Conrad must have spent an hour in the cabin before he happened to glance toward the porthole and saw clear sky. He went over and looked out: the horizon was a clear line, the sea glittered, there was no trace of fog. He wanted light, wanted to get away from the photographs and Fox-Bourne’s intimate presence. As soon as he came out on deck he saw the face of the fog bank in the distance, wider than the Dover cliffs and probably higher. In every other direction the horizon was sharply defined and that was also true for the Brigadier. Everything that had been shrouded by the fog, the gallows of the sweeping gear, the superstructure, the winches and guy wires, the guns that remained uncovered, was there before him as if for the first time. Only the gray paint carried a hint of the fog. Before long he saw the coast and could make out low hills dotted with houses, grazing cattle, the dark green line of hedgerows. Lowestoft gleaming beneath the flawless sky, the dock cranes still as sculptures, the ships motionless, the buildings he had barely been able to see in the morning clear and solid and welcoming. The crew came to life, their voices audible again, a general sense of relief palpable in the brisk air and celebration, too, over sinking a U-boat. He glanced up at the bridge half expecting to see Fox-Bourne but the platform was empty and the glare on the windows hid everyone inside.
They sailed by the buoys marking the channel and on into the bay, the jetty off to the left covered with seagulls basking in the sun, the metal frame supporting the navigation light guarded by three seals who seemed to be watching the ship’s progress. As the Brigadier approached her berth at the far side of the dock, where a crowd had gathered, he saw three officers, their hats and shoulders sparkling with gold braid, none signifying less than fleet rank. Either Fox-Bourne or one of his staff had radioed ahead and the word must have spread like wildfire across the station. The moment the lines were made fast and the gangway lowered the officers came aboard, crossing the deck briskly to the bridge ladder. As they climbed, Fox-Bourne appeared in the doorway, saluting each man as he came up and quickly following them inside.
The sailors on the dock had massed at the Brigadier’s bow. Conrad, along with a good number of the crew, joined them, gaping at the hole, which was large enough for a man to stand in. Here and there along the jagged edges he could see traces of the Valkerie’s black paint. It was pure luck that the minesweeper hadn’t sunk. From what he had seen of her during the tour with Whelan and later on, she had seemed decidedly on the tinny side. Lacking a double hull, it was anyone’s guess whether her bulkheads could have withstood flooding. He imagined the failure, it was only too real, and had a vision of the two crews in the water together, all their differences obliterated by the oil, an intense, disturbing vision in which he saw the engineer and the men who had jumped holding hands, Scorsby, Higgins, and Chambers bobbling beside them, and, a little farther off, the spirits of Whelan and the German captain arguing as they treaded water. It dissolved when a sailor called out and pointed at the senior officers striding across the dock, followed by Fox-Bourne, all grim-faced and tight-lipped, whatever had passed between them locked up like an official secret. Orderlies opened the car doors, and as soon as the men were inside, they sped away, Fox-Bourne in the front seat of the second one looking straight ahead.
With that, Lord Jim came back into Conrad’s head. He imagined the Brigadier’s bulkheads bulging in the exact words of the novel: Jim “came upon the second engineer getting up at the foot of the bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed and told me he thought his left arm was broken; he had slipped on the top step when getting down while I was forward. He exclaimed, ‘My God! That rotten bulkhead’ll give way in a minute, and the damned thing will go down under us like a lump of lead.’ ” That image had led to Jim’s disastrous leap into the lifeboat before his passengers, causing his disgrace.
At that moment Scorsby called to Conrad from above on the deck, so he squeezed through the crowd and walked over to the base of the gangway, where he waited. “There’s to be an inquiry in a week’s time,” Scorsby said, “and you’ve been named as a material witness,” delivering the news in a clipped, professional manner and doing a commendable job of hiding his feelings. Conrad had seen enough on board to know where he stood, and from the way Scorsby looked at him it was clear that the young officer knew they shared the same opinion. There had been no way to read the faces of the senior men during their brief appearance. For all he knew, they had closed ranks around Fox-Bourne, rallying around the flag, ready to shield a brother officer despite the horrific nature of the event.
As Conrad was heading back to his quarters there was a commotion among the men. Looking up, he saw two sailors descending the gangway with a stretcher covered by a white sheet. The men silently joined him and Scorsby at the bottom of the gangway, doffing their hats out of respect for Whelan as the stretcher bearers passed, carrying the ensign’s body up the walk to the nearest building, their excited talk gone, replaced by solemn quiet. The war had come home to roost. It was real now, no longer an abstract horror happening across the Channel. While they grappled with that, two more stretcher bearers appeared at the edge of the deck with the German who had been hauled on board. Enough oil had been wiped off his face for them to see that he was in pain, gripping the edges of the stretcher with each step they took. The other prisoners were brought forward, all as black as the moment Conrad had first seen them in the lifeboats. Surrounded by sailors with drawn pistols, the leg chains binding their ankles rattled on the boards while catcalls and obscenities rained down on them. As they passed, Conrad could smell the oil.
The Brigadier had reached port around five o’clock. It was now well past six and Scorsby suggested that they have dinner but Conrad begged off, saying he wanted to go up to the headquarters building and send Jessie a telegram. The radioman made short work of the message, leaving him unexpectedly free and wishing that he had told Scorsby to meet him in the mess. He hurried across the compound but when he reached the building there was no sign of Scorsby or any of the other officers. The cook, a kindly soul, served him up a huge piece of corned beef.
Conrad’s gout had begun acting up on the way back and he was in considerable pain by the time he reached his quarters. He immediately crawled into bed but was unable to relax. Too many things lay claim to his attention. He could not get out of his mind the way that the Brigadier must have looked to the men in the water as she disappeared in the fog. He believed he entered as fully into their anguish as was possible for one man to plumb the distress of another, that his vision must have come very close to the Germans’. The same was true when he tried to see the Germans as Fox-Bourne had, as the incarnation of the evil that took his son. On the way back to port he had thought of Borys, deeply aware of the unappeasable rage that would have followed the news of his death. Those feelings had not abated. As a father, he understood what drove Fox-Bourne, exactly what he must have felt when he first saw the Valkerie and when Whelan was shot, but knowing what drove the man did not absolve him. To the contrary, it brought to the foreground the hallowed notion of a fixed standard of conduct that governed every master of every ship, a standard that was necessarily pitiless and blind to lost sons or anything else but its own integrity.
HE SLEPT POORLY, plagued by dreams. A huge black wave whose curl hooded him was closing down with a roar when he woke, feeling his heart thudding, the wave fading but still clear enough in his mind to frighten him. As soon as he dressed he went outside. Not a hint of fog. A pink border at the base of the sky ran like a fringe along the low hills to the east, where the clarity of the scalloped horizon, the luminous quality of the light reminded him of the yellow cylinder. Turning up the collar of his coat against the chill, he set out toward the docks and had reached the building where the sailors had taken Whelan when he saw Fox-Bourne approaching the Brigadier. After he reached the top of the gangway and returned the salute of the watch officer, he disappeared behind the superstructure and came into view again near the bow, stopping where Whelan had died. He put his hands on the rail and gazed out to
sea in the direction they had gone the previous day. Conrad was certain that the man shared his sense of irony over the clear sky, yet no sooner did the idea occur to him than another swept in like a wave that washes away the underpinnings of a pier. Whereas he regretted with every fiber of his being the fog that had enveloped the Brigadier and the yellow cylinder that had fallen like a spotlight on the Valkerie, it was far more likely, more in keeping with what he knew of Fox-Bourne, that he was grateful for the opportunity the fog had provided. Had he been close enough to see Fox-Bourne’s expression, he knew that it would be touched with the cold satisfaction of vengeance.
He watched until Fox-Bourne stepped back from the rail and cast a last glance at the sea before walking back to the superstructure, where he climbed the ladder to the bridge, lingering a moment on the platform before going inside. Conrad’s sympathy went out to the man, that peculiar sympathy we can feel for someone in distress without exonerating him, staying with him all the way back to the mess.
Scorsby, Higgins, and Chambers were at a table on the far side of the room. He wanted to talk to them, compare his sense of what had happened with theirs in the hope that he might have missed something that would change his mind about Fox-Bourne. But they looked decidedly uncomfortable when they noticed him and so he waved to them and asked the steward for a cup of tea, which he took with him up to the headquarters building, where an officer arranged for someone to drive him to the train station.
III
* * *
Official Secrets
CONRAD REACHED this point in his story a bit past noon. By then, the fog had burned off and the red sun—Crane’s and now Conrad’s, too—was golden, as was the sky over London. The color reminded me of the yellow cylinder, which in turn brought to mind the interior dome of an Eastern Orthodox church lined with Byzantine frescoes, the saints’ large almond-shaped eyes forever fixed on supplicant and visitor alike. When I told Conrad, he grinned, saying it was an apt image for the story. The big eyes conveyed the exact sense of things on the dock where the sailors had watched the German prisoners coming down. I had the impression that he might take up the story again but he did not. Talking for nearly three hours had tired him so I suggested that we have lunch at a nearby café that served passable fish and chips. Fried food no longer agreed with him, he said, but a bowl of chowder would be fine.
As the heat had returned full force, we shed our jackets, though Conrad left on his waistcoat. On the road an old man walking a Doberman passed us, the two of them looking straight ahead, eyes fixed on a mutual goal, their paces matched after what must have been many years together. They headed for a bench, where they stopped, and the man withdrew a metal bowl from one pocket and a small bottle from the other, bending down to fill the bowl with water while the dog waited patiently for the command to drink. A few doors down the road we reached a ship chandler’s shop I visited for all sorts of hardware and advice, the owner, Martin Sebold, having been a shipbuilder in his earlier days. The big windows were packed with tools, ropes, compasses, brass clocks with beveled glass, latches, locks, knives, and a wonderful old sextant Sebold had taken weeks to restore. Conrad nodded appreciatively as I told him about the instrument, stepping to the left a pace or two to see it better and asking if I remembered ever seeing anything like it. I didn’t.
“Surely you remember Walter Craig’s.”
It came back to me in a flash. Our captain had had an identical sextant, which he kept in a velvet-lined box in his cabin. The old days rushed back and as we continued toward the café, Conrad dwelt on those good times as if he were seeking refuge from his story, throwing up defenses of vivid happy memories. I pitched in, too, relieved to put some distance between us and those dire events.
It seemed like a good time to tell him that I planned to return to the East before long and retire on Java, very likely in Batavia. He was not surprised, given how often I used to rave about the island. After a pause he asked if Ayu had anything to do with it. Of course she did. Her spirit infused the light of the island, the color, the shadows of the puppet theater she loved and had taught me to love, too. I saw her in many places, in the house in the highlands, the open-air markets where she sold her jewelry, the flash of silver rings on her hands, all of it as real as the buildings and people we passed. For a moment it seemed impossible that she was not still alive, waiting for my return.
During lunch Conrad asked after Viereck, a Dutch friend who had lived in Java for many years, and was delighted to hear that the old boy was still alive. Viereck and Jim had been much on his mind during the week he spent at home, waiting to be called back to Lowestoft for the inquiry. Viereck’s ideas about how men survived seemed particularly germane in the aftermath of the Valkerie tragedy. Jim’s trial in the Eastern port hovered in the back of his mind like a storm flag warning that things are rarely the way they seem. There were enough similarities between Jim’s and Fox-Bourne’s situations to make him cautious. Of all the people who would be called to testify, he alone knew why those Germans died. He did not believe that Fox-Bourne’s sorrow exonerated him, but it put another face on the events that bore a striking resemblance to Jim’s fear of drowning that had sent him vaulting over the side of the ship filled with religious pilgrims into the lifeboat. Both acts were as instinctual as anemones closing up at the slightest touch. Though their crimes were different in nature and degree, Jim’s was infinitely less consequential than Fox-Bourne’s. Conrad had no doubt that Fox-Bourne would share Jim’s disgrace and wondered aloud whether the captain might not also creep off as Jim had done, seeking anonymity.
“I thought of that,” I said. “By comparison, Jim comes off looking almost saintly.”
“Perhaps.”
“That sounds like you have doubts.”
“No,” he said after a pause, “put them side by side with a bill of particulars and there’s no question that Jim’s is the lesser offense. But what if the ship had gone down with those eight hundred souls?”
“There would still be a difference of intention,” I argued. “He wouldn’t have deliberately drowned those people. Besides, there was nothing he could do anyway to stop the bulkhead from giving way if it decided to. I suppose he might have given up his place in the lifeboat.”
“Do you think he would?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. In any case, Fox-Bourne murdered those Germans.”
“Let me tell you something, Malone. I never doubted Fox-Bourne’s guilt. Never. What bothered me during that week I was at home—what still bothers me—was the degree of his guilt. Poor Jessie. I talked about it nonstop, trapped her in the kitchen, the parlor, at the dinner table, in bed, making her listen to my interpretations. There was my own point of view, what I imagined to be Fox-Bourne’s, the junior officer’s, the ratings’, the admirals’ who stormed aboard. They coincided at certain points, diverged at others. Mostly they diverged.”
“But you knew what you saw.”
“I knew what I saw and what I felt. The sequence of cause and effect was clear. Edward’s death. Ramming the U-boat. Whelan’s death. Outrage and revenge. The question of what I might have done had I lost Borys.”
“You wouldn’t have done that,” I said emphatically.
“I would have considered it, Malone. The difference is between thought and action.”
“Staying on board or going ashore for a howl and a dance.”
“Exactly. I’d have stayed put, I’m almost certain. But the question, the possibility of doing otherwise, clouded the issue.”
“What did you conclude about Fox-Bourne?”
“Less than I wanted. I wanted clarity, a clear explanation. That was the reason I kept after Jessie day after day. I thought that if I kept talking I might get to it. All the while I was aware of the irony—still am—of wanting something in life that I worked to suppress in my writing. Explicitness kills the illusion you create, robs the reader and the writer of complexity. There I was, contradicting one of my deepest beliefs, wanting to know the
degree of Fox-Bourne’s guilt, trying to pinpoint it the way you do a position on a chart.”
“Did you?”
“Not to my satisfaction. Not then.”
“And now?”
“I wanted to shoot his position as precisely as one can the sun and stars with a sextant. But a man’s soul is harder to pinpoint. He was guilty. I had a range of culpability. That was what made him so fascinating, you see, that despite his guilt it wasn’t possible to label it, give it a number and position.”
“The shades of meaning you and Ford used to talk about,” I said.
He smiled.
“That was something we always agreed on.”
I remembered several of those occasions, Ford, particularly one in Rye where we’d all gone to visit Henry James only to find him tucked up in bed with a dreadful cold. We went for lunch at an old inn and the two of you worried the topic of guilt for a good hour. What fascinated me as a layman was the enormous concern you brought to the creation of your characters and your mutual horror at the possibility of simplifying them. Conrad never seemed quite clear in his mind over how Fox-Bourne saw his own actions. Had he lived another six years I could have told him, as I will you, eventually, the facts of the matter having come to me quite unexpectedly. I suspect Conrad wouldn’t have been surprised, but it isn’t what you may suspect, not by a long shot.
We left the café even though it was quiet now that the noontime crowd was gone. Conrad was eager to go back to the Nellie, as if she were the only place he could finish telling his story. We returned the way we had come and, when we passed Sebold’s, I took another look at the sextant, seeing it in a different light. I’d always had a deep faith in that instrument to get me through perilous times at sea. It is still a splendid way to take stock of the natural world, but taking the measure of a man required something other than finely machined and calibrated metal. It seemed to me that you and Conrad had that skill in abundance and when I told him he laughed.
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 7
