The Shadow Line

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THE SHADOW LINE

A CONFESSION

By Joseph Conrad



"Worthy of my undying regard"



To Borys And All Others Who,
Like Himself, Have Crossed In Early Youth
The Shadow Line Of Their Generation With Love





PART ONE


--_D'autre fois, calme plat, grand miroir De mon desespoir_.
--BAUDELAIRE


I

Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very young. No. The
very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege
of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful
continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.

One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness--and enters an
enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of
the path has its seduction. And it isn't because it is an undiscovered
country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that
way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an
uncommon or personal sensation--a bit of one's own.

One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessors, excited,
amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together--the kicks and
the half-pence, as the saying is--the picturesque common lot that holds
so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes.
One goes on. And the time, too, goes on--till one perceives ahead a
shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be
left behind.

This is the period of life in which such moments of which I have spoken
are likely to come. What moments? Why, the moments of boredom, of
weariness, of dissatisfaction. Rash moments. I mean moments when the
still young are inclined to commit rash actions, such as getting married
suddenly or else throwing up a job for no reason.

This is not a marriage story. It wasn't so bad as that with me. My
action, rash as it was, had more the character of divorce--almost of
desertion. For no reason on which a sensible person could put a finger I
threw up my job--chucked my berth--left the ship of which the worst that
could be said was that she was a steamship and therefore, perhaps, not
entitled to that blind loyalty which. . . . However, it's no use trying
to put a gloss on what even at the time I myself half suspected to be a
caprice.

It was in an Eastern port. She was an Eastern ship, inasmuch as then
she belonged to that port. She traded among dark islands on a blue
reef-scarred sea, with the Red Ensign over the taffrail and at her
masthead a house-flag, also red, but with a green border and with a
white crescent in it. For an Arab owned her, and a Syed at that. Hence
the green border on the flag. He was the head of a great House of
Straits Arabs, but as loyal a subject of the complex British Empire as
you could find east of the Suez Canal. World politics did not trouble
him at all, but he had a great occult power amongst his own people.

It was all one to us who owned the ship. He had to employ white men in
the shipping part of his business, and many of those he so employed had
never set eyes on him from the first to the last day. I myself saw him
but once, quite accidentally on a wharf--an old, dark little man blind
in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers. He was having his hand
severely kissed by a crowd of Malay pilgrims to whom he had done some
favour, in the way of food and money. His alms-giving, I have heard, was
most extensive, covering almost the whole Archipelago. For isn't it said
that "The charitable man is the friend of Allah"?

Excellent (and picturesque) Arab owner, about whom one needed not to
trouble one's head, a most excellent Scottish ship--for she was that
from the keep up--excellent sea-boat, easy to keep clean, most handy in
every way, and if it had not been for her internal propulsion, worthy of
any man's love, I cherish to this day a profound respect for her memory.
As to the kind of trade she was engaged in and the character of my
shipmates, I could not have been happier if I had had the life and the
men made to my order by a benevolent Enchanter.

And suddenly I left all this. I left it in that, to us, inconsequential
manner in which a bird flies away from a comfortable branch. It was
as though all unknowing I had heard a whisper or seen something.
Well--perhaps! One day I was perfectly right and the next everything was
gone--glamour, flavour, interest, contentment--everything. It was one
of these moments, you know. The green sickness of late youth descended
on me and carried me off. Carried me off that ship, I mean.

We were only four white men on board, with a large crew of Kalashes and
two Malay petty officers. The Captain stared hard as if wondering what
ailed me. But he was a sailor, and he, too, had been young at one time.
Presently a smile came to lurk under his thick iron-gray moustache, and
he observed that, of course, if I felt I must go he couldn't keep me
by main force. And it was arranged that I should be paid off the
next morning. As I was going out of his cabin he added suddenly, in a
peculiar wistful tone, that he hoped I would find what I was so anxious
to go and look for. A soft, cryptic utterance which seemed to reach
deeper than any diamond-hard tool could have done. I do believe he
understood my case.

But the second engineer attacked me differently. He was a sturdy young
Scot, with a smooth face and light eyes. His honest red countenance
emerged out of the engine-room companion and then the whole robust man,
with shirt sleeves turned up, wiping slowly the massive fore-arms with
a lump of cotton-waste. And his light eyes expressed bitter distaste, as
though our friendship had turned to ashes. He said weightily: "Oh! Aye!
I've been thinking it was about time for you to run away home and get
married to some silly girl."

It was tacitly understood in the port that John Nieven was a fierce
misogynist; and the absurd character of the sally convinced me that he
meant to be nasty--very nasty--had meant to say the most crushing thing
he could think of. My laugh sounded deprecatory. Nobody but a friend
could be so angry as that. I became a little crestfallen. Our chief
engineer also took a characteristic view of my action, but in a kindlier
spirit.

He was young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard
all round his haggard face. All day long, at sea or in harbour, he could
be seen walking hastily up and down the after-deck, wearing an
intense, spiritually rapt expression, which was caused by a perpetual
consciousness of unpleasant physical sensations in his internal economy.
For he was a confirmed dyspeptic. His view of my case was very simple.
He said it was nothing but deranged liver. Of course! He suggested I
should stay for another trip and meantime dose myself with a certain
patent medicine in which his own belief was absolute. "I'll tell you
what I'll do. I'll buy you two bottles, out of my own pocket. There. I
can't say fairer than that, can I?"

I believe he would have perpetrated the atrocity (or generosity) at the
merest sign of weakening on my part. By that time, however, I was more
discontented, disgusted, and dogged than ever. The past eighteen months,
so full of new and varied experience, appeared a dreary, prosaic waste
of days. I felt--how shall I express it?--that there was no truth to be
got out of them.

What truth? I should have been hard put to it to explain. Probably, if
pressed, I would have burst into tears simply. I was young enough for
that.

Next day the Captain and I transacted our business in the Harbour
Office. It was a lofty, big, cool, white room, where the screened light
of day glowed serenely. Everybody in it--the officials, the public--were
in white. Only the heavy polished desks gleamed darkly in a central
avenue, and some papers lying on them were blue. Enormous punkahs sent
from on high a gentle draught through that immaculate interior and upon
our perspiring heads.

The official behind the desk we approached grinned amiably and kept it
up till, in answer to his perfunctory question, "Sign off and on again?"
my Captain answered, "No! Signing off for good." And then his grin
vanished in sudden solemnity. He did not look at me again till he
handed me my papers with a sorrowful expression, as if they had been my
passports for Hades.

While I was putting them away he murmured some question to the Captain,
and I heard the latter answer good-humouredly:

"No. He leaves us to go home."

"Oh!" the other exclaimed, nodding mournfully over my sad condition.

I didn't know him outside the official building, but he leaned forward
the desk to shake hands with me, compassionately, as one would with some
poor devil going out to be hanged; and I am afraid I performed my part
ungraciously, in the hardened manner of an impenitent criminal.

No homeward-bound mail-boat was due for three or four days. Being now a
man without a ship, and having for a time broken my connection with the
sea--become, in fact, a mere potential passenger--it would have been
more appropriate perhaps if I had gone to stay at an hotel. There it
was, too, within a stone's throw of the Harbour Office, low, but somehow
palatial, displaying its white, pillared pavilions surrounded by trim
grass plots. I would have felt a passenger indeed in there! I gave it a
hostile glance and directed my steps toward the Officers' Sailors' Home.

I walked in the sunshine, disregarding it, and in the shade of the big
trees on the esplanade without enjoying it. The heat of the tropical
East descended through the leafy boughs, enveloping my thinly-clad body,
clinging to my rebellious discontent, as if to rob it of its freedom.

The Officers' Home was a large bungalow with a wide verandah and a
curiously suburban-looking little garden of bushes and a few trees
between it and the street. That institution partook somewhat of the
character of a residential club, but with a slightly Governmental
flavour about it, because it was administered by the Harbour Office. Its
manager was officially styled Chief Steward. He was an unhappy, wizened
little man, who if put into a jockey's rig would have looked the part to
perfection. But it was obvious that at some time or other in his life,
in some capacity or other, he had been connected with the sea. Possibly
in the comprehensive capacity of a failure.

I should have thought his employment a very easy one, but he used to
affirm for some reason or other that his job would be the death of him
some day. It was rather mysterious. Perhaps everything naturally was too
much trouble for him. He certainly seemed to hate having people in the
house.

On entering it I thought he must be feeling pleased. It was as still as
a tomb. I could see no one in the living rooms; and the verandah, too,
was empty, except for a man at the far end dozing prone in a long chair.
At the noise of my footsteps he opened one horribly fish-like eye. He
was a stranger to me. I retreated from there, and crossing the dining
room--a very bare apartment with a motionless punkah hanging over the
centre table--I knocked at a door labelled in black letters: "Chief
Steward."

The answer to my knock being a vexed and doleful plaint: "Oh, dear! Oh,
dear! What is it now?" I went in at once.

It was a strange room to find in the tropics. Twilight and stuffiness
reigned in there. The fellow had hung enormously ample, dusty, cheap
lace curtains over his windows, which were shut. Piles of cardboard
boxes, such as milliners and dressmakers use in Europe, cumbered the
corners; and by some means he had procured for himself the sort of
furniture that might have come out of a respectable parlour in the East
End of London--a horsehair sofa, arm-chairs of the same. I glimpsed
grimy antimacassars scattered over that horrid upholstery, which
was awe-inspiring, insomuch that one could not guess what mysterious
accident, need, or fancy had collected it there. Its owner had taken
off his tunic, and in white trousers and a thin, short-sleeved singlet
prowled behind the chair-backs nursing his meagre elbows.

An exclamation of dismay escaped him when he heard that I had come for a
stay; but he could not deny that there were plenty of vacant rooms.

"Very well. Can you give me the one I had before?"

He emitted a faint moan from behind a pile of cardboard boxes on the
table, which might have contained gloves or handkerchies or neckties. I
wonder what the fellow did keep in them? There was a smell of decaying
coral, or Oriental dust of zoological speciments in that den of his. I
could only see the top of his head and his unhappy eyes levelled at me
over the barrier.

"It's only for a couple of days," I said, intending to cheer him up.

"Perhaps you would like to pay in advance?" he suggested eagerly.

"Certainly not!" I burst out directly I could speak. "Never heard of
such a thing! This is the most infernal cheek. . . ."

He had seized his head in both hands--a gesture of despair which checked
my indignation.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Don't fly out like this. I am asking everybody."

"I don't believe it," I said bluntly.

"Well, I am going to. And if you gentlemen all agreed to pay in advance
I could make Hamilton pay up, too. He's always turning up ashore dead
broke, and even when he has some money he won't settle his bills. I
don't know what to do with him. He swears at me and tells me I can't
chuck a white man out into the street here. So if you only would. . . ."

I was amazed. Incredulous, too. I suspected the fellow of gratuitous
impertinence. I told him with marked emphasis that I would see him and
Hamilton hanged first, and requested him to conduct me to my room with
no more of his nonsense. He produced then a key from somewhere and led
the way out of his lair, giving me a vicious sidelong look in passing.

"Any one I know staying here?" I asked him before he left my room.

He had recovered his usual pained impatient tone, and said that Captain
Giles was there, back from a Solo Sea trip. Two other guests were
staying also. He paused. And, of course, Hamilton, he added.

"Oh, yes! Hamilton," I said, and the miserable creature took himself off
with a final groan.

His impudence still rankled when I came into the dining room at tiffin
time. He was there on duty overlooking the Chinamen servants. The tiffin
was laid on one end only of the long table, and the punkah was stirring
the hot air lazily--mostly above a barren waste of polished wood.

We were four around the cloth. The dozing stranger from the chair was
one. Both his eyes were partly opened now, but they did not seem to see
anything. He was supine. The dignified person next him, with short side
whiskers and a carefully scraped chin, was, of course, Hamilton. I have
never seen any one so full of dignity for the station in life Providence
had been pleased to place him in. I had been told that he regarded me as
a rank outsider. He raised not only his eyes, but his eyebrows as well,
at the sound I made pulling back my chair.

Captain Giles was at the head of the table. I exchanged a few words of
greeting with him and sat down on his left. Stout and pale, with a great
shiny dome of a bald forehead and prominent brown eyes, he might have
been anything but a seaman. You would not have been surprised to learn
that he was an architect. To me (I know how absurd it is) to me he
looked like a churchwarden. He had the appearance of a man from whom you
would expect sound advice, moral sentiments, with perhaps a platitude or
two thrown in on occasion, not from a desire to dazzle, but from honest
conviction.

Though very well known and appreciated in the shipping world, he had
no regular employment. He did not want it. He had his own peculiar
position. He was an expert. An expert in--how shall I say it?--in
intricate navigation. He was supposed to know more about remote and
imperfectly charted parts of the Archipelago than any man living. His
brain must have been a perfect warehouse of reefs, positions, bearings,
images of headlands, shapes of obscure coasts, aspects of innumerable
islands, desert and otherwise. Any ship, for instance, bound on a trip
to Palawan or somewhere that way would have Captain Giles on board,
either in temporary command or "to assist the master." It was said that
he had a retaining fee from a wealthy firm of Chinese steamship owners,
in view of such services. Besides, he was always ready to relieve any
man who wished to take a spell ashore for a time. No owner was ever
known to object to an arrangement of that sort. For it seemed to be the
established opinion at the port that Captain Giles was as good as
the best, if not a little better. But in Hamilton's view he was an
"outsider." I believe that for Hamilton the generalisation "outsider"
covered the whole lot of us; though I suppose that he made some
distinctions in his mind.

I didn't try to make conversation with Captain Giles, whom I had not
seen more than twice in my life. But, of course, he knew who I was.
After a while, inclining his big shiny head my way, he addressed me
first in his friendly fashion. He presumed from seeing me there, he
said, that I had come ashore for a couple of days' leave.

He was a low-voiced man. I spoke a little louder, saying that: No--I had
left the ship for good.

"A free man for a bit," was his comment.

"I suppose I may call myself that--since eleven o'clock," I said.

Hamilton had stopped eating at the sound of our voices. He laid down
his knife and fork gently, got up, and muttering something about "this
infernal heat cutting one's appetite," went out of the room. Almost
immediately we heard him leave the house down the verandah steps.

On this Captain Giles remarked easily that the fellow had no doubt gone
off to look after my old job. The Chief Steward, who had been leaning
against the wall, brought his face of an unhappy goat nearer to the
table and addressed us dolefully. His object was to unburden himself of
his eternal grievance against Hamilton. The man kept him in hot water
with the Harbour Office as to the state of his accounts. He wished
to goodness he would get my job, though in truth what would it be?
Temporary relief at best.

I said: "You needn't worry. He won't get my job. My successor is on
board already."

He was surprised, and I believe his face fell a little at the news.
Captain Giles gave a soft laugh. We got up and went out on the verandah,
leaving the supine stranger to be dealt with by the Chinamen. The last
thing I saw they had put a plate with a slice of pine-apple on it before
him and stood back to watch what would happen. But the experiment seemed
a failure. He sat insensible.

It was imparted to me in a low voice by Captain Giles that this was
an officer of some Rajah's yacht which had come into our port to be
dry-docked. Must have been "seeing life" last night, he added, wrinkling
his nose in an intimate, confidential way which pleased me vastly. For
Captain Giles had prestige. He was credited with wonderful adventures
and with some mysterious tragedy in his life. And no man had a word to
say against him. He continued:

"I remember him first coming ashore here some years ago. Seems only the
other day. He was a nice boy. Oh! these nice boys!"

I could not help laughing aloud. He looked startled, then joined in the
laugh. "No! No! I didn't mean that," he cried. "What I meant is that
some of them do go soft mighty quick out here."

Jocularly I suggested the beastly heat as the first cause. But Captain
Giles disclosed himself possessed of a deeper philosophy. Things out
East were made easy for white men. That was all right. The difficulty
was to go on keeping white, and some of these nice boys did not know
how. He gave me a searching look, and in a benevolent, heavy-uncle
manner asked point blank:

"Why did you throw up your berth?"

I became angry all of a sudden; for you can understand how exasperating
such a question was to a man who didn't know. I said to myself that I
ought to shut up that moralist; and to him aloud I said with challenging
politeness:

"Why . . . ? Do you disapprove?"

He was too disconcerted to do more than mutter confusedly: "I! . . . In
a general way. . ." and then gave me up. But he retired in good order,
under the cover of a heavily humorous remark that he, too, was getting
soft, and that this was his time for taking his little siesta--when he
was on shore. "Very bad habit. Very bad habit."

There was a simplicity in the man which would have disarmed a touchiness
even more youthful than mine. So when next day at tiffin he bent his
head toward me and said that he had met my late Captain last evening,
adding in an undertone: "He's very sorry you left. He had never had a
mate that suited him so well," I answered him earnestly, without any
affectation, that I certainly hadn't been so comfortable in any ship or
with any commander in all my sea-going days.

"Well--then," he murmured.

"Haven't you heard, Captain Giles, that I intend to go home?"

"Yes," he said benevolently. "I have heard that sort of thing so often
before."

"What of that?" I cried. I thought he was the most dull, unimaginative
man I had ever met. I don't know what more I would have said, but the
much-belated Hamilton came in just then and took his usual seat. So I
dropped into a mumble.

"Anyhow, you shall see it done this time."

Hamilton, beautifully shaved, gave Captain Giles a curt nod, but didn't
even condescend to raise his eyebrows at me; and when he spoke it was
only to tell the Chief Steward that the food on his plate wasn't fit
to be set before a gentleman. The individual addressed seemed much too
unhappy to groan. He cast his eyes up to the punkah and that was all.

Captain Giles and I got up from the table, and the stranger next to
Hamilton followed our example, manoeuvring himself to his feet with
difficulty. He, poor fellow, not because he was hungry but I verily
believe only to recover his self-respect, had tried to put some of that
unworthy food into his mouth. But after dropping his fork twice and
generally making a failure of it, he had sat still with an air of
intense mortification combined with a ghastly glazed stare. Both Giles
and I had avoided looking his way at table.

On the verandah he stopped short on purpose to address to us anxiously
a long remark which I failed to understand completely. It sounded like
some horrible unknown language. But when Captain Giles, after only an
instant for reflection, assured him with homely friendliness, "Aye, to
be sure. You are right there," he appeared very much gratified indeed,
and went away (pretty straight, too) to seek a distant long chair.

"What was he trying to say?" I asked with disgust.

"I don't know. Mustn't be down too much on a fellow. He's feeling pretty
wretched, you may be sure; and to-morrow he'll feel worse yet."

Judging by the man's appearance it seemed impossible. I wondered
what sort of complicated debauch had reduced him to that unspeakable
condition. Captain Giles' benevolence was spoiled by a curious air of
complacency which I disliked. I said with a little laugh:

"Well, he will have you to look after him." He made a deprecatory
gesture, sat down, and took up a paper. I did the same. The papers
were old and uninteresting, filled up mostly with dreary stereotyped
descriptions of Queen Victoria's first jubilee celebrations. Probably we
should have quickly fallen into a tropical afternoon doze if it had not
been for Hamilton's voice raised in the dining room. He was finishing
his tiffin there. The big double doors stood wide open permanently, and
he could not have had any idea how near to the doorway our chairs
were placed. He was heard in a loud, supercilious tone answering some
statement ventured by the Chief Steward.

"I am not going to be rushed into anything. They will be glad enough to
get a gentleman I imagine. There is no hurry."

A loud whispering from the Steward succeeded and then again Hamilton was
heard with even intenser scorn.

"What? That young ass who fancies himself for having been chief mate
with Kent so long? . . . Preposterous."

Giles and I looked at each other. Kent being the came of my late
commander, Captain Giles' whisper, "He's talking of you," seemed to me
sheer waste of breath. The Chief Steward must have stuck to his point,
whatever it was, because Hamilton was heard again more supercilious if
possible, and also very emphatic:

"Rubbish, my good man! One doesn't _compete_ with a rank outsider like
that. There's plenty of time."

Then there were pushing of chairs, footsteps in the next room, and
plaintive expostulations from the Steward, who was pursuing Hamilton,
even out of doors through the main entrance.

"That's a very insulting sort of man," remarked Captain
Giles--superfluously, I thought. "Very insulting. You haven't offended
him in some way, have you?"

"Never spoke to him in my life," I said grumpily. "Can't imagine what
he means by competing. He has been trying for my job after I left--and
didn't get it. But that isn't exactly competition."

Captain Giles balanced his big benevolent head thoughtfully. "He didn't
get it," he repeated very slowly. "No, not likely either, with Kent.
Kent is no end sorry you left him. He gives you the name of a good
seaman, too."