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TO-MORROW

by Joseph Conrad


What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was
not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place. He had come
to settle there under circumstances not at all mysterious--he used to
be very communicative about them at the time--but extremely morbid and
unreasonable. He was possessed of some little money evidently, because
he bought a plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages
run up very cheaply. He occupied one of them himself and let the other
to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil, the retired boat-builder--a man of evil
repute as a domestic tyrant.

These cottages had one wall in common, shared in a line of iron railing
dividing their front gardens; a wooden fence separated their back
gardens. Miss Bessie Carvil was allowed, as it were of right, to throw
over it the tea-cloths, blue rags, or an apron that wanted drying.

"It rots the wood, Bessie my girl," the captain would remark mildly,
from his side of the fence, each time he saw her exercising that
privilege.

She was a tall girl; the fence was low, and she could spread her elbows
on the top. Her hands would be red with the bit of washing she had
done, but her forearms were white and shapely, and she would look at her
father's landlord in silence--in an informed silence which had an air of
knowledge, expectation and desire.

"It rots the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd. "It is the only unthrifty,
careless habit I know in you. Why don't you have a clothes line out in
your back yard?"

Miss Carvil would say nothing to this--she only shook her head
negatively. The tiny back yard on her side had a few stone-bordered
little beds of black earth, in which the simple flowers she found time
to cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly overgrown, as if belonging
to an exotic clime; and Captain Hagberd's upright, hale person, clad in
No. 1 sail-cloth from head to foot, would be emerging knee-deep out of
rank grass and the tall weeks on his side of the fence. He appeared,
with the colour and uncouth stiffness of the extraordinary material in
which he chose to clothe himself--"for the time being," would be his
mumbled remark to any observation on the subject--like a man roughened
out of granite, standing in a wilderness not big enough for a decent
billiard-room. A heavy figure of a man of stone, with a red handsome
face, a blue wandering eye, and a great white beard flowing to his waist
and never trimmed as far as Colebrook knew.

Seven years before, he had seriously answered, "Next month, I think,"
to the chaffing attempt to secure his custom made by that distinguished
local wit, the Colebrook barber, who happened to be sitting insolently
in the tap-room of the New Inn near the harbour, where the captain had
entered to buy an ounce of tobacco. After paying for his purchase with
three half-pence extracted from the corner of a handkerchief which he
carried in the cuff of his sleeve, Captain Hagberd went out. As soon
as the door was shut the barber laughed. "The old one and the young one
will be strolling arm in arm to get shaved in my place presently. The
tailor shall be set to work, and the barber, and the candlestick maker;
high old times are coming for Colebrook, they are coming, to be sure. It
used to be 'next week,' now it has come to 'next month,' and so on--soon
it will be next spring, for all I know."

Noticing a stranger listening to him with a vacant grin, he explained,
stretching out his legs cynically, that this queer old Hagberd, a
retired coasting-skipper, was waiting for the return of a son of his.
The boy had been driven away from home, he shouldn't wonder; had run
away to sea and had never been heard of since. Put to rest in Davy
Jones's locker this many a day, as likely as not. That old man came
flying to Colebrook three years ago all in black broadcloth (had lost
his wife lately then), getting out of a third-class smoker as if the
devil had been at his heels; and the only thing that brought him down
was a letter--a hoax probably. Some joker had written to him about a
seafaring man with some such name who was supposed to be hanging about
some girl or other, either in Colebrook or in the neighbourhood. "Funny,
ain't it?" The old chap had been advertising in the London papers for
Harry Hagberd, and offering rewards for any sort of likely information.
And the barber would go on to describe with sardonic gusto, how that
stranger in mourning had been seen exploring the country, in carts, on
foot, taking everybody into his confidence, visiting all the inns
and alehouses for miles around, stopping people on the road with his
questions, looking into the very ditches almost; first in the greatest
excitement, then with a plodding sort of perseverance, growing slower
and slower; and he could not even tell you plainly how his son looked.
The sailor was supposed to be one of two that had left a timber
ship, and to have been seen dangling after some girl; but the old man
described a boy of fourteen or so--"a clever-looking, high-spirited
boy." And when people only smiled at this he would rub his forehead in
a confused sort of way before he slunk off, looking offended. He found
nobody, of course; not a trace of anybody--never heard of anything worth
belief, at any rate; but he had not been able somehow to tear himself
away from Colebrook.

"It was the shock of this disappointment, perhaps, coming soon after the
loss of his wife, that had driven him crazy on that point," the barber
suggested, with an air of great psychological insight. After a time the
old man abandoned the active search. His son had evidently gone away;
but he settled himself to wait. His son had been once at least in
Colebrook in preference to his native place. There must have been some
reason for it, he seemed to think, some very powerful inducement, that
would bring him back to Colebrook again.

"Ha, ha, ha! Why, of course, Colebrook. Where else? That's the only
place in the United Kingdom for your long-lost sons. So he sold up his
old home in Colchester, and down he comes here. Well, it's a craze,
like any other. Wouldn't catch me going crazy over any of my youngsters
clearing out. I've got eight of them at home." The barber was showing
off his strength of mind in the midst of a laughter that shook the
tap-room.

Strange, though, that sort of thing, he would confess, with the
frankness of a superior intelligence, seemed to be catching. His
establishment, for instance, was near the harbour, and whenever a
sailor-man came in for a hair-cut or a shave--if it was a strange face he
couldn't help thinking directly, "Suppose he's the son of old Hagberd!"
He laughed at himself for it. It was a strong craze. He could remember
the time when the whole town was full of it. But he had his hopes of the
old chap yet. He would cure him by a course of judicious chaffing. He
was watching the progress of the treatment. Next week--next month--next
year! When the old skipper had put off the date of that return till next
year, he would be well on his way to not saying any more about it. In
other matters he was quite rational, so this, too, was bound to come.
Such was the barber's firm opinion.

Nobody had ever contradicted him; his own hair had gone grey since
that time, and Captain Hagberd's beard had turned quite white, and had
acquired a majestic flow over the No. 1 canvas suit, which he had made
for himself secretly with tarred twine, and had assumed suddenly, coming
out in it one fine morning, whereas the evening before he had been seen
going home in his mourning of broadcloth. It caused a sensation in the
High Street--shopkeepers coming to their doors, people in the houses
snatching up their hats to run out--a stir at which he seemed strangely
surprised at first, and then scared; but his only answer to the
wondering questions was that startled and evasive, "For the present."

That sensation had been forgotten, long ago; and Captain Hagberd
himself, if not forgotten, had come to be disregarded--the penalty of
dailiness--as the sun itself is disregarded unless it makes its power
felt heavily. Captain Hagberd's movements showed no infirmity: he walked
stiffly in his suit of canvas, a quaint and remarkable figure; only his
eyes wandered more furtively perhaps than of yore. His manner abroad had
lost its excitable watchfulness; it had become puzzled and diffident,
as though he had suspected that there was somewhere about him something
slightly compromising, some embarrassing oddity; and yet had remained
unable to discover what on earth this something wrong could be.

He was unwilling now to talk with the townsfolk. He had earned for
himself the reputation of an awful skinflint, of a miser in the matter
of living. He mumbled regretfully in the shops, bought inferior scraps
of meat after long hesitations; and discouraged all allusions to his
costume. It was as the barber had foretold. For all one could tell, he
had recovered already from the disease of hope; and only Miss Bessie
Carvil knew that he said nothing about his son's return because with him
it was no longer "next week," "next month," or even "next year." It was
"to-morrow."

In their intimacy of back yard and front garden he talked with her
paternally, reasonably, and dogmatically, with a touch of arbitrariness.
They met on the ground of unreserved confidence, which was authenticated
by an affectionate wink now and then. Miss Carvil had come to look
forward rather to these winks. At first they had discomposed her: the
poor fellow was mad. Afterwards she had learned to laugh at them: there
was no harm in him. Now she was aware of an unacknowledged, pleasurable,
incredulous emotion, expressed by a faint blush. He winked not in the
least vulgarly; his thin red face with a well-modelled curved nose, had
a sort of distinction--the more so that when he talked to her he looked
with a steadier and more intelligent glance. A handsome, hale, upright,
capable man, with a white beard. You did not think of his age. His son,
he affirmed, had resembled him amazingly from his earliest babyhood.

Harry would be one-and-thirty next July, he declared. Proper age to get
married with a nice, sensible girl that could appreciate a good home. He
was a very high-spirited boy. High-spirited husbands were the easiest
to manage. These mean, soft chaps, that you would think butter
wouldn't melt in their mouths, were the ones to make a woman thoroughly
miserable. And there was nothing like a home--a fireside--a good roof:
no turning out of your warm bed in all sorts of weather. "Eh, my dear?"

Captain Hagberd had been one of those sailors that pursue their calling
within sight of land. One of the many children of a bankrupt farmer, he
had been apprenticed hurriedly to a coasting skipper, and had remained
on the coast all his sea life. It must have been a hard one at first:
he had never taken to it; his affection turned to the land, with its
innumerable houses, with its quiet lives gathered round its firesides.
Many sailors feel and profess a rational dislike for the sea, but his
was a profound and emotional animosity--as if the love of the stabler
element had been bred into him through many generations.

"People did not know what they let their boys in for when they let them
go to sea," he expounded to Bessie. "As soon make convicts of them at
once." He did not believe you ever got used to it. The weariness of such
a life got worse as you got older. What sort of trade was it in which
more than half your time you did not put your foot inside your house?
Directly you got out to sea you had no means of knowing what went on
at home. One might have thought him weary of distant voyages; and the
longest he had ever made had lasted a fortnight, of which the most part
had been spent at anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as his
wife had inherited a house and enough to live on (from a bachelor uncle
who had made some money in the coal business) he threw up his command of
an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he had escaped from the
galleys. After all these years he might have counted on the fingers of
his two hands all the days he had been out of sight of England. He
had never known what it was to be out of soundings. "I have never been
further than eighty fathoms from the land," was one of his boasts.

Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of their cottage grew an
under-sized ash; and on summer afternoons she would bring out a chair
on the grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain Hagberd, in his
canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He dug every day in his front plot. He
turned it over and over several times every year, but was not going to
plant anything "just at present."

To Bessie Carvil he would state more explicitly: "Not till our Harry
comes home to-morrow." And she had heard this formula of hope so often
that it only awakened the vaguest pity in her heart for that hopeful old
man.

Everything was put off in that way, and everything was being prepared
likewise for to-morrow. There was a boxful of packets of various
flower-seeds to choose from, for the front garden. "He will doubtless let
you have your say about that, my dear," Captain Hagberd intimated to her
across the railing.

Miss Bessie's head remained bowed over her work. She had heard all this
so many times. But now and then she would rise, lay down her sewing, and
come slowly to the fence. There was a charm in these gentle ravings. He
was determined that his son should not go away again for the want of a
home all ready for him. He had been filling the other cottage with all
sorts of furniture. She imagined it all new, fresh with varnish, piled
up as in a warehouse. There would be tables wrapped up in sacking; rolls
of carpets thick and vertical like fragments of columns, the gleam of
white marble tops in the dimness of the drawn blinds. Captain Hagberd
always described his purchases to her, carefully, as to a person having
a legitimate interest in them. The overgrown yard of his cottage could
be laid over with concrete . . . after to-morrow.

"We may just as well do away with the fence. You could have your
drying-line out, quite clear of your flowers." He winked, and she would
blush faintly.

This madness that had entered her life through the kind impulses of her
heart had reasonable details. What if some day his son returned? But she
could not even be quite sure that he ever had a son; and if he existed
anywhere he had been too long away. When Captain Hagberd got excited in
his talk she would steady him by a pretence of belief, laughing a little
to salve her conscience.

Only once she had tried pityingly to throw some doubt on that hope
doomed to disappointment, but the effect of her attempt had scared her
very much. All at once over that man's face there came an expression of
horror and incredulity, as though he had seen a crack open out in the
firmament.

"You--you--you don't think he's drowned!"

For a moment he seemed to her ready to go out of his mind, for in his
ordinary state she thought him more sane than people gave him credit
for. On that occasion the violence of the emotion was followed by a most
paternal and complacent recovery.

"Don't alarm yourself, my dear," he said a little cunningly: "the sea
can't keep him. He does not belong to it. None of us Hagberds ever did
belong to it. Look at me; I didn't get drowned. Moreover, he isn't
a sailor at all; and if he is not a sailor he's bound to come back.
There's nothing to prevent him coming back. . . ."

His eyes began to wander.

"To-morrow."

She never tried again, for fear the man should go out of his mind on
the spot. He depended on her. She seemed the only sensible person in
the town; and he would congratulate himself frankly before her face
on having secured such a levelheaded wife for his son. The rest of the
town, he confided to her once, in a fit of temper, was certainly queer.
The way they looked at you--the way they talked to you! He had never got
on with any one in the place. Didn't like the people. He would not have
left his own country if it had not been clear that his son had taken a
fancy to Colebrook.

She humoured him in silence, listening patiently by the fence;
crocheting with downcast eyes. Blushes came with difficulty on her
dead-white complexion, under the negligently twisted opulence of
mahogany-coloured hair. Her father was frankly carroty.

She had a full figure; a tired, unrefreshed face. When Captain Hagberd
vaunted the necessity and propriety of a home and the delights of one's
own fireside, she smiled a little, with her lips only. Her home delights
had been confined to the nursing of her father during the ten best years
of her life.

A bestial roaring coming out of an upstairs window would interrupt their
talk. She would begin at once to roll up her crochet-work or fold her
sewing, without the slightest sign of haste. Meanwhile the howls and
roars of her name would go on, making the fishermen strolling upon the
sea-wall on the other side of the road turn their heads towards the
cottages. She would go in slowly at the front door, and a moment
afterwards there would fall a profound silence. Presently she would
reappear, leading by the hand a man, gross and unwieldy like a
hippopotamus, with a bad-tempered, surly face.

He was a widowed boat-builder, whom blindness had overtaken years before
in the full flush of business. He behaved to his daughter as if she
had been responsible for its incurable character. He had been heard to
bellow at the top of his voice, as if to defy Heaven, that he did not
care: he had made enough money to have ham and eggs for his breakfast
every morning. He thanked God for it, in a fiendish tone as though he
were cursing.

Captain Hagberd had been so unfavourably impressed by his tenant, that
once he told Miss Bessie, "He is a very extravagant fellow, my dear."

She was knitting that day, finishing a pair of socks for her father, who
expected her to keep up the supply dutifully. She hated knitting,
and, as she was just at the heel part, she had to keep her eyes on her
needles.

"Of course it isn't as if he had a son to provide for," Captain
Hagberd went on a little vacantly. "Girls, of course, don't require so
much--h'm-h'm. They don't run away from home, my dear."

"No," said Miss Bessie, quietly.

Captain Hagberd, amongst the mounds of turned-up earth, chuckled. With
his maritime rig, his weather-beaten face, his beard of Father Neptune,
he resembled a deposed sea-god who had exchanged the trident for the
spade.

"And he must look upon you as already provided for, in a manner. That's
the best of it with the girls. The husbands . . ." He winked. Miss
Bessie, absorbed in her knitting, coloured faintly.

"Bessie! my hat!" old Carvil bellowed out suddenly. He had been sitting
under the tree mute and motionless, like an idol of some remarkably
monstrous superstition. He never opened his mouth but to howl for her,
at her, sometimes about her; and then he did not moderate the terms of
his abuse. Her system was never to answer him at all; and he kept up
his shouting till he got attended to--till she shook him by the arm, or
thrust the mouthpiece of his pipe between his teeth. He was one of the
few blind people who smoke. When he felt the hat being put on his head
he stopped his noise at once. Then he rose, and they passed together
through the gate.

He weighed heavily on her arm. During their slow, toilful walks she
appeared to be dragging with her for a penance the burden of that infirm
bulk. Usually they crossed the road at once (the cottages stood in the
fields near the harbour, two hundred yards away from the end of the
street), and for a long, long time they would remain in view, ascending
imperceptibly the flight of wooden steps that led to the top of the
sea-wall. It ran on from east to west, shutting out the Channel like a
neglected railway embankment, on which no train had ever rolled within
memory of man. Groups of sturdy fishermen would emerge upon the sky,
walk along for a bit, and sink without haste. Their brown nets, like the
cobwebs of gigantic spiders, lay on the shabby grass of the slope; and,
looking up from the end of the street, the people of the town would
recognise the two Carvils by the creeping slowness of their gait.
Captain Hagberd, pottering aimlessly about his cottages, would raise his
head to see how they got on in their promenade.

He advertised still in the Sunday papers for Harry Hagberd. These sheets
were read in foreign parts to the end of the world, he informed Bessie.
At the same time he seemed to think that his son was in England--so
near to Colebrook that he would of course turn up "to-morrow." Bessie,
without committing herself to that opinion in so many words, argued that
in that case the expense of advertising was unnecessary; Captain Hagberd
had better spend that weekly half-crown on himself. She declared she did
not know what he lived on. Her argumentation would puzzle him and cast
him down for a time. "They all do it," he pointed out. There was a whole
column devoted to appeals after missing relatives. He would bring the
newspaper to show her. He and his wife had advertised for years; only
she was an impatient woman. The news from Colebrook had arrived the very
day after her funeral; if she had not been so impatient she might have
been here now, with no more than one day more to wait. "You are not an
impatient woman, my dear."

"I've no patience with you sometimes," she would say.

If he still advertised for his son he did not offer rewards for
information any more; for, with the muddled lucidity of a mental
derangement he had reasoned himself into a conviction as clear as
daylight that he had already attained all that could be expected in that
way. What more could he want? Colebrook was the place, and there was no
need to ask for more. Miss Carvil praised him for his good sense, and
he was soothed by the part she took in his hope, which had become his
delusion; in that idea which blinded his mind to truth and probability,
just as the other old man in the other cottage had been made blind, by
another disease, to the light and beauty of the world.

But anything he could interpret as a doubt--any coldness of assent, or
even a simple inattention to the development of his projects of a home
with his returned son and his son's wife--would irritate him into flings
and jerks and wicked side glances. He would dash his spade into
the ground and walk to and fro before it. Miss Bessie called it his
tantrums. She shook her finger at him. Then, when she came out again,
after he had parted with her in anger, he would watch out of the corner
of his eyes for the least sign of encouragement to approach the iron
railings and resume his fatherly and patronising relations.

For all their intimacy, which had lasted some years now, they had never
talked without a fence or a railing between them. He described to her
all the splendours accumulated for the setting-up of their housekeeping,
but had never invited her to an inspection. No human eye was to behold
them till Harry had his first look. In fact, nobody had ever been
inside his cottage; he did his own housework, and he guarded his son's
privilege so jealously that the small objects of domestic use he bought
sometimes in the town were smuggled rapidly across the front garden
under his canvas coat. Then, coming out, he would remark apologetically,
"It was only a small kettle, my dear."

And, if not too tired with her drudgery, or worried beyond endurance by
her father, she would laugh at him with a blush, and say: "That's all
right, Captain Hagberd; I am not impatient."

"Well, my dear, you haven't long to wait now," he would answer with a
sudden bashfulness, and looking uneasily, as though he had suspected
that there was something wrong somewhere.

Every Monday she paid him his rent over the railings. He clutched
the shillings greedily. He grudged every penny he had to spend on his
maintenance, and when he left her to make his purchases his bearing
changed as soon as he got into the street. Away from the sanction of her
pity, he felt himself exposed without defence. He brushed the walls with
his shoulder. He mistrusted the queerness of the people; yet, by then,
even the town children had left off calling after him, and the tradesmen
served him without a word. The slightest allusion to his clothing had
the power to puzzle and frighten especially, as if it were something
utterly unwarranted and incomprehensible.

In the autumn, the driving rain drummed on his sailcloth suit saturated
almost to the stiffness of sheet-iron, with its surface flowing with
water. When the weather was too bad, he retreated under the tiny porch,
and, standing close against the door, looked at his spade left planted
in the middle of the yard. The ground was so much dug up all over, that
as the season advanced it turned to a quagmire. When it froze hard, he
was disconsolate. What would Harry say? And as he could not have so much
of Bessie's company at that time of the year, the roars of old Carvil,
that came muffled through the closed windows, calling her indoors,
exasperated him greatly.