________________________________________________
_
CHAPTER VI
In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary
stage of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments,
and even two distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its
successive scenes, a certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable.
I am conscious of it in these pages. This remark is put forward
in no apologetic spirit. As years go by and the number of pages
grows steadily, the feeling grows upon one too that one can write
only for friends. Then why should one put them to the necessity
of protesting (as a friend would do) that no apology is
necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of one's
discretion? So much as to the care due to those friends whom a
word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the
right place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety,
has drawn from the great multitude of fellow-beings even as a
fish is drawn from the depths of the sea. Fishing is notoriously
(I am talking now of the deep sea) a matter of luck. As to one's
enemies, those will take care of themselves.
There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking,
jumps upon me with both feet. This image has no grace, but it is
exceedingly apt to the occasion--to the several occasions. I
don't know precisely how long he had been indulging in that
intermittent exercise, whose seasons are ruled by the custom of
the publishing trade. Somebody pointed him out (in printed
shape, of course) to my attention some time ago, and straightway
I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man.
He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for the
writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain
shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred!
Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or
perversity. It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more
estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness. It
is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given (reluctantly) for
a consideration, for several considerations. There is that
robustness, for instance, so often the sign of good moral
balance. That's a consideration. It is not, indeed, pleasant to
be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation,
implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into
work whose qualities and defects, whatever they may be, are not
so much on the surface, is something to be thankful for in view
of the fact that it may happen to one's work to be condemned
without being read at all. This is the most fatuous adventure
that can well happen to a writer venturing his soul amongst
criticisms. It can do one no harm, of course, but it is
disagreeable. It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering
a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot of folk in a third-
class compartment. The open impudence of the whole transaction,
appealing insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the
brazen, shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while
insisting on the fairness of the game, give one a feeling of
sickening disgust. The honest violence of a plain man playing a
fair game fairly--even if he means to knock you over--may appear
shocking, but it remains within the pale of decency. Damaging as
it may be, it is in no sense offensive. One may well feel some
regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's own vile body.
But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not be
stayed by explanations or placated by apologies. Were I to
advance the plea of youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found
in these pages, he would be likely to say "Bosh!" in a column and
a half of fierce print. Yet a writer is no older than his first
published book, and, notwithstanding the vain appearances of
decay which attend us in this transitory life, I stand here with
the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.
With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of
feeling and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that,
upon the whole, my previous state of existence was not a good
equipment for a literary life. Perhaps I should not have used the
word literary. That word presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance
with letters, a turn of mind and a manner of feeling to which I
dare lay no claim. I only love letters; but the love of letters
does not make a literary man, any more than the love of the sea
makes a seaman. And it is very possible, too, that I love the
letters in the same way a literary man may love the sea he looks
at from the shore--a scene of great endeavour and of great
achievements changing the face of the world, the great open way
to all sorts of undiscovered countries. No, perhaps I had better
say that the life at sea--and I don't mean a mere taste of it,
but a good broad span of years, something that really counts as
real service--is not, upon the whole, a good equipment for a
writing life. God forbid, though, that I should be thought of as
denying my masters of the quarter-deck. I am not capable of that
sort of apostasy. I have confessed my attitude of piety towards
their shades in three or four tales, and if any man on earth more
than another needs to be true to himself as he hopes to be saved,
it is certainly the writer of fiction.
What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training
does not prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary
criticism. Only that, and no more. But this defect is not
without gravity. If it be permissible to twist, invert, adapt
(and spoil) M. Anatole France's definition of a good critic, then
let us say that the good author is he who contemplates without
marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst
criticisms. Far be from me the intention to mislead an attentive
public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea. That
would be dishonest, and even impolite. Everything can be found
at sea, according to the spirit of your quest--strife, peace,
romance, naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom,
disgust, inspiration--and every conceivable opportunity,
including the opportunity to make a fool of yourself--exactly as
in the pursuit of literature. But the quarter-deck criticism is
somewhat different from literary criticism. This much they have
in common, that before the one and the other the answering back,
as a general rule, does not pay.
Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation--I tell you
everything is to be found on salt water--criticism generally
impromptu, and always viva voce, which is the outward, obvious
difference from the literary operation of that kind, with
consequent freshness and vigour which may be lacking in the
printed word. With appreciation, which comes at the end, when
the critic and the criticised are about to part, it is otherwise.
The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the permanency
of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal in
its phrasing. There the literary master has the superiority,
though he, too, can in effect but say--and often says it in the
very phrase--"I can highly recommend." Only usually he uses the
word "We," there being some occult virtue in the first person
plural, which makes it specially fit for critical and royal
declarations. I have a small handful of these sea appreciations,
signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my writing-table's
left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a
handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree
of knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits
of paper, headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the
names of a few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced
the astonished indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of
a sort hard to bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been
charged with the want of patriotism, the want of sense, and the
want of heart too; that I went through agonies of self-conflict
and shed secret tears not a few, and had the beauties of the
Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called an "incorrigible
Don Quixote," in allusion to the book-born madness of the knight.
For that spoil! They rustle, those bits of paper--some dozen of
them in all. In that faint, ghostly sound there live the
memories of twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more,
the strong voice of the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a
mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea, which must have
somehow reached my inland cradle and entered my unconscious ear,
like that formula of Mohammedan faith the Mussulman father
whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making him one of
the faithful almost with his first breath. I do not know whether
I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful
one. And after all there is that handful of "characters" from
various ships to prove that all these years have not been
altogether a dream. There they are, brief, and monotonous in
tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me as any inspired
page to be found in literature. But then, you see, I have been
called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem
to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that
charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at
whatever cost, for a change. With this end in view, I will
confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to
see my blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these
suggestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain
the words "strictly sober."
Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's very gratifying, to be
sure"? Well, yes, it is gratifying--thank you. It is at least
as gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified romantic,
though such certificates would not qualify one for the
secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of
official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as
the London County Council, for instance. The above prosaic
reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general
sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it
because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine
being published in a French translation, a Parisian critic--I am
almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn in the "Gil-Blas"--giving
me a short notice, summed up his rapid impression of the writer's
quality in the words un puissant reveur. So be it! Who would
cavil at the words of a friendly reader? Yet perhaps not such an
unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold to say that
neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of
responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication.
Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful
of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment,
in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it,
such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame. It is but a
maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength
of wine. I have tried to be a sober worker all my life--all my
two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt, having an instinctive
horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also from
artistic conviction. Yet there are so many pitfalls on each side
of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a little
battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the mere
daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept
always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power,
and truth, and peace.
As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing
in their time. I seem to hear your polite murmur that "Surely
this might have been taken for granted." Well, no. It might not
have been. That august academical body the Marine Department of
the Board of Trade takes nothing for granted in the granting of
its learned degrees. By its regulations issued under the first
Merchant Shipping Act, the very word SOBER must be written, or a
whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the most enthusiastic
appreciation will avail you nothing. The door of the examination
rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties. The most
fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly
fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board
of Trade. As I have been face to face at various times with all
the examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can
be no doubt as to the force and the continuity of my
abstemiousness. Three of them were examiners in seamanship, and
it was my fate to be delivered into the hands of each of them at
proper intervals of sea service. The first of all, tall, spare,
with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet, kindly
manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced to
conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my
appearance. His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his
crossed legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice,
and went on, went on. . .It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I
been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to
the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more
microscopic examination. Greatly reassured by his apparent
benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers. But
at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me.
And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold
ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got
frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that
eventuality did not even present itself to my mind. It was
something much more serious, and weird. "This ancient person," I
said to myself, terrified, "is so near his grave that he must
have lost all notion of time. He is considering this examination
in terms of eternity. It is all very well for him. His race is
run. But I may find myself coming out of this room into the
world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to
remember the way to my hired home." This statement is not so
much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very
queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my
answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor
yet with anything reasonable known to this earth. I verily
believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of languid way.
At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for
ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of
paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my
parting bow. . .
When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed
lemon, and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to
get my hat and tip him a shilling, said:
"Well! I thought you were never coming out."
"How long have I been in there?" I asked faintly.
He pulled out his watch.
"He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this
ever happened with any of the gentlemen before."
It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk
on air. And the human animal being averse from change and timid
before the unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really
being examined by the same man on a future occasion. But when
the time of ordeal came round again the doorkeeper let me into
another room, with the now familiar paraphernalia of models of
ships and tackle, a board for signals on the wall, a big long
table covered with official forms, and having an unrigged mast
fixed to the edge. The solitary tenant was unknown to me by
sight, though not by reputation, which was simply execrable.
Short and sturdy as far as I could judge, clad in an old, brown,
morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his
eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the
other side of the table. He was motionless, mysterious, remote,
enigmatical, with something mournful too in the pose, like that
statue of Giuliano (I think) de' Medici shading his face on the
tomb by Michael Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far from
being beautiful. He began by trying to make me talk nonsense.
But I had been warned of that fiendish trait, and contradicted
him with great assurance. After a while he left off. So far
good. But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the
abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and
more impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and
then, placing me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under
certain conditions of weather, season, locality, &c. &c.--all
very clear and precise--ordered me to execute a certain
manoeuvre. Before I was half through with it he did some
material damage to the ship. Directly I had grappled with the
difficulty he caused another to present itself, and when that too
was met he stuck another ship before me, creating a very
dangerous situation. I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity
in piling up trouble upon a man.
"I wouldn't have got into that mess," I suggested mildly. "I
could have seen that ship before."
He never stirred the least bit.
"No, you couldn't. The weather's thick."
"Oh! I didn't know," I apologised blankly.
I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with
sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business
went on. You must understand that the scheme of the test he was
applying to me was, I gathered, a homeward passage--the sort of
passage I would not wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary
ship seemed to labour under a most comprehensive curse. It's no
use enlarging on these never-ending misfortunes; suffice it to
say that long before the end I would have welcomed with gratitude
an opportunity to exchange into the "Flying Dutchman." Finally
he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and provided me with
a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks--the Dutch coast presumably.
Distance, eight miles. The evidence of such implacable animosity
deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.
"Well," he said--for our pace had been very smart indeed till
then.
"I will have to think a little, sir."
"Doesn't look as if there were much time to think," he muttered
sardonically from under his hand.
"No, sir," I said with some warmth. "Not on board a ship I could
see. But so many accidents have happened that I really can't
remember what there's left for me to work with."
Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made
unexpectedly a grunting remark.
"You've done very well."
"Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?" I asked.
"Yes."
I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them
both go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of
testing resourcefulness came into play again.
"But there's only one cable. You've lost the other."
It was exasperating.
"Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser
on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she
parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing.
She would have to go."
"Nothing more to do, eh?"
"No, sir. I could do no more."
He gave a bitter half-laugh.
"You could always say your prayers."
He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly. It was a
sallow, strong, unamiable face. He put me in a surly, bored
fashion through the usual questions as to lights and signals, and
I escaped from the room thankfully--passed! Forty minutes! And
again I walked on air along Tower Hill, where so many good men
had lost their heads, because, I suppose, they were not
resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of hearts I had
no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third
and last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I
should. I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an
unreasonable time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .
But not a bit of it. When I presented myself to be examined for
Master the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a
round, soft face in grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious
lips.
He commenced operations with an easy-going "Let's see. H'm.
Suppose you tell me all you know of charter-parties." He kept it
up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of
comment into bits out of his own life, then pulling himself up
short and returning to the business in hand. It was very
interesting. "What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?" he queried
suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a
point of stowage.
I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea,
and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-
book. In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had
invented himself years before, when in command of a 3000-ton
steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance
imaginable. "May be of use to you some day," he concluded. "You
will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam."
There he was wrong. I never went into steam--not really. If I
only live long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead
barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the
dark ages who had never gone into steam--not really.
Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few
interesting details of the transport service in the time of the
Crimean War.
"The use of wire rigging became general about that time too," he
observed. "I was a very young master then. That was before you
were born."
"Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857."
"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if to himself, adding in a
louder tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of
Bengal, employed under a Government charter.
Clearly the transport service had been the making of this
examiner, who so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his
existence, awakening in me the sense of the continuity of that
sea-life into which I had stepped from outside; giving a touch of
human intimacy to the machinery of official relations. I felt
adopted. His experience was for me, too, as though he had been
an ancestor.
Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care
on the slip of blue paper, he remarked:
"You are of Polish extraction."
"Born there, sir."
He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for
the first time.
"Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I
never remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea.
Don't remember ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren't
you?"
I said yes--very much so. We were remote from the sea not only
by situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect
association, not being a commercial nation at all, but purely
agricultural. He made then the quaint reflection that it was "a
long way for me to come out to begin a sea-life"; as if sea-life
were not precisely a life in which one goes a long way from home.
I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much
nearer my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was
to be a seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other. It
was a matter of deliberate choice.
He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent
a little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West
Indies. I did not want to present myself to the British Merchant
Service in an altogether green state. It was no use telling him
that my mysterious vocation was so strong that my very wild oats
had to be sown at sea. It was the exact truth, but he would not
have understood the somewhat exceptional psychology of my sea-
going, I fear.
"I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at
sea. Have you now?"
I admitted I never had. The examiner had given himself up to the
spirit of gossiping idleness. For myself, I was in no haste to
leave that room. Not in the least. The era of examinations was
over. I would never again see that friendly man who was a
professional ancestor, a sort of grandfather in the craft.
Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me, and of that there
was no sign. As he remained silent, looking at me, I added:
"But I have heard of one, some years ago. He seems to have been
a boy serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not
mistaken."
"What was his name?"
I told him.
"How did you say that?" he asked, puckering up his eyes at the
uncouth sound.
I repeated the name very distinctly.
"How do you spell it?"
I told him. He moved his head at the impracticable nature of
that name, and observed:
"It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?"
There was no hurry. I had passed for Master, and I had all the
rest of my life before me to make the best of it. That seemed a
long time. I went leisurely through a small mental calculation,
and said:
"Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir."
"Is it?" The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the
table to me, and rose from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very
abrupt ending of our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part
from that excellent man, who was master of a ship before the
whisper of the sea had reached my cradle. He offered me his hand
and wished me well. He even made a few steps towards the door
with me, and ended with good-natured advice.
"I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into
steam. When a man has got his master's certificate it's the
proper time. If I were you I would go into steam."
I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era
of examinations. But that time I did not walk on air, as on the
first two occasions. I walked across the Hill of many beheadings
with measured steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was
now a British master mariner beyond a doubt. It was not that I
had an exaggerated sense of that very modest achievement, with
which, however, luck, opportunity, or any extraneous influence
could have had nothing to do. That fact, satisfactory and
obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal significance. It
was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even to some
not very kind aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had
been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I
don't mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my
desire to go to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen,
sensitive enough, in all conscience, the commotion of his little
world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed. So
considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to
this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect
meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed
boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of
his impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people
who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I
verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality
and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his
racial surroundings and associations. For you must understand
that there was no idea of any sort of "career" in my call. Of
Russia or Germany there could be no question. The nationality,
the antecedents, made it impossible. The feeling against the
Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there would
have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School
at Pola. It would have meant six months' extra grinding at
German, perhaps, but I was not past the age of admission, and in
other respects I was well qualified. This expedient to palliate
my folly was thought of--but not by me. I must admit that in
that respect my negative was accepted at once. That order of
feeling was comprehensible enough to the most inimical of my
critics. I was not called upon to offer explanations; the truth
is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but the sea.
There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the
language at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is
with France that Poland has most connection. There were some
facilities for having me a little looked after, at first.
Letters were being written, answers were being received,
arrangements were being made for my departure for Marseilles,
where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in a roundabout
fashion through various French channels, had promised good-
naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent
ship for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier
de chien.
I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own
counsel. But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly
true. Already the determined resolve, that "if a seaman, then an
English seaman," was formulated in my head though, of course, in
the Polish language. I did not know six words of English, and I
was astute enough to understand that it was much better to say
nothing of my purpose. As it was I was already looked upon as
partly insane, at least by the more distant acquaintances. The
principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in the good-
natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.
This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned
out a quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black,
short beard, a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He
was as jovial and good-natured as any boy could desire. I was
still asleep in my room in a modest hotel near the quays of the
old port, after the fatigues of the journey via Vienna, Zurich,
Lyons, when he burst in flinging the shutters open to the sun of
Provence and chiding me boisterously for lying abed. How
pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to be up and
off instantly for a "three years' campaign in the South Seas." O
magic words! Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud"--
that is the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.
He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was
unwearied; but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship
for me in a very solemn spirit. He had been at sea himself, but
had left off at the age of twenty-five, finding he could earn his
living on shore in a much more agreeable manner. He was related
to an incredible number of Marseilles well-to-do families of a
certain class. One of his uncles was a ship-broker of good
standing, with a large connection amongst English ships; other
relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts, sold
chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers,
shipwrights. His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a
kind, the Syndic of the Pilots. I made acquaintances amongst
these people, but mainly amongst the pilots. The very first
whole day I ever spent on salt water was by invitation, in a big
half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs on the look-
out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and the
smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall
Planier lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon
with a white perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls,
these sturdy Provencal seamen. Under the general designation of
le petit ami de Baptistin I was made the guest of the Corporation
of Pilots, and had the freedom of their boats night or day. And
many a day and a night too did I spend cruising with these rough,
kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy with the sea began.
Many a time "the little friend of Baptistin" had the hooded cloak
of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest hands
while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch
for the lights of ships. Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or
shaved, lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the
pilot-breed, and here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a
hairy ear, bent over my sea-infancy. The first operation of
seamanship I had an opportunity of observing was the boarding of
ships at sea, at all times, in all states of the weather. They
gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited to sit in
more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick
plate by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses
of black hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and
dazzlingly white teeth.
I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of
them, Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a
statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front
seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable
airing. She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in
the south. In her haughty weariness she used to make me think of
Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the master for
which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and
unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of
other men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in
Polish and in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by
a not very surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book
reminded me strongly of the belle Madame Delestang.
Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose,
and a perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as
it were by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir
Leicester Dedlock's "grand air" and courtly solemnity. He
belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was a banker, with
whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs. He was such an
ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he used in
current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should say,
with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money matters
reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of post-
Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were
still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles,
and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime
affairs. You must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth
century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. Luckily in the counting-
house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the Delestang town
residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts were kept in
modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my
wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist (I
suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty
ceilings with heavily moulded cornices. I always felt on going
out as though I had been in the temple of some very dignified but
completely temporal religion. And it was generally on these
occasions that under the great carriage gateway Lady Ded-- I mean
Madame Delestang, catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon
me with an amiable imperiousness to the side of the carriage, and
suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, "Venez donc faire un
tour avec nous," to which the husband would add an encouraging
"C'est ca. Allons, montez, jeune homme." He questioned me
sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as
to the way I employed my time, and never failed to express the
hope that I wrote regularly to my "honoured uncle." I made no
secret of the way I employed my time, and I rather fancy that my
artless tales of the pilots and so on entertained Madame
Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman could be entertained by
the prattle of a youngster very full of his new experience
amongst strange men and strange sensations. She expressed no
opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in
the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and
fleeting episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner
of a street, she offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight
pressure, for a moment. While the husband sat motionless and
looking straight before him, she leaned forward in the carriage
to say, with just a shade of warning in her leisurely tone: "Il
faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater sa vie." I had
never seen her face so close to mine before. She made my heart
beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life.
But she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that
danger seemed to me.
Content of CHAPTER VI [Joseph Conrad's book: Some Reminiscences]
_
Read next: CHAPTER VII
Read previous: CHAPTER V
Table of content of A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
