Inglese that nothing would be easier than to put him ashore in the course of the next day.
“What do you think, Excellency, there is my own native village not very far from Genoa on the Riviera di Ponente, and you will be amongst friends to carry out such orders as you may give, or pass you from one to another back to Genoa as fast as mules can climb or horses trot. And it would be the same from any point in Italy. They would get you into Genoa in disguise, or without disguise, and into the very house of Cantelucci, so that you could appear there without a soul knowing how you entered or how you came back.”
Cosmo, feeling a sudden relief, wondered that he should have found it in the mere resolution to go off secretly with only the clothes he stood up in, absolutely without money or anything of value on him, not even a watch, and without a hat, at the mere bidding of a man bound on some secret work, God knows where and for what object, and who had volunteered to him no statement except that he had cousins in every spot in Italy and a love affair with an ortolana. The enormous absurdity of it made him impatient to be doing, and upon his expressed desire to make a start Attilio, with the words, “You command here, signore,” told his men it was time to be moving.
In less than half an hour the boat, with all her crew crouching at the bottom and using the oars for poling in the shallow water along the coast with infinite precaution to avoid knocks and bangs as though the boat, the oars, and everything in her were made of glass, had been moved far enough from the tower to have her nose put to the open sea. After the first few strokes Cosmo felt himself draw back again to the receding shore. But it was too late. He seemed to feel profoundly that he was not — perhaps no man was — a free agent. He felt a sort of fear, a faltering of all his limbs, as he swung back to his oar. Then his eyes caught the galley, indeed everybody’s eyes in the boat were turned that way except the eyes of the ancient steersman, the white-headed figure in an unexpectedly erect attitude who, with hardly any breath left in his body and a mere helpless victim of other men’s will, had a strange appearance of the man in command.
In less than ten minutes the galley became invisible, and even the long shadows of the jetties had sunk to the level of the sea. There was a moment when one of the men observed without excitement, “She’s after us,” but this remark provoked no answer and turned out to be mistaken, and for an hour longer Attilio, pulling stroke, watched the faint phosphorescent wake, the evanescent fire under the black smoothness of the sea, elusive like the tail of a comet amongst the dim reflections of the stars. Its straightness was the only proof of the silent helmsman with his arm resting along the tiller being still alive. Then he began to look about him, and presently, laying in his oar, relieved the old man at the tiller. He had to take his arm off it. The other never said a word.
The boat moved slowly now. The problem was to discover the awaiting felucca without lights and with her sails lowered. Several times Attilio stood up to have a look without being able to make out anything. He was growing uneasy. He spoke to Cosmo.
“I hope we haven’t passed her by. If we once get her between us and the land it will be hopeless to catch sight of her till the day breaks. Better rest on your oars.”
He remained standing himself. His eyes roamed to and fro patiently and suddenly he emitted a short laugh. “Why, there she is.”
He steered, still standing, while the others pulled gently. The old man, who had not emitted a sound, had slipped off the seat on to the stern sheets. Attilio said quietly, “Take your oars in,” and suddenly Cosmo felt the boat bump against the low side of the felucca, which he had never turned his head to see. No hail or even murmur came from her. She had no lights. Attilio’s voice said, “You first, signore,” and Cosmo, looking up, saw three motionless heads above the bulwarks. No word was spoken to him. He was not even looked at by those silent and shadowy men. The first sound he heard were the words, “Take care,” pronounced by Attilio in connection with getting the old boatman on board. Cosmo, standing aside, saw a group carry him over to the other side of the deck. While the sails were being hoisted he sat on the hatch and came to the very verge of believing himself invisible till suddenly Attilio stood by his side.
“Like this we will catch the very first breath of daybreak, and may a breeze follow it to take us out of sight of that town defiled by the Austrians and soon to be the prey of the nobles and the priests.” He paused. “So at least Cantelucci says. There are bed places below, if you want to take some rest, signore.”
“I am not sleepy,” said Cosmo. If no longer invisible, he could still feel disembodied, as it were. He was neither sleepy nor tired, nor hungry, nor even curious, as if altogether freed from the weaknesses of the body, and not indifferent but without apprehensions or speculations of any sort to disturb his composure as if of a fully informed wisdom. He did not seem to himself to weigh more than a feather. He was suffering the reaction of the upheaval of all his feelings and the endless contest of his thoughts and that sort of mental agony which had taken possession of him while he was descend- ing the great staircase of the Palazzo under the eye of the Count de Montevesso. It was as though one of those fevers in which the victim watches his own delirium had left him irresponsible, like a sick man in his bed. Attilio went on:
“ Cantelucci’s an experienced conspirator. He thinks that the force of the people is such that it would be like an uprising of the ground itself. May be, but where is the man that would know how to use it?”
Cosmo let it go by like a problem that could await solution or as a matter of mere vain words. The night air did not stir, and Attilio changed his tone.
“They had their lines out ever since the calm began. We will have fish to eat in the morning. You will have to be one of ourselves for a time and observe the customs of the common people.”
“Tell me, Attilio,” Cosmo questioned, not widely but in a quiet, almost confidential tone, and laying his hand for the first time on the shoulder of that man only a little older than himself. “Tell me, what am I doing here?”
Attilio, the wanderer of the seas along the southern shores of the earth and the pupil of the hermit of the plains that lie under the constellation of the southern sky, smiled in the dark, a faint friendly gleam of white teeth in an over-shadowed face. But all the answer he made was:
“Who would dare say now that our stars have not come together? Come to sit at the stern, signore. I can find a rug to throw over a coil of rope for a seat. I am now the padrone of that felucca, but of course barring her appointed work you are entirely the master of her.”
These words were said with a marked accent of politeness such as one uses for a courtesy formula. But he stopped for a moment on his way aft to point his finger on the deck.
“We have thrown a bit of canvas over him. Yes, that is the old man whose last bit of work was to steer a boat, and strange to think perhaps it had been done for Italy.”
“Where is his star now?” said Cosmo, after looking down in silence for a time.
“Signore, it should be out,” said Attilio with studied intonation. “But who will miss it out of the sky?”
The Short Stories
Nowy Zwiat, Warsaw, where Conrad lived with his parents in his earliest years
THE BLACK MATE
A good many years ago there were several ships loading at the Jetty, London Dock. I am speaking here of the ‘eighties of the last century, of the time when London had plenty of fine ships in the docks, though not so many fine buildings in its streets.
The ships at the Jetty were fine enough; they lay one behind the other; and the Sapphire, third from the end, was as good as the rest of them, and nothing more. Each ship at the Jetty had, of course, her chief officer on board. So had every other ship in dock.
The policeman at the gates knew them all by sight, without being able to say at once, without thinking, to what ship any particular man belonged. As a matter of fact, the mates of the ships then lying in the London Dock were like the majority of officers in the Merchan
t Service — a steady, hard-working, staunch, un-romantic-looking set of men, belonging to various classes of society, but with the professional stamp obliterating the personal characteristics, which were not very marked anyhow.
This last was true of them all, with the exception of the mate of the Sapphire. Of him the policemen could not be in doubt. This one had a presence.
He was noticeable to them in the street from a great distance; and when in the morning he strode down the Jetty to his ship, the lumpers and the dock labourers rolling the bales and trundling the cases of cargo on their hand-trucks would remark to each other:
“Here’s the black mate coming along.”
That was the name they gave him, being a gross lot, who could have no appreciation of the man’s dignified bearing. And to call him black was the superficial impressionism of the ignorant.
Of course, Mr. Bunter, the mate of the Sapphire, was not black. He was no more black than you or I, and certainly as white as any chief mate of a ship in the whole of the Port of London. His complexion was of the sort that did not take the tan easily; and I happen to know that the poor fellow had had a month’s illness just before he joined the Sapphire.
From this you will perceive that I knew Bunter. Of course I knew him. And, what’s more, I knew his secret at the time, this secret which — never mind just now. Returning to Bunter’s personal appearance, it was nothing but ignorant prejudice on the part of the foreman stevedore to say, as he did in my hearing: “I bet he’s a furriner of some sort.” A man may have black hair without being set down for a Dago. I have known a West-country sailor, boatswain of a fine ship, who looked more Spanish than any Spaniard afloat I’ve ever met. He looked like a Spaniard in a picture.
Competent authorities tell us that this earth is to be finally the inheritance of men with dark hair and brown eyes. It seems that already the great majority of mankind is dark-haired in various shades. But it is only when you meet one that you notice how men with really black hair, black as ebony, are rare. Bunter’s hair was absolutely black, black as a raven’s wing. He wore, too, all his beard (clipped, but a good length all the same), and his eyebrows were thick and bushy. Add to this steely blue eyes, which in a fair-haired man would have been nothing so extraordinary, but in that sombre framing made a startling contrast, and you will easily understand that Bunter was noticeable enough.
If it had not been for the quietness of his movements, for the general soberness of his demeanour, one would have given him credit for a fiercely passionate nature.
Of course, he was not in his first youth; but if the expression “in the force of his age” has any meaning, he realized it completely. He was a tall man, too, though rather spare. Seeing him from his poop indefatigably busy with his duties, Captain Ashton, of the clipper ship Elsinore, lying just ahead of the Sapphire, remarked once to a friend that “Johns has got somebody there to hustle his ship along for him.”
Captain Johns, master of the Sapphire, having commanded ships for many years, was well known without being much respected or liked. In the company of his fellows he was either neglected or chaffed. The chaffing was generally undertaken by Captain Ashton, a cynical and teasing sort of man. It was Captain Ashton who permitted himself the unpleasant joke of proclaiming once in company that “Johns is of the opinion that every sailor above forty years of age ought to be poisoned — shipmasters in actual command excepted.”
It was in a City restaurant, where several well-known shipmasters were having lunch together. There was Captain Ashton, florid and jovial, in a large white waistcoat and with a yellow rose in his buttonhole; Captain Sellers in a sack-coat, thin and pale-faced, with his iron-gray hair tucked behind his ears, and, but for the absence of spectacles, looking like an ascetical mild man of books; Captain Hell, a bluff sea-dog with hairy fingers, in blue serge and a black felt hat pushed far back off his crimson forehead. There was also a very young shipmaster, with a little fair moustache and serious eyes, who said nothing, and only smiled faintly from time to time.
Captain Johns, very much startled, raised his perplexed and credulous glance, which, together with a low and horizontally wrinkled brow, did not make a very intellectual ensemble. This impression was by no means mended by the slightly pointed form of his bald head.
Everybody laughed outright, and, thus guided, Captain Johns ended by smiling rather sourly, and attempted to defend himself. It was all very well to joke, but nowadays, when ships, to pay anything at all, had to be driven hard on the passage and in harbour, the sea was no place for elderly men. Only young men and men in their prime were equal to modern conditions of push and hurry. Look at the great firms: almost every single one of them was getting rid of men showing any signs of age. He, for one, didn’t want any oldsters on board his ship.
And, indeed, in this opinion Captain Johns was not singular. There was at that time a lot of seamen, with nothing against them but that they were grizzled, wearing out the soles of their last pair of boots on the pavements of the City in the heart-breaking search for a berth.
Captain Johns added with a sort of ill-humoured innocence that from holding that opinion to thinking of poisoning people was a very long step.
This seemed final but Captain Ashton would not let go his joke.
“Oh, yes. I am sure you would. You said distinctly ‘of no use.’ What’s to be done with men who are ‘of no use?’ You are a kind-hearted fellow, Johns. I am sure that if only you thought it over carefully you would consent to have them poisoned in some painless manner.”
Captain Sellers twitched his thin, sinuous lips.
“Make ghosts of them,” he suggested, pointedly.
At the mention of ghosts Captain Johns became shy, in his perplexed, sly, and unlovely manner.
Captain Ashton winked.
“Yes. And then perhaps you would get a chance to have a communication with the world of spirits. Surely the ghosts of seamen should haunt ships. Some of them would be sure to call on an old shipmate.”
Captain Sellers remarked drily:
“Don’t raise his hopes like this. It’s cruel. He won’t see anything. You know, Johns, that nobody has ever seen a ghost.”
At this intolerable provocation Captain Johns came out of his reserve. With no perplexity whatever, but with a positive passion of credulity giving momentary lustre to his dull little eyes, he brought up a lot of authenticated instances. There were books and books full of instances. It was merest ignorance to deny supernatural apparitions. Cases were published every month in a special newspaper. Professor Cranks saw ghosts daily. And Professor Cranks was no small potatoes either. One of the biggest scientific men living. And there was that newspaper fellow — what’s his name? — who had a girl-ghost visitor. He printed in his paper things she said to him. And to say there were no ghosts after that!
“Why, they have been photographed! What more proof do you want?”
Captain Johns was indignant. Captain Bell’s lips twitched, but Captain Ashton protested now.
“For goodness’ sake don’t keep him going with that. And by the by, Johns, who’s that hairy pirate you’ve got for your new mate? Nobody in the Dock seems to have seen him before.”
Captain Johns, pacified by the change of subjects, answered simply that Willy, the tobacconist at the corner of Fenchurch Street, had sent him along.
Willy, his shop, and the very house in Fenchurch Street, I believe, are gone now. In his time, wearing a careworn, absent-minded look on his pasty face, Willy served with tobacco many southern-going ships out of the Port of London. At certain times of the day the shop would be full of shipmasters. They sat on casks, they lounged against the counter.
Many a youngster found his first lift in life there; many a man got a sorely needed berth by simply dropping in for four pennyworth of birds’-eye at an auspicious moment. Even Willy’s assistant, a redheaded, uninterested, delicate-looking young fellow, would hand you across the counter sometimes a bit of valuable intelligence with your box of cigarettes,
in a whisper, lips hardly moving, thus: “The Bellona, South Dock. Second officer wanted. You may be in time for it if you hurry up.”
And didn’t one just fly!
“Oh, Willy sent him,” said Captain Ashton. “He’s a very striking man. If you were to put a red sash round his waist and a red handkerchief round his head he would look exactly like one of them buccaneering chaps that made men walk the plank and carried women off into captivity. Look out, Johns, he don’t cut your throat for you and run off with the Sapphire. What ship has he come out of last?”
Captain Johns, after looking up credulously as usual, wrinkled his brow, and said placidly that the man had seen better days. His name was Bunter.
“He’s had command of a Liverpool ship, the Samaria, some years ago. He lost her in the Indian Ocean, and had his certificate suspended for a year. Ever since then he has not been able to get another command. He’s been knocking about in the Western Ocean trade lately.”
“That accounts for him being a stranger to everybody about the Docks,” Captain Ashton concluded as they rose from table.
Captain Johns walked down to the Dock after lunch. He was short of stature and slightly bandy. His appearance did not inspire the generality of mankind with esteem; but it must have been otherwise with his employers. He had the reputation of being an uncomfortable commander, meticulous in trifles, always nursing a grievance of some sort and incessantly nagging. He was not a man to kick up a row with you and be done with it, but to say nasty things in a whining voice; a man capable of making one’s life a perfect misery if he took a dislike to an officer.
That very evening I went to see Bunter on board, and sympathized with him on his prospects for the voyage. He was subdued. I suppose a man with a secret locked up in his breast loses his buoyancy. And there was another reason why I could not expect Bunter to show a great elasticity of spirits. For one thing he had been very seedy lately, and besides — but of that later.
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 514
