Joseph Conrad - The Collected Works of Joseph Conrad - Novels, Short Stories, Letters & Memoirs

‘His face crimsoned as though he could not get rid of the air in his lungs.

‘“No harm!” he burst out. “I leave it to you. You can understand. Can’t you? You see it — don’t you? No harm! Good God! What more could they have done? Oh yes, I know very well — I jumped. Certainly. I jumped! I told you I jumped; but I tell you they were too much for any man. It was their doing as plainly as if they had reached up with a boat-hook and pulled me over. Can’t you see it? You must see it. Come. Speak — straight out.”

His uneasy eyes fastened upon mine, questioned, begged, challenged, entreated. For the life of me I couldn’t help murmuring, “You’ve been tried.” “More than is fair,” he caught up swiftly. “I wasn’t given half a chance — with a gang like that. And now they were friendly — oh, so damnably friendly! Chums, shipmates. All in the same boat. Make the best of it. They hadn’t meant anything. They didn t care a hang for George. George had gone back to his berth for something at the last moment and got caught. The man was a manifest fool. Very sad, of course. . . . Their eyes looked at me; their lips moved; they wagged their heads at the other end of the boat — three of them; they beckoned — to me. Why not? Hadn’t I jumped? I said nothing. There are no words for the sort of things I wanted to say. If I had opened my lips just then I would have simply howled like an animal. I was asking myself when I would wake up. They urged me aloud to come aft and hear quietly what the skipper had to say. We were sure to be picked up before the evening — right in the track of all the Canal traffic; there was smoke to the north-west now.

‘“It gave me an awful shock to see this faint, faint blur, this low trail of brown mist through which you could see the boundary of sea and sky. I called out to them that I could hear very well where I was. The skipper started swearing, as hoarse as a crow. He wasn’t going to talk at the top of his voice for my accommodation. ‘Are you afraid they will hear you on shore?’ I asked. He glared as if he would have liked to claw me to pieces. The chief engineer advised him to humour me. He said I wasn’t right in my head yet. The other rose astern, like a thick pillar of flesh — and talked — talked. . . . ”

‘Jim remained thoughtful. “Well?” I said. “What did I care what story they agreed to make up?” he cried recklessly. “They could tell what they jolly well liked. It was their business. I knew the story. Nothing they could make people believe could alter it for me. I let him talk, argue — talk, argue. He went on and on and on. Suddenly I felt my legs give way under me. I was sick, tired — tired to death. I let fall the tiller, turned my back on them, and sat down on the foremost thwart. I had enough. They called to me to know if I understood — wasn’t it true, every word of it? It was true, by God! after their fashion. I did not turn my head. I heard them palavering together. ‘The silly ass won’t say anything.’ ‘Oh, he understands well enough.’ ‘Let him be; he will be all right.’ ‘What can he do?’ What could I do? Weren’t we all in the same boat? I tried to be deaf. The smoke had disappeared to the northward. It was a dead calm. They had a drink from the water-breaker, and I drank too. Afterwards they made a great business of spreading the boat-sail over the gunwales. Would I keep a look-out? They crept under, out of my sight, thank God! I felt weary, weary, done up, as if I hadn’t had one hour’s sleep since the day I was born. I couldn’t see the water for the glitter of the sunshine. From time to time one of them would creep out, stand up to take a look all round, and get under again. I could hear spells of snoring below the sail. Some of them could sleep. One of them at least. I couldn’t! All was light, light, and the boat seemed to be falling through it. Now and then I would feel quite surprised to find myself sitting on a thwart. . . . ”

‘He began to walk with measured steps to and fro before my chair, one hand in his trousers-pocket, his head bent thoughtfully, and his right arm at long intervals raised for a gesture that seemed to put out of his way an invisible intruder.

‘“I suppose you think I was going mad,” he began in a changed tone. “And well you may, if you remember I had lost my cap. The sun crept all the way from east to west over my bare head, but that day I could not come to any harm, I suppose. The sun could not make me mad. . . . ” His right arm put aside the idea of madness. . . . “Neither could it kill me. . . . ” Again his arm repulsed a shadow. . . . “That rested with me.”

‘“Did it?” I said, inexpressibly amazed at this new turn, and I looked at him with the same sort of feeling I might be fairly conceived to experience had he, after spinning round on his heel, presented an altogether new face.

‘“I didn’t get brain fever, I did not drop dead either,” he went on. “I didn’t bother myself at all about the sun over my head. I was thinking as coolly as any man that ever sat thinking in the shade. That greasy beast of a skipper poked his big cropped head from under the canvas and screwed his fishy eyes up at me. ‘Donnerwetter! you will die,’ he growled, and drew in like a turtle. I had seen him. I had heard him. He didn’t interrupt me. I was thinking just then that I wouldn’t.”

‘He tried to sound my thought with an attentive glance dropped on me in passing. “Do you mean to say you had been deliberating with yourself whether you would die?” I asked in as impenetrable a tone as I could command. He nodded without stopping. “Yes, it had come to that as I sat there alone,” he said. He passed on a few steps to the imaginary end of his beat, and when he flung round to come back both his hands were thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped short in front of my chair and looked down. “Don’t you believe it?” he inquired with tense curiosity. I was moved to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me.’

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‘He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being. The dim candle spluttered within the ball of glass, and that was all I had to see him by; at his back was the dark night with the clear stars, whose distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light seemed to show me his boyish head, as if in that moment the youth within him had, for a second, glowed and expired. “You are an awful good sort to listen like this,” he said. “It does me good. You don’t know what it is to me. You don’t” . . . words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of heat! . . . Yes; I had a glimpse of him then . . . and it was not the last of that kind. . . . “You don’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed — make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so difficult — so awfully unfair — so hard to understand.”

‘The mists were closing again. I don’t know how old I appeared to him — and how much wise. Not half as old as I felt just then; not half as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be. Surely in no other craft as in that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire. There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward. What we get — well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality — in no other is the beginning all illusion — the disenchantment more swift — the subjugation more complete. Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a wider feeling — the feeling that binds a man to a child. He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a scrape, the sort of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly while they hide a smile. And he had been deliberating upon death — confound him! He had found that to meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the night. What more natural! It was tragic enough and funny enough in all conscience to call aloud for compassion, and in what was I better than the rest of us to refuse him my pity? And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent, and his voice spoke —