Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)

by Joseph Conrad

  Suddenly one of the coolies began to speak. The light came and went on his lean, straining face; he threw his head up like a baying hound. From the bunker came the sounds of knocking and the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural hooting sounds, that did not seem to belong to a human language, penetrated Jukes with a strange emotion as if a brute had tried to be eloquent.

  Two more started mouthing what seemed to Jukes fierce denunciations; the others stirred with grunts and growls. Jukes ordered the hands out of the ‘tweendecks hurriedly. He left last himself, backing through the door, while the grunts rose to a loud murmur and hands were extended after him as after a malefactor. The boatswain shot the bolt, and remarked uneasily, “Seems as if the wind had dropped, sir.”

  The seamen were glad to get back into the alleyway. Secretly each of them thought that at the last moment he could rush out on deck — and that was a comfort. There is something horribly repugnant in the idea of being drowned under a deck. Now they had done with the Chinamen, they again became conscious of the ship’s position.

  Jukes on coming out of the alleyway found himself up to the neck in the noisy water. He gained the bridge, and discovered he could detect obscure shapes as if his sight had become preternaturally acute. He saw faint outlines. They recalled not the familiar aspect of the Nan-Shan, but something remembered — an old dismantled steamer he had seen years ago rotting on a mudbank. She recalled that wreck.

  There was no wind, not a breath, except the faint currents created by the lurches of the ship. The smoke tossed out of the funnel was settling down upon her deck. He breathed it as he passed forward. He felt the deliberate throb of the engines, and heard small sounds that seemed to have survived the great uproar: the knocking of broken fittings, the rapid tumbling of some piece of wreckage on the bridge. He perceived dimly the squat shape of his captain holding on to a twisted bridge-rail, motionless and swaying as if rooted to the planks. The unexpected stillness of the air oppressed Jukes.

  “We have done it, sir,” he gasped.

  “Thought you would,” said Captain MacWhirr.

  “Did you?” murmured Jukes to himself.

  “Wind fell all at once,” went on the Captain.

  Jukes burst out: “If you think it was an easy job — ”

  But his captain, clinging to the rail, paid no attention. “According to the books the worst is not over yet.”

  “If most of them hadn’t been half dead with seasickness and fright, not one of us would have come out of that ‘tween-deck alive,” said Jukes.

  “Had to do what’s fair by them,” mumbled MacWhirr, stolidly. “You don’t find everything in books.”

  “Why, I believe they would have risen on us if I hadn’t ordered the hands out of that pretty quick,” continued Jukes with warmth.

  After the whisper of their shouts, their ordinary tones, so distinct, rang out very loud to their ears in the amazing stillness of the air. It seemed to them they were talking in a dark and echoing vault.

  Through a jagged aperture in the dome of clouds the light of a few stars fell upon the black sea, rising and falling confusedly. Sometimes the head of a watery cone would topple on board and mingle with the rolling flurry of foam on the swamped deck; and the Nan-Shan wallowed heavily at the bottom of a circular cistern of clouds. This ring of dense vapours, gyrating madly round the calm of the centre, encompassed the ship like a motionless and unbroken wall of an aspect inconceivably sinister. Within, the sea, as if agitated by an internal commotion, leaped in peaked mounds that jostled each other, slapping heavily against her sides; and a low moaning sound, the infinite plaint of the storm’s fury, came from beyond the limits of the menacing calm. Captain MacWhirr remained silent, and Jukes’ ready ear caught suddenly the faint, long-drawn roar of some immense wave rushing unseen under that thick blackness, which made the appalling boundary of his vision.

  “Of course,” he started resentfully, “they thought we had caught at the chance to plunder them. Of course! You said — pick up the money. Easier said than done. They couldn’t tell what was in our heads. We came in, smash — right into the middle of them. Had to do it by a rush.”

  “As long as it’s done . . . ,” mumbled the Captain, without attempting to look at Jukes. “Had to do what’s fair.”

  “We shall find yet there’s the devil to pay when this is over,” said Jukes, feeling very sore. “Let them only recover a bit, and you’ll see. They will fly at our throats, sir. Don’t forget, sir, she isn’t a British ship now. These brutes know it well, too. The damned Siamese flag.”

  “We are on board, all the same,” remarked Captain MacWhirr.

  “The trouble’s not over yet,” insisted Jukes, prophetically, reeling and catching on. “She’s a wreck,” he added, faintly.

  “The trouble’s not over yet,” assented Captain MacWhirr, half aloud . . . . “Look out for her a minute.”

  “Are you going off the deck, sir?” asked Jukes, hurriedly, as if the storm were sure to pounce upon him as soon as he had been left alone with the ship.

  He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleams of distant worlds. She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam — and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jukes’ head a few stars shone into a pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars, too, seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.

  Captain MacWhirr had gone into the chart-room. There was no light there; but he could feel the disorder of that place where he used to live tidily. His armchair was upset. The books had tumbled out on the floor: he scrunched a piece of glass under his boot. He groped for the matches, and found a box on a shelf with a deep ledge. He struck one, and puckering the corners of his eyes, held out the little flame towards the barometer whose glittering top of glass and metals nodded at him continuously.

  It stood very low — incredibly low, so low that Captain MacWhirr grunted. The match went out, and hurriedly he extracted another, with thick, stiff fingers.

  Again a little flame flared up before the nodding glass and metal of the top. His eyes looked at it, narrowed with attention, as if expecting an imperceptible sign. With his grave face he resembled a booted and misshapen pagan burning incense before the oracle of a Joss. There was no mistake. It was the lowest reading he had ever seen in his life.

  Captain MacWhirr emitted a low whistle. He forgot himself till the flame diminished to a blue spark, burnt his fingers and vanished. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the thing!

  There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the indifference of matter. There was no room for doubt now. Captain MacWhirr pshawed at it, and threw the match down.

  The worst was to come, then — and if the books were right this worst would be very bad. The experience of the last six hours had enlarged his conception of what heavy weather could be like. “It’ll be terrific,” he pronounced, mentally. He had not consciously looked at anything by the light of the matches except at the barometer; and yet somehow he had seen that his water-bottle and the two tumblers had been flung out of their stand. It seemed to give him a more intimate knowledge of the tossing the ship had gone through. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he thought. And his table had been cleared, too; his rulers, his pencils, the inkstand — all the things that had their safe appointed places — they were gone, as if a mischievous hand had plucked them ou
t one by one and flung them on the wet floor. The hurricane had broken in upon the orderly arrangements of his privacy. This had never happened before, and the feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his composure. And the worst was to come yet! He was glad the trouble in the ‘tween-deck had been discovered in time. If the ship had to go after all, then, at least, she wouldn’t be going to the bottom with a lot of people in her fighting teeth and claw. That would have been odious. And in that feeling there was a humane intention and a vague sense of the fitness of things.

  These instantaneous thoughts were yet in their essence heavy and slow, partaking of the nature of the man. He extended his hand to put back the matchbox in its corner of the shelf. There were always matches there — by his order. The steward had his instructions impressed upon him long before. “A box . . . just there, see? Not so very full . . . where I can put my hand on it, steward. Might want a light in a hurry. Can’t tell on board ship what you might want in a hurry. Mind, now.”

  And of course on his side he would be careful to put it back in its place scrupulously. He did so now, but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that box any more. The vividness of the thought checked him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind.

  Not yet. He heard only the wash of water, the heavy splashes, the dull shocks of the confused seas boarding his ship from all sides. She would never have a chance to clear her decks.

  But the quietude of the air was startlingly tense and unsafe, like a slender hair holding a sword suspended over his head. By this awful pause the storm penetrated the defences of the man and unsealed his lips. He spoke out in the solitude and the pitch darkness of the cabin, as if addressing another being awakened within his breast.

  “I shouldn’t like to lose her,” he said half aloud.

  He sat unseen, apart from the sea, from his ship, isolated, as if withdrawn from the very current of his own existence, where such freaks as talking to himself surely had no place. His palms reposed on his knees, he bowed his short neck and puffed heavily, surrendering to a strange sensation of weariness he was not enlightened enough to recognize for the fatigue of mental stress.

  From where he sat he could reach the door of a washstand locker. There should have been a towel there. There was. Good. . . . He took it out, wiped his face, and afterwards went on rubbing his wet head. He towelled himself with energy in the dark, and then remained motionless with the towel on his knees. A moment passed, of a stillness so profound that no one could have guessed there was a man sitting in that cabin. Then a murmur arose.

  “She may come out of it yet.”

  When Captain MacWhirr came out on deck, which he did brusquely, as though he had suddenly become conscious of having stayed away too long, the calm had lasted already more than fifteen minutes — long enough to make itself intolerable even to his imagination. Jukes, motionless on the forepart of the bridge, began to speak at once. His voice, blank and forced as though he were talking through hard-set teeth, seemed to flow away on all sides into the darkness, deepening again upon the sea.

  “I had the wheel relieved. Hackett began to sing out that he was done. He’s lying in there alongside the steering-gear with a face like death. At first I couldn’t get anybody to crawl out and relieve the poor devil. That boss’n’s worse than no good, I always said. Thought I would have had to go myself and haul out one of them by the neck.”

  “Ah, well,” muttered the Captain. He stood watchful by Jukes’ side.

  “The second mate’s in there, too, holding his head. Is he hurt, sir?”

  “No — crazy,” said Captain MacWhirr, curtly.

  “Looks as if he had a tumble, though.”

  “I had to give him a push,” explained the Captain.

  Jukes gave an impatient sigh.

  “It will come very sudden,” said Captain MacWhirr, “and from over there, I fancy. God only knows though. These books are only good to muddle your head and make you jumpy. It will be bad, and there’s an end. If we only can steam her round in time to meet it. . . .”

  A minute passed. Some of the stars winked rapidly and vanished.

  “You left them pretty safe?” began the Captain abruptly, as though the silence were unbearable.

  “Are you thinking of the coolies, sir? I rigged lifelines all ways across that ‘tween-deck.”

  “Did you? Good idea, Mr. Jukes.”

  “I didn’t . . . think you cared to . . . know,” said Jukes — the lurching of the ship cut his speech as though somebody had been jerking him around while he talked — ”how I got on with . . . that infernal job. We did it. And it may not matter in the end.”

  “Had to do what’s fair, for all — they are only Chinamen. Give them the same chance with ourselves — hang it all. She isn’t lost yet. Bad enough to be shut up below in a gale — ”

  “That’s what I thought when you gave me the job, sir,” interjected Jukes, moodily.

  “ — without being battered to pieces,” pursued Captain MacWhirr with rising vehemence. “Couldn’t let that go on in my ship, if I knew she hadn’t five minutes to live. Couldn’t bear it, Mr. Jukes.”

  A hollow echoing noise, like that of a shout rolling in a rocky chasm, approached the ship and went away again. The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist of its beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging over the ship — and went out.

  “Now for it!” muttered Captain MacWhirr. “Mr. Jukes.”

  “Here, sir.”

  The two men were growing indistinct to each other.

  “We must trust her to go through it and come out on the other side. That’s plain and straight. There’s no room for Captain Wilson’s storm-strategy here.”

  “No, sir.”

  “She will be smothered and swept again for hours,” mumbled the Captain. “There’s not much left by this time above deck for the sea to take away — unless you or me.”

  “Both, sir,” whispered Jukes, breathlessly.

  “You are always meeting trouble half way, Jukes,” Captain MacWhirr remonstrated quaintly. “Though it’s a fact that the second mate is no good. D’ye hear, Mr. Jukes? You would be left alone if. . . .”

  Captain MacWhirr interrupted himself, and Jukes, glancing on all sides, remained silent.

  “Don’t you be put out by anything,” the Captain continued, mumbling rather fast. “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it — always facing it — that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart.

  In the next few seconds the Captain spoke to the engine-room and got an answer.

  For some reason Jukes experienced an access of confidence, a sensation that came from outside like a warm breath, and made him feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of the darkness stole into his ears. He noted it unmoved, out of that sudden belief in himself, as a man safe in a shirt of mail would watch a point.

  The ship laboured without intermission amongst the black hills of water, paying with this hard tumbling the price of her life. She rumbled in her depths, shaking a white plummet of steam into the night, and Jukes’ thought skimmed like a bird through the engine-room, where Mr. Rout — good man — was ready. When the rumbling ceased it seemed to him that there was a pause of every sound, a dead pause in which Captain MacWhirr’s voice rang out startlingly.

  “What’s that? A puff of wind?” — it spoke much louder than Jukes had ever heard it before — ”On the bow. That’s right. She may come out of it yet.”

  The mutter of the winds drew near apace. In the forefront c
ould be distinguished a drowsy waking plaint passing on, and far off the growth of a multiple clamour, marching and expanding. There was the throb as of many drums in it, a vicious rushing note, and like the chant of a tramping multitude.

  Jukes could no longer see his captain distinctly. The darkness was absolutely piling itself upon the ship. At most he made out movements, a hint of elbows spread out, of a head thrown up.

  Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: “I wouldn’t like to lose her.”

  He was spared that annoyance.

  VI

  On A bright sunshiny day, with the breeze chasing her smoke far ahead, the Nan-Shan came into Fu-chau. Her arrival was at once noticed on shore, and the seamen in harbour said: “Look! Look at that steamer. What’s that? Siamese — isn’t she? Just look at her!”

  She seemed, indeed, to have been used as a running target for the secondary batteries of a cruiser. A hail of minor shells could not have given her upper works a more broken, torn, and devastated aspect: and she had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world — and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth. She was incrusted and gray with salt to the trucks of her masts and to the top of her funnel; as though (as some facetious seaman said) “the crowd on board had fished her out somewhere from the bottom of the sea and brought her in here for salvage.” And further, excited by the felicity of his own wit, he offered to give five pounds for her — ”as she stands.”