Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (867 page)

In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange city in the Midlands and particularly out of touch with the world’s politics.  Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all real interest.  I don’t think I had looked at a daily for a month past.

But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there out of pure kindness to bear me company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.

It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.

The impression was mediocre.  I was barely aware that such a man existed.  I remembered only that not long before he had visited London.  The recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked.

Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was Archducal, dynastic, purely accidental.  Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an Archduke?  And now he was no more; removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life.  I connected that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations so little that I had actually to ask where it had happened.  My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences of that grave event.  He asked me what I thought would happen next.

It was with perfect sincerity that I answered “Nothing,” and having a great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, I dismissed the subject.  It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless.  I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy Archdukes in the background, out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the light of the European stage.  And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgment who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that time.  What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was fixed upon my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating holiday-promising aspect.  I had been obtaining my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now and then to see us.  They arrived with their pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest.  And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it.  It had wearied out one’s attention.  Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world-drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the Powers of the Old World?  Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility, while they watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate.  It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race, liberation, justice — and the same mood of trivial demonstrations.  One could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg.  “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking clerk.  Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some
café turc
at the end of his lunch.

“Monsieur veut dire Café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.

I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and in its second phase.  But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism.  As to alarm, I pointed out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary.  It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions.  But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively.  It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing — a sort of thing I am not capable of.  Rather than be thought a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments.  It was pointed out to me that these Eastern nations were not far removed from a savage state.  Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding the pigs.  The highly-developed material civilisation of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a war.  The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.

Very plausible all this sounded.  War does not pay.  There had been a book written on that theme — an attempt to put pacificism on a material basis.  Nothing more solid in the way of argument could have been advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe.  War was “bad business!”  This was final.

But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world.  Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret them correctly.  The most innocent of passions will take the edge off one’s judgment.  The desire which possessed me was simply the desire to travel.  And that being so it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the Continent.  My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there.  My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.

In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but within the Russian frontier.  The enterprise at first seemed to me considerable.  Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made.  I confess that my first impulse about a projected journey is to leave it alone.  But the invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings.  Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life.  It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of that age.  It was within those historical walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence.  It was like the experience of another world.  The wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth.  I feared.  But fear in itself may become a fascination.  Men have gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight — just to see what would happen.  And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine.  Neither would it be pursued alone.  The invitation was extended to us all.  This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe.  My present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past.  I was pleased with the idea of showing my companions what Polish country life was like; to visit the town where I was at school before the boys by my side should grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own, should lose their unsophisticated interest in mine.  It is only in the short instants of early youth that we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the emotions of another soul.  For youth all is reality in this world, and with justice, since it apprehends so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance.  I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have been a fibre which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received its earliest independent impressions.

The first days of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue books, yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of mankind, passed for us in light-hearted preparations for the journey.  What was it but just a rush through Germany, to get across as quickly as possible?

Germany is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least.  In all my life I had been across it only twice.  I may well say of it
vidi tantum
; and the very little I saw was through the window of a railway carriage at express speed.  Those journeys of mine had been more like pilgrimages when one hurries on towards the goal for the satisfaction of a deeper need than curiosity.  In this last instance, too, I was so incurious that I would have liked to have fallen asleep on the shores of England and opened my eyes, if it were possible, only on the other side of the Silesian frontier.  Yet, in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it” — that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or barbarous niggers; and, with a consciousness of superiority freeing their hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s burden.”  Meantime, in a clearing of the Teutonic forest, their sages were rearing a Tree of Cynical Wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen now lying over the prostrate body of Belgium.  It must be said that they laboured openly enough, watering it with the most authentic sources of all madness, and watching with their be-spectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit.  The sincerest words of peace, words of menace, and I verily believe words of abasement, even if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy.  For when the fruit ripens on a branch it must fall.  There is nothing on earth that can prevent it.

II.

For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea.  We should proceed from Harwich to Hamburg.  Besides being thirty-six times longer than the Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive like an enticing mirage.

And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage.  No wonder they were excited.  It’s no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage.  The day of departure had come, the very hour had struck.  The luggage was coming downstairs.  It was most convincing.  Poland then, if erased from the map, yet existed in reality; it was not a mere
pays du rêve
, where you can travel only in imagination.  For no man, they argued, not even father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the novelist’s art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voyage
au pays du rêve
.

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the parched fields.  A pearly blur settled over them, and a light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies.  All unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, I carried off in my eye, this tiny fragment of Great Britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace.  And I felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a woman is conquered — by love, which is a sort of surrender.

These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday.  And I am certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation.  The forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest — which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the most precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness rather than possessed by you.  Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and more plainly, that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and continuity of his life — so that at times it presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals — still more dreadful.

I down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why there was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war.  I don’t mean to say that I ignored the possibility; I simply did not think of it.  And it made no difference; for if I had thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual certitude — obviously unattainable by the man in the street — could have stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.