All this the goggle-eyed mate had said in a resentful and melancholy voice, with pauses, to the gentle murmur of the sea. It was for him a bitter sort of pleasure to have a fresh pair of ears, a newcomer, to whom he could repeat all these matters of grief and suspicion talked over endlessly by the band of Captain Anthony’s faithful subordinates. It was evidently so refreshing to his worried spirit that it made him forget the advisability of a little caution with a complete stranger. But really with Mr. Powell there was no danger. Amused, at first, at these plaints, he provoked them for fun. Afterwards, turning them over in his mind, he became impressed, and as the impression grew stronger with the days his resolution to keep it to himself grew stronger too.
* * * * *
What made it all the easier to keep — I mean the resolution — was that Powell’s sentiment of amused surprise at what struck him at first as mere absurdity was not unmingled with indignation. And his years were too few, his position too novel, his reliance on his own opinion not yet firm enough to allow him to express it with any effect. And then — what would have been the use, anyhow — and where was the necessity?
But this thing, familiar and mysterious at the same time, occupied his imagination. The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one’s experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon. He viewed the apoplectic, goggle-eyed mate and the saturnine, heavy-eyed steward as the victims of a peculiar and secret form of lunacy which poisoned their lives. But he did not give them his sympathy on that account. No. That strange affliction awakened in him a sort of suspicious wonder.
Once — and it was at night again; for the officers of the Ferndale keeping watch and watch as was customary in those days, had but few occasions for intercourse — once, I say, the thick Mr. Franklin, a quaintly bulky figure under the stars, the usual witnesses of his outpourings, asked him with an abruptness which was not callous, but in his simple way:
“I believe you have no parents living?”
Mr. Powell said that he had lost his father and mother at a very early age.
“My mother is still alive,” declared Mr. Franklin in a tone which suggested that he was gratified by the fact. “The old lady is lasting well. Of course she’s got to be made comfortable. A woman must be looked after, and, if it comes to that, I say, give me a mother. I dare say if she had not lasted it out so well I might have gone and got married. I don’t know, though. We sailors haven’t got much time to look about us to any purpose. Anyhow, as the old lady was there I haven’t, I may say, looked at a girl in all my life. Not that I wasn’t partial to female society in my time,” he added with a pathetic intonation, while the whites of his goggle eyes gleamed amorously under the clear night sky. “Very partial, I may say.”
Mr. Powell was amused; and as these communications took place only when the mate was relieved off duty he had no serious objection to them. The mate’s presence made the first half-hour and sometimes even more of his watch on deck pass away. If his senior did not mind losing some of his rest it was not Mr. Powell’s affair. Franklin was a decent fellow. His intention was not to boast of his filial piety.
“Of course I mean respectable female society,” he explained. “The other sort is neither here nor there. I blame no man’s conduct, but a well-brought-up young fellow like you knows that there’s precious little fun to be got out of it.” He fetched a deep sigh. “I wish Captain Anthony’s mother had been a lasting sort like my old lady. He would have had to look after her and he would have done it well. Captain Anthony is a proper man. And it would have saved him from the most foolish — ”
He did not finish the phrase which certainly was turning bitter in his mouth. Mr. Powell thought to himself: “There he goes again.” He laughed a little.
“I don’t understand why you are so hard on the captain, Mr. Franklin. I thought you were a great friend of his.”
Mr. Franklin exclaimed at this. He was not hard on the captain. Nothing was further from his thoughts. Friend! Of course he was a good friend and a faithful servant. He begged Powell to understand that if Captain Anthony chose to strike a bargain with Old Nick to-morrow, and Old Nick were good to the captain, he (Franklin) would find it in his heart to love Old Nick for the captain’s sake. That was so. On the other hand, if a saint, an angel with white wings came along and — ”
He broke off short again as if his own vehemence had frightened him. Then in his strained pathetic voice (which he had never raised) he observed that it was no use talking. Anybody could see that the man was changed.
“As to that,” said young Powell, “it is impossible for me to judge.”
“Good Lord!” whispered the mate. “An educated, clever young fellow like you with a pair of eyes on him and some sense too! Is that how a happy man looks? Eh? Young you may be, but you aren’t a kid; and I dare you to say ‘Yes!’”
Mr. Powell did not take up the challenge. He did not know what to think of the mate’s view. Still, it seemed as if it had opened his understanding in a measure. He conceded that the captain did not look very well.
“Not very well,” repeated the mate mournfully. “Do you think a man with a face like that can hope to live his life out? You haven’t knocked about long in this world yet, but you are a sailor, you have been in three or four ships, you say. Well, have you ever seen a shipmaster walking his own deck as if he did not know what he had underfoot? Have you? Dam’me if I don’t think that he forgets where he is. Of course he can be no other than a prime seaman; but it’s lucky, all the same, he has me on board. I know by this time what he wants done without being told. Do you know that I have had no order given me since we left port? Do you know that he has never once opened his lips to me unless I spoke to him first? I? His chief officer; his shipmate for full six years, with whom he had no cross word — not once in all that time. Aye. Not a cross look even. True that when I do make him speak to me, there is his dear old self, the quick eye, the kind voice. Could hardly be other to his old Franklin. But what’s the good? Eyes, voice, everything’s miles away. And for all that I take good care never to address him when the poop isn’t clear. Yes! Only we two and nothing but the sea with us. You think it would be all right; the only chief mate he ever had — Mr. Franklin here and Mr. Franklin there — when anything went wrong the first word you would hear about the decks was ‘Franklin!’ — I am thirteen years older than he is — you would think it would be all right, wouldn’t you? Only we two on this poop on which we saw each other first — he a young master — told me that he thought I would suit him very well — we two, and thirty-one days out at sea, and it’s no good! It’s like talking to a man standing on shore. I can’t get him back. I can’t get at him. I feel sometimes as if I must shake him by the arm: “Wake up! Wake up! You are wanted, sir . . . !”
Young Powell recognized the expression of a true sentiment, a thing so rare in this world where there are so many mutes and so many excellent reasons even at sea for an articulate man not to give himself away, that he felt something like respect for this outburst. It was not loud. The grotesque squat shape, with the knob of the head as if rammed down between the square shoulders by a blow from a club, moved vaguely in a circumscribed space limited by the two harness-casks lashed to the front rail of the poop, without gestures, hands in the pockets of the jacket, elbows pressed closely to its side; and the voice without resonance, passed from anger to dismay and back again without a single louder word in the hurried delivery, interrupted only by slight gasps for air as if the speaker were being choked by the suppressed passion of his grief.
Mr. Powell, though moved to a certain extent, was by no means carried away. And just as he thought that it was all over, the other, fidgeting in the darkness, was heard again explosive, bewildered but not very loud in the silence of the ship and the great empty peace of the sea.
“They have done something to him! What is it? What can it be? Can’t you g
uess? Don’t you know?”
“Good heavens!” Young Powell was astounded on discovering that this was an appeal addressed to him. “How on earth can I know?”
“You do talk to that white-faced, black-eyed . . . I’ve seen you talking to her more than a dozen times.”
Young Powell, his sympathy suddenly chilled, remarked in a disdainful tone that Mrs. Anthony’s eyes were not black.
“I wish to God she had never set them on the captain, whatever colour they are,” retorted Franklin. “She and that old chap with the scraped jaws who sits over her and stares down at her dead-white face with his yellow eyes — confound them! Perhaps you will tell us that his eyes are not yellow?”
Powell, not interested in the colour of Mr. Smith’s eyes, made a vague gesture. Yellow or not yellow, it was all one to him.
The mate murmured to himself. “No. He can’t know. No! No more than a baby. It would take an older head.”
“I don’t even understand what you mean,” observed Mr. Powell coldly.
“And even the best head would be puzzled by such devil-work,” the mate continued, muttering. “Well, I have heard tell of women doing for a man in one way or another when they got him fairly ashore. But to bring their devilry to sea and fasten on such a man! . . . It’s something I can’t understand. But I can watch. Let them look out — I say!”
His short figure, unable to stoop, without flexibility, could not express dejection. He was very tired suddenly; he dragged his feet going off the poop. Before he left it with nearly an hour of his watch below sacrificed, he addressed himself once more to our young man who stood abreast of the mizzen rigging in an unreceptive mood expressed by silence and immobility. He did not regret, he said, having spoken openly on this very serious matter.
“I don’t know about its seriousness, sir,” was Mr. Powell’s frank answer. “But if you think you have been telling me something very new you are mistaken. You can’t keep that matter out of your speeches. It’s the sort of thing I’ve been hearing more or less ever since I came on board.”
Mr. Powell, speaking truthfully, did not mean to speak offensively. He had instincts of wisdom; he felt that this was a serious affair, for it had nothing to do with reason. He did not want to raise an enemy for himself in the mate. And Mr. Franklin did not take offence. To Mr. Powell’s truthful statement he answered with equal truth and simplicity that it was very likely, very likely. With a thing like that (next door to witchcraft almost) weighing on his mind, the wonder was that he could think of anything else. The poor man must have found in the restlessness of his thoughts the illusion of being engaged in an active contest with some power of evil; for his last words as he went lingeringly down the poop ladder expressed the quaint hope that he would get him, Powell, “on our side yet.”
Mr. Powell — just imagine a straightforward youngster assailed in this fashion on the high seas — answered merely by an embarrassed and uneasy laugh which reflected exactly the state of his innocent soul. The apoplectic mate, already half-way down, went up again three steps of the poop ladder. Why, yes. A proper young fellow, the mate expected, wouldn’t stand by and see a man, a good sailor and his own skipper, in trouble without taking his part against a couple of shore people who — Mr. Powell interrupted him impatiently, asking what was the trouble?
“What is it you are hinting at?” he cried with an inexplicable irritation.
“I don’t like to think of him all alone down there with these two,” Franklin whispered impressively. “Upon my word I don’t. God only knows what may be going on there . . . Don’t laugh . . . It was bad enough last voyage when Mrs. Brown had a cabin aft; but now it’s worse. It frightens me. I can’t sleep sometimes for thinking of him all alone there, shut off from us all.”
Mrs. Brown was the steward’s wife. You must understand that shortly after his visit to the Fyne cottage (with all its consequences), Anthony had got an offer to go to the Western Islands, and bring home the cargo of some ship which, damaged in a collision or a stranding, took refuge in St. Michael, and was condemned there. Roderick Anthony had connections which would put such paying jobs in his way. So Flora de Barral had but a five months’ voyage, a mere excursion, for her first trial of sea-life. And Anthony, dearly trying to be most attentive, had induced this Mrs. Brown, the wife of his faithful steward, to come along as maid to his bride. But for some reason or other this arrangement was not continued. And the mate, tormented by indefinite alarms and forebodings, regretted it. He regretted that Jane Brown was no longer on board — as a sort of representative of Captain Anthony’s faithful servants, to watch quietly what went on in that part of the ship this fatal marriage had closed to their vigilance. That had been excellent. For she was a dependable woman.
Powell did not detect any particular excellence in what seemed a spying employment. But in his simplicity he said that he should have thought Mrs. Anthony would have been glad anyhow to have another woman on board. He was thinking of the white-faced girlish personality which it seemed to him ought to have been cared for. The innocent young man always looked upon the girl as immature; something of a child yet.
“She! glad! Why it was she who had her fired out. She didn’t want anybody around the cabin. Mrs. Brown is certain of it. She told her husband so. You ask the steward and hear what he has to say about it. That’s why I don’t like it. A capable woman who knew her place. But no. Out she must go. For no fault, mind you. The captain was ashamed to send her away. But that wife of his — aye the precious pair of them have got hold of him. I can’t speak to him for a minute on the poop without that thimble-rigging coon coming gliding up. I’ll tell you what. I overheard once — God knows I didn’t try to — only he forgot I was on the other side of the skylight with my sextant — I overheard him — you know how he sits hanging over her chair and talking away without properly opening his mouth — yes I caught the word right enough. He was alluding to the captain as “the jailer.” The jail . . . !”
Franklin broke off with a profane execration. A silence reigned for a long time and the slight, very gentle rolling of the ship slipping before the N.E. trade-wind seemed to be a soothing device for lulling to sleep the suspicions of men who trust themselves to the sea.
A deep sigh was heard followed by the mate’s voice asking dismally if that was the way one would speak of a man to whom one wished well? No better proof of something wrong was needed. Therefore he hoped, as he vanished at last, that Mr. Powell would be on their side. And this time Mr. Powell did not answer this hope with an embarrassed laugh.
That young officer was more and more surprised at the nature of the incongruous revelations coming to him in the surroundings and in the atmosphere of the open sea. It is difficult for us to understand the extent, the completeness, the comprehensiveness of his inexperience, for us who didn’t go to sea out of a small private school at the age of fourteen years and nine months. Leaning on his elbow in the mizzen rigging and so still that the helmsman over there at the other end of the poop might have (and he probably did) suspect him of being criminally asleep on duty, he tried to “get hold of that thing” by some side which would fit in with his simple notions of psychology. “What the deuce are they worrying about?” he asked himself in a dazed and contemptuous impatience. But all the same “jailer” was a funny name to give a man; unkind, unfriendly, nasty. He was sorry that Mr. Smith was guilty in that matter because, the truth must be told, he had been to a certain extent sensible of having been noticed in a quiet manner by the father of Mrs. Anthony. Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr. Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical.
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 329
