Part 8

By the light of morning this surprising homeliness appeared the less secure. It was no more than a little cheerful bravado. The railway bridge, the big Sikh policemen with their rifles, and the array of bottles of European drinks on the shelves of the Chinaman’s store, were not triumphantly significant. The wilderness was not far away. It almost reached the bridge. It stood, patient and dark, waiting just across the padi marshes, with the blue untraversed hills of the interior above it. The sun was that of the dry monsoon. Sauntering leisurely across the iron railway bridge were figures which could have been assembling for the rehearsal of a strange drama, for the costumes of those women coming from Siam into Kelantan to market would make the ballet of a musical comedy look tawdry and unreal. They followed the railway track to the station buildings, where they sat by their wares, which mostly were fruits, scarlet and emerald chillies, yellow lansats, mangosteens the colour and size of new cricket-balls, and crimson rambutans. The natives were as quiet and passive as images. Only their eyes moved; and when a girl whose father was a Chinaman and her mother a Siamese villager looks at you, then you understand that the art of coquetry has been nothing but a Western phrase. The quiet folk of the country, whose life showed ardent only in the audacious colours of their dress, which betrayed their silence and langour; the strange houses under a weight of sun, and the palms and bamboos jetting from the ground like fountains, made that railway track, neat and direct as Western logic, as queer as such logic often appears in the East. The station clock bore the name of a famous London maker. But perhaps it gave only the London hour, and the palms knew better. This also was bravado. The track, so much like commercial orderliness and promptitude, was empty in both directions. Its ballast and sleepers were as arid, hot, and hopeless, as a trail in the desert. A buzzard was floating overhead. Two Chinamen were quarrelling outside the waiting-room.

The unbelievable train came as a sudden shadow and an uproar. Confidence was restored. The order and progress of a Western notion cut straight into the East, and at almost the appointed minute. And presently the cluster of huts and the groups of people by the station began to recede. More progress was being made.

I found myself beside an Englishman in an otherwise empty carriage. He was a stout young man in a despondent suit of Shantung silk. His white sun hat was beside him. He held a handkerchief in his hand, which frequently he passed across his moist face, blowing as he did it. He was reclining his heavy body on one elbow, but his eyes were alert and cheerful. “Morning,” he said loudly. “Didn’t expect to see anyone at that station.”

He was communicative. He was not like the Malays, who will travel with you all day and use only a few words when necessary, reserving their quiet gossip for the evening. I soon knew that he was not like the East, which, however, he understood very well. He thought trade was reviving. He himself was not doing so badly. Only leave alone the people who knew what to do, and no nonsense, and believe him ... and so on. These natives liked being governed and ordered about. They’d never do anything unless they were made to. Lazy swine. Look at him! Fat! Yet he got through enough work, hot as it was.

What was more, there was gold in that country. Only wanted developing. A little organisation, sir. The Malays didn’t know. The Siamese didn’t know. Nor care. The people who knew would have to see that it was done. He hoped to make enough in another five years to get home for good. Then, a little place in the country, and a seat on the local bench, and he would be happy.

The buffaloes stared at us as we went along, as motionless as figures in metal. My fellow passenger was telling me that he had been given a rotten O. B. E. for what he did during the war, but it ought to have been a K. B. E. He reckoned he had earned it. As he told me this I was looking at a Malay child, holding a big deer by a cord. They stared at us intently without moving, and might have been trying to catch a word or two about the O. B. E. as we went slowly past those huts. I heard more then about the rewards for industrious men who would attend strictly to their business in that land, and of what fellows he knew, knew quite well, had been given for their war services. “Though, dammit, sir, they had made enough without that.”

[Illustration:

_The buffaloes stared at us as we went along, as motionless as figures in metal._ ]

We ran into our last station. I looked from my carriage window on the strangest figure of a Malay I had seen. He was an old man, but as stout as my English fellow-traveller. He wore a yellow sarong, and yellow is the royal colour. But his tunic was the old scarlet affair, with yellow facings, of an English infantryman. Instead of the hat of a Mohammedan, he wore a white regimental helmet. He had a blue sash. On his breast were displayed a number of ornate decorations, brass regimental badges, and medals won by other people in the past for the most diverse things--for swimming at Plymouth and running at Stamford Bridge. And central on his breast, hanging by a cord, was a conspicuous red reflector from the rear lamp of a bicycle.

My English friend knew him well. He greeted the Malay cheerfully, and bestowed on him another decoration, a silverplated monogram he had found. The old man was so delighted that he regarded my contribution of a dollar with no joy whatever. He continued his conversation with my friend, in Malay, while he crumpled my currency note in his hand.

The Englishman turned to me, as we left the ancient, and chuckled. “See his battle honours and decorations, and all that? Quite mad, you know. Used to be a rajah till we turned him out, and thinks he’s one still. Just as well to humour the poor old thing.”

V. THE STORM PETREL

I paused on the bridge in Old Gravel Lane, that surprising lapse in the walls of Wapping, because water was on either side of it. The street lamps were just lit, but the sky was still high and yellow. The forms of the ships under the dock warehouses were plain, like dim creatures asleep in the shadows at the base of cliffs. It did not look like the present, that silent scene, but the past. I was peering into the past, a vista down the London Dock which evening was quickly closing, when Captain McLachlan took hold of me and brought me back to Old Gravel Lane. I didn’t know his ship was in port. “Don’t lie,” he jollied me. “Don’t pretend you knew I was in, and that you were looking for me.”

As if anyone would lie to McLachlan! No need. He is too good-natured, too sagacious. So judicious and deliberate that he would see through almost any neat and nicely polished artifice. “You never told me you would be here to-day,” I reminded him.

“Well, I’m off at midnight,” he said, still with a grip on my arm. “You come along with me.”

“Not to Glasgow,” I said in alarm.

“No. Just as far as she is now. There she is.” The skipper pointed to a misty confusion of funnels and masts up the dock.

It seemed easy to get to her. She was not far off. But in fact, at that hour, which was neither day nor night, our little journey through streets and sheds, and by quaysides where lower lights were burning though day was in the sky, and the shapes of things were queer, was like an excursion into an inverted world. It was confused. What were streets doing there, and ships? They had been jumbled in an antipodean upset. The lights were not in the right places. The shadows were all wrong. Funnels were in the streets, apparently, and houses in the water. But the skipper kept on talking, stepping over mooring ropes and children on kerbstones.

“That was a nasty passage down,” he was saying.

“It was? But I don’t remember a blow this week.”

“I do; but you wouldn’t have noticed it. I didn’t like it. Here’s me, with forty years of it, but I didn’t like it. Once or twice I wondered whether the old girl could stand it. Aye. Most of the way from the Broomielaw. Mind that rope.”

We were standing now on concrete, looking up at a steamer’s counter. This was McLachlan’s charge. She was not a liner, but an aristocrat compared with the usual coaster. She looked quite big in that place and in that light.

The skipper was shaking his head. “God forbid that I ever see the Storm Petrel again.”

This was a little ridiculous, and not at all like my friend. Almost superstitious of him. I thought it was his fun, but then he turned to mount the gangway of his ship. His face, downcast to his footing, was serious enough. His short, hard moustache looked even grim. It was amusing to discover that the skipper, among the orderly and scientific sequence of his experiences and thoughts, should allow an old myth about a bird to interrupt Scotch logic so irrelevantly. I chuckled as I followed the elderly seaman to his ship, and to divert his attention asked his opinion about the derivation and uses of the word cleat. That gangway reminded me of it. There had been a dispute ashore about it, and McLachlan was the man who would know. He keeps even _The Golden Bough_ in his cabin, with Burns, Shelley, _The Evolution of the Idea of God_, an encyclopædia, and other incongruous companions. He is the unknown but harsh enemy of all hurried journalists. His untiring exactitude over trifles is awe-inspiring, and even tedious to casual and indifferent men. He paused on deck, gave me the root of the word, and assured me of all its uses, with qualifications; then turned into a door and descended to the saloon.

His steward stood at attention as we squirmed into those seats which will not push back from saloon tables, and then the man went, as the captain made a perfunctory sign for what we wanted. The skipper sat without speaking till he had the glass in his hand. “Ye see, I knew we were in for it as soon as I clapped eyes on yon lunatic,” he remarked. He had not been at all cautious with what he measured into the glasses. “As soon as the Storm Petrel came aboard, two firemen went ashore. He was enough for them. No good talking to the fellows. They were scared. They knew what that warning meant, and it happened they saw him coming up the gangway.”

“I thought it was a bird,” I said.

“No. It’s a parson. You’d know him fine if you were coasting. A wee man. I can’t leave the ship myself, but I wished the fellow to the devil. He didn’t look like a man of God to me that night for all his clericals. And he was so damn jolly when he saw me. He always is. ‘There’s something brewing, captain,’ says he, rubbing his hands. ‘You’re going to get a dusting.’ He was in his oilskins then. A good beginning, wasn’t it?”

“And you got it?”

“And we did. Anyhow, the sight of that man made me give a good look to everything.” He paused for a spell, with his service cap pushed well back, so that I could see the unweathered top of his forehead. He began talking to the clock at the end of the saloon very deliberately. “I’ve seen too much to be easily scared. Perhaps I’m too old to be scared at all. No. I wouldn’t call it fear, at my age. It’s not that. Y’see, you can watch heavy weather without worry, when you know your ship. That’s just it--knowing her. It isn’t a matter of calculation. You know, but you don’t quite know why. So I wouldn’t say that I’m afraid of big waters--not often--not to call it that. But it’s happened at times that I’ve had a sort of white feeling inside me while gripping a stanchion. You could tell it then. The little ship herself was frightened. She’d got more than she could do.

“So it was that night, and all the next day. I had the feeling twice. But that blackbird was enjoying it. He always does, though I hoped then he’d got more than he’d bargained for. But not him. He was all right. I wished he’d gone overside.”

“Who is he? What’s his caper?” I asked.

“He’s a parson. Got a quiet vicarage somewhere, I suppose. I’ve thought about him a lot. Church too peaceful for him, maybe. He mustn’t sin, not in a small country parish, and he needs excitement. It’s as good as drink to him. Better, perhaps. Anyhow, he looks for trouble. He comes and has it with us. ‘Sir,’ says the steward, ‘Mr. Jenkins has just come aboard.’ ‘The hell he has,’ I say, and look at the glass. Sure enough, down it goes. And there the wee man is. ‘Hullo, captain,’ he says, ‘good evening. But it won’t be good for long. I’ve been watching the barometer, and I’ve just had this telegram from the Meteorological Office. There’s going to be a snorter.’ He always seems as pleased as though he’d come into a legacy. Rubs his hands. Looks round. ‘I’m coming along with you,’ says the blackbird.

“And a snorter it is, for sure. All the coasters know him. You ought to hear the men when they see him hurrying along the quay, just before we cast off. They’d tip him overside, give him all the trouble there is, if he wasn’t always so grateful afterwards for the good time he’s had with us. He’s free with his tips. He pays for his fun.”

“Well, anyway, that’s over,” said the skipper. He poured out some more. “I deserve this,” he went on. “That last was a voyage and a half. Now look here. There’s four hours to midnight. I haven’t seen you to talk to you yet. You run home and get your bag. Come round with us. You know you can. So don’t argue. I want to hear about things. It’ll be a quiet trip this time.”

“Any other passengers?”

“Not one. It’s not the season. We’ll have it to ourselves. Likely we’ll have spring weather all the way. That last blow must have emptied the sky. What’s this I hear about the American astronomer who is denying Einstein? Come and tell me.”

I rose to go. It was tempting. I had got to like the smell of the ship. She looked good. And McLachlan’s reliable face, with its taut mouth and moustache, and mocking and contemplative eyes--a talk with him would be more than a holiday. Could I do it?

We mounted the companion to the deck. It was a still night, with an audience of placid little clouds about a full moon. The dock was asleep. I went with the captain to his cabin, for he had a book of mine, and he wished to return it. That peaceful cabin, with its library, and the broad back of the sailor as he peered into his bookcase, settled it. I would hurry home and get my bag. Then there was a voice behind me: “Sir, Mr. Jenkins has come back. He’s just come aboard.”

The skipper turned slowly round to stare at his steward, dragging his spectacles from his eyes as he did so. His mouth was partly open. He only stared for some seconds.

“Has that man brought his bag, Jones?”

“Yes, sir. He’s in his oilskins, sir.”

VI. ON THE CHESIL BANK

I

The Chesil Bank was new to me, and it had no message. It was pleasing, but it was strange, though it was England. It was but a whitewashed wall topped by a tamarisk hedge. Below the wall was a deserted ridge and beach of shingle, tawny and glowing, and a wide sea without a ship in sight. The white wall, the pale and shimmering stones, and the bright sea, were as far from my own interests as a West Indian cay.

A figure appeared in the distance, so unusual a blot on the shingle that I watched it two miles away. There was nothing else to do. It moved with briskness and determination, but appeared to be unconcerned with anything I could see on that strand. It came straight towards me as though it knew I was there, and at length handed me a telegram. It was a smiling and rosy-cheeked little messenger from the post-office, three miles away. The child waited, like the eternal figure of Eros in a British uniform, as though it had been doing this, off and on, in some form or other, since the gods began to sport with the affairs of earth. “What’s all this about?” I asked Eros. But he only smiled. I wondered who was in such a hurry to announce something, and opened the envelope. “Conrad is dead.”

I stared at the messenger for a space, as though there must be something more to come. But nothing more came. Then the messenger spoke. “Anything to go back?”

Anything to go back? No, nothing to go back. Somehow, life seems justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not seem to leave us any the poorer. But to-day, when it happens, we feel a distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed of late years by lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainty that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance of solace in years that have not been easily borne.

Yet I cannot pretend to intimacy with him, nor to complete absorption in his work. There was something in him not to be clearly discerned. It was sought in his books with curiosity, but it did not appear to be there. The man was only partly seen, as through a veil. Sometimes his face peered through the filmy obscurity, massively, in still and overlooking scrutiny, his eyes remote but intent, kindly but dangerous, a face in a seclusion one could approach but never enter. Most of us are aware, of course, that we are secluded, and that our friends can never find out where we are. We wish they could. It is not a joy to us that, in the nature of things, we must be alone. But Conrad, perhaps, was more accustomed to exile and a solitary watch under the silent stars. Occasionally he would vouchsafe a closer glimpse of himself, something to make us alert, but at once fade into his own place. He would utter such a word as _Meddlers_, meaning you and me, meaning all those Englishmen, who, for example, are restive under the constraint of foolish men and statutes, and plainly show it. He would exclaim _Humanitarians_ in a way that implied, merely implied, that pitiful men are a nuisance. My own guess is that he desired to take part in English affairs, for he had strong antipathies, but that he repressed himself, doubting his right to--well, to meddle. Perhaps it is as well he kept out. He would have proved a formidable opponent. But mainly he was silent about the affairs that provoked the prejudices of the English, giving no more than an appraising and ironic glance. Or he would, when we talked with emphasis about our national concerns, make an enigmatic gesture. He was an aristocrat. Yet what does that mean? Of course he was. Aristocrat and democrat are tokens that to-day look much alike, and appear to have no relevance even to a money-lender. We may throw them away. Everybody has forgotten what they mean.

I suppose it is about eighteen years ago since I began to read Conrad. I knew of him, but mistrusted the evidence of the critics. The literature of the sea did not interest me, for I had had some experience with that rollicking stuff; the stories which, we are told, have something called “tang” in them, the stories that represent seamen as good-natured imbeciles, with a violent bully here and there among them altogether too ingenious and foul-mouthed for comfort. Hearty yarns! But I happened to know several seamen, and a few ships. However, one day, in a hurry for a train, I snatched up the _Nigger_, and began it in the cab on the way to Euston. That was a great surprise. The _Narcissus_ was certainly the kind of craft which made fast in the South-West India Dock; and old man Singleton was the embodiment of the virtues and faults of a race of mariners which, in the year in which I read the book, had all but gone. Singleton was of the clippers. I had known some of those men, and I recognised Singleton at once. This novelist had made a picture of a type of British seaman which, but for his genius, would have been lost to us and forgotten.

There could be no doubt about it. The _Nigger_ was the thing itself, and I had never expected to see it. Next I read _Typhoon_; and the _Nan-Shan_ and her men were exactly what even now you may meet any day somewhere east of Tower Hill, if you care to look, and know what to look for. I was not certain whether the critics knew it, but to me it was plain that this worker, who was a Pole, I was told, had added to the body of English literature testimony to a period of British ships and seamen which otherwise would have passed as unmarked as the voyages of the men of Tyre and Sidon. Its very atmosphere was there. As for _Youth_ it is, without doubt, one of the finest short narratives in the language, and there will never be again such a yarn of such a voyage in such a ship.