Sailors on the Inward Sea (5 page)

His aunt had been alone since his uncle Charles had died some years back and was delighted with the company, making a fuss over the three of them as if they were all children. The villa seemed like a safe haven, immune from the dangers he had worried over all the way from Cracow. Of course, it was an illusion. The war was expanding alarmingly fast, according to reports on the radio they listened to in the living room filled with dark old furniture. He felt himself slipping into depression fueled by anger over what was happening to Poland and his inability to do anything about it.

For relief, he took long walks soon after he awoke. The exercise was salutary, but what brought him the greatest solace was the familiar view of houses scattered among stands of alders, deep green pastures above the treeline dotted with grazing sheep, a view that swept aside the uncertainty of the present and returned him to the happier days of childhood. The magic of images, he told me, was never more powerful than those seen in the fresh cold air of morning, the equal of Proust's madeleine or Balzac's fermenting apples. The view was a transforming lens, a time machine that revealed a world steeped in tradition, impervious to change, the world children know.

As he was resting on a rock one morning, gazing down into the valley where farmers were working in the fields, a scene that put him in mind of Millet's “Gleaners,” ageless people working ageless land, flesh and earth hardly distinguishable one from the other, he saw a line of lorries on the road that ran through the valley, saw them stop, saw soldiers get out and go into the fields and wrest horses from the farmers' plows, tying each animal to a towline and leading them into the next field. It was like watching paralysis set in. The valley had been full of movement, alive. With each theft it was losing its vitality. The abandoned plows leaning forward on their traces looked like the bleached skulls found in deserts. That was how
the war started for him, with the pillaging of the sacrosanct fields of his youth, the destruction of memory.

They stayed on in the villa for several days, unsure what to do until a friend of his aunt's with ties to the government called to warn her that British subjects were in danger. At midnight they left in an open carriage with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, driving thirty miles in a snowstorm to a railway station where he was able to buy tickets to Cracow. It took eighteen hours to cover the fifty miles back to the city in the train, which reeked of disinfectants and threatened to roll off the tracks at every turn. Once there, they spent a long time in the station restaurant, waiting for room on a train bound for Vienna, which they reached the next day. Conrad's gout was so bad that he had to stay in bed for five days before they continued on to Genoa and booked passage on a Dutch mail boat that took them to England, where he was forced to stay in bed most of a fortnight. Yet the pain in his leg was less agonizing than what he felt in his heart, for he could not forget the humiliation of being run off in the middle of the night, forced to travel in freezing weather, wondering on the train if soldiers were going to stomp into the car at the next station, demand their papers, throw them into jail.

Returning with his tail between his legs was bad enough, and it was made worse by the
son et lumiére
of patriotic outrage, headlines blaring the latest news, the country poised for invasion. Daily reports of Armageddon across the Channel sent his emotions spinning in half a dozen directions. Against Jessie's protests he volunteered, reasoning that a man with knowledge of the sea could be useful in any number of ways, but he was informed by the services that he was too old. You can imagine how well that sat with him, especially when his friends—including you—turned up in uniform to say good-bye. It made no difference that your jackets bulged with ample middle-aged waistlines, or that many of you had no useful
military experience; in his eyes you were all resplendent good soldiers off to do your duty until the last parade while the war passed him by like a diabolical cabdriver speeding past a quay. His sense of uselessness came to a head one day in Hyde Park, a bright, sunny day that had put a bit of a spring into his step before he came upon an old man sitting on a bench wearing the uniform of an army pensioner, a relic of the Boer War taking the sun with his eyes closed and no doubt dreaming of past glories. He saw himself reflected in that old chap and it hurt to feel so diminished when he had more adventures to his credit by the time he was twenty-five than most men experience in a lifetime. And then Borys joined the army and that was damned near the coup de grâce.

“I felt that I was sending him off to do my part,” Conrad said gloomily. Of course, he was proud of Borys, but with the pride came fear for his son's safety that stayed close to his heart until the war ended. When Borys paid a brief surprise visit home a few days before shipping out to France, Conrad insisted that he spend most of the time upstairs with Jessie. Later, when he came down, Conrad looked at him and said, “Look here, boy, in case you should get yourself knocked on the head out there, I should at least like to know where your remains are disposed of.” He then put a piece of paper down on the table and wrote out a code he had invented to confound the army censors that would let Borys indicate in letters he sent home exactly where he was at the front.

He tried to console himself with the thought that he had done everything possible to lend a hand in the war effort. The only discernible effect was that the thorn plunged deeper into his side. He tried throwing himself into his writing. It should have been a propitious time, he said, that period being the first in his career when he did not have to worry about money, a situation he had dreamed of more or less constantly since he had quit the sea. He started
The Shadow Line
and did a few stories but the work was halting and he took little pleasure in it. It was not because his imagination flagged or that he lacked energy: His mind was overflowing with characters and stories. The problem was that his conscience got in the way. Writing when so many people were being slaughtered, when continental Europe was buried beneath a pall of smoke, seemed indecent. “It was terrible,” he said, looking at me gravely, “to feel that way about your craft. I can't remember it now without a shudder.” I saw the pain in his eyes as he leaned forward and took his drink from the table between us. He continued after a while, saying that it became very clear that the only subject he could deal with was the war itself but he could not bring himself to invent something for fear of trivializing what was happening in the trenches and on the seas. A tone came into his voice that I could not identify at the time but which I was able to later, at the end of the day, his words coming back to me in all their irony.

And that was when his luck unexpectedly changed. He had been seeing something of Lord Northcliffe socially, and it occurred to him that the old boy might be willing to use his influence to involve him in the war effort. To that end, he wrote a long letter offering his services in whatever capacity might be useful. A few weeks later Northcliffe called, saying that he would like Conrad to visit some naval installations to observe and make recommendations for improvements. Of course, the lord was throwing an old sea dog a soft bone to chew, probably for no other purpose than to silence the supporters Conrad had enlisted to pester him, but the motive made no difference. Conrad had begun to feel more and more like an invalid, snapping at Jessie for nothing, falling into those black depressions. He leapt at the chance.

He was waiting for the inspection tour to begin when an assistant to Northcliffe offered him a chance to make a flight from the Royal Naval air station at Yarmouth. He had never flown and would not
have gone out of his way to do so. Airplanes fascinated him from a technical perspective. He admired their sleek design, but entrusting his life to one of those fragile structures of wood and cloth and metal called for a leap of faith greater than he possessed. He went up only because he wanted to avoid being thought a coward. The takeoff was thrilling, the rush of the plane down the runway, the deafening roar of the engines, and then he was looking down at the receding airfield, the tiny shapes of men and planes that brought on a bout of vertigo and with it the purest fear he had experienced in a long time. He thought he might have to keep his eyes closed or fixed on the back of the pilot's head for the duration of the flight, but then he glimpsed the countryside, the distant hills, and was enchanted, filled with a sudden sense of enormous privilege, even of power, the kind of emotion generally reserved for dreams. The sky was new, the land below, the sea in the distance. He felt the depression that had gripped him since returning from Poland peeling off as if it were an old skin; the flight seemed like a preparation, a purifying ritual. When they landed he was ready to engage whatever came his way.

A week later he was invited to Granton Harbour near Edinburgh to spend a day on a vessel assigned to mending torpedo nets, but the weather was terrible, a gale threatened the ship, and there was an hour or so when he doubted that he would see his family again. It was, all in all, an inauspicious beginning of his tour. Though the officers treated him respectfully, he could see in their eyes that they felt put upon having to waste time escorting an ancient mariner with political connections. But what put him off were the ships themselves. The net tender was the only one that put to sea. The rest were tied down like Gulliver by the Lilliputians, ungainly things rocked by the slightest movement, long narrow hotels essentially useless for anything other than providing roofs for their crews. They reminded him of the old soldier in the park, and he felt equally useless
as he went about their decks, looking for something to comment on. He began to think that it might be better to accept his age and infirmities and quit his sentimental romanticizing when he received word that he was to go on patrol aboard the minesweeper
Brigadier,
which was docked at Lowestoft, and that there would be further assignments on such vessels.

Over the next few weeks he put Jessie to no end of trouble, demanding meat at every meal, eggs, milk, second helpings. He took long walks in the morning, which were followed by brisk exercises in the yard, and was more fit than he had been in years the evening he arrived at Lowestoft. An orderly met him at the station and drove him out to the port, showing him to his quarters in a barracks. The room was on the spartan side—bed, chair, chest of drawers, nothing else—but to Conrad it was fit for an admiral. The fact of the matter was that he would have been happy sleeping on a bed of nails. On the way in from the station the orderly said that the
Brigadier
would be patrolling shipping lanes where the Germans were laying mines to block British supply routes. There had been considerable activity during the last fortnight or so and it was well within the realm of possibility that she would have some business with a few of the bloody things. Conrad asked the man what the minesweeper did when she came upon a mine and the young fellow replied, “Well, sir, we cut them loose and blow them to smithereens. Sometimes we're right on top of one before we see it.” In the quiet of his room that night, in the general quiet that descends on military posts after the day's work is done, he imagined muffled roars followed by plumes of spray discolored with smoke and bits of steel, a baptism of fire.

HE SLEPT BETTER
than he had in months, waking early, around six o'clock, excited and eager. As a veteran of the war his zeal may strike
you as naive, Ford, even repugnant, but you must remember that he had lived every moment since being run out of Poland in a state of anger and frustration. In any case, when he raised the curtain, fog obscured the port and all but the masts of the ships, the visibility so poor he could only guess at the character of the vessels and nothing of the sea behind the heavy bank. He dressed quickly and went outside, hoping that the
Brigadier'
s captain, David Fox-Bourne, was not so timid that he would be cowed by a little weather. The fog moved on the wind, the billows surging this way and that, tumbling over themselves and flattening out, signs to an old sailor that it was very heavy and unlikely to break up soon. The orderly had given him instructions on how to find the officers' mess. As he went along the path, sailors emerged from the fog walking briskly, the way men do on the way to work, and that cheered him. A bit of fog was not going to deter the Royal Navy.

In the mess he gave his name to the steward, who escorted him to a table reserved for senior men and introduced him as the admiral's guest. He was ready for them to react more or less as their brother officers had done earlier in the tour, and in that he was wrong. Several knew his work and everyone greeted him with the deference due a personage. A few had seen something of the Eastern seas while sailing on merchant vessels, a fact that put him at ease and in a pleasant frame of mind. It felt good to be with his own kind, members of the clan who were sailors first before they were naval officers, sharing beliefs that knew no boundaries of rank or class.

They were reminiscing about Singapore when the city was little more than a pirate's den, exchanging knowing looks, laughing the way older men do at the memory of indiscretions committed in the past, when a young ensign with pink cheeks who was probably about the age they had been in China appeared in the doorway and spoke to the steward, who directed him to their table, where he announced
that Captain Fox-Bourne had sent him to escort Mr. Joseph Conrad to the
Brigadier.
His name was Geoffrey Whelan. He was excessively polite to Conrad on the way down to the dock, calling him “sir” and awkwardly entertaining him with facts about the ships, which at that distance were no more than indistinct presences in the mist. When they were close enough to make out the name of the
Brigadier
emblazoned in black letters on her bow, Whelan cleared his throat and said, stammering rather badly, his cheeks darkening to a deep crimson, that it was an extraordinary honor to talk to him. He had read all of Conrad's work, every word, and many of his classmates at Cambridge had too. The fact of the matter, said Whelan, was that he had literary ambitions of his own and it would mean the world to him if Conrad would agree to take a look at a few pages. When Conrad suggested that he bring something to his quarters after they had returned to port, Whelan beamed bright as a lighthouse.