Sailors on the Inward Sea (19 page)

As you probably know, Ford, Conrad met George Antoine Klein, the company agent of the Societe Anonyme Belge who became Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness,
at Stanley Falls, the last stop on his ill-fated journey up the Congo. Sickness was rife among the white men, which explains why Conrad did not get to know the man well. As soon as they could leave, Klein and Conrad departed down the river whose “brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness leading us towards the sea.” Klein did not get that far, dying in Tchumbiri, where he was buried.

I was well acquainted with Klein, having run into him while I was engaged in a bit of gun-running for those who opposed the Belgians' looting. Yes, I got to know the man, Ford, becoming a kind of confessor willing to listen to all sorts of things. For reasons I'll never
fathom, he liked and trusted me even though I'd made clear at the outset of our relationship that I disapproved heartily of everything he and his kind were doing in the name of progress. I remember Klein quite vividly in a white pith helmet, white jacket, and knee-high boots sitting in a chair before a group of black men, each of whom was balancing a huge elephant tusk on the ground in front of him, an enormous weight, waiting for Klein to call to him so that he could lug the tusk forward and hear Klein's ridiculously low price. And I remember a dozen hippo heads stacked in a pyramid, hippos Klein himself shot and whose decapitation he supervised on the riverbank so he could sell them off to certain wealthy men with a taste for the bizarre. Klein enjoyed talking to me about ivory and hunting and ideas. I've known a number of great talkers in my time and he was among the most prodigious, quite happy to go on for hours without the aid of whisky about his plans. He had discovered that he had the power to do anything he liked and was drunk on it, Ford, drunk on George Antoine Klein, besotted with visions of his impending greatness.

Conrad had known the dying man. I knew the living one. It was no surprise that Conrad could not resist the temptation—the opportunity—to put them together. “Everything was bright and clear,” he said, as if illuminated by lightning. “I had tried out your voice in ‘Youth,' and it came back quite wonderfully in
Heart of Darkness,
Malone, like a voice out of thunder,” which made him feel more like an amanuensis than a novelist. He took it all down and finished during the first week of February 1899.

“By then I was caught in the net of your voice. A few days later I returned to
Jim
and everything came together. I felt like the opium eater who swears he won't go down the alley leading to a certain door and then does, as fast as his feet will carry him. Do I have to say it? You're my
Palestine.
The first sentence of ‘Youth' was my jump,
and the hole I landed in was every bit as deep as Jim's. I imagined faces in my study, people crowded round, ridiculing me. They ignored my explanation. Intention doesn't interest agents or publishers or reviewers or the public. Even if I went on to write a dozen books without a peep in any of them from you, people would always think of me as a sham, a thief of words, passing off what you had said and experienced as my own.

“I used you to tell the story of my mental life, Malone. You allowed me to say what I thought. For the first time I was able to hear myself, and learn my own truth. It's all there in
Lord Jim,
in the passage where Marlow summarizes Jim's dilemma:

“But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit—it is those who understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! Few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. I don't know how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such truth of some such illusion—I don't care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little. The thing is that by virtue of his feeling he mattered.”

His recitation moved me, Ford. I was touched that of all the passages from that magnificent novel he had chosen this one defining
Jim, showing why he mattered, to share with me as an example of what Marlow let him say. He was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again there was a profound candor in his words.

“My idea,” he said, “your voice, a kind of duet, if you will.”

“A duet,” I said. “I like that.”

“Someday a scholar with an interest in my work, a literary archaeologist, might dig into these stories. Imagine him removing the broken stones and potsherds and finally arriving at the area of the hearth. Nearby there will be a slight protuberance in the soil and there he will find us, Malone, side by side, laid out with whatever laurels the world conferred.”

That lovely if somewhat mysterious phrase marked the end of our conversation. He walked over to the fireplace and prodded the logs. Sparks flew up the chimney and some fell onto the hearth. Suddenly he appeared frail and I was so relieved when Jessie chose that moment to poke her head in the door and say she was off to bed that I could have kissed her.

“I think I'll turn in, Jack.”

“Fine,” I said. “I'm fagged too.”

When he started toward the door I went over and took him by the shoulders.

“They're your stories,” I said. “You wrote them, brought them to life. They were just things that happened to me.”

“Yes, of course. Sleep well. If you'd bank the fire before you go up . . .”

I heard him climbing the stairs, hesitating with each step, debating some point I could not even guess. I was sickened by what my blunder had cost him and felt guilty, the way you do in a dream when a sentence has been pronounced upon you. The only thing I could accuse myself of was curiosity. What was so bad telling him what I knew? And then an explanation for what he'd done came to me. It
was the equivalent of having me sit as a model, with the caveat that he hadn't bothered to ask my permission and had painted me on the sly, as it were. It was reasonable, essentially true. I got up, intending to follow him upstairs, when I heard the bedroom door close. It's all right, I thought. Tell him in the morning.

I made myself comfortable in front of the fire. The more I thought about the comparison, the more convincing it seemed. All great artists used models. The only difference between him and Titian or Raphael was the medium, and that was not even at issue. I remembered students in the Uffizi copying the masters. Conrad had worked from life, absorbed the raw materials of my adventures and transformed them into something uniquely his own.

With the logs settling and burning down, slowly turning gray and sending up small showers of sparks, my thoughts drifted back to the long halls of the museum, the rooms echoing faintly with footsteps that emphasized the profound quiet of the Uffizi. In the fall of light from a tall window I saw a young woman bent over her easel, studiously copying a painting, the scene superimposed on the ash that now covered the logs. And then I remembered a hall of statues and a marble face appeared in the ash outlined by the faint red lines of fire burning beneath it—a Roman warrior I had stopped to admire who had caught my attention because he wasn't one of those handsome youths indistinguishable from a god. This chap was old enough to have learned a thing or two. His grizzled beard and ringlets of hair falling in disarray from beneath his helmet framed deep-set eyes that stared straight ahead with a kind of defiance that suggested his will was adequate to whatever he had to do. With his left hand he held a round shield embossed with an elaborate design in front of his chest. His right arm, broken off at the elbow, extended from his shoulder in such a way that suggested it once grasped a sword or spear. There was no question that he was on the attack, and that was when the
Roman at the beginning of
Heart of Darkness,
the commander of a trireme who faced killing work upriver, materialized, his haggard face bearing the same determination as the warrior's. The conflation of those old legionnaires led me to the verge of a revelation, Ford. It seemed only a matter of translating their composite features into the idea that bound them when the logs settled and the ash that held the warrior's face slid away and I was there alone with a dim red glow.

I
N THE MORNING
I woke with a vague memory of those warriors cloaked with blowing ash. I was groggy from the wine and had a headache in my temples and the pain was sharpened by my recollection of Conrad's distress. I lay in bed listening to birds chattering in the tree outside the window, appalled by the direction things had taken and scarcely able to believe I could have misjudged his response so badly. It's embarrassing to admit it, Ford, but my immediate impulse was to blame his sensitivity, shoulder the cause for the blowup onto him, even though I knew damned well that the responsibility lay with me. I should have known what would happen. On some level I had known that anything I said was bound to lead to a blowup and had gone ahead anyway out of curiosity and probably irritation at not being told, which only made it worse. I needed to apologize. Conrad was an early riser and the house usually rang with his voice, sleeping visitors be damned, but there was only the birds and in a while the muted clatter of a pot. I decided to tell him about the models, an excellent idea that would surely put the question of me and Marlow in a broader perspective that he would appreciate. The legionnaires paid a perfunctory visit as I dressed, and then flitted away as I descended the stairs.

Jessie and Borys were alone in the kitchen.

“Joseph?” I asked.

“He's not well,” Borys said without looking up from a wooden train he was pushing back and forth on the table.

Jessie wiped her hands on her apron.

“You look a little rough around the edges.”

“The port,” I told her.

“Maybe he'll feel better if you take him some tea and toast.”

A few minutes later, holding the tray in one hand like a waiter, I knocked on the bedroom door. Silence. I knocked again. A muffled “What?” this time.

“Tea,” I said as I opened the door, “toast.”

I was surprised to find him dressed and standing beside the window, looking out. When I put the tray down on the table he ran a hand through his disheveled hair and regarded me balefully.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

I expected him to say something along the lines that I damned well should have. Instead, he shook his head and went over to the table, where he poured two cups of tea. He handed one to me and then stirred sugar into his.

“No. You had to, Jack. It's easier this way, for both of us. If you hadn't, every time we met you'd have thought about it. So would I, wondering if you knew. Imagine what that would have been like for both of us. I should have told you. I thought about doing so many times.”

I was reminded of Jim after he'd confessed to me and was casting his woeful eyes about my room, trying to find a way out. Conrad had clearly spent a restless night. Residue of our conversation showed like a stain on his face, the way high tide leaves flotsam halfway up a beach. He was considering something he wanted to say, a defense, an elaboration of what he'd brought up the previous night, perhaps even an announcement that he was severing our relationship. If I were in his shoes, feeling the way he did, I might have done just that, given old Jack the boot and slammed the door behind him.

“Have you spoken about this to anyone?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “You know me better than that.”

“What about this Jones chap?”

“I wasn't under the impression he'd shared it,” I told him. “Besides, I can't imagine anyone besides me who'd be interested.”

“I don't suppose you could ask him . . .”

“He's sailed but don't worry. Clive's not that sort.”

He didn't believe me. To be fair, there was no reason to. For all he knew, Clive had been blabbing since he made the discovery. Nothing could be done about him. I could tell the thing was getting out of control, becoming more unmanageable by the moment. I'd never seen Conrad in need of assurance but he was then, desperately, and my thoughts took me back to that distressing moment in
Heart of Darkness
when Kurtz's intended came forward to greet Marlow in that black dress, asking with her eyes for something only he could give her, the message she had to hear.

“It's between us,” I said. “I promise.”