“That depends on the circulation and the number of pages,” says Morel.
“And that depends on the content,” says Alice. “So, what have you got for us, Roddie?”
Casement considers. Where to start? The pool of human suffering expands in all directions, a widening, unstoppable vortex filling the air with the metallic stench of blood. It is unbelievable even to him who has witnessed, so how to make others believe? How to best appeal to their sense of morality?
“Don’t think too hard, Roddie. We don’t have time for that. You’re not delivering a speech. You’re giving us some facts. And Morel here will boil it down further and give it context.”
Morel has a small notebook into which he is scribbling some figures with a gnawed-at pencil. Casement can hear him speaking the figures to himself in French. Morel, like Casement, had started off as clerk at Elder Dempster in Liverpool. And this company, which delivered Casement to the Congo, had sent Morel to the serpent’s den in Antwerp as his French was native, and even his clerking à la Français.
“Morel, what have you got?” says Alice.
“Nothing yet.” Morel doesn’t look up from his calculations. “Different budgets create different publications, so perhaps it would be helpful to have some figures for our benefactor to look over.”
“That’s one variable,” says Alice. “And the other is content.”
“And that,” says Casement, “is infinite.”
This drawing room with its decorous trappings and sweet heat, the light collecting in the grooves of the cut-crystal jug, the paintings thrown into shadow, Alice’s face carved out by the darkness, and Morel creating music with the scrape of his pencil—is this truly the crucible of reform? Is this how people are saved? Morel is a Quaker, has made peace his life’s work, has a wife who is his soldier as much as spouse. Casement is happy to place him in charge of the Congo Reform Association.
And Alice Green, her wit aggressively sharpened on the whetstone of her sex, sees suffering both farther afield and closer to home. She’s from Kells, County Meath. When she and Casement are not picking apart the tangle of power that has the Congo so ensnared, their conversation wanders. She has renewed Casement’s interest in the Irish language and in the heathen origins of the true Ireland, before Cromwell, before Patrick. She’s selected him for something, he knows it, even though she has not yet shared the specifics.
Casement is on a train heading to Sussex, speedily propelled and also trapped in this cold yet airless carriage, trapped with his thoughts. He leans his head against the windowpane and feels the soothing vibration of the train’s progress, the glass cool against his cheek. Conrad will have something to say. Conrad always has something to say. This is not a war to be waged with weapons—if it were, the winners would already be decided. Is the pen mightier than the sword? He rolls his eyes at some invisible witness. Is he back in Ballycastle, engaging in schoolboy debate? This is what such worn questions bring to mind. Well, is it? Is the pen mightier? And all the boys—grouped in teams—duck their heads together and scribble, foment pompous arguments, perform juvenile orations, exercise rhetoric, and nothing is at stake except a bonus hour on the sports field or an extra helping of pudding at dinner. Is the pen mightier than the sword? is a question created to pit pen against pen, not Irish diplomats against Belgian sovereigns.
Is compassion mightier than the sword? is a better question. But he already knows the answer to that: no. Compassion is not mightier than the sword. Compassion is an indulgence, or a condition—somehow profoundly powerful in its experience yet diminishing to naught in its deployment. Unless it can be alchemized into something artful—a persuasive essay, a paragraph with the capacity to enrage the public, to make them weep. Yes, weep and then act.
Again.
Is the pen mightier than the sword?
The train arrives in Hythe and Casement asks the way to Conrad’s house. It is a three-mile walk along winding country roads. The wind rolls up the Downs, flinging heavy damp and light fog. He’ll walk quickly and the walk is probably good for him, good to loosen up his back and get the blood circulating. The crouch over his desk, the lurch and pitch of his sleep, the cramping of his bowels: That has been the last couple of weeks. Although he has managed to find company—a young lad with red hair, a dour expression, poor posture, yet complete unbridled boldness, which was all the more welcome for the surprise of it. And then there was the other, black-haired, blue-eyed, resigned yet merry, as if they were two soldiers in a drawn-out battle not of their choosing who had decided to make the best of it.
On the other side of the lane a farmer walks towards him, leading a horse. The horse is bearing light bundles of wood and the man is happily chatting with it. Casement wonders at the light load, the contented talk, and imagines a dark cottage, a small fire weakly licking the cold, the dour wife who has sent this man wandering the Downs with his horse. This report! He has begun compulsively filling in narratives for everyone. Casement nods at the farmer as they pass and the farmer calls out to him, Good day to you, in a low rumble, and the horse seems to raise its whiskery chin in greeting.
He wonders how John is fairing in Lisbon. Soon Casement will be there too—or at least the possibility of it has been introduced, as Parkinson, the current consul, is again threatening (or promising) to retire and Casement’s hardship service, along with his poor health, make him an obvious choice for the position. And he and John will be reunited.
Casement pauses at the gate. Inside, the writer moves behind the window, disappears behind a wall, reappears in the other window. And then the wife appears. And then the child. This is how families are assembled.
Conrad looks up and, seeing him, is quickly out the front door. “Casement,” he says, “you have the look of a wanderer.”
True enough. He’s even holding a crooked walking stick that he’d found along the road, one that must have slipped from the horse’s bundle. “And you have the look of a man living in a cottage with his wife and son.”
Conrad smiles with subtle shrug. He looks over his shoulder and shrugs again as if it has all been an accident of little importance. They meet halfway up the path and shake hands. “No family?” asks Conrad.
“I borrow one when it’s needed.”
The parlor is a low, wide room with a broad oak beam running the width of it. The walls are thick, and the windows thick-paned. Conrad is subletting the place from Ford Maddox Ford. There are paintings by the eponymous uncle Ford Maddox Brown, a couple of small Rosettis, a desk by William Morris. It is an odd location for Conrad, made even stranger by the presence of the pleasant wife and the bright-eyed Borys. Although Conrad seems to find it to his liking. Or, perhaps a truer observation, as much to his liking as something else would be. There are quite a few writers in the vicinity and Conrad tells Casement that he isn’t lonely.
“Or not as lonely as I’d like to be, but it is very good to see you.”
Casement and Conrad lapse into easy conversation. Ivory was bad, but rubber presents greater hardship for the native, and since the advent of the rubber tree—cultivated in places like Malaysia—rubber vines don’t offer an easy profit.
“Slave labor helps in this regard,” says Casement. “This is why rubber is worse than ivory.”
Conrad lifts his shoulders. “Ivory is better to write about, although the plight of these natives working the rubber is affecting.” Conrad gives his head a rapid shake. “I’m not sure why you think I can help.”
“I’m collaborating with some people to form a society, the Congo Relief Association. Perhaps you could influence some of your friends to join.”
“Who is organizing this?”
“Currently Alice Stopford Green. Do you know her?”
“She was married to that historian from Oxford.”
“And is an historian in her own right. And there’s Edward Morel, who edits the West African Mail.”
“What is your involvement?”
“I just finished up the report and now I’m trying to get people to pay attention to it, but support is . . . well, complicated by many things.”
“Such as?”
“For example, although saving Congo natives from slavery would seem to be a good thing to do, not everyone is behind it. Some see it as an attack on the Catholics and as the vast majority of the missionaries—whose accounts are forming the bulk of commentary—are Baptists and other Protestants, powerful Catholics are seeing the whole movement as an attack on King Leopold’s good work. Catholics make easy targets.”
“But isn’t Alice Stopford Green a Roman Catholic?”
“Irish and Protestant.”
“And you?”
“The same.”
“Your life is complicated.”
“Yes, it is.” He leans back and strokes his beard, amused to see that Conrad has replicated the gesture, although he doesn’t seem to notice. “What I need is a sympathetic newspaper with a large circulation. Maybe you can help with that?”
“Currently I’ve been submitting work to the Daily Mail. And I do like the editor, but I’m not sure he’s interested in humanitarian issues.”
“Daily Mail. That’s Alfred Harmsworth.”
“Do you know him?”
“No. He is a good friend of a good friend of mine.”
“Maybe he can put a word in,” says Conrad. “And I will too. But I’m not overly optimistic. Currently it’s balloons that excite him.”
“But he has shown interest in Africa.”
Conrad seems skeptical.
“During the Boer War. Harmsworth refused to publish unverified accounts of English victories and ended up being labeled as pro-German for destroying morale.”
“Of course.” Conrad’s mind finds the track. “But that wasn’t really about Africa. Harmsworth has some theory about Germany’s ascendancy. It’s all about Germany and England. To Harmsworth, Africa doesn’t exist in a real way.”
“Just as a rugby field for other powers?”
Conrad nods. “I’ll try him,” he says, “but Harmsworth’s fond of sensation.”
Casement feels the panic rising as his patience dissolves. “Children are being tortured.”
“Unfortunately,” says Conrad, philosophically, topping up Casement’s glass, “that is hardly the stuff of news.”
XII
The Pennsylvania
September 1904
The sun has finally broken through after three long days of damp chill, horizontal rain, and rough seas. Sarita, wrapped in an oilskin, had been enjoying her quick, on-deck strolls in peace, but now the weather is mild and all those people have been released from their cabins. Sarita hopes her black dress will put them off, because she is jealous of this solitude. Her sister Ettie has been dead one year today, of influenza, leaving James and the three children. Ettie, dead. It’s not as if she and her sister had communicated much over the last five years, so how does Ettie’s absence even register? But it is sad. Poor Ettie, who, after trying to find a way to avoid her husband for years, finally figured it out.
It was Ettie’s death that sent Mother into decline, as if all the work of mourning for that long dead daughter, buried in a pine box in New Orleans, had somehow been undone. The grief for Ettie compounded with this revenant sorrow had caused something to snap, although Mother had first borne her grief with an oppressive, performing silence. Mother had survived Ettie by six months. The cause of her death? No one really bothered to address that beyond a vague reference to her suffering from “nerves,” since women in their sixties were often dead for no particular reason. Sarita had known it was grief, was embarrassed at her own resentment that her presence in her mother’s life had not been enough to make life worthwhile, and then let it go. She was a mother and once there were children, one abandoned the role of child, had to acknowledge that aging parents too were a variety of child. Still, her independence and success as wife and mother had somehow made her less lovable than the passive, stuck-in-a-loveless-marriage Ettie. When her father had asked that Sarita be the one to accompany the casket back to New Jersey for burial, she was resentful, even though she is the only child left to do it. And where is her father? In South America, making deals.
Half of her feels that he should be the one on the boat with the body—he owes her mother that at least. Half of her feels that her father’s presence would be hypocrisy too perfect to bear. All these actions distract from the real grief, which is an odd, cold, terrifying thing composed in parts of stunning absence, maudlin pining, and the sensation that her mother’s vacating the role of matron has forced her to occupy it. Sarita now has a deeper understanding of her own mortality.
Soon it will be time for lunch. Sarita is waiting for the boy to finish tucking a blanket around some old man, supervised by a woman who must be the daughter, who controls all the action as if the boy is a marionette. She pantomimes with her hands paddling the air. Why not fix your father’s blanket yourself? Or leave him to the cold? The man doesn’t look particularly animated and—a casual look here—that open mouth could just as easily illustrate a postmortem gawp as an orifice well adjusted for the intake of oxygen. Heart attack, please, Sarita wishes for herself. She wishes it for all of them—Father, Herbert. Why can’t we all disappear with a little crackle of energy and some dissipating wisps of smoke? The boy is done and Sarita gets his attention with a raised parasol.
“Yes, Madame,” says the boy.
“Do you know Mister Ward? Mustaches, blond hair?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ward, of course.”
Herbert’s always friendly with boys on ships, remembering that boy who, all those years ago, took passage to New Zealand. And she’s kind to this boy because he’s roughly Charlie’s age. “Could you please tell him that I’m going to have lunch in our rooms, but that he shouldn’t be obligated to join?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ward.”
She watches the boy step away in a funny, jerky gait. Maybe his shoes are too small.
The ship had hardly steamed out of Plymouth before Herbert reconnected with a Mr. Grimes, known from his last trip to Panama, and the two have disappeared into the world of cigars and whiskey and men. Herbert always runs into people he knows. Or turns complete strangers into people he knows. She’ll make one last promenade along the deck to pass time in case Herbert wants to join her but, to be honest, she’d rather be left to her letter-writing; there are still some people—Father’s friends, all of them—who have yet to be informed of Mother’s final retreat from society.
There, at the railing, is a woman who seems not altogether unfamiliar. Something in her posture—the aggressive thrust of shoulders and lengthened neck—is known to Sarita. Before this elegant, contrived creature has made a full turn to face her, Sarita has figured it out. It’s Paz.
How long has it been since Sarita has seen Paz? Paz left her service shortly after Cricket’s birth, and Cricket is now fifteen years old. Paz is wearing a yellow silk walking suit and her hat is elegant, feathered, yet small enough to not overpower her features: the pronounced nose with flaring nostrils, the arched eyebrows, the liquid, almond eyes. Perhaps her mouth has grown a little harder with the passage of years, but Paz’s dramatic beauty still commands. In her expensive clothing, she is certainly turning heads on deck.
Sarita is almost upon her when Paz registers who she is. Part of this is, perhaps, that Paz is unaccustomed to being approached, but whatever work the years has performed on Paz, an equal measure has extruded across Sarita’s own features. Sarita lets a moment expire before she says anything. She extends her hand.
“Paz, how long has it been?”
“Madame,” Paz says. She takes Sarita’s hand and squeezes with the correct pressure. A number of adjustments are being made to Paz’s expression, little moments of honesty that surface, quickly veiled by comp
osure.
“You must call me Sarita,” Sarita says, although she’s not sure why. It’s clear that Paz, as attested to by her outfit—the latest couture—is no longer a lady’s maid, but Sarita senses that she’s wandered into a realm that has yet to be covered by contemporary etiquette.
“I trust that Mister Ward is in good health?” says Paz, in heavily accented English.
“Quite well,” Sarita responds, then, dropping into Spanish, adds, “the dress is for my mother. If you’re not busy, maybe you could join me for some lunch or a little coffee in my rooms?”
Once the two women are seated across from each other on the stiff little couches in the stiff little drawing room, Mother in the next room enacting a stiffness all her own, Sarita is not sure what to say. The obvious is to ask Paz how she’s doing, and how she’s occupying herself, but her set of skills might not be a good topic for conversation. Pointing out Paz’s finery is no doubt also the wrong thing to do, but the only alternative seems to be this awkward silence. “That is a lovely color on you, Paz. You were always trying to get me to wear yellow,” she adds, “but it is an atrocious color on me, washes me out and makes me look dead. It might be a good option for my burial, or at least appropriate.”
“Black is what looks best on you,” Paz replies, tilting her head to better gauge. She’s relaxed her face into a smile, “although mourning does not.”
“It’s been tiring.”
“And how is Sarita Enriqueta?”
“We call her Cricket, and she’s poorly behaved and a lot of fun.”
“And I heard there was another daughter?”
“Dimples. She’s twelve. And I have three sons. The youngest is six.”
Paz smiles politely as she does the math in her head. Sarita was forty-two when Roddie was born.
“I am blessed with children,” Sarita says.
“And they are blessed with you,” Paz responds. The coffee arrives. The girl, in some prolonged state of “training,” is unsteady with the tray and the jittering of the crockery increases as she’s presented with the spectacle of Paz in her yellow dress. Paz gives the maid a patient, condescending smile, maintaining silence until she leaves the room.
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