Authors: Joseph Conrad
There was no wind, and a small brig that had lain all the afternoon a
few miles to the northward and westward of Carimata had hardly altered
its position half a mile during all these hours. The calm was absolute,
a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere.
As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but an impressive
immobility. Nothing moved on earth, on the waters, and above them in the
unbroken lustre of the sky. On the unruffled surface of the straits the
brig floated tranquil and upright as if bolted solidly, keel to keel,
with its own image reflected in the unframed and immense mirror of
the sea. To the south and east the double islands watched silently the
double ship that seemed fixed amongst them forever, a hopeless captive
of the calm, a helpless prisoner of the shallow sea.
Since midday, when the light and capricious airs of these seas had
abandoned the little brig to its lingering fate, her head had swung
slowly to the westward and the end of her slender and polished jib-boom,
projecting boldly beyond the graceful curve of the bow, pointed at the
setting sun, like a spear poised high in the hand of an enemy. Right
aft by the wheel the Malay quartermaster stood with his bare, brown feet
firmly planted on the wheel-grating, and holding the spokes at right
angles, in a solid grasp, as though the ship had been running before a
gale. He stood there perfectly motionless, as if petrified but ready
to tend the helm as soon as fate would permit the brig to gather way
through the oily sea.
The only other human being then visible on the brig's deck was the
person in charge: a white man of low stature, thick-set, with shaven
cheeks, a grizzled moustache, and a face tinted a scarlet hue by the
burning suns and by the sharp salt breezes of the seas. He had thrown
off his light jacket, and clad only in white trousers and a thin cotton
singlet, with his stout arms crossed on his breast—upon which they
showed like two thick lumps of raw flesh—he prowled about from side to
side of the half-poop. On his bare feet he wore a pair of straw sandals,
and his head was protected by an enormous pith hat—once white but now
very dirty—which gave to the whole man the aspect of a phenomenal
and animated mushroom. At times he would interrupt his uneasy shuffle
athwart the break of the poop, and stand motionless with a vague gaze
fixed on the image of the brig in the calm water. He could also see down
there his own head and shoulders leaning out over the rail and he would
stand long, as if interested by his own features, and mutter vague
curses on the calm which lay upon the ship like an immovable burden,
immense and burning.
At last, he sighed profoundly, nerved himself for a great effort, and
making a start away from the rail managed to drag his slippers as far
as the binnacle. There he stopped again, exhausted and bored. From under
the lifted glass panes of the cabin skylight near by came the feeble
chirp of a canary, which appeared to give him some satisfaction. He
listened, smiled faintly muttered "Dicky, poor Dick—" and fell back
into the immense silence of the world. His eyes closed, his head hung
low over the hot brass of the binnacle top. Suddenly he stood up with a
jerk and said sharply in a hoarse voice:
"You've been sleeping—you. Shift the helm. She has got stern way on
her."
The Malay, without the least flinch of feature or pose, as if he had
been an inanimate object called suddenly into life by some hidden magic
of the words, spun the wheel rapidly, letting the spokes pass through
his hands; and when the motion had stopped with a grinding noise, caught
hold again and held on grimly. After a while, however, he turned his
head slowly over his shoulder, glanced at the sea, and said in an
obstinate tone:
"No catch wind—no get way."
"No catch—no catch—that's all you know about it," growled the
red-faced seaman. "By and by catch Ali—" he went on with sudden
condescension. "By and by catch, and then the helm will be the right
way. See?"
The stolid seacannie appeared to see, and for that matter to hear,
nothing. The white man looked at the impassive Malay with disgust,
then glanced around the horizon—then again at the helmsman and ordered
curtly:
"Shift the helm back again. Don't you feel the air from aft? You are
like a dummy standing there."
The Malay revolved the spokes again with disdainful obedience, and the
red-faced man was moving forward grunting to himself, when through the
open skylight the hail "On deck there!" arrested him short, attentive,
and with a sudden change to amiability in the expression of his face.
"Yes, sir," he said, bending his ear toward the opening. "What's the
matter up there?" asked a deep voice from below.
The red-faced man in a tone of surprise said:
"Sir?"
"I hear that rudder grinding hard up and hard down. What are you up to,
Shaw? Any wind?"
"Ye-es," drawled Shaw, putting his head down the skylight and speaking
into the gloom of the cabin. "I thought there was a light air, and—but
it's gone now. Not a breath anywhere under the heavens."
He withdrew his head and waited a while by the skylight, but heard
only the chirping of the indefatigable canary, a feeble twittering that
seemed to ooze through the drooping red blossoms of geraniums growing in
flower-pots under the glass panes. He strolled away a step or two before
the voice from down below called hurriedly:
"Hey, Shaw? Are you there?"
"Yes, Captain Lingard," he answered, stepping back. "Have we drifted
anything this afternoon?"
"Not an inch, sir, not an inch. We might as well have been at anchor."
"It's always so," said the invisible Lingard. His voice changed its tone
as he moved in the cabin, and directly afterward burst out with a
clear intonation while his head appeared above the slide of the cabin
entrance:
"Always so! The currents don't begin till it's dark, when a man can't
see against what confounded thing he is being drifted, and then the
breeze will come. Dead on end, too, I don't doubt."
Shaw moved his shoulders slightly. The Malay at the wheel, after making
a dive to see the time by the cabin clock through the skylight, rang a
double stroke on the small bell aft. Directly forward, on the main deck,
a shrill whistle arose long drawn, modulated, dying away softly. The
master of the brig stepped out of the companion upon the deck of his
vessel, glanced aloft at the yards laid dead square; then, from the
door-step, took a long, lingering look round the horizon.
He was about thirty-five, erect and supple. He moved freely, more like
a man accustomed to stride over plains and hills, than like one who from
his earliest youth had been used to counteract by sudden swayings of his
body the rise and roll of cramped decks of small craft, tossed by the
caprice of angry or playful seas.
He wore a grey flannel shirt, and his white trousers were held by a blue
silk scarf wound tightly round his narrow waist. He had come up only for
a moment, but finding the poop shaded by the main-topsail he remained
on deck bareheaded. The light chestnut hair curled close about his
well-shaped head, and the clipped beard glinted vividly when he passed
across a narrow strip of sunlight, as if every hair in it had been
a wavy and attenuated gold wire. His mouth was lost in the heavy
moustache; his nose was straight, short, slightly blunted at the end;
a broad band of deeper red stretched under the eyes, clung to the cheek
bones. The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. The eyebrows,
darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and
unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face. The eyes, as if
glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their
greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of their
gaze.
That man, once so well known, and now so completely forgotten amongst
the charming and heartless shores of the shallow sea, had amongst his
fellows the nickname of "Red-Eyed Tom." He was proud of his luck but not
of his good sense. He was proud of his brig, of the speed of his craft,
which was reckoned the swiftest country vessel in those seas, and proud
of what she represented.
She represented a run of luck on the Victorian goldfields; his sagacious
moderation; long days of planning, of loving care in building; the
great joy of his youth, the incomparable freedom of the seas; a perfect
because a wandering home; his independence, his love—and his anxiety.
He had often heard men say that Tom Lingard cared for nothing on earth
but for his brig—and in his thoughts he would smilingly correct the
statement by adding that he cared for nothing
living
but the brig.
To him she was as full of life as the great world. He felt her live in
every motion, in every roll, in every sway of her tapering masts,
of those masts whose painted trucks move forever, to a seaman's
eye, against the clouds or against the stars. To him she was always
precious—like old love; always desirable—like a strange woman; always
tender—like a mother; always faithful—like the favourite daughter of a
man's heart.
For hours he would stand elbow on rail, his head in his hand and
listen—and listen in dreamy stillness to the cajoling and promising
whisper of the sea, that slipped past in vanishing bubbles along the
smooth black-painted sides of his craft. What passed in such moments
of thoughtful solitude through the mind of that child of generations of
fishermen from the coast of Devon, who like most of his class was
dead to the subtle voices, and blind to the mysterious aspects of the
world—the man ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how
terrible or menacing, yet defenceless as a child before the shadowy
impulses of his own heart; what could have been the thoughts of such a
man, when once surrendered to a dreamy mood, it is difficult to say.
No doubt he, like most of us, would be uplifted at times by the awakened
lyrism of his heart into regions charming, empty, and dangerous. But
also, like most of us, he was unaware of his barren journeys above the
interesting cares of this earth. Yet from these, no doubt absurd and
wasted moments, there remained on the man's daily life a tinge as that
of a glowing and serene half-light. It softened the outlines of his
rugged nature; and these moments kept close the bond between him and his
brig.
He was aware that his little vessel could give him something not to be
had from anybody or anything in the world; something specially his own.
The dependence of that solid man of bone and muscle on that obedient
thing of wood and iron, acquired from that feeling the mysterious
dignity of love. She—the craft—had all the qualities of a living
thing: speed, obedience, trustworthiness, endurance, beauty, capacity
to do and to suffer—all but life. He—the man—was the inspirer of that
thing that to him seemed the most perfect of its kind. His will was
its will, his thought was its impulse, his breath was the breath of
its existence. He felt all this confusedly, without ever shaping this
feeling into the soundless formulas of thought. To him she was unique
and dear, this brig of three hundred and fourteen tons register—a
kingdom!
And now, bareheaded and burly, he walked the deck of his kingdom with a
regular stride. He stepped out from the hip, swinging his arms with
the free motion of a man starting out for a fifteen-mile walk into open
country; yet at every twelfth stride he had to turn about sharply and
pace back the distance to the taffrail.
Shaw, with his hands stuck in his waistband, had hooked himself with
both elbows to the rail, and gazed apparently at the deck between his
feet. In reality he was contemplating a little house with a tiny front
garden, lost in a maze of riverside streets in the east end of London.
The circumstance that he had not, as yet, been able to make the
acquaintance of his son—now aged eighteen months—worried him slightly,
and was the cause of that flight of his fancy into the murky atmosphere
of his home. But it was a placid flight followed by a quick return.
In less than two minutes he was back in the brig. "All there," as his
saying was. He was proud of being always "all there."
He was abrupt in manner and grumpy in speech with the seamen. To his
successive captains, he was outwardly as deferential as he knew how, and
as a rule inwardly hostile—so very few seemed to him of the "all there"
kind. Of Lingard, with whom he had only been a short time—having been
picked up in Madras Roads out of a home ship, which he had to leave
after a thumping row with the master—he generally approved, although he
recognized with regret that this man, like most others, had some absurd
fads; he defined them as "bottom-upwards notions."
He was a man—as there were many—of no particular value to anybody but
himself, and of no account but as the chief mate of the brig, and the
only white man on board of her besides the captain. He felt himself
immeasurably superior to the Malay seamen whom he had to handle, and
treated them with lofty toleration, notwithstanding his opinion that at
a pinch those chaps would be found emphatically "not there."
As soon as his mind came back from his home leave, he detached himself
from the rail and, walking forward, stood by the break of the poop,
looking along the port side of the main deck. Lingard on his own side
stopped in his walk and also gazed absentmindedly before him. In the
waist of the brig, in the narrow spars that were lashed on each side of
the hatchway, he could see a group of men squatting in a circle around a
wooden tray piled up with rice, which stood on the just swept deck.
The dark-faced, soft-eyed silent men, squatting on their hams, fed
decorously with an earnestness that did not exclude reserve.
Of the lot, only one or two wore sarongs, the others having
submitted—at least at sea—to the indignity of European trousers. Only
two sat on the spars. One, a man with a childlike, light yellow face,
smiling with fatuous imbecility under the wisps of straight coarse hair
dyed a mahogany tint, was the tindal of the crew—a kind of boatswain's
or serang's mate. The other, sitting beside him on the booms, was a
man nearly black, not much bigger than a large ape, and wearing on
his wrinkled face that look of comical truculence which is often
characteristic of men from the southwestern coast of Sumatra.