A Set of Six

J >> Joseph Conrad >> A Set of Six


"'Don't I know her!' cries he, stamping his foot in a perfect fury. And
he out with his whistle to make that bothered tug get the ship's head
up again as quick as possible. He blew like mad, waving his arm to port,
and presently we could see that the tug's engines had been set going
ahead. Her paddles churned the water, but it was as if she had been
trying to tow a rock--she couldn't get an inch out of that ship. Again
the pilot blew his whistle, and waved his arm to port. We could see the
tug's paddles turning faster and faster away, broad on our bow.

"For a moment tug and ship hung motionless in a crowd of moving
shipping, and then the terrific strain that evil, stony-hearted brute
would always put on everything, tore the towing-chock clean out. The
tow-rope surged over, snapping the iron stanchions of the head-rail one
after another as if they had been sticks of sealing-wax. It was only
then I noticed that in order to have a better view over our heads,
Maggie had stepped upon the port anchor as it lay flat on the forecastle
deck.

"It had been lowered properly into its hardwood beds, but there had been
no time to take a turn with it. Anyway, it was quite secure as it was,
for going into dock; but I could see directly that the tow-rope would
sweep under the fluke in another second. My heart flew up right into
my throat, but not before I had time to yell out: 'Jump clear of that
anchor!'

"But I hadn't time to shriek out her name. I don't suppose she heard me
at all. The first touch of the hawser against the fluke threw her down;
she was up on her feet again quick as lightning, but she was up on the
wrong side. I heard a horrid, scraping sound, and then that anchor,
tipping over, rose up like something alive; its great, rough iron arm
caught Maggie round the waist, seemed to clasp her close with a dreadful
hug, and flung itself with her over and down in a terrific clang of
iron, followed by heavy ringing blows that shook the ship from stem to
stern--because the ring stopper held!"

"How horrible!" I exclaimed.

"I used to dream for years afterwards of anchors catching hold of
girls," said the man in tweeds, a little wildly. He shuddered. "With a
most pitiful howl Charley was over after her almost on the instant. But,
Lord! he didn't see as much as a gleam of her red tam o' shanter in the
water. Nothing! nothing whatever! In a moment there were half-a-dozen
boats around us, and he got pulled into one. I, with the boatswain and
the carpenter, let go the other anchor in a hurry and brought the
ship up somehow. The pilot had gone silly. He walked up and down the
forecastle head wringing his hands and muttering to himself: 'Killing
women, now! Killing women, now!' Not another word could you get out of
him.

"Dusk fell, then a night black as pitch; and peering upon the river I
heard a low, mournful hail, 'Ship, ahoy!' Two Gravesend watermen came
alongside. They had a lantern in their wherry, and looked up the ship's
side, holding on to the ladder without a word. I saw in the patch of
light a lot of loose, fair hair down there."

He shuddered again.

"After the tide turned poor Maggie's body had floated clear of one of
them big mooring buoys," he explained. "I crept aft, feeling half-dead,
and managed to send a rocket up--to let the other searchers know, on
the river. And then I slunk away forward like a cur, and spent the night
sitting on the heel of the bowsprit so as to be as far as possible out
of Charley's way."

"Poor fellow!" I murmured.

"Yes. Poor fellow," he repeated, musingly. "That brute wouldn't let
him--not even him--cheat her of her prey. But he made her fast in dock
next morning. He did. We hadn't exchanged a word--not a single look for
that matter. I didn't want to look at him. When the last rope was fast
he put his hands to his head and stood gazing down at his feet as if
trying to remember something. The men waited on the main deck for
the words that end the voyage. Perhaps that is what he was trying to
remember. I spoke for him. 'That'll do, men.'

"I never saw a crew leave a ship so quietly. They sneaked over the rail
one after another, taking care not to bang their sea chests too heavily.
They looked our way, but not one had the stomach to come up and offer to
shake hands with the mate as is usual.

"I followed him all over the empty ship to and fro, here and there, with
no living soul about but the two of us, because the old ship-keeper
had locked himself up in the galley--both doors. Suddenly poor Charley
mutters, in a crazy voice: 'I'm done here,' and strides down the gangway
with me at his heels, up the dock, out at the gate, on towards Tower
Hill. He used to take rooms with a decent old landlady in America
Square, to be near his work.

"All at once he stops short, turns round, and comes back straight at
me. 'Ned,' says he, I am going home.' I had the good luck to sight a
four-wheeler and got him in just in time. His legs were beginning to
give way. In our hall he fell down on a chair, and I'll never forget
father's and mother's amazed, perfectly still faces as they stood over
him. They couldn't understand what had happened to him till I blubbered
out, 'Maggie got drowned, yesterday, in the river.'

"Mother let out a little cry. Father looks from him to me, and from me
to him, as if comparing our faces--for, upon my soul, Charley did not
resemble himself at all. Nobody moved; and the poor fellow raises his
big brown hands slowly to his throat, and with one single tug rips
everything open--collar, shirt, waistcoat--a perfect wreck and ruin of
a man. Father and I got him upstairs somehow, and mother pretty nearly
killed herself nursing him through a brain fever."

The man in tweeds nodded at me significantly.

"Ah! there was nothing that could be done with that brute. She had a
devil in her."

"Where's your brother?" I asked, expecting to hear he was dead. But he
was commanding a smart steamer on the China coast, and never came home
now.

Jermyn fetched a heavy sigh, and the handkerchief being now sufficiently
dry, put it up tenderly to his red and lamentable nose.

"She was a ravening beast," the man in tweeds started again. "Old
Colchester put his foot down and resigned. And would you believe it?
Apse & Sons wrote to ask whether he wouldn't reconsider his decision!
Anything to save the good name of the Apse Family.' Old Colchester went
to the office then and said that he would take charge again but only to
sail her out into the North Sea and scuttle her there. He was nearly off
his chump. He used to be darkish iron-grey, but his hair went snow-white
in a fortnight. And Mr. Lucian Apse (they had known each other as young
men) pretended not to notice it. Eh? Here's infatuation if you like!
Here's pride for you!

"They jumped at the first man they could get to take her, for fear of
the scandal of the Apse Family not being able to find a skipper. He was
a festive soul, I believe, but he stuck to her grim and hard. Wilmot was
his second mate. A harum-scarum fellow, and pretending to a great scorn
for all the girls. The fact is he was really timid. But let only one of
them do as much as lift her little finger in encouragement, and there
was nothing that could hold the beggar. As apprentice, once, he deserted
abroad after a petticoat, and would have gone to the dogs then, if his
skipper hadn't taken the trouble to find him and lug him by the ears out
of some house of perdition or other.

"It was said that one of the firm had been heard once to express a hope
that this brute of a ship would get lost soon. I can hardly credit the
tale, unless it might have been Mr. Alfred Apse, whom the family didn't
think much of. They had him in the office, but he was considered a
bad egg altogether, always flying off to race meetings and coming home
drunk. You would have thought that a ship so full of deadly tricks would
run herself ashore some day out of sheer cussedness. But not she! She
was going to last for ever. She had a nose to keep off the bottom."

Jermyn made a grunt of approval.

"A ship after a pilot's own heart, eh?" jeered the man in tweeds. "Well,
Wilmot managed it. He was the man for it, but even he, perhaps, couldn't
have done the trick without the green-eyed governess, or nurse, or
whatever she was to the children of Mr. and Mrs. Pamphilius.

"Those people were passengers in her from Port Adelaide to the
Cape. Well, the ship went out and anchored outside for the day. The
skipper--hospitable soul--had a lot of guests from town to a farewell
lunch--as usual with him. It was five in the evening before the last
shore boat left the side, and the weather looked ugly and dark in the
gulf. There was no reason for him to get under way. However, as he had
told everybody he was going that day, he imagined it was proper to do so
anyhow. But as he had no mind after all these festivities to tackle the
straits in the dark, with a scant wind, he gave orders to keep the ship
under lower topsails and foresail as close as she would lie, dodging
along the land till the morning. Then he sought his virtuous couch.
The mate was on deck, having his face washed very clean with hard rain
squalls. Wilmot relieved him at midnight.

"The Apse Family had, as you observed, a house on her poop . . ."

"A big, ugly white thing, sticking up," Jermyn murmured, sadly, at the
fire.

"That's it: a companion for the cabin stairs and a sort of chart-room
combined. The rain drove in gusts on the sleepy Wilmot. The ship was
then surging slowly to the southward, close hauled, with the coast
within three miles or so to windward. There was nothing to look out for
in that part of the gulf, and Wilmot went round to dodge the squalls
under the lee of that chart-room, whose door on that side was open. The
night was black, like a barrel of coal-tar. And then he heard a woman's
voice whispering to him.

"That confounded green-eyed girl of the Pamphilius people had put the
kids to bed a long time ago, of course, but it seems couldn't get to
sleep herself. She heard eight bells struck, and the chief mate come
below to turn in. She waited a bit, then got into her dressing-gown and
stole across the empty saloon and up the stairs into the chart-room. She
sat down on the settee near the open door to cool herself, I daresay.

"I suppose when she whispered to Wilmot it was as if somebody had struck
a match in the fellow's brain. I don't know how it was they had got so
very thick. I fancy he had met her ashore a few times before. I couldn't
make it out, because, when telling the story, Wilmot would break off to
swear something awful at every second word. We had met on the quay in
Sydney, and he had an apron of sacking up to his chin, a big whip in his
hand. A wagon-driver. Glad to do anything not to starve. That's what he
had come down to.

"However, there he was, with his head inside the door, on the girl's
shoulder as likely as not--officer of the watch! The helmsman, on giving
his evidence afterwards, said that he shouted several times that the
binnacle lamp had gone out. It didn't matter to him, because his orders
were to 'sail her close.' 'I thought it funny,' he said, 'that the ship
should keep on falling off in squalls, but I luffed her up every time
as close as I was able. It was so dark I couldn't see my hand before my
face, and the rain came in bucketfuls on my head.'

"The truth was that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till
gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a
single soul in her being aware of it. Wilmot himself confessed that he
had not been near the standard compass for an hour. He might well have
confessed! The first thing he knew was the man on the look-out shouting
blue murder forward there.

"He tore his neck free, he says, and yelled back at him: 'What do you
say?'

"'I think I hear breakers ahead, sir,' howled the man, and came rushing
aft with the rest of the watch, in the 'awfullest blinding deluge that
ever fell from the sky,' Wilmot says. For a second or so he was so
scared and bewildered that he could not remember on which side of the
gulf the ship was. He wasn't a good officer, but he was a seaman all
the same. He pulled himself together in a second, and the right orders
sprang to his lips without thinking. They were to hard up with the helm
and shiver the main and mizzen-topsails.

"It seems that the sails actually fluttered. He couldn't see them, but
he heard them rattling and banging above his head. 'No use! She was too
slow in going off,' he went on, his dirty face twitching, and the damn'd
carter's whip shaking in his hand. 'She seemed to stick fast.' And then
the flutter of the canvas above his head ceased. At this critical moment
the wind hauled aft again with a gust, filling the sails and sending the
ship with a great way upon the rocks on her lee bow. She had overreached
herself in her last little game. Her time had come--the hour, the man,
the black night, the treacherous gust of wind--the right woman to put
an end to her. The brute deserved nothing better. Strange are the
instruments of Providence. There's a sort of poetical justice--"

The man in tweeds looked hard at me.

"The first ledge she went over stripped the false keel off her. Rip! The
skipper, rushing out of his berth, found a crazy woman, in a red flannel
dressing-gown, flying round and round the cuddy, screeching like a
cockatoo.

"The next bump knocked her clean under the cabin table. It also started
the stern-post and carried away the rudder, and then that brute ran up a
shelving, rocky shore, tearing her bottom out, till she stopped short,
and the foremast dropped over the bows like a gangway."

"Anybody lost?" I asked.

"No one, unless that fellow, Wilmot," answered the gentleman, unknown
to Miss Blank, looking round for his cap. "And his case was worse than
drowning for a man. Everybody got ashore all right. Gale didn't come
on till next day, dead from the West, and broke up that brute in a
surprisingly short time. It was as though she had been rotten at heart."
. . . He changed his tone, "Rain left off? I must get my bike and rush
home to dinner. I live in Herne Bay--came out for a spin this morning."

He nodded at me in a friendly way, and went out with a swagger.

"Do you know who he is, Jermyn?" I asked.

The North Sea pilot shook his head, dismally. "Fancy losing a ship in
that silly fashion! Oh, dear! oh dear!" he groaned in lugubrious tones,
spreading his damp handkerchief again like a curtain before the glowing
grate.

On going out I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the
respectable Miss Blank, barmaid of the Three Crows.





A DESPERATE TALE



AN ANARCHIST

That year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of
the estates--in fact, on the principal cattle estate--of a famous
meat-extract manufacturing company.

B.O.S. Bos. You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement
pages of magazines and newspapers, in the windows of provision
merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the
month of November. They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly
enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of
slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The "art"
illustrating that "literature" represents in vivid and shining colours
a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing
in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background. It
is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease,
weakness--perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the
majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. O. S. Ltd., with
its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled
perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly
concentrated, but already half digested. Such apparently is the love
that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen--even as the love of the
father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings.

Of course the capital of a country must be productively employed. I
have nothing to say against the company. But being myself animated by
feelings of affection towards my fellow-men, I am saddened by the
modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise,
ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to
my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is
called gullibility.

In various parts of the civilized and uncivilized world I have had to
swallow B. O. S. with more or less benefit to myself, though without
great pleasure. Prepared with hot water and abundantly peppered to bring
out the taste, this extract is not really unpalatable. But I have never
swallowed its advertisements. Perhaps they have not gone far enough. As
far as I can remember they make no promise of everlasting youth to the
users of B. O. S., nor yet have they claimed the power of raising the
dead for their estimable products. Why this austere reserve, I wonder?
But I don't think they would have had me even on these terms. Whatever
form of mental degradation I may (being but human) be suffering from, it
is not the popular form. I am not gullible.

I have been at some pains to bring out distinctly this statement about
myself in view of the story which follows. I have checked the facts as
far as possible. I have turned up the files of French newspapers, and I
have also talked with the officer who commands the military guard on
the Ile Royale, when in the course of my travels I reached Cayenne. I
believe the story to be in the main true. It is the sort of story that
no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither
grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to gratify a perverted
vanity.

It concerns the engineer of the steam-launch belonging to the Maranon
cattle estate of the B. O. S. Co., Ltd. This estate is also an
island--an island as big as a small province, lying in the estuary of a
great South American river. It is wild and not beautiful, but the grass
growing on its low plains seems to possess exceptionally nourishing
and flavouring qualities. It resounds with the lowing of innumerable
herds--a deep and distressing sound under the open sky, rising like
a monstrous protest of prisoners condemned to death. On the mainland,
across twenty miles of discoloured muddy water, there stands a city
whose name, let us say, is Horta.

But the most interesting characteristic of this island (which seems like
a sort of penal settlement for condemned cattle) consists in its being
the only known habitat of an extremely rare and gorgeous butterfly.
The species is even more rare than it is beautiful, which is not saying
little. I have already alluded to my travels. I travelled at that time,
but strictly for myself and with a moderation unknown in our days of
round-the-world tickets. I even travelled with a purpose. As a matter of
fact, I am--"Ha, ha, ha!--a desperate butterfly-slayer. Ha, ha, ha!"

This was the tone in which Mr. Harry Gee, the manager of the cattle
station, alluded to my pursuits. He seemed to consider me the greatest
absurdity in the world. On the other hand, the B. O. S. Co., Ltd.,
represented to him the acme of the nineteenth century's achievement. I
believe that he slept in his leggings and spurs. His days he spent in
the saddle flying over the plains, followed by a train of half-wild
horsemen, who called him Don Enrique, and who had no definite idea of
the B. O. S. Co., Ltd., which paid their wages. He was an excellent
manager, but I don't see why, when we met at meals, he should have
thumped me on the back, with loud, derisive inquiries: "How's the deadly
sport to-day? Butterflies going strong? Ha, ha, ha!"--especially as he
charged me two dollars per diem for the hospitality of the B. O. S. Co.,
Ltd., (capital L1,500,000, fully paid up), in whose balance-sheet for
that year those monies are no doubt included. "I don't think I can
make it anything less in justice to my company," he had remarked, with
extreme gravity, when I was arranging with him the terms of my stay on
the island.

His chaff would have been harmless enough if intimacy of intercourse
in the absence of all friendly feeling were not a thing detestable in
itself. Moreover, his facetiousness was not very amusing. It consisted
in the wearisome repetition of descriptive phrases applied to people
with a burst of laughter. "Desperate butterfly-slayer. Ha, ha, ha!" was
one sample of his peculiar wit which he himself enjoyed so much. And in
the same vein of exquisite humour he called my attention to the engineer
of the steam-launch, one day, as we strolled on the path by the side of
the creek.

The man's head and shoulders emerged above the deck, over which were
scattered various tools of his trade and a few pieces of machinery. He
was doing some repairs to the engines. At the sound of our footsteps
he raised anxiously a grimy face with a pointed chin and a tiny fair
moustache. What could be seen of his delicate features under the black
smudges appeared to me wasted and livid in the greenish shade of the
enormous tree spreading its foliage over the launch moored close to the
bank.

To my great surprise, Harry Gee addressed him as "Crocodile," in
that half-jeering, half-bullying tone which is characteristic of
self-satisfaction in his delectable kind:

"How does the work get on, Crocodile?"

I should have said before that the amiable Harry had picked up French
of a sort somewhere--in some colony or other--and that he pronounced
it with a disagreeable forced precision as though he meant to guy the
language. The man in the launch answered him quickly in a pleasant
voice. His eyes had a liquid softness and his teeth flashed dazzlingly
white between his thin, drooping lips. The manager turned to me, very
cheerful and loud, explaining:

"I call him Crocodile because he lives half in, half out of the creek.
Amphibious--see? There's nothing else amphibious living on the island
except crocodiles; so he must belong to the species--eh? But in reality
he's nothing less than un citoyen anarchiste de Barcelone."

"A citizen anarchist from Barcelona?" I repeated, stupidly, looking down
at the man. He had turned to his work in the engine-well of the launch
and presented his bowed back to us. In that attitude I heard him
protest, very audibly:

"I do not even know Spanish."

"Hey? What? You dare to deny you come from over there?" the accomplished
manager was down on him truculently.

At this the man straightened himself up, dropping a spanner he had been
using, and faced us; but he trembled in all his limbs.

"I deny nothing, nothing, nothing!" he said, excitedly.

He picked up the spanner and went to work again without paying any
further attention to us. After looking at him for a minute or so, we
went away.

"Is he really an anarchist?" I asked, when out of ear-shot.

"I don't care a hang what he is," answered the humorous official of the
B. O. S. Co. "I gave him the name because it suited me to label him in
that way, It's good for the company."

"For the company!" I exclaimed, stopping short.

"Aha!" he triumphed, tilting up his hairless pug face and straddling his
thin, long legs. "That surprises you. I am bound to do my best for my
company. They have enormous expenses. Why--our agent in Horta tells me
they spend fifty thousand pounds every year in advertising all over the
world! One can't be too economical in working the show. Well, just you
listen. When I took charge here the estate had no steam-launch. I asked
for one, and kept on asking by every mail till I got it; but the man
they sent out with it chucked his job at the end of two months, leaving
the launch moored at the pontoon in Horta. Got a better screw at a
sawmill up the river--blast him! And ever since it has been the same
thing. Any Scotch or Yankee vagabond that likes to call himself a
mechanic out here gets eighteen pounds a month, and the next you know
he's cleared out, after smashing something as likely as not. I give you
my word that some of the objects I've had for engine-drivers couldn't
tell the boiler from the funnel. But this fellow understands his trade,
and I don't mean him to clear out. See?"

And he struck me lightly on the chest for emphasis. Disregarding his
peculiarities of manner, I wanted to know what all this had to do with
the man being an anarchist.

"Come!" jeered the manager. "If you saw suddenly a barefooted, unkempt
chap slinking amongst the bushes on the sea face of the island, and at
the same time observed less than a mile from the beach, a small schooner
full of niggers hauling off in a hurry, you wouldn't think the man fell
there from the sky, would you? And it could be nothing else but either
that or Cayenne. I've got my wits about me. Directly I sighted this
queer game I said to myself--'Escaped Convict.' I was as certain of
it as I am of seeing you standing here this minute. So I spurred on
straight at him. He stood his ground for a bit on a sand hillock crying
out: 'Monsieur! Monsieur! Arretez!' then at the last moment broke and
ran for life. Says I to myself, 'I'll tame you before I'm done with
you.' So without a single word I kept on, heading him off here and
there. I rounded him up towards the shore, and at last I had him
corralled on a spit, his heels in the water and nothing but sea and sky
at his back, with my horse pawing the sand and shaking his head within a
yard of him.