of seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide oceans.  My teachers had been the sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning.  Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all, as far as I can remember.

That is what years ago the North Sea I could hear growling in the dark all round the ship had been for me.  And I fancied that I must have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition.

I could not guess that before many days my old schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under its waters.  Perhaps while I am writing these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in trawlers, under the Naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.

III.

I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship before I launched myself on the wider oceans.  Confined as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know it in all its parts.  My class-room was the region of the English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its maritime history.  It was a peaceful coast, agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen.  At night the lights of its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the land.  On many a night I have hauled at the braces under the shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people on shore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound of the sea.  I imagine that not one head on those envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to bring so close to their homes.

Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings.  It was a cloudy, nasty day: and the aspects of Nature don’t change, unless in the course of thousands of years — or, perhaps, centuries.  The Phoenicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even on a July afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean.  For myself, a very late comer into that sea, and its former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days of training.  The same old thing.  A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting-paper.  From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.

Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood.  It might have been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were on this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen.  Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea I could have given myself up to the illusion of a revised past, had it not been for the periodical transit across my gaze of a German passenger.  He was marching round and round the boat deck with characteristic determination.  Two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet.  He was bringing them home, from their school in England, for their holiday.  What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and criminal country I cannot imagine.  It could hardly have been from motives of economy.  I did not speak to him.  He trod the deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny.  Later I could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the
Landwehr
corps, that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian army in Eastern Galicia.  Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an officer of the
Landwehr
; and perhaps those two fine active boys are orphans by now.  Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of time.  A citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of six million fighting particles, an unconsidered trifle for the jaws of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at the time.  Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea.  He was but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the West, in the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in the winter of ‘81, not of war, truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements which were very angry indeed.