Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (870 page)

To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others.  In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall.  In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood out small and very distinct.

There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for our ears.  Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the Florian Gate.  It was in the winter months of 1868.  At eight o’clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian Street.  But of that, my first school, I remember very little.  I believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of historical documents.  But I didn’t suffer much from the various imperfections of my first school.  I was rather indifferent to school troubles.  I had a private gnawing worm of my own.  This was the time of my father’s last illness.  Every evening at seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a good distance beyond the Great Square.  There, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done.  The table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear.  There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns.  Their voices were seldom heard.  For, indeed, what could they have had to say?  When they did speak to me it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral, clear whisper.  Our domestic matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the Cathedral, lent for the emergency.  She, too, spoke but seldom.  She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom.  And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note.  The air around me was all piety, resignation, and silence.

I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading boy.  My prep. finished I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through the closed door and coldly enfold my scared heart.  I suppose that in a futile childish way I would have gone crazy.  But I was a reading boy.  There were many books about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the floor, for we had not had time to settle down.  I read!  What did I not read!  Sometimes the elder nun, gliding up and casting a mistrustful look on the open pages, would lay her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful whisper, “Perhaps it is not very good for you to read these books.”  I would raise my eyes to her face mutely, and with a vague gesture of giving it up she would glide away.

Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tip-toe into the sick room to say good-night to the figure prone on the bed, which often could not acknowledge my presence but by a slow movement of the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the coverlet, and tip-toe out again.  Then I would go to bed, in a room at the end of the corridor, and often, not always, cry myself into a good sound sleep.

I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror.  I turned my eyes from it sometimes with success, and yet all the time I had an awful sensation of the inevitable.  I had also moments of revolt which stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the universe.  But when the inevitable entered the sick room and the white door was thrown wide open, I don’t think I found a single tear to shed.  I have a suspicion that the Canon’s housekeeper looked on me as the most callous little wretch on earth.

The day of the funeral came in due course and all the generous “Youth of the Schools,” the grave Senate of the University, the delegations of the Trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared)
de visu
evidence of the callousness of the little wretch.  There was nothing in my aching head but a few words, some such stupid sentences as, “It’s done,” or, “It’s accomplished” (in Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, repeating itself endlessly.  The long procession moved out of the narrow street, down a long street, past the Gothic front of St. Mary’s under its unequal towers, towards the Florian Gate.

In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memories, I could see again the small boy of that day following a hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the pavements with fixed, serious eyes.  Half the population had turned out on that fine May afternoon.  They had not come to honour a great achievement, or even some splendid failure.  The dead and they were victims alike of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit and glory.  They had come only to render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been a fearless confession in word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand.

It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had called up.  They were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent in their clinging air of the grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity of old hopes.

“Let’s go back to the hotel, my boy,” I said.  “It’s getting late.”

It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that night of a possible war.  For the next two days I went about amongst my fellow men, who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness, but unanimously derided my fears of a war.  They would not believe in it.  It was impossible.  On the evening of the second day I was in the hotel’s smoking room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few choice minds of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more hushed than any club reading-room I have ever been in.  Gathered into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued tones suitable to the genius of the place.

A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an impatient finger in my direction and apostrophised me.

“What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would come in.”

The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without faltering.

“Most assuredly.  I should think all Europe knows that by this time.”

He took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a slight jerk for greater emphasis, said forcibly:

“Then, if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can be no war.  Germany won’t be so mad as that.”

On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum.  The day after came the declaration of war, and the Austrian mobilisation order.  We were fairly caught.  All that remained for me to do was to get my party out of the way of eventual shells.  The best move which occurred to me was to snatch them up instantly into the mountains to a Polish health resort of great repute — which I did (at the rate of one hundred miles in eleven hours) by the last civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks.

And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland, not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain the permission to travel by train, or road.  It was a wonderful, a poignant two months.  This is not the time, and, perhaps, not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust anyone, to appeal to anyone, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope and even of its last illusions, and unable, in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences, to take refuge in stoical acceptance.  I have seen all this.  And I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: Ruin — and Extinction.

But enough of this.  For our little band there was the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West.  It is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there.  Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, France giving in under repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and England involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic!  Polish papers, of course, had no other but German sources of information.  Naturally, we did not believe all we read, but it was sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness.

We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up.  But it was a beastly time.  People used to come to me with very serious news and ask, “What do you think of it?”  And my invariable answer was: “Whatever has happened, or is going to happen, whoever wants to make peace, you may be certain that England will not make it, not for ten years, if necessary.”‘

But enough of this, too.  Through the unremitting efforts of Polish friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna.  Once there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads.  We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who, all along, interested himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf, his invaluable assistance and the real friendliness of his reception in Vienna.  Owing to Mr. Penfield’s action we obtained the permission to leave Austria.  And it was a near thing, for his Excellency has informed my American publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have us detained till the end of the war.  However, we effected our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of call.

On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality.  We saw the signs of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British submarines in the Channel.  Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two Naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland, piloted the ship through the Downs.

The Downs!  There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life.  But what were to me now the futilities of an individual past?  As our ship’s head swung into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear found its way straight into my heart.  Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my wife’s eyes.  She also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders — shaping the future.

FIRST NEWS — 1918

Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the town of Cracow, Austrian Poland, nobody would believe that the war was coming.  My apprehensions were met by the words: “We have had these scares before.”  This incredulity was so universal amongst people of intelligence and information, that even I, who had accustomed myself to look at the inevitable for years past, felt my conviction shaken.  At that time, it must be noted, the Austrian army was already partly mobilised, and as we came through Austrian Silesia we had noticed all the bridges being guarded by soldiers.

“Austria will back down,” was the opinion of all the well-informed men with whom I talked on the first of August.  The session of the University was ended and the students were either all gone or going home to different parts of Poland, but the professors had not all departed yet on their respective holidays, and amongst them the tone of scepticism prevailed generally.  Upon the whole there was very little inclination to talk about the possibility of a war.  Nationally, the Poles felt that from their point of view there was nothing to hope from it.  “Whatever happens,” said a very distinguished man to me, “we may be certain that it’s our skins which will pay for it as usual.”  A well-known literary critic and writer on economical subjects said to me: “War seems a material impossibility, precisely because it would mean the complete ruin of all material interests.”

He was wrong, as we know; but those who said that Austria as usual would back down were, as a matter of fact perfectly right.  Austria did back down.  What these men did not foresee was the interference of Germany.  And one cannot blame them very well; for who could guess that, when the balance stood even, the German sword would be thrown into the scale with nothing in the open political situation to justify that act, or rather that crime — if crime can ever be justified?  For, as the same intelligent man said to me: “As it is, those people” (meaning Germans) “have very nearly the whole world in their economic grip.  Their prestige is even greater than their actual strength.  It can get for them practically everything they want.  Then why risk it?”  And there was no apparent answer to the question put in that way.  I must also say that the Poles had no illusions about the strength of Russia.  Those illusions were the monopoly of the Western world.

Next day the librarian of the University invited me to come and have a look at the library which I had not seen since I was fourteen years old.  It was from him that I learned that the greater part of my father’s MSS. was preserved there.  He confessed that he had not looked them through thoroughly yet, but he told me that there was a lot of very important letters bearing on the epoch from ‘60 to ‘63, to and from many prominent Poles of that time: and he added: “There is a bundle of correspondence that will appeal to you personally.  Those are letters written by your father to an intimate friend in whose papers they were found.  They contain many references to yourself, though you couldn’t have been more than four years old at the time.  Your father seems to have been extremely interested in his son.”  That afternoon I went to the University, taking with me
my
eldest son.  The attention of that young Englishman was mainly attracted by some relics of Copernicus in a glass case.  I saw the bundle of letters and accepted the kind proposal of the librarian that he should have them copied for me during the holidays.  In the range of the deserted vaulted rooms lined with books, full of august memories, and in the passionless silence of all this enshrined wisdom, we walked here and there talking of the past, the great historical past in which lived the inextinguishable spark of national life; and all around us the centuries-old buildings lay still and empty, composing themselves to rest after a year of work on the minds of another generation.