IN THE MORNING I heated water in the kettle and got some toast and marmalade down my throat along with a cup of Turkish coffee—the British mania for tea always left me cold, that watery treacle not being my idea of a proper drink. Fortified, I pushed open the cabin door and stepped outside into a heavy fog, which I greeted as a blessing since it kept the heat at bay. In the gloom I heard the voices of men on nearby boats, the creak of spars, the dull slap of anchor chains and then the distant call of a foghorn. I had been at work an hour or so replacing brass fittings when I heard Conrad impatiently call my name from the dock. He couldn’t see the Nellie nor could I see him so I shouted. A minute later he emerged, trailing wisps of fog like gauze. He had aged badly. His pointed beard was mostly gray and his eyes, half-obscured beneath the heavy folds of his lids, looked watery though still intense. Despite the obvious wear and tear, he had kept up his appearance as well as his famous accountant in Heart of Darkness. In his well-cut dark suit with waistcoat and matching cap, he could have been a baron on vacation from his estate outside Warsaw, an effect made even more credible by his monocle. He stepped onto the gangway, supporting himself with a silver-handled blackthorn walking stick, looking at me fondly with an expression that was both familiar and a bit strange, a kind of serenity gracing his eyes and manner I had not seen before. When he stepped aboard he held out his hand.
“My dear faller,” he said warmly, “I’ve missed you. Perhaps now that you’ve retired we can see more of each other.”
I said nothing would please me more and then unfolded two steamer chairs, which I placed close to the hallowed spot on the deck. While I described my narrow escape from the barge he leaned back so that his face was bathed in the weak sunlight beginning to color the fog, his arms resting heavily on those of the chair, a perfect picture of a man aged beyond his years. A mild wind blew away the fog between the Nellie and the nearby boats lying at anchor. Farther out the swells caught glints of the sun, the whole reach of the Thames dotted with oblongs of light like a rush of spawning salmon. He wanted to hear about my plans for the Nellie, of which he approved. He even made a few additional suggestions. Though he clearly enjoyed the technical conversation, it did not take me long to realize what was on his mind. The look in his eyes was as good as a signal flag.
“The old thing?” I said.
He nodded.
“You amaze me. I thought you’d have let it go by now.”
“You know me better than that, Malone.”
“Well,” I replied, “I needn’t tell you what I think about it.”
Ignoring my sarcasm, he went on.
“Marlow and I,” he said, “have parted company forever.”
When I asked if that was what he was so eager to tell me, he said no, though in the long run the two were related.
“So it’s still an issue,” I said.
“Because of its nature.”
I will explain this business with Marlow in due time, Ford, but as it is secondary to the story he soon began to tell, I think I should go on. It will make more sense that way.
In the past, when our conversation had taken such a depressingly familiar turn, he had invariably drifted into one of those black moods that left him inaccessible, but while all the signs were there that day, he was not giving in to them. To the contrary, I had the impression of a man in repose whose confidence had weathered an unpleasant admission, and was struck again by the serenity I had noticed as he came up the gangway.
He withdrew a pipe and a leather tobacco pouch from his pocket and carefully filled the bowl. Once it was going, he took several deep puffs and watched the smoke drift leeward. By then the fog had dissipated and we could see the smokestacks of large ships, along with the odd mast and sail. Conrad pointed skyward with the stem of his pipe.
“ ‘The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.’ Wonderful image. I’ve always been shamelessly jealous of Stephen Crane.”
From far down the estuary came the sound of a foghorn quickly answered by another. Those invisible vessels calling out their warnings reminded me of times when I stood blind on a bridge, attentive to the trumpeting of another ship while staring into the impenetrable fog, on the lookout for the vaguest shape, the slightest hint of darkness that would be the bow of a vessel making toward mine, a perfectly natural memory that I thought no more of until it came back several hours later tinged with the color of Stephen’s sun.
Conrad tamped the bowl of his pipe with a silver tool and regarded me soberly over the match flame.
“It’s unique, Jack, the red of soldier’s blood and the blood of Christ and sacrifice and rage, all that and more. The color stays in your mind like the sun does after you’ve looked at it, glowing after you’ve closed your eyes. What’s more, he doesn’t force it on you, doesn’t have to. The red is perfectly natural, the result of smoke in the air, the color of battle.”
I said, “I’ve always wondered if the book would have been better if he had actually been in the war.”
“I don’t think so,” he responded. “His imagination gave him a color that was more true than what he would have seen. This story of mine has color too, a soft yellow that surrounds everything. You know how it is sometimes when you try to remember the beginning of a story. It’s hazy like the fog out there. You think it could have been this or that. The roots of this one are very clear, mon vieux, a beautiful view in the Carpathian Mountains.” He made a sweeping gesture with his pipe as if he were sketching a mountain valley. “A place of small farms and pastures, absolutely bucolic. I have never seen a place so at one with that word.”
UNDER THE DIM glow of that red sun Conrad began talking about visiting Poland in 1914, looking so intently over the half-obscured waters of the great river that I thought he might be trying to see the spires and steeples of his homeland. I was immediately caught up and quite forgot about the color of the sun, which, in retrospect I now realize, he had intentionally called to my attention. Not until an hour later did I understand that it was implicated in his story, something I am sure you will pick up on and hold in your mind as you read. Your way with signs has always seemed to set you and Conrad apart from your contemporaries.
But to get on with the story. Conrad said that he had decided on the visit after Pinker, his agent, sold the serial rights of Victory for the hefty sum of a thousand pounds, far more than he had expected. Twenty-one years had gone by since he had seen Poland and he was yearning to make a pilgrimage to the haunts of his early life for himself and also for his son, Borys. It seemed to be a propitious time. Conrad was a successful writer going home to render his account to whoever was still alive and remembered him, present himself to them and to the land for which he harbored an almost mystical attachment. And yet, proud as he was, he felt a certain trepidation. He was not sure what his feelings would be when he opened a door or turned into a familiar street and encountered a stranger who would come into focus with a name as suddenly as a landscape does when one adjusts binoculars. He had the rather odd notion that he might sense his own life going backward at such a moment, repossessed by the past.
When Conrad and his family left Harwich for Hamburg in late July 1914, traveling with old Polish friends, he knew that the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated in Sarajevo a month earlier; that, only days before he sailed, Austria-Hungary had delivered an ultimatum to Serbia. But those events were like distant thunder, he said, unnerving, but not enough to worry about, certainly not enough to force a postponement of the visit. Only full-scale war could do that, and no one was predicting such a dire turn of events.
From Hamburg they traveled by train across Germany. When they reached the border with Poland, Conrad said that he felt as if his spirit was infused with the rolling farmland, a sensation that deepened over the hours, preparing the way for his first glimpse of Cracow, whose spires rose dark against the waning light. Through the window of the cab they took from Central Station he watched the lights of the city coming on, the streetlights runnin
g off in the distance, the lights of shops and apartments in the old buildings where he could see people inside, Cracow sparkling like a Christmas tree, a shower of stars, fireworks.
He rose early the next morning and left while Jessie and Borys were still asleep. As he pushed open the intricate metal doors of the Hotel Pod Roza and stepped outside he felt like Rip van Winkle. Nothing had changed. He walked a mile or so and then returned for Borys, taking him to the old Florian Gate, where they sat a while on a bench watching the pigeons in the Great Square, then on to Poselska Street, where he had followed the funeral cortege of his father, Apollo. They went on to St. Mary’s Church and down the street, the stained stone buildings impregnated with so many memories that he felt as if he were walking past pictures in a museum dedicated to his family’s life. At the university they walked through the great courtyard into the Jagellon Library, where they were met by a man who knew not only Conrad’s work but his father’s as well. Saying there was something on the second floor that Conrad would find interesting, the librarian guided them up the ornate old staircase and into a small room where he removed from a cabinet a collection of manuscripts and letters written by Apollo. Conrad spent half an hour reading them, translating fiery political writings for Borys—grandfather, son, and grandson together awhile in that quiet old building, reunited by language and memory.
That day and the next were colored by the powerful experience in the Jagellon Library. Apollo’s voice seemed to echo in his head as he herded his family from one site to another. And then, overnight, everything changed. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. A few days later, on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and sent troops into France.
Over the next few days Cracow became a military depot, its once peaceful streets jammed with lorries and soldiers, the incessant noise drowning out the sound of cathedral bells except very early in the morning and late at night, when they sounded as if they were tolling the loss of a way of life that would come no more. In the Hotel Pod Roza a steady stream of guests descended the stairs to the lobby, which was chest-deep in luggage, the guests waiting in long lines to pay their bills while others stood at the curb outside, frantically hailing cabs. Conrad wanted to return to Britain but Jessie could hardly walk and Borys had caught a cold and was running a temperature. Even if they had been well enough to travel, the long journey across Europe was too hazardous to risk and so, standing at the reception desk in the lobby, surrounded by all that noise and confusion, he placed a call to his aunt who lived in the resort town of Zakopané, a four-hour trip by rail, asking her to take them in until the situation stabilized enough so he could make plans to go home.
When the train pulled away from the platform in Central Station the next morning Conrad told Jessie and Borys that his family had stayed in the country often when he was a child and that everything would be fine. They could relax in the pine-scented air and be treated to wonderful stories his aged aunt was very likely still capable of telling. And while he truly believed they might enjoy themselves, Conrad said that for him the journey to Zakopané was the saddest of his life, every mile reminding him of the pleasure he had taken as a boy, the places he remembered best, a valley with a river, a series of hills sheered off eons ago by a glacier that left a pale palisade, a millhouse on a stream, all mocking him with their old purity as if he were traveling through ghosts. He kept his thoughts to himself, entertaining Jessie and Borys like a tour guide, pointing out the attractions one by one, talking about his feelings toward them when he was a child, relieved when they reached a bend and all those old vistas were left behind.
But his spirits improved when the Villa Konstantynowka came into view an hour later. He had hired a coach at the train station to take them the rest of the way and as they entered the valley he saw the house and felt again the excitement he had experienced as a boy at its wondrous shape. An elaborate mansard roof graced the villa’s three stories like a collection of tents you would imagine appropriate to a Mongol lord. It swept upward from the eaves in elegant curves, terminating in a sharp peak of copper shingles that had long ago developed a turquoise patina. On each floor tall windows rounded at the top reflected the trees on the property so that the house appeared to be inhabited by poplars, firs, and pines and also tiny white clouds in patches of mountain blue sky. “I used to sit by the window in the attic,” Conrad said, “reading stories of Polish heroes and imagining myself doing battle on horseback with invaders down in the valley, returning triumphant to the safety of the villa, which I, of course, thought of as a castle.”
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 info
rmed 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.
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 3