Typhoon

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Typhoon

[The other stories included in this volume ("Amy Foster," "Falk: A
Reminiscence," and "To-morrow") being already available in another
volume, have not been entered here.]



TYPHOON

BY JOSEPH CONRAD



Far as the mariner on highest mast Can see all around upon the calmed
vast, So wide was Neptune's hall . . . -- KEATS



AUTHOR'S NOTE

The main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the
stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been
written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.

The period is that which follows on my connection with Blackwood's
Magazine. I had just finished writing "The End of the Tether" and was
casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter
form than the tales in the volume of "Youth" when the instance of a
steamship full of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in
northern China occurred to my recollection. Years before I had heard
it being talked about in the East as a recent occurrence. It was for us
merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. Men
earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop,
not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also
because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never
had the time to get acquainted with them. Life, for most of us, is not
so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of
which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary
complication brought into the ship's life at a moment of exceptional
stress by the human element below her deck. Neither was the story itself
ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In that company each of us could
imagine easily what the whole thing was like. The financial difficulty
of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too
simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle talk
for which it was not adapted.

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that
such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient
subject for meditation. Yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all. I
felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent
to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive
that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that
would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.

What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him
I could see that he was the man for the situation. I don't mean to
say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in
contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is
not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. He
is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. Conscious invention
had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never
walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely
difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly
authentic. I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the
story, while I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a
typhoon of my actual experience.

At its first appearance "Typhoon," the story, was classed by some
critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece. Others picked out
MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention. Neither
was exclusively my intention. Both the typhoon and Captain MacWhirr
presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction
with which I approached the subject of the story. It was their
opportunity. It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to
discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages
themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for
themselves.

This is a belated reflection. If it had occurred to me before it would
have perhaps done away with the existence of this Author's Note; for,
indeed, the same remark applies to every story in this volume. None
of them are stories of experience in the absolute sense of the word.
Experience in them is but the canvas of the attempted picture. Each of
them has its more than one intention. With each the question is what the
writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the question for
itself in words which, if I may say so without undue solemnity, were
written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations.
And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its
own way to the conscience of each successive reader.

"Falk"--the second story in the volume--offended the delicacy of one
critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject. But what is the
subject of "Falk"? I personally do not feel so very certain about it. He
who reads must find out for himself. My intention in writing "Falk"
was not to shock anybody. As in most of my writings I insist not on
the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in
everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and
that is to capture the reader's attention, by securing his interest and
enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be,
within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of
human emotions.

I may safely say that Falk is absolutely true to my experience of
certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural
ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy. Falk obeys the law
of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to his right,
but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not
condescend to dodge the truth. As he is presented as sensitive enough to
be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience
had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject
of the tale. If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk's attempt
to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself
unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.

"Falk" shares with one other of my stories ("The Return" in the "Tales
of Unrest" volume) the distinction of never having been serialized. I
think the copy was shown to the editor of some magazine who rejected it
indignantly on the sole ground that "the girl never says anything." This
is perfectly true. From first to last Hermann's niece utters no word in
the tale--and it is not because she is dumb, but for the simple reason
that whenever she happens to come under the observation of the narrator
she has either no occasion or is too profoundly moved to speak. The
editor, who obviously had read the story, might have perceived that for
himself. Apparently he did not, and I refrained from pointing out the
impossibility to him because, since he did not venture to say that "the
girl" did not live, I felt no concern at his indignation.

All the other stories were serialized. The "Typhoon" appeared in the
early numbers of the Pall Mall Magazine, then under the direction of the
late Mr. Halkett. It was on that occasion, too, that I saw for the first
time my conceptions rendered by an artist in another medium. Mr. Maurice
Grieffenhagen knew how to combine in his illustrations the effect of his
own most distinguished personal vision with an absolute fidelity to the
inspiration of the writer. "Amy Foster" was published in The Illustrated
London News with a fine drawing of Amy on her day out giving tea to the
children at her home, in a hat with a big feather. "To-morrow" appeared
first in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of that story I will only say that
it struck many people by its adaptability to the stage and that I was
induced to dramatize it under the title of "One Day More"; up to the
present my only effort in that direction. I may also add that each of
the four stories on their appearance in book form was picked out on
various grounds as the "best of the lot" by different critics, who
reviewed the volume with a warmth of appreciation and understanding, a
sympathetic insight and a friendliness of expression for which I cannot
be sufficiently grateful.


1919. J. C.



TYPHOON

I

Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in
the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his
mind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity;
it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary,
irresponsive, and unruffled.

The only thing his aspect might have been said to suggest, at times, was
bashfulness; because he would sit, in business offices ashore, sunburnt
and smiling faintly, with downcast eyes. When he raised them, they were
perceived to be direct in their glance and of blue colour. His hair was
fair and extremely fine, clasping from temple to temple the bald dome
of his skull in a clamp as of fluffy silk. The hair of his face, on the
contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped
short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved,
fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the
surface of his cheeks. He was rather below the medium height, a bit
round-shouldered, and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked a
shade too tight for his arms and legs. As if unable to grasp what is due
to the difference of latitudes, he wore a brown bowler hat, a complete
suit of a brownish hue, and clumsy black boots. These harbour togs gave
to his thick figure an air of stiff and uncouth smartness. A thin silver
watch chain looped his waistcoat, and he never left his ship for the
shore without clutching in his powerful, hairy fist an elegant umbrella
of the very best quality, but generally unrolled. Young Jukes, the chief
mate, attending his commander to the gangway, would sometimes venture
to say, with the greatest gentleness, "Allow me, sir"--and possessing
himself of the umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferule, shake
the folds, twirl a neat furl in a jiffy, and hand it back; going through
the performance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon
Rout, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight,
would turn away his head in order to hide a smile. "Oh! aye! The blessed
gamp. . . . Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank 'ee," would mutter Captain MacWhirr,
heartily, without looking up.

Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day,
and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same
cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior
who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship
Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.
It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as
it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing
except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools. Yet the
uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the
bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in Captain
MacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could
have induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in
Belfast to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the
age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the
idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap
of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and
setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable
goals and in undreamt-of directions.

His father never really forgave him for this undutiful stupidity. "We
could have got on without him," he used to say later on, "but there's
the business. And he an only son, too!" His mother wept very much after
his disappearance. As it had never occurred to him to leave word behind,
he was mourned over for dead till, after eight months, his first letter
arrived from Talcahuano. It was short, and contained the statement:
"We had very fine weather on our passage out." But evidently, in the
writer's mind, the only important intelligence was to the effect that
his captain had, on the very day of writing, entered him regularly on
the ship's articles as Ordinary Seaman. "Because I can do the work," he
explained. The mother again wept copiously, while the remark, "Tom's an
ass," expressed the emotions of the father. He was a corpulent man, with
a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised
in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a
half-witted person.

MacWhirr's visits to his home were necessarily rare, and in the course
of years he despatched other letters to his parents, informing them of
his successive promotions and of his movements upon the vast earth. In
these missives could be found sentences like this: "The heat here is
very great." Or: "On Christmas day at 4 P. M. we fell in with some
icebergs." The old people ultimately became acquainted with a good
many names of ships, and with the names of the skippers who commanded
them--with the names of Scots and English shipowners--with the names
of seas, oceans, straits, promontories--with outlandish names of
lumber-ports, of rice-ports, of cotton-ports--with the names of
islands--with the name of their son's young woman. She was called Lucy.
It did not suggest itself to him to mention whether he thought the name
pretty. And then they died.

The great day of MacWhirr's marriage came in due course, following
shortly upon the great day when he got his first command.

All these events had taken place many years before the morning when, in
the chart-room of the steamer Nan-Shan, he stood confronted by the
fall of a barometer he had no reason to distrust. The fall--taking into
account the excellence of the instrument, the time of the year, and
the ship's position on the terrestrial globe--was of a nature ominously
prophetic; but the red face of the man betrayed no sort of inward
disturbance. Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover
the message of a prophecy till the fulfilment had brought it home to his
very door. "That's a fall, and no mistake," he thought. "There must be
some uncommonly dirty weather knocking about."

The Nan-Shan was on her way from the southward to the treaty port of
Fu-chau, with some cargo in her lower holds, and two hundred Chinese
coolies returning to their village homes in the province of Fo-kien,
after a few years of work in various tropical colonies. The morning was
fine, the oily sea heaved without a sparkle, and there was a queer white
misty patch in the sky like a halo of the sun. The fore-deck, packed
with Chinamen, was full of sombre clothing, yellow faces, and pigtails,
sprinkled over with a good many naked shoulders, for there was no wind,
and the heat was close. The coolies lounged, talked, smoked, or stared
over the rail; some, drawing water over the side, sluiced each other;
a few slept on hatches, while several small parties of six sat on their
heels surrounding iron trays with plates of rice and tiny teacups; and
every single Celestial of them was carrying with him all he had in the
world--a wooden chest with a ringing lock and brass on the corners,
containing the savings of his labours: some clothes of ceremony,
sticks of incense, a little opium maybe, bits of nameless rubbish of
conventional value, and a small hoard of silver dollars, toiled for in
coal lighters, won in gambling-houses or in petty trading, grubbed out
of earth, sweated out in mines, on railway lines, in deadly jungle,
under heavy burdens--amassed patiently, guarded with care, cherished
fiercely.

A cross swell had set in from the direction of Formosa Channel about ten
o'clock, without disturbing these passengers much, because the Nan-Shan,
with her flat bottom, rolling chocks on bilges, and great breadth of
beam, had the reputation of an exceptionally steady ship in a sea-way.
Mr. Jukes, in moments of expansion on shore, would proclaim loudly
that the "old girl was as good as she was pretty." It would never have
occurred to Captain MacWhirr to express his favourable opinion so loud
or in terms so fanciful.

She was a good ship, undoubtedly, and not old either. She had been built
in Dumbarton less than three years before, to the order of a firm of
merchants in Siam--Messrs. Sigg and Son. When she lay afloat, finished
in every detail and ready to take up the work of her life, the builders
contemplated her with pride.

"Sigg has asked us for a reliable skipper to take her out," remarked one
of the partners; and the other, after reflecting for a while, said:
"I think MacWhirr is ashore just at present." "Is he? Then wire him
at once. He's the very man," declared the senior, without a moment's
hesitation.

Next morning MacWhirr stood before them unperturbed, having travelled
from London by the midnight express after a sudden but undemonstrative
parting with his wife. She was the daughter of a superior couple who had
seen better days.

"We had better be going together over the ship, Captain," said the
senior partner; and the three men started to view the perfections of the
Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and from her keelson to the trucks of her
two stumpy pole-masts.

Captain MacWhirr had begun by taking off his coat, which he hung on the
end of a steam windless embodying all the latest improvements.

"My uncle wrote of you favourably by yesterday's mail to our good
friends--Messrs. Sigg, you know--and doubtless they'll continue you out
there in command," said the junior partner. "You'll be able to boast of
being in charge of the handiest boat of her size on the coast of China,
Captain," he added.

"Have you? Thank 'ee," mumbled vaguely MacWhirr, to whom the view of
a distant eventuality could appeal no more than the beauty of a wide
landscape to a purblind tourist; and his eyes happening at the moment to
be at rest upon the lock of the cabin door, he walked up to it, full of
purpose, and began to rattle the handle vigorously, while he observed,
in his low, earnest voice, "You can't trust the workmen nowadays. A
brand-new lock, and it won't act at all. Stuck fast. See? See?"

As soon as they found themselves alone in their office across the yard:
"You praised that fellow up to Sigg. What is it you see in him?" asked
the nephew, with faint contempt.

"I admit he has nothing of your fancy skipper about him, if that's what
you mean," said the elder man, curtly. "Is the foreman of the joiners
on the Nan-Shan outside? . . . Come in, Bates. How is it that you let
Tait's people put us off with a defective lock on the cabin door? The
Captain could see directly he set eye on it. Have it replaced at once.
The little straws, Bates . . . the little straws. . . ."

The lock was replaced accordingly, and a few days afterwards the
Nan-Shan steamed out to the East, without MacWhirr having offered any
further remark as to her fittings, or having been heard to utter a
single word hinting at pride in his ship, gratitude for his appointment,
or satisfaction at his prospects.

With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little
occasion to talk. There were matters of duty, of course--directions,
orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and the
future not there yet, the more general actualities of the day required
no comment--because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming
precision.

Old Mr. Sigg liked a man of few words, and one that "you could be sure
would not try to improve upon his instructions." MacWhirr satisfying
these requirements, was continued in command of the Nan-Shan, and
applied himself to the careful navigation of his ship in the China seas.
She had come out on a British register, but after some time Messrs. Sigg
judged it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese flag.

At the news of the contemplated transfer Jukes grew restless, as if
under a sense of personal affront. He went about grumbling to himself,
and uttering short scornful laughs. "Fancy having a ridiculous
Noah's Ark elephant in the ensign of one's ship," he said once at the
engine-room door. "Dash me if I can stand it: I'll throw up the billet.
Don't it make you sick, Mr. Rout?" The chief engineer only cleared his
throat with the air of a man who knows the value of a good billet.

The first morning the new flag floated over the stern of the Nan-Shan
Jukes stood looking at it bitterly from the bridge. He struggled with
his feelings for a while, and then remarked, "Queer flag for a man to
sail under, sir."

"What's the matter with the flag?" inquired Captain MacWhirr. "Seems all
right to me." And he walked across to the end of the bridge to have a
good look.

"Well, it looks queer to me," burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated, and
flung off the bridge.

Captain MacWhirr was amazed at these manners. After a while he stepped
quietly into the chart-room, and opened his International Signal
Code-book at the plate where the flags of all the nations are correctly
figured in gaudy rows. He ran his finger over them, and when he came to
Siam he contemplated with great attention the red field and the white
elephant. Nothing could be more simple; but to make sure he brought the
book out on the bridge for the purpose of comparing the coloured drawing
with the real thing at the flagstaff astern. When next Jukes, who was
carrying on the duty that day with a sort of suppressed fierceness,
happened on the bridge, his commander observed:

"There's nothing amiss with that flag."

"Isn't there?" mumbled Jukes, falling on his knees before a deck-locker
and jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-line.

"No. I looked up the book. Length twice the breadth and the elephant
exactly in the middle. I thought the people ashore would know how to
make the local flag. Stands to reason. You were wrong, Jukes. . . ."

"Well, sir," began Jukes, getting up excitedly, "all I can say--" He
fumbled for the end of the coil of line with trembling hands.

"That's all right." Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on a
little canvas folding-stool he greatly affected. "All you have to do is
to take care they don't hoist the elephant upside-down before they get
quite used to it."

Jukes flung the new lead-line over on the fore-deck with a loud "Here
you are, bo'ss'en--don't forget to wet it thoroughly," and turned with
immense resolution towards his commander; but Captain MacWhirr spread
his elbows on the bridge-rail comfortably.

"Because it would be, I suppose, understood as a signal of distress," he
went on. "What do you think? That elephant there, I take it, stands for
something in the nature of the Union Jack in the flag. . . ."

"Does it!" yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan's decks
looked towards the bridge. Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation:
"It would certainly be a dam' distressful sight," he said, meekly.

Later in the day he accosted the chief engineer with a confidential,
"Here, let me tell you the old man's latest."

Mr. Solomon Rout (frequently alluded to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father
Rout), from finding himself almost invariably the tallest man on board
every ship he joined, had acquired the habit of a stooping, leisurely
condescension. His hair was scant and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale,
his bony wrists and long scholarly hands were pale, too, as though he
had lived all his life in the shade.

He smiled from on high at Jukes, and went on smoking and glancing about
quietly, in the manner of a kind uncle lending an ear to the tale of an
excited schoolboy. Then, greatly amused but impassive, he asked:

"And did you throw up the billet?"

"No," cried Jukes, raising a weary, discouraged voice above the harsh
buzz of the Nan-Shan's friction winches. All of them were hard at work,
snatching slings of cargo, high up, to the end of long derricks, only,
as it seemed, to let them rip down recklessly by the run. The cargo
chains groaned in the gins, clinked on coamings, rattled over the
side; and the whole ship quivered, with her long gray flanks smoking in
wreaths of steam. "No," cried Jukes, "I didn't. What's the good? I might
just as well fling my resignation at this bulkhead. I don't believe you
can make a man like that understand anything. He simply knocks me over."

At that moment Captain MacWhirr, back from the shore, crossed the deck,
umbrella in hand, escorted by a mournful, self-possessed Chinaman,
walking behind in paper-soled silk shoes, and who also carried an
umbrella.

The master of the Nan-Shan, speaking just audibly and gazing at his
boots as his manner was, remarked that it would be necessary to call
at Fu-chau this trip, and desired Mr. Rout to have steam up to-morrow
afternoon at one o'clock sharp. He pushed back his hat to wipe his
forehead, observing at the same time that he hated going ashore
anyhow; while overtopping him Mr. Rout, without deigning a word, smoked
austerely, nursing his right elbow in the palm of his left hand.
Then Jukes was directed in the same subdued voice to keep the forward
'tween-deck clear of cargo. Two hundred coolies were going to be put
down there. The Bun Hin Company were sending that lot home. Twenty-five
bags of rice would be coming off in a sampan directly, for stores. All
seven-years'-men they were, said Captain MacWhirr, with a camphor-wood
chest to every man. The carpenter should be set to work nailing
three-inch battens along the deck below, fore and aft, to keep these
boxes from shifting in a sea-way. Jukes had better look to it at once.
"D'ye hear, Jukes?" This chinaman here was coming with the ship as far
as Fu-chau--a sort of interpreter he would be. Bun Hin's clerk he
was, and wanted to have a look at the space. Jukes had better take him
forward. "D'ye hear, Jukes?"