Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  I found nothing of Conrad’s. After all the anticipation, coming face-to-face with Marlow had lost some of its appeal. Years later I would remember that feeling during the fortnight I waited to hear from Conrad. The rainy afternoon would come back and with it a vision of Fox-Bourne stepping out of the shadows into the space between those tall shelves. He began rummaging through them, pulling books down and tossing them aside after a cursory glance at the titles. Growing increasingly desperate as he worked his way down the aisle, I realized that he was looking for himself just as I had looked for Marlow. I didn’t know what to make of that vision then and don’t now. I mention it only to give you a better idea of how the past and present merged during that period, all that had happened and was going to happen coming together in an unbroken sense of duration.

  In any case, on that long-ago rainy day, I was coming back up the aisle when a man pushed aside a curtain that separated the shop from the living quarters. I had a glimpse of a few chairs, piles of books, a woman with a kettle in her hands before the curtain fell back. He was biting into an apple so large that it almost dislodged the thick glasses through which he stared at me with remarkably candid eyes. He was in shirtsleeves, and I could not help noticing that his high, starched collar was frayed by too many ironings. He came right up in front of me and stood munching. Except for the regular motion of his jaw, he could have been an iron footman bolted to the walk in front of an elegant home, waiting for the reins of blooded horses.

  “Conrad,” I blurted out. “Do you have any of his work?”

  His blighted eyes lit up.

  “Of course, of course. I specialize in the literature of the sea. I have everything of his. Which are you interested in?”

  “The Marlow books,” I said self-consciously.

  His eyes glowed as if I had uttered a magical incantation.

  “Ah, yes,” he answered, laying the nibbled core on a table. “I might have known. He’s very popular. Extremely popular. Marlow. Everyone asks for the books with him. Quite interesting when you think about it. Can’t say I’ve seen the like of it all the time I’ve run the shop. Even a bit on the mystical side. Poor Conrad seems to have disappeared inside his character. Come along.”

  We went to the front, where a sign proclaimed THE LITERATURE OF THE SEA. The collection filled a dozen shelves, maybe more, all marshaled as neatly as sailors on the deck of a ship awaiting an admiral’s inspection—Marrayat, Bulwer-Lytton, Melville, French and Spanish authors, the whole crew so far as I could tell.

  “The best collection in London if I do say so myself, the best. And there’s a reason. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do—not write, I haven’t the skill—sail. I’d wager you feel the same.”

  Since it was so obviously important to him I said I did.

  “I can always tell, always. We’re the same under the skin. That’s what I tell my wife. Kindred spirits and all that. Just hold on a moment, please.”

  He stepped up on a milk stool and removed three volumes, which he handed to me.

  “What do you know about Marlow?”

  “Oh,” I replied, “just that he’s said to be interesting.”

  “He’s that, all right. Very interesting, very interesting indeed. A whole man—that’s how I think of him, from boyhood to middle age, not as a character. A remarkable performance. I hope Conrad hasn’t used him up.”

  While he was extolling Marlow’s virtues I thought of how much Conrad would enjoy his enthusiasm. You know how he worried himself sick over the way the public responded, complained night and day that so few people read his books. It would have done him a world of good. As the man expanded on his views of the sailing life, it was clear that he knew what he was talking about. Since it was impossible to believe from the look of him that he had ever been on anything larger than a dinghy, his knowledge must have been gleaned from his reading. I like to see a man’s enthusiasm—it always tends to bring out the best in him—but I cut him off, saying that I had a busy evening ahead of me.

  After I paid he said he was sure that I would enjoy the books.

  “Can’t be helped, really. You see, there’s a little of all of us in Marlow.”

  I grinned at that, Ford, couldn’t help myself, and said, “I suppose that’s true.”

  The rain had stopped and the lamps inside the shops reflected on the wet road as if it were black ice, the shapes shimmering, the whole of the square inviting as a picture. I thought of people inside their rooms, getting ready to sit down to their evening meal, pleased that I had conjured such happiness from the reflected lights even though it was an illusion, subject to change with the next gust of wind. I don’t know why I was put in mind of that.

  I SPENT THE NEXT five days sitting in the corner of my room beside the big window with a view of the street below, each successive book on my lap illuminated by a cone of yellow light falling from an old-fashioned lamp whose faded green shade was fringed at the edges, a self-contained space that shut out the world. The steady rhythm of Conrad’s sentences muffled the sound of traffic. The occasional shout rising from the street might as well have been uttered halfway round the world. What I found went beyond the bookseller’s prophecy. My adventures were intact, true in letter and spirit to my experiences, all so powerfully rendered that even when I rested my eyes or went to bed the ambience remained, infusing the atmosphere of my mind like a woman’s perfume lingers in the air after she has passed you on the street and disappeared into the crowd.

  If I had been able to fast or live on bread I wouldn’t have left my rooms, the desire to stay in touch with those stories, with the world emerging sentence by graceful sentence, not far from what you must feel in the midst of composition, fearing that if you step away from your desk you’ll lose your sense of contact. But even though I hated to interrupt the flow of thought and feeling, I had to eat—the fact of the matter is that by dinnertime I was ravenous—and so I went out for dinner, always to a restaurant near the boardinghouse that served passable shepherd’s pie and other simple dishes at a decent price. I took a book and pored over it while I ate, occasionally looking up and noticing the odd glance from fellow diners, who must have thought I was a scholar searching for some bit of information that would justify his labors and perhaps shed a light the world was bound to notice. Those glances fed a sense, already well developed by then, of being exposed. Who wouldn’t feel naked when his most private thoughts are paraded before the eyes of strangers? It was as if the door of my bathroom had been pushed open while I stood in the tub, drying off, and people were crowding in for a look at my pasty shanks. But that didn’t dissuade me from ordering tea and lighting a cheroot and reading on to the end of the chapter, unwilling to break off for the time it would take to walk back to my rooms.

  It seems as though I spent that time lost in a huge tapestry of words, each story flowing into the next, each more complex than the one before. It was intoxicating, Ford. Most of us live our lives bottled up in ourselves, at best with two or three people who care enough to notice what we regard as our singular virtues. When they speak of such things our response is almost always accompanied by a flush of pleasure. Conrad flattered me with his attention. The man in the books is better than I am, more idealistic, more generous, the man I’d have liked to be. Conrad had filtered my ideas through his mind—ingested me, made his thoughts flow in my thoughts, his blood in my veins! I remembered the bookseller saying, “It’s as if the author had disappeared into the character,” and felt as possessed as a man who thinks spirits are trampling about inside his head. For those five days I lived in the midst of Conrad’s creative ferment, in another man’s imagination, my life transmuted before my eyes in an act of alchemy—I could practically see Conrad busy over alembics and burners—into magic signs that fascinated me. My irritation all but vanished. I wanted to know how he did it, what he felt as he knitted the two of us together and named the product Marlow.

  I WENT OUT for a stroll a little while ago, Ford, and have just returned wi
th a fresh notion whose outriders started pestering me as I walked along the Old Port, trying to guess the character of ships from the stack of lights rising above their invisible hulls, an old sailor’s version of a crossword puzzle. Then I realized that something was missing from my tale and hurriedly retraced my steps to my bungalow before I lost my train of thought.

  You and I, Ford, are closer to the heart of this memoir than I knew when I began it. On the way back from the port I thought of you and Conrad collaborating on your three novels, merging your skills and philosophies into a third narrative entity, a child of your minds’ fruitfulness. But it wasn’t until I was almost home that I saw how close the three of us have become in the pages of this memoir. Conrad’s use of me parallels your use of your dear friend as a model for characters in The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. You must feel an overwhelming sympathy with Conrad’s discovery of the spark for the Marlow books in the reality of another man’s experience. I wish there had been some way for you and Conrad and me to talk when the events of this story were still unfolding. You could have advised him about your own experience and probably lessened his discomfort, discomfort that lasted for years, refusing to let go until he finished the Fox-Bourne novel.

  SINCE CONRAD refused to have a telephone at the Pent because it played havoc with his concentration, I wrote to him the morning after I finished reading Lord Jim. Looking back now at what happened as a result of that letter, I should have simply told him the bald truth about why I wanted to see him, but it seemed impossible—the reason was too private, too blamed intimate to put in writing. What would I have said? I just learned that you borrowed my character and some of my experiences for your Marlow books and wonder if you’d mind explaining why you never mentioned it? Knowing Conrad, you know the explosion that would have set off, one that could have been heard miles from the Pent. Instead, I went through half a dozen sheets of paper before lighting on an equivocal explanation that avoided an outright lie, saying that the city was getting on my nerves, which was true, that he had been much on my mind, also true, and that an invitation to visit him for a weekend would be a boon. His reply came by return post. He was delighted and would expect me the following Friday

  There are more dramatic routes in this world than the one from London to Kent—through the Alps, for instance, snow-covered peaks leaning over the countryside like tottering patriarchs, or India, where you can see elephants painted in garish colors, soaring temples—but the British countryside has virtues particularly suited to a man who has traveled the greater part of his life in the more exotic parts of the world, its streams and ricks and villages a welcome relief from fantastic upheavals of the earth and shrines to unknown gods. The fields of rye and wheat sweeping by outside the window, separated by hedgerows and patches of rich brown earth left fallow or plowed for seed, had the look of a counterpane. I wanted to pull England up to my chin and drift off to pleasant dreams. Instead, Marlow, Jim, Kurtz, other characters entirely Conrad’s invention, demanded my attention. At some point, my thoughts drifted to an island in the archipelago where I used to trade, a place of thatched-hut villages hanging on the banks of a green river whose inhabitants ran away from anyone brandishing a camera, convinced for what they believed were perfectly sound reasons that he was intent on stealing their souls. Conrad had done pretty much the same thing snapping my picture in the Marlow books, immobilizing me for the delectation of his readers no less than the image of a Malay is forever captured in a photograph on display in some Pall Mall club. What he had done amounted to a kind of petty theft, serious enough to justify going up to see him and asking for an explanation.

  An hour later I saw people waiting with suitcases at the gingerbread station with its Victorian excess. The conductor, a fat man with enormous muttonchops, called, “Stanford, Stanford,” as if nobody had the wit to recognize the place. I got my kit down from the overhead rack and went along the corridor to the car door. Stepping out, I found the platform my side of the tracks deserted except for the conductor and two young men walking ahead of me to the north end, where a man in a brown suit put their baggage in the boot of a large car and drove off, leaving a cloud of dust on the windless air.

  “Look here,” I said to the conductor, “I’m in a jam. There doesn’t seem to be any public conveyance.”

  “Go to the far end.”

  I turned and saw nothing. The conductor smiled.

  “Just go round to the shade. That’s where old Tewksbury always stops. He’ll take you where you’re going.”

  With that he blew a shrill note on his whistle that echoed under the eaves and a moment later the train jerked forward with a loud clatter of couplings. I shouldered my bag and started toward the end of the platform, walking against the direction of the train so that the faces of the passengers sitting next to the windows fled by. Tewksbury was exactly where the conductor said he’d be. One glance convinced me that I could probably reach the Pent faster walking. He sat motionlessly on the seat of a decrepit wagon, a countryman approximately the age of Methuselah, his hat well down over his eyes so there was no way of knowing if he was aware of me or asleep. The horse padded once, apparently a signal worked out back in the Bronze Age to alert his owner of customers. The voluminously clothed figure then moved. Despite the weather, his jacket was buttoned up to his chin and I followed the row of buttons to two red-rimmed eyes. When I asked if he knew where Pent Farm was he grunted, or coughed, or simply drew in a deep, rattling breath while at the same time motioning for me to get in.

  I should tell you that I saw him again, many years later—not in the flesh, as he was certainly dead by then—but in The Secret Agent as the cabbie who conveys Winnie to Verloc. I can’t help but wonder how long he had percolated in Conrad’s brain, whether he was stored away as I was, kept in reserve for the right moment, or if Conrad simply sat down to compose the scene and was visited by the old boy.

  The horse labored to put one foot in front of the other, a pace the driver obviously liked. Slow as our progress was, I can’t say it made me unhappy. The hills were splendid with wildflowers, the birds sang, even the heat seemed benign. My need to put London behind me was more real than I had imagined. Before long we went up a rise and from the crest I could see the Pent in the distance framed by old oak trees, looking distinctly like a fairy-tale house with its bow windows and heavily shingled roof from which rose that comical chimney pot. Neatly trimmed hedges surrounded the lawn that time of year, and off to the right ivy grew luxuriously over a broken stone fence. While I understood its attraction for Conrad, I knew that within a month’s time the silence would drive me back to our imperfect civilization on the Thames, the very silence that Conrad found positively tonic, though I suspect his zeal for everything British played no small part in his choice to live as a country gentleman.

  Tewksbury held the coins I gave him close to his rheumy eyes. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d put them between his stained teeth to test their authenticity. Satisfied that they were the coin of the realm, he drove off without a word. As I opened the garden gate and started up the gravel path, Jessie came out onto the porch, her limp more pronounced than the last time I had seen her. Borys ran out from behind a hedge wearing a floppy yellow hat and brandishing a butterfly net, pausing just long enough to say he was glad to see me before he raised the net high and brought it down. He smiled and held it up. Something with orange wings was beating against the cords.

  Jessie gave me a hug and a kiss, effusive as ever. Conrad could not have found a better wife if he’d interviewed every available woman in England and on the Continent. He needed someone strong enough to stand up to him and put him in his place when he got too overbearing, but more than that he needed a woman with indefatigable spirits who could deal with his black moods. Over the years I must have watched her coax him up from that darkness a dozen times, talking to him in a quiet, patient voice, never making light of his afflictions, acknowledging their severity and the pain they caused him, but refusing to l
et him sink further. Still, I’m sure there were times when she feared even she could not halt his slide. I don’t like saints, Ford. I don’t like the idea of them or the examples that were shoved down my throat as a boy, the lot being vastly too prim and inhuman for me, but by God, Jessie is my idea of a saint, both feet planted firmly on the earth and her heart big enough for any heaven.

  She said that Conrad couldn’t stand waiting around and had gone for a walk.

  “He’ll be home soon,” she assured me. “Put your kit in the upstairs bedroom and I’ll start tea. He’s been lonely, Jack. He just beamed when your letter came.”

  I was glad for her invitation because I needed to get hold of myself. I was there under false pretenses. The fragment of truth in what I had told them about needing to get away from the city couldn’t hide the fact that I had omitted my real purpose. Had I known what was going to happen as a consequence I would have laid it out in my letter.

  After hanging up my clothes and opening the dormer window to let in some fresh air, I lay down and dozed off only to be wakened by the sound of the back door opening with a bang. Conrad’s voice filled the kitchen with a tirade against the neighbor’s dog. Jessie said something and he boomed, “Where is he?”