Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (428 page)

“No!  No!  How can I?”  Mr. Smith got quite agitated, for him, which did not amount to much.  He was just asking for the sake of something to talk about.  No idea at all of going home.  One could not always do what one wanted and that’s why there were moments when one felt ashamed to live.  This did not mean that one did not want to live.  Oh no!

He spoke with careless slowness, pausing frequently and in such a low voice that Powell had to strain his hearing to catch the phrases dropped overboard as it were.  And indeed they seemed not worth the effort.  It was like the aimless talk of a man pursuing a secret train of thought far removed from the idle words we so often utter only to keep in touch with our fellow beings.  An hour passed.  It seemed as though Mr. Smith could not make up his mind to go below.  He repeated himself.  Again he spoke of lives which one was ashamed of.  It was necessary to put up with such lives as long as there was no way out, no possible issue.  He even alluded once more to mail-boat services on the East coast of Africa and young Powell had to tell him once more that he knew nothing about them.

“Every fortnight, I thought you said,” insisted Mr. Smith.  He stirred, seemed to detach himself from the rail with difficulty.  His long, slender figure straightened into stiffness, as if hostile to the enveloping soft peace of air and sea and sky, emitted into the night a weak murmur which Mr. Powell fancied was the word, “Abominable” repeated three times, but which passed into the faintly louder declaration: “The moment has come — to go to bed,” followed by a just audible sigh.

“I sleep very well,” added Mr. Smith in his restrained tone.  “But it is the moment one opens one’s eyes that is horrible at sea.  These days!  Oh, these days!  I wonder how anybody can . . . “

“I like the life,” observed Mr. Powell.

“Oh, you.  You have only yourself to think of.  You have made your bed.  Well, it’s very pleasant to feel that you are friendly to us.  My daughter has taken quite a liking to you, Mr. Powell.”

He murmured, “Good-night” and glided away rigidly.  Young Powell asked himself with some distaste what was the meaning of these utterances.  His mind had been worried at last into that questioning attitude by no other person than the grotesque Franklin.  Suspicion was not natural to him.  And he took good care to carefully separate in his thoughts Mrs. Anthony from this man of enigmatic words — her father.  Presently he observed that the sheen of the two deck dead-lights of Mr. Smith’s room had gone out.  The old gentleman had been surprisingly quick in getting into bed.  Shortly afterwards the lamp in the foremost skylight of the saloon was turned out; and this was the sign that the steward had taken in the tray and had retired for the night.

Young Powell had settled down to the regular officer-of-the-watch tramp in the dense shadow of the world decorated with stars high above his head, and on earth only a few gleams of light about the ship.  The lamp in the after skylight was kept burning through the night.  There were also the dead-lights of the stern-cabins glimmering dully in the deck far aft, catching his eye when he turned to walk that way.  The brasses of the wheel glittered too, with the dimly lit figure of the man detached, as if phosphorescent, against the black and spangled background of the horizon.

Young Powell, in the silence of the ship, reinforced by the great silent stillness of the world, said to himself that there was something mysterious in such beings as the absurd Franklin, and even in such beings as himself.  It was a strange and almost improper thought to occur to the officer of the watch of a ship on the high seas on no matter how quiet a night.  Why on earth was he bothering his head?  Why couldn’t he dismiss all these people from his mind?  It was as if the mate had infected him with his own diseased devotion.  He would not have believed it possible that he should be so foolish.  But he was — clearly.  He was foolish in a way totally unforeseen by himself.  Pushing this self-analysis further, he reflected that the springs of his conduct were just as obscure.

“I may be catching myself any time doing things of which I have no conception,” he thought.  And as he was passing near the mizzen-mast he perceived a coil of rope left lying on the deck by the oversight of the sweepers.  By an impulse which had nothing mysterious in it, he stooped as he went by with the intention of picking it up and hanging it up on its proper pin.  This movement brought his head down to the level of the glazed end of the after skylight — the lighted skylight of the most private part of the saloon, consecrated to the exclusiveness of Captain Anthony’s married life; the part, let me remind you, cut off from the rest of that forbidden space by a pair of heavy curtains.  I mention these curtains because at this point Mr. Powell himself recalled the existence of that unusual arrangement to my mind.

He recalled them with simple-minded compunction at that distance of time.  He said: “You understand that directly I stooped to pick up that coil of running gear — the spanker foot-outhaul, it was — I perceived that I could see right into that part of the saloon the curtains were meant to make particularly private.  Do you understand me?” he insisted.

I told him that I understood; and he proceeded to call my attention to the wonderful linking up of small facts, with something of awe left yet, after all these years, at the precise workmanship of chance, fate, providence, call it what you will!  “For, observe, Marlow,” he said, making at me very round eyes which contrasted funnily with the austere touch of grey on his temples, “observe, my dear fellow, that everything depended on the men who cleared up the poop in the evening leaving that coil of rope on the deck, and on the topsail-tie carrying away in a most incomprehensible and surprising manner earlier in the day, and the end of the chain whipping round the coaming and shivering to bits the coloured glass-pane at the end of the skylight.  It had the arms of the city of Liverpool on it; I don’t know why unless because the Ferndale was registered in Liverpool.  It was very thick plate glass.  Anyhow, the upper part got smashed, and directly we had attended to things aloft Mr. Franklin had set the carpenter to patch up the damage with some pieces of plain glass.  I don’t know where they got them; I think the people who fitted up new bookcases in the captain’s room had left some spare panes.  Chips was there the whole afternoon on his knees, messing with putty and red-lead.  It wasn’t a neat job when it was done, not by any means, but it would serve to keep the weather out and let the light in.  Clear glass.  And of course I was not thinking of it.  I just stooped to pick up that rope and found my head within three inches of that clear glass, and — dash it all!  I found myself out.  Not half an hour before I was saying to myself that it was impossible to tell what was in people’s heads or at the back of their talk, or what they were likely to be up to.  And here I found myself up to as low a trick as you can well think of.  For, after I had stooped, there I remained prying, spying, anyway looking, where I had no business to look.  Not consciously at first, may be.  He who has eyes, you know, nothing can stop him from seeing things as long as there are things to see in front of him.  What I saw at first was the end of the table and the tray clamped on to it, a patent tray for sea use, fitted with holders for a couple of decanters, water-jug and glasses.  The glitter of these things caught my eye first; but what I saw next was the captain down there, alone as far as I could see; and I could see pretty well the whole of that part up to the cottage piano, dark against the satin-wood panelling of the bulkhead.  And I remained looking.  I did.  And I don’t know that I was ashamed of myself either, then.  It was the fault of that Franklin, always talking of the man, making free with him to that extent that really he seemed to have become our property, his and mine, in a way.  It’s funny, but one had that feeling about Captain Anthony.  To watch him was not so much worse than listening to Franklin talking him over.  Well, it’s no use making excuses for what’s inexcusable.  I watched; but I dare say you know that there could have been nothing inimical in this low behaviour of mine.  On the contrary.  I’ll tell you now what he was doing.  He was helping himself out of a decanter.  I saw every movement, and I said to myself mockingly as though jeering at Franklin in my thoughts, ‘Hallo!  Here’s the captain taking to drink at last.’  He poured a little brandy or whatever it was into a long glass, filled it with water, drank about a fourth of it and stood the glass back into the holder.  Every sign of a bad drinking bout, I was saying to myself, feeling quite amused at the notions of that Franklin.  He seemed to me an enormous ass, with his jealousy and his fears.  At that rate a month would not have been enough for anybody to get drunk.  The captain sat down in one of the swivel arm-chairs fixed around the table; I had him right under me and as he turned the chair slightly, I was looking, I may say, down his back.  He took another little sip and then reached for a book which was lying on the table.  I had not noticed it before.  Altogether the proceedings of a desperate drunkard — weren’t they?  He opened the book and held it before his face.  If this was the way he took to drink, then I needn’t worry.  He was in no danger from that, and as to any other, I assure you no human being could have looked safer than he did down there.  I felt the greatest contempt for Franklin just then, while I looked at Captain Anthony sitting there with a glass of weak brandy-and-water at his elbow and reading in the cabin of his ship, on a quiet night — the quietest, perhaps the finest, of a prosperous passage.  And if you wonder why I didn’t leave off my ugly spying I will tell you how it was.  Captain Anthony was a great reader just about that time; and I, too, I have a great liking for books.  To this day I can’t come near a book but I must know what it is about.  It was a thickish volume he had there, small close print, double columns — I can see it now.  What I wanted to make out was the title at the top of the page.  I have very good eyes but he wasn’t holding it conveniently — I mean for me up there.  Well, it was a history of some kind, that much I read and then suddenly he bangs the book face down on the table, jumps up as if something had bitten him and walks away aft.

“Funny thing shame is.  I had been behaving badly and aware of it in a way, but I didn’t feel really ashamed till the fright of being found out in my honourable occupation drove me from it.  I slunk away to the forward end of the poop and lounged about there, my face and ears burning and glad it was a dark night, expecting every moment to hear the captain’s footsteps behind me.  For I made sure he was coming on deck.  Presently I thought I had rather meet him face to face and I walked slowly aft prepared to see him emerge from the companion before I got that far.  I even thought of his having detected me by some means.  But it was impossible, unless he had eyes in the top of his head.  I had never had a view of his face down there.  It was impossible; I was safe; and I felt very mean, yet, explain it as you may, I seemed not to care.  And the captain not appearing on deck, I had the impulse to go on being mean.  I wanted another peep.  I really don’t know what was the beastly influence except that Mr. Franklin’s talk was enough to demoralize any man by raising a sort of unhealthy curiosity which did away in my case with all the restraints of common decency.

“I did not mean to run the risk of being caught squatting in a suspicious attitude by the captain.  There was also the helmsman to consider.  So what I did — I am surprised at my low cunning — was to sit down naturally on the skylight-seat and then by bending forward I found that, as I expected, I could look down through the upper part of the end-pane.  The worst that could happen to me then, if I remained too long in that position, was to be suspected by the seaman aft at the wheel of having gone to sleep there.  For the rest my ears would give me sufficient warning of any movements in the companion.

“But in that way my angle of view was changed.  The field too was smaller.  The end of the table, the tray and the swivel-chair I had right under my eyes.  The captain had not come back yet.  The piano I could not see now; but on the other hand I had a very oblique downward view of the curtains drawn across the cabin and cutting off the forward part of it just about the level of the skylight-end and only an inch or so from the end of the table.  They were heavy stuff, travelling on a thick brass rod with some contrivance to keep the rings from sliding to and fro when the ship rolled.  But just then the ship was as still almost as a model shut up in a glass case while the curtains, joined closely, and, perhaps on purpose, made a little too long moved no more than a solid wall.”

* * * * *

Marlow got up to get another cigar.  The night was getting on to what I may call its deepest hour, the hour most favourable to evil purposes of men’s hate, despair or greed — to whatever can whisper into their ears the unlawful counsels of protest against things that are; the hour of ill-omened silence and chill and stagnation, the hour when the criminal plies his trade and the victim of sleeplessness reaches the lowest depth of dreadful discouragement; the hour before the first sight of dawn.  I know it, because while Marlow was crossing the room I looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.  He however never looked that way though it is possible that he, too, was aware of the passage of time.  He sat down heavily.

“Our friend Powell,” he began again, “was very anxious that I should understand the topography of that cabin.  I was interested more by its moral atmosphere, that tension of falsehood, of desperate acting, which tainted the pure sea-atmosphere into which the magnanimous Anthony had carried off his conquest and — well — his self-conquest too, trying to act at the same time like a beast of prey, a pure spirit and the “most generous of men.”  Too big an order clearly because he was nothing of a monster but just a common mortal, a little more self-willed and self-confident than most, may be, both in his roughness and in his delicacy.

As to the delicacy of Mr. Powell’s proceedings I’ll say nothing.  He found a sort of depraved excitement in watching an unconscious man — and such an attractive and mysterious man as Captain Anthony at that.  He wanted another peep at him.  He surmised that the captain must come back soon because of the glass two-thirds full and also of the book put down so brusquely.  God knows what sudden pang had made Anthony jump up so.  I am convinced he used reading as an opiate against the pain of his magnanimity which like all abnormal growths was gnawing at his healthy substance with cruel persistence.  Perhaps he had rushed into his cabin simply to groan freely in absolute and delicate secrecy.  At any rate he tarried there.  And young Powell would have grown weary and compunctious at last if it had not become manifest to him that he had not been alone in the highly incorrect occupation of watching the movements of Captain Anthony.