Sailors on the Inward Sea (6 page)

Whether out of gratitude or in response to orders, he gave Conrad the grand tour of the minesweeper, keeping up a constant patter as they walked the length of her, explaining that she was classified as a sloop of the
Arabis
type and lay low in the water due to her exceptional weight of 1,250 tonnes. Whelan then led him down a flight of stairs to the engine room, which was immaculate and gleaming, a far cry from those in most of the ships Conrad had commanded, but equally noisy so that the ensign had to shout to be heard. She was powered by Yarrow boilers feeding two screws through vertical triple expansion engines whose torque he would feel as soon as they were under way. Back on deck Whelan partly removed the canvas shrouds of the two four-inch guns located fore and aft, adding that they had never been fired in battle. Neither the
Brigadier
nor any of the other Lowestoft sweepers had sighted a German ship, seeing only their filthy handiwork bobbing on the sea. Whelan's pride in the minesweeper suggested that she was his first
ship and he was impatient for her to distinguish herself, a feeling Conrad understood, for despite her odd looks, a sort of cross between the old river gunboats deployed on the China Sea and the Roi des Beiges, he knew she was lovely to Whelan.

Up on the bridge four officers hovered over a chart. The tallest looked up as they entered, his insignia identifying him as the captain. Fox-Bourne had a shock of blond hair and ruddy cheeks above a jaw-line beard, a grin at odds with his military bearing. As Whelan was leaving, Conrad reminded him of his promise to bring some pages by his quarters.

“Absolutely, sir. That's not something I'd forget.”

“Nice young chap,” Conrad said after he was gone.

“He is,” Fox-Bourne said affectionately. “He'll go places. Of course, he hasn't been worth a fig since he heard you were coming. Practically bowled him over. I must apologize on that score: I'm afraid I haven't read your work. We may have some luck with the bloody mines, but I should warn you there's a chance the only thing we'll turn up in the nets is an old boot or a grouper. You'll have to excuse me now.”

Conrad went out the door to the railed walk that ran the width of the bridge. It was cold and as he turned up the collar of his coat he noticed that Whelan was supervising a gang of sailors casting off the lines. In the time he had been aboard the fog had thickened and while he could see Whelan and the men perfectly well, the dock was little more than a hazy black shape and the buildings beyond them had virtually disappeared. As soon as the last of the thick hawsers was let go he felt a vibration beneath his feet. The pitch of the big engines deepened, and the
Brigadier
slipped away from the dock, quickly plunging into the fog.

A
T PRECISELY
the moment Conrad's voice trailed off it seemed that every ship in the estuary, whether sailing for distant ports or coming home, holds bursting with cargo, sounded their foghorns. The slight differences in tone were absorbed by the shifting whiteness so that you might have thought they came from a single ship or some beast of the deep wailing in pain or loneliness. Conrad turned in his chair and gazed south over the hidden river and juts of land, lost in some reverie. That sort of thing was not at all unusual with him, as you know. I have no idea how many times during our years together that he had suddenly broken off in the middle of a conversation only to return to exactly the place he had left minutes later as if nothing had happened. At first I thought he might simply be indulging in nostalgia, a habit I know something about, having fallen into it out here. It's a harmless thing so long as one doesn't gaze too long on
les neiges d'antan.
Then he shifted his position and I was able to see his face in profile, eyes half-closed, the angular lines as striking as the head of a caesar on a Roman coin, and I understood that whatever had drawn his attention away was very serious. He was obviously steeling himself, Ford. Those dark expressive eyes had the heavy, burdened look of a man confronting something he would rather not deal with but had to. Whatever it was had robbed him of the serenity I remarked on earlier. What puzzled me was that nothing he had said so far remotely hinted at anything that could cause such an onslaught of emotion. And it was that—a concentration of feelings that must have
seemed to me all the more intense because I had no idea where it came from.

Since I felt awkward sitting there, I decided to go below and brew some coffee. When it was ready I carried the pot and cups on a tray and put it down on the table, calling his attention to a passing freighter with an oddly shaped poop deck that had emerged from the fog. While he agreed it was unusual, he added none of his customary observations about design. I set to work mending a rope, an old pleasure for men of my ilk, as knitting is for women. I had just finished trimming the fray when he relit his pipe and went on with the story from behind a veil of sweet-smelling smoke.

WITH FOX-BOURNE
occupied maneuvering his ship out of the harbor, Conrad descended the bridge ladder, noticing on his way aft that the portion of Lowestoft's buildings and dock he could still see were framed by parallel fog banks that lay close to the water and moved erratically, one spreading out behind the ship like a smoky wake, the other sealing off the coast. From behind him fog blew in overhead, a thick gray mass that effaced all but the shadowy forms of the gallows of the sweeping gear. He went up to the bow and could scarcely see the water directly below. Whelan was standing lookout on the starboard side, and Conrad was glad of it. He was not about to go soft over a little fog, he said, but it had been a long time since he had seen anything so bad.

“Like hunter's soup,” came Fox-Bourne's voice from behind him, “nothing to worry about.”

Conrad turned and saw Fox-Bourne wreathed with haze as if he were coming out of a steam bath.

“Quite common this time of year,” the captain went on. “We proceed slowly. You've no doubt noticed. A bit farther west the fog
generally breaks into patches. We should come out of it soon. If not, we shall return home, not worth the risk. Wouldn't want to damage the king's property, would we? If you'll excuse me, I'll just have a word with Whelan.”

The ensign grasped the rail, unaware that the captain was approaching until Fox-Bourne put his hand on his shoulder, an affectionate gesture that did not surprise Conrad, who had sensed that their relationship went beyond official ties. They could have been father and son from the easy way they talked. He remembered a photograph Jessie had taken of him and Borys on a quay that showed them with their arms around each other, Borys resplendent in his army uniform, in the background two or three pleasure craft and beyond them the low skyline of suburban London, a wonderful picture, though deceptive as all photographs are since it suggested that the captured moment was still going on, defying duration, whereas in fact Borys was at the front. Another vision emerged, a vision of battlefields with soldiers streaming out of trenches, climbing over the earthen berms that had protected them from the Huns, the sky darkening with smoke, shells bursting.

“Father-feeling,” he said to me, “the father's fear for his son made worse by the fact there wasn't a damned thing I could do.”

That image of young men climbing out of the safety of the earth into fusillades of bullets had plagued him over and over after he received Borys's first letter from the front. To break its hold, he strode across the deck and interrupted Fox-Bourne and Whelan with a question about the young man's writing. Whelan was delighted. He said he was working on a coming-of-age novel based on his grandfather's life that was set in nineteenth-century Yorkshire. The section he was going to show Conrad focused on a horse race at a county fair, quite the best thing in the book, he thought, a tribute to Hardy but with a definite modern tone. The battlefield receded, giving
way to an impressionistic rush of horseflesh. He told Whelan that he was eager to see how he handled the movement since that kind of thing was always difficult for him. They discussed the problem of dealing with simultaneous actions, Conrad deferring to the young man, letting him show what he knew and complimenting him on his idea. Whelan had the love of words, Conrad told me, there was no question about it. Fox-Bourne listened appreciatively with a smile on his lips, clearly proud of the show Whelan was putting on. Eventually he asked the ensign if he thought it was possible to write and pursue a career in the navy at the same time.

“Sir,” said Whelan, “we're standing here with a man who's done both.”

Conrad did not have the heart to remind him that he had abandoned the sea.

“Well, in any case,” Fox-Bourne said, “there's no time for writing today. Keep a sharp eye out, lad. This is quite nasty.”

He then invited Conrad back to the bridge, saying that once the fog cleared he could see the operation much better from that vantage point.

But the fog did not clear. It grew thicker than ever. The whole apparatus of the sweeping gear had gone missing, the deck was barely invisible, sailors appeared and disappeared like ghosts. On the bridge, Conrad gathered around the chart table with three other officers, Chambers, Higgins, and Scorsby, the tip of Fox-Bourne's pointer inching across the lines of latitude and longitude, numbers indicating depth, names of shoals, its black rubber tip describing a shallow arc from their present location to the shipping lanes where Fritz enjoyed laying his eggs. It seemed like a schoolroom exercise, the journey traced by the pointer accompanied by Fox-Bourne's commentary and observations by the other officers being purely academic unless the fog lifted.

Half an hour later it did. Fox-Bourne had just informed his officers that they would very likely have to abandon the search when the gray wall suddenly lightened. A patch of blue appeared directly overhead. Conrad could now see the whole length of the deck, make out the forward gun, capstans, hatch covers, Whelan and another sailor near the bow, a portion of the sea, almost black in contrast, off the starboard side. He said they proceeded through the milky whiteness for five minutes or so when a huge yellow cylinder appeared, one of those freakish phenomena encountered at sea from time to time, odd as waterspouts or the northern lights, things ancient sailors took as signs and wonders and brought back to tell of round the communal fire.

Revolving slowly, the cylinder expanded in width and height, looking rather like a door or a portal, and when the
Brigadier
entered it the glow lit her bow with a golden radiance. A moment later Whelan took hold of the rail with both hands and leaned out as if he were a gymnast on the parallel bars.

“I think he's seen a mine,” Chambers said.

“Well, damn it,” Fox-Bourne replied, “he'll go over if he isn't careful.”

The prospect appeared distinctly more likely when Whelan stood on the lower rung and leaned out farther, hanging there as if he were suspended in space before he jumped down and looked toward the bridge, shouting unintelligibly while he pointed at the wall of fog, jabbing his finger at it repeatedly in an indecipherable comic pantomime. The yellow light consumed the fog as the cylinder broadened. Conrad saw a long black object on the surface, which he thought was a shoal before remembering that the chart had showed nothing but open sea. You probably know, Ford, that the oceans are strewn with every imaginable object, hazards a sailor can't prepare for and sometimes doesn't even see until it is too late. Conrad certainly
knew this. In the course of his career he had half a dozen narrow escapes, the most remarkable from a large section of a pier off some Asian coast that passed so close he could see the barnacles on its pilings. Such experiences had impressed him sufficiently for him to have chosen a similar event as the malignant cause of misfortune in
Lord Jim.
That was his second guess, probably shared by the others, and they were all wrong. The cylinder shifted and within seconds the rectangular shape of a submarine's conning tower glided magisterially into view. The vessel lay at right angles to the
Brigadier,
directly in its path at a distance of less than two hundred meters.

Fox-Bourne called for full reverse and in the same breath ordered the helmsman to make a hard right. No sooner did the telegraph chime than the sailor swung the wheel violently, an extraordinary performance, though in vain since there was not enough distance between the ships to avoid a collision. Any chance of doing so was nullified when he realized that the U-boat was dead in the water. The yellow light bathing the entire length of the submarine illuminated its name,
Die Valkerie,
and its designation, U-21, in crimson Gothic script below the fluted tip of the observation platform. Farther down what looked incongruously like a row of white flowers baffled him every bit as much as Marlow had been on his approach to Kurtz's compound, where he thought he saw decorative knobs on all the fenceposts. When they were a little closer he saw that they were the outlines of ships.