Some Reminiscences

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Some Reminiscences


Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's very gratifying, to be sure"?
Well, yes, it is gratifying--thank you. It is at least as gratifying to
be certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates
would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association
or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic
institution such as the London County Council, for instance. The above
prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general
sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because
a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published in
a French translation, a Parisian critic--I am almost certain it was M.
Gustave Kahn in the "Gil-Blas"--giving me a short notice, summed up
his rapid impression of the writer's quality in the words un puissant
reveur. So be it! Who would cavil at the words of a friendly reader? Yet
perhaps not such an unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold
to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of
responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before
the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of
interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked
form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be
rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that
comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried to be a sober
worker all my life--all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt,
having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession,
but also from artistic conviction. Yet there are so many pitfalls on
each side of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a
little battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the
mere daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept
always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power, and
truth, and peace.

As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing in their
time. I seem to hear your polite murmur that "Surely this might have
been taken for granted." Well, no. It might not have been. That august
academical body the Marine Department of the Board of Trade takes
nothing for granted in the granting of its learned degrees. By its
regulations issued under the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very word
_sober_ must be written, or a whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the
most enthusiastic appreciation will avail you nothing. The door of the
examination rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.
The most fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly
fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board of
Trade. As I have been face to face at various times with all the
examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can be no doubt
as to the force and the continuity of my abstemiousness. Three of them
were examiners in seamanship, and it was my fate to be delivered into
the hands of each of them at proper intervals of sea service. The first
of all, tall, spare, with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet,
kindly manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced
to conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my
appearance. His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his crossed
legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice, and went on,
went on. . . . It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange
microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I
could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly
reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in
my answers. But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept
upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of
untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got
frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did
not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious,
and weird. "This ancient person," I said to myself, terrified, "is so
near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is
considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is all very well
for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room
into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the
way to my hired home." This statement is not so much of a verbal
exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through
my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing
to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this
earth. I verily believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of
languid way. At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last
for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper
to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting
bow. . . .

When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon,
and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and
tip him a shilling, said:

"Well! I thought you were never coming out."

"How long have I been in there?" I asked faintly.

He pulled out his watch.

"He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this ever
happened with any of the gentlemen before."

It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk on
air. And the human animal being averse from change and timid before the
unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really being examined
by the same man on a future occasion. But when the time of ordeal
came round again the doorkeeper let me into another room, with the
now familiar paraphernalia of models of ships and tackle, a board for
signals on the wall, a big long table covered with official forms,
and having an unrigged mast fixed to the edge. The solitary tenant
was unknown to me by sight, though not by reputation, which was simply
execrable. Short and sturdy as far as I could judge, clad in an old,
brown, morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his
eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the other side
of the table. He was motionless, mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with
something mournful too in the pose, like that statue of Giuliano (I
think) de' Medici shading his face on the tomb by Michael Angelo,
though, of course, he was far, far from being beautiful. He began by
trying to make me talk nonsense. But I had been warned of that fiendish
trait, and contradicted him with great assurance. After a while he left
off. So far good. But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the
abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and more
impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and then, placing
me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under certain conditions of
weather, season, locality, &c. &c.--all very clear and precise--ordered
me to execute a certain manoeuvre. Before I was half through with it he
did some material damage to the ship. Directly I had grappled with the
difficulty he caused another to present itself, and when that too
was met he stuck another ship before me, creating a very dangerous
situation. I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity in piling up
trouble upon a man.

"I wouldn't have got into that mess," I suggested mildly. "I could have
seen that ship before."

He never stirred the least bit.

"No, you couldn't. The weather's thick."

"Oh! I didn't know," I apologised blankly.

I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with
sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on.
You must understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me
was, I gathered, a homeward passage--the sort of passage I would not
wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ship seemed to labour under
a most comprehensive curse. It's no use enlarging on these never-ending
misfortunes; suffice it to say that long before the end I would have
welcomed with gratitude an opportunity to exchange into the "Flying
Dutchman." Finally he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and
provided me with a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks--the Dutch coast
presumably. Distance, eight miles. The evidence of such implacable
animosity deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.

"Well," he said--for our pace had been very smart indeed till then.

"I will have to think a little, sir."

"Doesn't look as if there were much time to think," he muttered
sardonically from under his hand.

"No, sir," I said with some warmth. "Not on board a ship I could see.
But so many accidents have happened that I really can't remember what
there's left for me to work with."

Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made unexpectedly a
grunting remark.

"You've done very well."

"Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?" I asked.

"Yes."

I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them both
go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of testing
resourcefulness came into play again.

"But there's only one cable. You've lost the other."

It was exasperating.

"Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser on
board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from
that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have to
go."

"Nothing more to do, eh?"

"No, sir. I could do no more."

He gave a bitter half-laugh.

"You could always say your prayers."

He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly. It was a sallow,
strong, unamiable face. He put me in a surly, bored fashion through the
usual questions as to lights and signals, and I escaped from the room
thankfully--passed! Forty minutes! And again I walked on air along Tower
Hill, where so many good men had lost their heads, because, I suppose,
they were not resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of hearts
I had no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third and
last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I should.
I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an unreasonable
time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .

But not a bit of it. When I presented myself to be examined for Master
the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face
in grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.

He commenced operations with an easy-going "Let's see. H'm. Suppose you
tell me all you know of charter-parties." He kept it up in that style
all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his
own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in
hand. It was very interesting. "What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?"
he queried suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon
a point of stowage.

I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave
him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange
he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before,
when in command of a 3000-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest
contrivance imaginable. "May be of use to you some day," he concluded.
"You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam."

There he was wrong. I never went into steam--not really. If I only live
long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort
of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the dark ages who had never
gone into steam--not really.

Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few interesting
details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.

"The use of wire rigging became general about that time too," he
observed. "I was a very young master then. That was before you were
born."

"Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857."

"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder
tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed
under a Government charter.

Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who
so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in
me the sense of the continuity of that sea-life into which I had stepped
from outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of
official relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as
though he had been an ancestor.

Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care on the
slip of blue paper, he remarked:

"You are of Polish extraction."

"Born there, sir."

He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for the
first time.

"Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I never
remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea. Don't
remember ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren't you?"

I said yes--very much so. We were remote from the sea not only by
situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect association, not
being a commercial nation at all, but purely agricultural. He made then
the quaint reflection that it was "a long way for me to come out to
begin a sea-life"; as if sea-life were not precisely a life in which one
goes a long way from home.

I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much nearer
my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was to be a
seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other. It was a matter of
deliberate choice.

He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent a
little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I
did not want to present myself to the British Merchant Service in an
altogether green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious
vocation was so strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea.
It was the exact truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat
exceptional psychology of my sea-going, I fear.

"I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at sea. Have
you now?"

I admitted I never had. The examiner had given himself up to the spirit
of gossiping idleness. For myself, I was in no haste to leave that room.
Not in the least. The era of examinations was over. I would never
again see that friendly man who was a professional ancestor, a sort of
grandfather in the craft. Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me,
and of that there was no sign. As he remained silent, looking at me, I
added:

"But I have heard of one, some years ago. He seems to have been a boy
serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not mistaken."

"What was his name?"

I told him.

"How did you say that?" he asked, puckering up his eyes at the uncouth
sound.

I repeated the name very distinctly.

"How do you spell it?"

I told him. He moved his head at the impracticable nature of that name,
and observed:

"It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?"

There was no hurry. I had passed for Master, and I had all the rest of
my life before me to make the best of it. That seemed a long time. I
went leisurely through a small mental calculation, and said:

"Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir."

"Is it?" The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the table to
me, and rose from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very abrupt ending of
our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part from that excellent man,
who was master of a ship before the whisper of the sea had reached my
cradle. He offered me his hand and wished me well. He even made a few
steps towards the door with me, and ended with good-natured advice.

"I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into steam.
When a man has got his master's certificate it's the proper time. If I
were you I would go into steam."

I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era of
examinations. But that time I did not walk on air, as on the first two
occasions. I walked across the Hill of many beheadings with measured
steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now a British master
mariner beyond a doubt. It was not that I had an exaggerated sense of
that very modest achievement, with which, however, luck, opportunity,
or any extraneous influence could have had nothing to do. That
fact, satisfactory and obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal
significance. It was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even
to some not very kind aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had
been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I don't
mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go
to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough,
in all conscience, the commotion of his little world had seemed a very
considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the
echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and
retrospect meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed
boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his
impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called
upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine
was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking
a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and
associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort
of "career" in my call. Of Russia or Germany there could be no question.
The nationality, the antecedents, made it impossible. The feeling
against the Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there
would have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School at
Pola. It would have meant six months' extra grinding at German, perhaps,
but I was not past the age of admission, and in other respects I was
well qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly was thought of--but
not by me. I must admit that in that respect my negative was accepted
at once. That order of feeling was comprehensible enough to the most
inimical of my critics. I was not called upon to offer explanations; the
truth is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but the sea.
There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the language
at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is with France that
Poland has most connection. There were some facilities for having me a
little looked after, at first. Letters were being written, answers
were being received, arrangements were being made for my departure
for Marseilles, where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in
a roundabout fashion through various French channels, had promised
good-naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent ship
for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier de chien.

I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own counsel.
But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already
the determined resolve, that "if a seaman, then an English seaman," was
formulated in my head though, of course, in the Polish language. I did
not know six words of English, and I was astute enough to understand
that it was much better to say nothing of my purpose. As it was I was
already looked upon as partly insane, at least by the more distant
acquaintances. The principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in
the good-natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.

This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out a
quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black, short beard,
a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He was as jovial and
good-natured as any boy could desire. I was still asleep in my room in
a modest hotel near the quays of the old port, after the fatigues of
the journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyons, when he burst in flinging the
shutters open to the sun of Provence and chiding me boisterously for
lying abed. How pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to
be up and off instantly for a "three years' campaign in the South Seas."
O magic words! "Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud"--that is
the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.

He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was unwearied;
but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me in a very
solemn spirit. He had been at sea himself, but had left off at the age
of twenty-five, finding he could earn his living on shore in a much more
agreeable manner. He was related to an incredible number of Marseilles
well-to-do families of a certain class. One of his uncles was a
ship-broker of good standing, with a large connection amongst English
ships; other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts,
sold chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers, shipwrights.
His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
Pilots. I made acquaintances amongst these people, but mainly amongst
the pilots. The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by
invitation, in a big half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs
on the look-out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and
the smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall Planier
lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon with a white
perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provencal
seamen. Under the general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin I
was made the guest of the Corporation of Pilots, and had the freedom
of their boats night or day. And many a day and a night too did I spend
cruising with these rough, kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy
with the sea began. Many a time "the little friend of Baptistin" had the
hooded cloak of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest
hands while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch
for the lights of ships. Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or shaved,
lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the pilot-breed, and
here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over my
sea-infancy. The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of
observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states
of the weather. They gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited
to sit in more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate
by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses of black
hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly white
teeth.

I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them,
Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style,
would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the
Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old
aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to
make me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the
master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense
and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other
men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and
in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by a not very
surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly
of the belle Madame Delestang.

Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose, and a
perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as it were
by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock's
"grand air" and courtly solemnity. He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie
only, and was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my
needs. He was such an ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist
that he used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary,
I should say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money
matters reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of
post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were still
promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur
de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs. You must admit
that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.
Luckily in the counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of
the Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts
were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in
making my wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist
(I suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with
heavily moulded cornices. I always felt on going out as though I had
been in the temple of some very dignified but completely temporal
religion. And it was generally on these occasions that under the great
carriage gateway Lady Ded-- I mean Madame Delestang, catching sight of
my raised hat, would beckon me with an amiable imperiousness to the side
of the carriage, and suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, "Venez
donc faire un tour avec nous," to which the husband would add an
encouraging "C'est ca. Allons, montez, jeune homme." He questioned me
sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as to the
way I employed my time, and never failed to express the hope that I
wrote regularly to my "honoured uncle." I made no secret of the way I
employed my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots
and so on entertained Madame Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman
could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of his new
experience amongst strange men and strange sensations. She expressed no
opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in the
gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and fleeting
episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street, she
offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight pressure, for a moment.
While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she
leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of warning in
her leisurely tone: "Il faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater
sa vie." I had never seen her face so close to mine before. She made
my heart beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life. But
she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed
to me.