Sailors on the Inward Sea (20 page)

“I made a fool of myself last night,” he said. “I regret insulting you, Jack. It was churlish.”

“Listen,” I told him, “I understand how you feel, not the depths of it but enough. After you went to bed I thought of something. What happened is no different from what artists have done for hundreds of years. You used me as a model. What's the difference between the words in your books and what a painter does in his studio with someone posed in front of his easel? Nothing, not a damned thing. It just would have been easier all round if you'd told me what you had in mind.”

I was afraid he would dismiss what I said—I'd seen him do exactly that before when he was upset—but I could tell that the idea comforted him a little. He even managed a grin.

“So you see me as Rembrandt?”

“Any of them.”

“I understand the comparison,” he said, “but it's not that simple.”

“It is,” I said, irritated, “if you'd let it be.”

“To you. What I see is not innocent, not at all. This modeling is pervasive. I relied on you.”

“There's as much of you in Marlow as there is of me.”

“My part in his character is not as interesting as yours, not as important, either. Forgive me for saying this, Jack, but your idea is superficial. Models come and go. They sit and are paid and depart, maybe to another atelier. As I told you last night, you have never left.”

I did not know that I would see some of those sentiments return many years later in the form of an author's note he would write to introduce a collection of his stories. Perhaps you remember it, Ford, the piece that begins with him pointing out that “Youth” marked “the first appearance in the world of the man Marlow, with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years.” At the time, of course, I was simply moved by that image of us and not a little flattered that I had played such a significant role in his work.

The model, my simple idea of a model, lay in a heap on the floor like a child's broken doll. I hadn't been wrong, only shortsighted, unable to see what I was really like to Conrad, how I hung on in his mind, set up housekeeping in his study. A man like Conrad, possessed of a silver tongue, can consume all the air in a room and that was how it felt even though the windows were open. Our possibilities for the weekend were exhausted. So were we. We had fallen into a silence and it was clear that he preferred to stay in it. He needed time to reflect and so did I.

I said, “I think I should catch the afternoon train.”

He gave me a pained look.

“Yes,” he said, “that's probably best.”

“I shouldn't have said anything. It was stupid.”

“You had to.”

“It wouldn't have been so bad.”

“You say that now.”

“I mean it.”

“That's how it seems today. Tomorrow, next month, over the years. Think about it. It would always be there and you'd resent me, yes, without a doubt. For me this is better, painful but better. It clears the air.”

Maybe he believed what he said, but it struck me that he was offering the idea for my benefit, to make me feel better. It was just like him.

“Well,” I said, “don't worry. I won't say a word.”

He nodded.

“I'll drive you to the station.”

“I can walk. It's only three miles.”

“I wouldn't think of it.” He grinned and added, “I'll go slowly.”

After I packed I went downstairs with him and told Jessie I couldn't see my way to staying with Conrad under the weather. She started to protest but let it go. A glance at the two of us told her something had gone wrong. She insisted that I stay for breakfast and I couldn't resist.

We were silent on the drive into Stanford. When the station came into view, I remembered Tewksbury and gave Conrad some money for him if he showed up.

“Did he say he would?”

“He grunted and nodded. I think he was agreeing.”

Conrad laughed and said, “Nobody understands a word he says. Got kicked in the head by a horse when he was just a boy. He's quite aware of what goes on around him but the words just don't come out right.”

I got my bag out of the backseat and looked at him.

“Would you like me to wait with you?” he added.

“There's no need.”

We shook hands through the window, an awkward thing to do but appropriate in view of the rest of the morning.

“It was good seeing you,” I said, “despite everything. And don't worry.”

He released my hand, saying, “I've always admired your discretion.”

“Well, then,” I said, and shouldered my bag.

I watched him drive off, picking up speed once he reached the main road, roaring down it so fast the dust rose up behind the car and curled like waves over the fields. The platform faced a weed-covered embankment that obscured my view of the countryside. With the exception of an old woman sitting at the far end I was alone. She was eating a sandwich and as soon as she finished and scattered crumbs on the concrete in front of the bench, birds descended from the rafters, a dozen or two that hopped about, pecking while she watched with her hands folded in her lap, smiling, totally absorbed. Out of the quiet I heard the train coming and a minute or two later it chugged into the station belching steam and the birds flew away in a cone-shaped formation above the tracks, veered, scattered. As I picked up my bag and went over the edge of the platform, the old woman carefully folded the paper that had held her food and put it in her purse. Instead of joining me she went on to the stairs. She probably came to the station often for lunch and to feed the birds, a way to spend an hour of an uneventful day.

No sooner did I board and find an empty compartment than the word
discretion
began rolling about in my head like a ball bearing in a steel drum, striking one end and sliding through its echo on its way to striking the other, rolling back, the three syllables sounding more ironic with each repetition. Conrad's heart, which was expansive and generous in so many ways, and had always made him worry about
things other men would laugh away, now compelled him to feel the pulse of my loyalty with the care a physician brings to a patient's wrist. I knew that my stay at the Pent was the beginning of a long uneasiness, Ford, though of, course, I had no idea at the time that it would follow me across seas and continents.

THE TRAIN WAS
a local and stopped at every station. Being in no hurry to return to London, I was content to watch the fields flowing by and listen to the clatter of the wheels. The conductor came up the aisle to punch my ticket, gruff as that breed usually is. Minutes later we were shunted onto a side track, where we remained for upward of an hour. I was watching some men harvesting grain, bundling sheaves in an effortless rhythm that came from long practice, when the drum suddenly tilted and the word rolled noisily again. Something was at work in my mind, some half-perceived notion was trying to climb up to the surface of consciousness. What was it? I remembered Conrad looking at me through the car's open window, saying he had always admired my discretion. And then I remembered again the scene he had invented for Marlow in
Heart of Darkness
where he interviews Kurtz's fiancée, remembered the emotions that had filled Marlow's heart when he entered the street in Brussels where the woman lived, the houses looming tall and solemn as fate, though the street itself was lost in shadows. The great mahogany door was opened by a tiny maid who led him into the drawing room and left him waiting for the woman to appear. I remembered the dread that accompanied her footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs, the sound oddly in concert with the pale light falling on a grand piano Kurtz might have played, his ghostly sonata giving the moment a nightmarish quality as the intended, dressed in black, entered, her voice filling the room with sad gratitude. Her hands
were icy when she reached out and took his. Whatever consolation Kurtz's letters might offer were nothing compared with the story she wanted from him. She spoke about Kurtz in an impassioned voice filled with the kinds of things that live in the hearts of devoted women, none of which bore the faintest semblance to the man she asserted Marlow had known. When he said, “I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another,” above and behind her the three tall windows scintillating in the light seemed to reflect Kurtz's multiple spirits—the man she loyally remembered, the man who had pronounced such a terrible judgment on his own soul, the man her simple decency forced Marlow to invent on the spot. Accepting her creation, Marlow gave her the letters and the room seemed to grow darker. But she wanted more, not less than Kurtz's last words “to live with.” And Marlow told her that the last word Kurtz pronounced was her name.

At that moment, the train jerked forward. Why, I wondered, did Conrad conclude with a lie that flashed like wildfire across the whole story and created so much doubt? To show Marlow's human side, I told myself, and because the truth “would have been too dark—” as Conrad wrote, “too dark altogether. . . .”

And then a chill rippled across my chest, Ford. Now I knew what had gone wrong the previous night with the example of the painter's model. I should have been paying attention to the artist. Conrad had imitated those old painters who put a tiny portrait of themselves in a group of bystanders, or looking in at the scene through a window or reflected in a mirror. But those self-portraits are visual jokes between painter and viewer. This was serious. Marlow's lie constituted Conrad's self-portrait, his way of telling the reader that he had borrowed the story!

The train had picked up speed, stations and farmhouses and villages flashed by and were gone. What remained was Conrad's face,
solemn and intent, peering out of the pages of
Heart of Darkness
and
Lord Jim.
The latter novel turned neither on his romantic soul or the terrible accident of the
Patna.
It turned on the fact that Jim had lived a lie as Lord of Patusan, a lie that came tumbling down about his ears the moment that Jackson—Gentleman Brown—confronted him across that muddy stream. I remembered the great, wrenching coughs that had torn at the old pirate's lungs as he told me his story on his deathbed and how I despised him for betraying Jim. I had unwittingly played Brown to Conrad's Jim back at the Pent. I had completely missed what he had done in the books and the meaning of what he had said that morning. I thought of the agony those novels must have cost him, what he must have felt leaving clues to his borrowings and I felt sick, not the sickness of the body but of conscience, which is the worst kind of illness. The window of my compartment became a screen onto which my mind projected images of Jackson/Brown lying on his pallet, speaking as rapidly as he could in an effort to get it all out before he was swallowed by hellfire. I saw Conrad's version of the scene in his novel, which he had raised to a level of intensity that far exceeded the real thing. I saw Conrad in his own house, rendering judgment on himself.

London was rising out of the plain. I did not want to be approaching the city, Ford. I wanted to step out at a station, change trains, return to Stanford, catch a ride with Tewksbury to the Pent. I wanted to rush upstairs and ask Conrad to forgive me, tell him I understood what he had done. Well, I did not get off. I sat there on the worn red plush seat regreting my shortsightedness, thinking of how Conrad and I were bound by a friendship based on a common love of the sea, a remarkable similarity of views, interested in each other enough to have overcome the considerable difficulties entailed in staying in touch over vast distances punctuated by long periods of time when we did not see each other. Despite all that I had misread his heart.

The train was crawling toward the station when another passed going in the opposite direction. I saw the passengers settled down for their journey, the conductor walking down the corridor with a nickel-plated punch in his hand, and then the other train was gone and I could see the grimy stone-and-concrete embankment across rows of tracks, smoke-stained buildings rising up, and then the sky disappeared as we went under the vaulted roof. I stepped onto the platform and let myself be borne along by the crowd, still thinking about my failure. For some reason I was more aware than I usually was in depots and terminals of the way most people seemed to be sleepwalking, staring straight ahead, so indifferent to those around them that they might as well have been alone. Not exactly a stunning observation, I know, but I saw myself in them, saw how I had passed by Conrad without any sense of his interior struggle, the range and subtlety of his demons. I was near the entrance, when over the clatter, footsteps, voices, the hiss of steam escaping from engines, echoes of these and other sounds, I heard scraps of music. As I walked on, the fragmented bars came together into an old hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” that seemed to mock my blindness and that of my fellow travelers. Outside I saw a Salvation Army band, six black-clad men standing in a semicircle around a conductor, their trumpets and saxophones gleaming in the sun.

At a cab station I gave a driver my address on Charlwood Street and when we turned onto it a short time later I felt immensely comforted by the familiar parallel lines of iron fences that ran on uninterrupted for blocks, hemming in the modest buildings that were scarcely distinguishable one from the other, producing a sense of order. I was glad to be home. Though I had been away only one night, it seemed much longer. I let myself into the flat and was greeted by the sight of Conrad's books piled on the table next to the chair, their titles and his name running together in a continuum of
letters. After putting my bag down on the sofa, I poured some whisky from the bottle I kept on the sideboard, remembering Clive and the bookseller and Conrad's face drained of color when I told him that I had read his work, the sequence seeming to go back a long way, much farther than it actually did. I drank the whisky, refilled my glass, and went over to the chair, picking up
Lord Jim
as I sat down, deeply curious about how the story would strike me now. I was far more aware than I had been on the first reading of the similarities between Marlow's voice and mine, especially in certain habitual phrasings that Conrad had imitated so perfectly I could actually hear myself saying them. And yet many of the ideas he allowed me to explore were his and would have been foreign to me in actual life. As I reread the first chapter it was very clear to me that not only did our words—his and mine and Marlow's—mesh into a single voice, but also that our temperaments were mysteriously elided, the work of writing having erased all substantial differences. Yes, I know Marlow was a creature of paper and ink, but damn it, Ford, he felt alive to me, was alive through me and Conrad.