Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (385 page)

“What’s the matter?” I asked rather roughly, not relishing to be admonished by this forlorn broken-down ghost.

“Nothing!  Nothing, sir,” he protested so hastily that he lost his poor breath again and I felt sorry for him.  “Only the captain and his missus are sleeping on board.  She’s a lady that mustn’t be disturbed.  They came about half-past eight, and we had a permit to have lights in the cabin till ten to-night.”

“This struck me as a considerable piece of news.  I had never been in a ship where the captain had his wife with him.  I’d heard fellows say that captains’ wives could work a lot of mischief on board ship if they happened to take a dislike to anyone; especially the new wives if young and pretty.  The old and experienced wives on the other hand fancied they knew more about the ship than the skipper himself and had an eye like a hawk’s for what went on.  They were like an extra chief mate of a particularly sharp and unfeeling sort who made his report in the evening.  The best of them were a nuisance.  In the general opinion a skipper with his wife on board was more difficult to please; but whether to show off his authority before an admiring female or from loving anxiety for her safety or simply from irritation at her presence — nobody I ever heard on the subject could tell for certain.

“After I had bundled in my things somehow I struck a match and had a dazzling glimpse of my berth; then I pitched the roll of my bedding into the bunk but took no trouble to spread it out.  I wasn’t sleepy now, neither was I tired.  And the thought that I was done with the earth for many many months to come made me feel very quiet and self-contained as it were.  Sailors will understand what I mean.”

Marlow nodded.  “It is a strictly professional feeling,” he commented.  “But other professions or trades know nothing of it.  It is only this calling whose primary appeal lies in the suggestion of restless adventure which holds out that deep sensation to those who embrace it.  It is difficult to define, I admit.”

“I should call it the peace of the sea,” said Mr. Charles Powell in an earnest tone but looking at us as though he expected to be met by a laugh of derision and were half prepared to salve his reputation for common sense by joining in it.  But neither of us laughed at Mr. Charles Powell in whose start in life we had been called to take a part.  He was lucky in his audience.

“A very good name,” said Marlow looking at him approvingly.  “A sailor finds a deep feeling of security in the exercise of his calling.  The exacting life of the sea has this advantage over the life of the earth that its claims are simple and cannot be evaded.”

“Gospel truth,” assented Mr. Powell.  “No! they cannot be evaded.”

That an excellent understanding should have established itself between my old friend and our new acquaintance was remarkable enough.  For they were exactly dissimilar — one individuality projecting itself in length and the other in breadth, which is already a sufficient ground for irreconcilable difference.  Marlow who was lanky, loose, quietly composed in varied shades of brown robbed of every vestige of gloss, had a narrow, veiled glance, the neutral bearing and the secret irritability which go together with a predisposition to congestion of the liver.  The other, compact, broad and sturdy of limb, seemed extremely full of sound organs functioning vigorously all the time in order to keep up the brilliance of his colouring, the light curl of his coal-black hair and the lustre of his eyes, which asserted themselves roundly in an open, manly face.  Between two such organisms one would not have expected to find the slightest temperamental accord.  But I have observed that profane men living in ships like the holy men gathered together in monasteries develop traits of profound resemblance.  This must be because the service of the sea and the service of a temple are both detached from the vanities and errors of a world which follows no severe rule.  The men of the sea understand each other very well in their view of earthly things, for simplicity is a good counsellor and isolation not a bad educator.  A turn of mind composed of innocence and scepticism is common to them all, with the addition of an unexpected insight into motives, as of disinterested lookers-on at a game.  Mr. Powell took me aside to say,

“I like the things he says.”

“You understand each other pretty well,” I observed.

“I know his sort,” said Powell, going to the window to look at his cutter still riding to the flood.  “He’s the sort that’s always chasing some notion or other round and round his head just for the fun of the thing.”

“Keeps them in good condition,” I said.

“Lively enough I dare say,” he admitted.

“Would you like better a man who let his notions lie curled up?”

“That I wouldn’t,” answered our new acquaintance.  Clearly he was not difficult to get on with.  “I like him, very well,” he continued, “though it isn’t easy to make him out.  He seems to be up to a thing or two.  What’s he doing?”

I informed him that our friend Marlow had retired from the sea in a sort of half-hearted fashion some years ago.

Mr. Powell’s comment was: “Fancied had enough of it?”

“Fancied’s the very word to use in this connection,” I observed, remembering the subtly provisional character of Marlow’s long sojourn amongst us.  From year to year he dwelt on land as a bird rests on the branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after minute.  The sea is the sailor’s true element, and Marlow, lingering on shore, was to me an object of incredulous commiseration like a bird, which, secretly, should have lost its faith in the high virtue of flying.

CHAPTER TWO — THE FYNES AND THE GIRL-FRIEND

We were on our feet in the room by then, and Marlow, brown and deliberate, approached the window where Mr. Powell and I had retired.  “What was the name of your chance again?” he asked.  Mr. Powell stared for a moment.

“Oh!  The Ferndale.  A Liverpool ship.  Composite built.”

“Ferndale,” repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  “Ferndale.”

“Know her?”

“Our friend,” I said, “knows something of every ship.  He seems to have gone about the seas prying into things considerably.”

Marlow smiled.

“I’ve seen her, at least once.”

“The finest sea-boat ever launched,” declared Mr. Powell sturdily.  “Without exception.”

“She looked a stout, comfortable ship,” assented Marlow.  “Uncommonly comfortable.  Not very fast tho’.”

“She was fast enough for any reasonable man — when I was in her,” growled Mr. Powell with his back to us.

“Any ship is that — for a reasonable man,” generalized Marlow in a conciliatory tone.  “A sailor isn’t a globe-trotter.”

“No,” muttered Mr. Powell.

“Time’s nothing to him,” advanced Marlow.

“I don’t suppose it’s much,” said Mr. Powell.  “All the same a quick passage is a feather in a man’s cap.”

“True.  But that ornament is for the use of the master only.  And by the by what was his name?”

“The master of the Ferndale?  Anthony.  Captain Anthony.”

“Just so.  Quite right,” approved Marlow thoughtfully.  Our new acquaintance looked over his shoulder.

“What do you mean?  Why is it more right than if it had been Brown?”

“He has known him probably,” I explained.  “Marlow here appears to know something of every soul that ever went afloat in a sailor’s body.”

Mr. Powell seemed wonderfully amenable to verbal suggestions for looking again out of the window, he muttered:

“He was a good soul.”

This clearly referred to Captain Anthony of the Ferndale.  Marlow addressed his protest to me.

“I did not know him.  I really didn’t.  He was a good soul.  That’s nothing very much out of the way — is it?  And I didn’t even know that much of him.  All I knew of him was an accident called Fyne.

At this Mr. Powell who evidently could be rebellious too turned his back squarely on the window.

“What on earth do you mean?” he asked.  “An — accident — called Fyne,” he repeated separating the words with emphasis.

Marlow was not disconcerted.

“I don’t mean accident in the sense of a mishap.  Not in the least.  Fyne was a good little man in the Civil Service.  By accident I mean that which happens blindly and without intelligent design.  That’s generally the way a brother-in-law happens into a man’s life.”

Marlow’s tone being apologetic and our new acquaintance having again turned to the window I took it upon myself to say:

“You are justified.  There is very little intelligent design in the majority of marriages; but they are none the worse for that.  Intelligence leads people astray as far as passion sometimes.  I know you are not a cynic.”

Marlow smiled his retrospective smile which was kind as though he bore no grudge against people he used to know.

“Little Fyne’s marriage was quite successful.  There was no design at all in it.  Fyne, you must know, was an enthusiastic pedestrian.  He spent his holidays tramping all over our native land.  His tastes were simple.  He put infinite conviction and perseverance into his holidays.  At the proper season you would meet in the fields, Fyne, a serious-faced, broad-chested, little man, with a shabby knap-sack on his back, making for some church steeple.  He had a horror of roads.  He wrote once a little book called the ‘Tramp’s Itinerary,’ and was recognised as an authority on the footpaths of England.  So one year, in his favourite over-the-fields, back-way fashion he entered a pretty Surrey village where he met Miss Anthony.  Pure accident, you see.  They came to an understanding, across some stile, most likely.  Little Fyne held very solemn views as to the destiny of women on this earth, the nature of our sublunary love, the obligations of this transient life and so on.  He probably disclosed them to his future wife.  Miss Anthony’s views of life were very decided too but in a different way.  I don’t know the story of their wooing.  I imagine it was carried on clandestinely and, I am certain, with portentous gravity, at the back of copses, behind hedges . . .

“Why was it carried on clandestinely?” I inquired.

“Because of the lady’s father.  He was a savage sentimentalist who had his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives.  He was a terror; but the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in his wife’s parentage.  It stimulated his ingenuity too.  Difficult — is it not? — to introduce one’s wife’s maiden name into general conversation.  But my simple Fyne made use of Captain Anthony for that purpose, or else I would never even have heard of the man.  “My wife’s sailor-brother” was the phrase.  He trotted out the sailor-brother in a pretty wide range of subjects: Indian and colonial affairs, matters of trade, talk of travels, of seaside holidays and so on.  Once I remember “My wife’s sailor-brother Captain Anthony” being produced in connection with nothing less recondite than a sunset.  And little Fyne never failed to add “The son of Carleon Anthony, the poet — you know.”  He used to lower his voice for that statement, and people were impressed or pretended to be.”

The late Carleon Anthony, the poet, sang in his time of the domestic and social amenities of our age with a most felicitous versification, his object being, in his own words, “to glorify the result of six thousand years’ evolution towards the refinement of thought, manners and feelings.”  Why he fixed the term at six thousand years I don’t know.  His poems read like sentimental novels told in verse of a really superior quality.  You felt as if you were being taken out for a delightful country drive by a charming lady in a pony carriage.  But in his domestic life that same Carleon Anthony showed traces of the primitive cave-dweller’s temperament.  He was a massive, implacable man with a handsome face, arbitrary and exacting with his dependants, but marvellously suave in his manner to admiring strangers.  These contrasted displays must have been particularly exasperating to his long-suffering family.  After his second wife’s death his boy, whom he persisted by a mere whim in educating at home, ran away in conventional style and, as if disgusted with the amenities of civilization, threw himself, figuratively speaking, into the sea.  The daughter (the elder of the two children) either from compassion or because women are naturally more enduring, remained in bondage to the poet for several years, till she too seized a chance of escape by throwing herself into the arms, the muscular arms, of the pedestrian Fyne.  This was either great luck or great sagacity.  A civil servant is, I should imagine, the last human being in the world to preserve those traits of the cave-dweller from which she was fleeing.  Her father would never consent to see her after the marriage.  Such unforgiving selfishness is difficult to understand unless as a perverse sort of refinement.  There were also doubts as to Carleon Anthony’s complete sanity for some considerable time before he died.

Most of the above I elicited from Marlow, for all I knew of Carleon Anthony was his unexciting but fascinating verse.  Marlow assured me that the Fyne marriage was perfectly successful and even happy, in an earnest, unplayful fashion, being blessed besides by three healthy, active, self-reliant children, all girls.  They were all pedestrians too.  Even the youngest would wander away for miles if not restrained.  Mrs. Fyne had a ruddy out-of-doors complexion and wore blouses with a starched front like a man’s shirt, a stand-up collar and a long necktie.  Marlow had made their acquaintance one summer in the country, where they were accustomed to take a cottage for the holidays . . .

At this point we were interrupted by Mr. Powell who declared that he must leave us.  The tide was on the turn, he announced coming away from the window abruptly.  He wanted to be on board his cutter before she swung and of course he would sleep on board.  Never slept away from the cutter while on a cruise.  He was gone in a moment, unceremoniously, but giving us no offence and leaving behind an impression as though we had known him for a long time.  The ingenuous way he had told us of his start in life had something to do with putting him on that footing with us.  I gave no thought to seeing him again.

Marlow expressed a confident hope of coming across him before long.