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.
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.
II
* * *
Death of the Valkerie
AT 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 thi
cker 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.
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 4