Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  Sarita waits as Herbert gets the mail. There’s a damp edge to the wind and she wonders if the afternoon will bring rain.

  “Two letters,” says Herbert, exiting the post office. “One from Hatton for me, and this one, for you, from a Spencer Nyman.”

  Sarita reaches casually for her letter and Ward whips it out of reach. They exchange a look.

  “Spencer Nyman. Garnet’s brother.”

  “Does he look anything like his sister?”

  “He is quite good-looking, but I prefer blonds.”

  Herbert lets her have the letter, and she taps it in her palm thoughtfully.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Why not?”

  Sarita smiles, raises her eyebrows. “What do you think that’s about?” she says, referencing the Hatton letter with her chin.

  Ward shakes the letter. “I have half a mind to burn it without opening it.”

  “You think it’s about Stanley.”

  “No, because you’ve forbidden me to think about that, but if I were allowed to think about that, that’s the first place my mind would go.”

  Of course it is about Stanley and Sarita gives Herbert a dispensation to mull it over, to wander down the well-worn ruts of his concern, to go over every little thing in this static past and quickly setting present, to turn and churn and torture each completed and possible development as he sits on the floor in the corner of the cottage, knees pulled up, imploring some uncaring God to fix it all. Through all of this, Sarita isn’t even sure if he’s entirely innocent. Herbert probably did have a woman in Africa, must have. At least one. To be honest, right now she doesn’t even care, so long as he keeps stuck in this self-absorbed and all-absorbing monologue.

  After a simple meal of pork cutlets and roast potatoes, after Greta has washed up and made her way across the moonlit field to her house, Herbert presents Sarita with Spencer Nyman’s letter.

  “I’m not sure why you don’t want to read this,” he says. “It’s probably about Garnet.”

  “It’s definitely about Garnet,” says Sarita.

  Herbert’s eyes cross her face, looking for clues.

  “Why is Spencer Nyman writing to me about his sister?”

  Herbert looks at the letter, treating it with more respect.

  “You open it, Herbert.”

  “Me?”

  “I want you to.”

  Herbert settles into his seat across the table and tears open the flap. It’s a short letter and she watches his bright eyes flicker across its information. She sees his mouth tighten and hears his sigh, although it is controlled and very quiet. “So,” Sarita braces, “she’s gone, then.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “And the baby?”

  “I’m afraid the baby did not make it. It was a girl.”

  Sarita does not move. Her eyes fill up, but she controls herself. She knows that Herbert is watching her and is so outside herself that she manages her sensations through what he must be seeing, sees herself slump into the chair, sees herself shake her head as if to find a preferable reality, sees herself draw deeper inwards.

  “Sarita . . .”

  “Garnet was my best friend,” she says, although that was obvious to everyone. “I loved her more than anyone except my father.” This much honesty cannot be good, but Herbert is not easily frightened and sits in place. “I’m to have a baby,” she says. She gauges Herbert’s surprise, his suppression of happiness. “Maybe it will be a girl too.”

  “I will welcome a girl,” he says, small joy creeping past the caution.

  “Maybe it will be a boy.” Sarita shrugs. “Maybe it will kill me.”

  He feels he should comfort her but knows that is not what Sarita wants. She demands a constant, exhausting honesty. “I really liked Garnet.” He feels his own eyes filling. “She made you happy and that made me happy. Her death does no one any good.”

  Sarita nods. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “I’d rather be alone.” Sarita stands from the table and pushes her chair back, grinding the legs across the floor. He watches her walk out the front door without her shawl. She is barely gone when he realizes that he has to follow her whether she wants it or not. This is what he needs to do.

  The clouds have come in but somewhere behind this screen the moon is nearly full and the path—packed dirt—glows between the fields and cottages. He checks to the left, towards the Headlands, and then up the road and sees her—or some vague woman figure moving quickly—by the mill. As she rounds the curve in the path, he loses her in the shadows, but there she is again. He hurries to reach the corner of the Avenue and sees her by the gate of the old monastery. Ward clings to the shadows, not sure why he is hiding or why he does not call out for her to wait. He sees Sarita disappear at the corner. She is heading west. On his right, the blank fields fill with moonlight, but she has headed to the tunnel of trees and is no doubt weaving her way on the narrow paths that skirt the stream. Ahead, he can hear the leaves rustle beneath her feet, the occasional snap of a twig, and then there is silence. She must have reached the packed dirt of the cliff path.

  Before him is blackness now, the moonlight obscured behind a wall of rock, and then he sees a perfect square of brightness. He has reached the Window, a lookout hole blasted through the cliff with man-made exactness. The drop from this ledge could kill, but now with the moon softened by the fabric of cloud and the crash of waves swallowed into the darkness, it seems almost as likely that one could float upward—that gravity would have relaxed her hold. Even the stars have been erased in the gray wash, hidden behind the clouds as sunken ships hide beneath waves. Sarita is in shadow—must be—sitting with her back against the wall, listening to the waves assault the cliffs.

  “Sarita.”

  “I said I wanted to be alone.”

  “I’ll be quiet.” And he is, for a while, but there is so much he wants to say to her. Ward also knows that she’s aware of his presence and is being silent as a way of disciplining him to her need for boundaries. “You don’t want to be alone,” he says. “You want Garnet to be alive.” He hears her adjust her position. “Let’s go home and have a glass of brandy.” He gets up, extends a hand to Sarita, and helps her to her feet.

  They walk together in silence until they reach the gate of the monastery. Ward stops and turns Sarita to him.

  “When did you know?” he asks her.

  “I didn’t.”

  “I meant about your condition.”

  “I am still not sure or I would have told you.”

  But he knows that she is sure, even if her body has not confirmed it: She knows and she didn’t tell him because she wanted to keep it from herself.

  PART TWO

  I

  The Congo

  June 1890

  Casement is back in the Congo, despite his having vowed to have no more to do with this Belgian enterprise. His old friend Parminter had begged him, had said that he was the only person who could open up the new trade route to Luvituku. When Casement had disagreed, Parminter asked him to name his alternate. And the only name Casement could come up with was Ward, who was both embroiled in a scandal and recently married. Casement needs the work, the money. Perhaps having a kinder presence here in Matadi is better for the natives than a protest accomplished with absence. Still, Casement’s refused the usual three-year contract, determined to be out of the Congo and free of Belgians in the next twelve months.

  There is nothing to recommend Matadi. There is only a track coming in, a track going out, and a mess of hastily constructed shacks that nod towards settlement. A convoy of porters has just left for the interior, creating a stillness in their wake, making the sloping piazza of packed mud rimmed with shaky huts seem all the more arbitrary.

 
De Schepper, the station officer, emerges from his rooms. This shamble of planks and bent nails he refers to, improbably, as “the office.” It is where official things happen. He waves at Casement, squinting into the sun, but then De Schepper always squints.

  “That new Société man is here,” he informs Casement. “I told him to put his traps in with you.”

  “Is he there now?”

  “Taking a stroll.” Which, given the size of Matadi, won’t take long.

  “What sort of man is he?” asks Casement, although, as Leopold’s latest emissary, he doesn’t inspire much optimism.

  “Full of himself, if you ask me. Not friendly,” De Schepper responds, a mediocre officer, who is also full of himself and not friendly.

  “Belgian?”

  “I don’t think so, and not English. Something else.”

  “I’ll do my best to make him feel at home,” says Casement, an impossibility, unless this man’s home—wherever it is—happens to be a tract of rickety tin shimbeks where the waft of sewage waits on the warm wind.

  Casement looks up the dirt track towards the river. He sees only the usual: children and pariah dogs, shadows and heat. Two women start an argument and a chicken breaks into a run, stops, and flaps its wings, suddenly self-conscious. Casement wonders how long he’ll be sharing his one-room hut with this man. At any rate, Casement will be away in Boma for some of this. He’s committed to supervising a caravan of ivory back to the coast, and in the days leading up to this departure and after his return, Casement will be busy rounding up more porters for the Luvituku trail.

  Casement turns to Mbatchi. “Did you get a look at him?”

  Mbatchi nods.

  “And what does he look like?”

  “He looks like you.” Mbatchi giggles because he says that about all Europeans. “He also has a beard like you, but his eyes are small and black and he looks angry.”

  “Wonderful,” says Casement. He’s about to whistle for his dogs but sees them both, Bindy and Paddy, panting behind him. “The dogs need water,” he says, “and later maybe this angry man will want to eat and I’ll need your help with that.”

  Casement is buried in some lines—surely there’s a better word than heart to rhyme with part?—when the man shows up, darkening the doorway. Casement swings his feet off his cot. For a moment—as if roused from a dream—Casement can’t remember who this man is. The two regard each other.

  “You must be Mister Casement,” the man finally says.

  “You must be the new man from the Société,” says Casement, who has momentarily forgotten his name. They’re speaking English, rather than French, and the man does have an accent but Casement can’t place it. He stands and extends his hand. “Roger Casement,” he says.

  “Joseph Conrad,” the man replies. This is not the name that Casement was expecting. “Or Korseniewski. As you like,” he shrugs, banishing importance. “I disturbed you.”

  “Oh, that,” Casement looks at the papers spread across the cotton blanket, “should be disturbed.”

  Conrad approves of this, it seems, and smiles, looking less angry. He has the facial ticks of a Russian.

  “Please take a seat,” says Casement, gesturing towards the one chair in the room—a rickety wooden thing set by the desk—and makes an apologetic face for his forgetful manners.

  Conrad sits down.

  “How do you find Matadi?” asks Casement, sits through a second’s silence, adds, “Or are you too polite to say?”

  Another pause. “I was going to say that people talk ill of each other, but realized that in saying that I would be doing the same.”

  Casement laughs and this Conrad laughs too, as if in relief. Casement has been identified, correctly, as one of the few reasonable men of the area and, he thinks, this man sitting across from him is probably one of his tribe. “So what brings you here, Captain Conrad?”

  There’s a long pause, as if Casement’s polite patter has opened an ontological chasm.

  “The Société. We all must work. And I have my captain’s license, but am now signed on as mate, until they find me my own boat. But I understand there aren’t many boats here.”

  “Not now, but there will be.”

  “And what brings you here, Mister Casement? Are you a trader?”

  “No. Not much good at that.” He sees a look flicker across Conrad’s face and he knows that the captain has already heard about his poor business skills, his useless, kind nature. “I’m establishing a new track that is necessary for the railroad. I work with the local tribes and find porters.”

  “How does one accomplish that?”

  “Well, you go and talk to people. You say, ‘I will pay you this much to carry that much,’ and so on. And then you show them what to carry and where to go.”

  “You make it sound very simple, but I have heard,” he smiles at the admission, “that no one is as good at this as you are.”

  “I speak the local languages,” says Casement, “and I’ve been here since ’85. So, enough time to develop a relationship with the local chiefs.”

  “And what are they like, these local chiefs?”

  “Depends on what chief. I find the Bakongo, and Loanda—my boy is Loanda—pleasant and peaceful, although not exactly civilized. But of course there are the other tribes.”

  “Cannibals?”

  “I know it’s a horror,” says Casement, “but if you’re already dead, does it really matter if someone eats you? I’ve always thought the loss of life to be the greater problem than the provision of a meal, but around here, that makes me somewhat remarkable.”

  On cue, Mbatchi sticks his head into the hut. “Food now,” he says in En­glish. And then, recalling his lessons, and with a flourish, “Dinner is served.”

  For the next few days Conrad accompanies Casement to the local villages. He is a good listener, this Conrad, and he has a few stories to tell. He left home at sixteen, left like Ward, for a life of the sea. But this man is shuttered and the reasons for his escape to the Far East aren’t explained. He is one of those people who creates an impression of having answered a question, although later Casement can’t remember the answer. Just the opposite of Ward, who seems to be waiting for people to ask him why he left home at such a tender age in order to tell them about the monster that was his father.

  Conrad does not remember Ward, although they might have met, and he leaves them in the possibility of their having crossed paths, which is far more provocative and romantic than had they in fact known each other. Conrad’s home is actually Poland, although he has lived abroad for many years. But he seems not quite a Pole. Korseniewski is the name he was born to, but he has taken on the Joseph Conrad along with English citizenship several years ago when he got his Third Mate’s license. Casement thinks to make a joke of this, to tell him jovially, “You’re sailing under a new name,” but something prevents him. Conrad will at one moment bend his head and reveal the intimacies of his life—his family’s exile to remote Russia, his youthful gambling debts—but at another quickly retreat into a distant self. No matter what is going on, he has a capacity for isolation. And this is a good trait for a sailor to have. The boat is just a prison of sticks stitched together.

  When Conrad signed his contract in Brussels, Stanley was also there, apparently celebrating the triumphant rescue of Emin Pasha. Conrad cannot help but thrill at Stanley’s exploits but says that his desire to visit Africa predates by long years his knowledge of Stanley and even Stanley’s knowledge of Africa. He, like Casement, has been drawn to the empty spaces on maps and he, like Casement, knows that he is performing their extinction.

  In a small notebook, Conrad keeps track of certain words in Bakongo, in Loanda, in Bangala.

  “If you just point at something, the natives know to give the word for it,” says Casement. “They’re happy to. They don’t want us stumbling about
as deaf mutes.” But although Conrad sees the value in learning these words and has enjoyed following Casement, watching him palaver with the local chiefs, scratching the dogs’ heads, observing with a pleased intensity, he does not feel the need to actively engage and if his appearance was not remarkable—his compact frame, black hair, eyes set to the offing even in the suffocating jungle—it would be easy to forget that he was there.

  In the evenings, if not too tired, they have both turned to their writing, although here again—even though the manuscript is in plain sight—­Casement has not felt at liberty to ask. And then there is the Conrad of late night, asking for Casement to pass the bottle, and divulging slowly, as one uncoils a rope, the complicated matter of his life. His Polish nationalist parents exiled to Vologda, his paternal uncles executed for opposing the Russians, his mother succumbing to tuberculosis, his father—a translator of Shakespeare—following her three short years later. And young Konrad Korseniewski, his face pressed against the glass, watching the agitated Russian landscape slip into memory as he barreled towards his homeland, his own exile completed.

  “And yet you were destined for this.” Casement gestures at the tin walls upon which dozens of suicidal insects tattoo a dissonant percussion.

  “As opposed to what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. That fate of rebel heroes, like your uncles.”

  “They were not rebel heroes so much as martyrs, Casement. Do you find that romantic?”

  “Honestly, I do. Who wouldn’t?”

  Conrad gestures for him to pass the bottle. “I wouldn’t. I would find it a tragic waste of life. I would find it suicide, a suicide at the hands of butchers.”