Sailors on the Inward Sea (2 page)

During the dry season a little more than a year and a half ago, the heat had become unbearable in Batavia and I decided to escape for a few days, taking a bus to Panchuk, a village in the highlands. One
rides for an hour with the heat streaming through the open windows and then, within a mile or two, the road rises into foothills and the temperature drops before you reach the lush green tea plantations that range over the slopes and perfume the air for miles around. Higher up in the mountains, palm trees grow side by side with pines, giving Panchuk the look of an imagined place.

It rained the night of my arrival. I was sitting on the balcony, enjoying the downpour while thunder cracked over the mountains, remembering bad weather at sea, when my thoughts drifted to my first meeting with Conrad in Singapore, in 1892. He was in a hospital recovering from a nasty blow to the head administered by a boom that had got loose, a good crack that might have killed him but only gave him terrible headaches and some rather wonderful nightmares. Being there for malaria, I was seeing things myself. I had fallen ill off the China coast while in command of a filthy steamer I had been chained to for nearly a year, continuing to work while the disease dug its hooks into me, feeling weaker and more light-headed by the day. At some point, two deckhands came into my cabin looking like angels of death—what I construed as wings must have been slickers, a squall having overtaken the ship—but I recalled nothing between then and when I regained consciousness in that sweltering room filled with beds holding what appeared to be corpses.

My head felt as if it were full of bilgewater as I sat up and noticed a man with an aristocratic air about my age staring at me. It was Conrad and he had been waiting for me to come round, assuming from my pasty skin that I spoke English or French and could rescue him from the incomprehensible languages of the East. He introduced himself as the chief mate of the
Highland Forest,
a position he would still occupy were it not for the accident during the passage from Amsterdam to Samarang. He was seeing things even then, some quite pleasant, some he wouldn't care to come upon again, things with
rather longish tails. A Dutch doctor in Samarang advised him to go into hospital as soon as he reached Singapore and remain absolutely silent for an indefinite period of time. He called the idea preposterous. From his point of view, it was better to let some witch doctor dance about and sprinkle a little goat urine, maybe shake a gourd in front of his nose and utter incantations that would probably sound like hyenas arguing over first rights to the offal of a hapless wildebeest.

His humor did as much to help me recover as the quinine. When we were fit enough to be discharged, we took rooms in a hotel and went out to explore the city, which I knew quite well. Singapore wants to be experienced in small bites, nibbled, not swallowed in chunks like an Englishman's baron of beef. With anyone other than Conrad that would have been my preferred course, but he was tireless, indefatigably curious. We wandered down the esplanade, shadowed by big trees and surrounded by neat green lawns. He was suitably awed by the blazing white cathedral. Up Sultan Gate, off the Beach Road, we inspected the Arab sector, where, amid the mosques, Arab textile traders begged for our business while calligraphers went about their work in the shadows of the palace of the former sultan. I had intentionally taken a route that led us to the waterfront, where it seemed as if the whole populace of the city flowed between piles of goods lying alongside the roads, half-naked men jostling to position their rickshaws, the lower part of their bodies wrapped in sarongs, their heads covered with conical straw hats. And everywhere there were the beautiful women of Singapore—slim, elegant, seeming to float above the noise and filth of the streets. At the Boat Quay the bustle of the roads gave way to sampans and lighters disgorging cargo, a huge eye glaring from each bow, which the sailors believed beneficial in warning off evil spirits. We walked about until the eyes faded at dusk, when lanterns set up on the boats cast an eerie glow on the spars and masts.

As we were both famished, I offered to stand him dinner at Raffles. We went up to the nearest cross street past the Cricket Club pavilion and were soon tucking into the hotel's fine food, after which we took our drinks out to the Palm Court and decided then and there to stick together for a while. A fortnight later we signed on as chief and second mate aboard the
Vidar,
a steamer owned by an Arab with the euphonious name of Syed Mohsin Bin Saleh Al Joofree and commanded by an Englishman, Walter Craig. To make the international nature of the compact complete, she sailed under the Dutch flag. We made a three-week voyage from Singapore through the Malay Archipelago, threading through the Carimata Strait to Banjarmassin on the Borneo coast and from thence to Palo Laut for coal, down to Dongala in the Celebes for coffee before finally turning round at Belingan, heavy with rubber, cane, and gutta-percha. My memory of that voyage was intense, filled with images of docks stacked with goods, men sweating under the Asian sun bent double by the weight of sacks or boxes, Conrad wearing a blue head cloth, shirtless, in charge of the loading, the two of us still young enough to work long hours in the heat, determined to satisfy Walter Craig, who depended on us to keep his ship on schedule and make sure we were not cheated by the locals.

We both left the
Vidar
a few months later for better posts. The next important thing that happened occurred five years later in London, where we saw a good deal of each other, most often on the
Nellie,
a cruising yawl owned by an old friend of Conrad's named Harrison whose financial talents had led him to the boardroom of a company where he presided as director.

Conrad had met Harrison at the beginning of his writing career and through Conrad I made his acquaintance. At one time Harrison and the other members of our gang—a lawyer named Barnes and an accountant named Kepler—had followed the sea, and my position as
a captain had a nostalgic appeal that fed their dreams. We may have seemed an odd lot at first glance, but friendships have been forged among people with less in common, the bond of the sea overcoming differences in temperament and outlook. That bond does not exactly constitute a philosophy, Ford, but it is the basis for thoughts with a philosophical turn, a shaper of ideas and attitudes you immediately recognize when a fellow starts talking. Whether we were sailing or in port due to inclement weather, playing dominoes and watching ships coming and going in the estuary, we talked exhaustively—business, politics, religion along with soul-searching that would have been quite unthinkable in a pub or even in someone's home. There was a whiff of confession in our stories, admissions of things we had thought or done or desired to do, of failures and heartaches usually uttered through a lattice to a man in a collar. We felt free to do so because of an unspoken pact that nothing we said went off the boat.

The five of us took the
Nellie
out on weekend excursions that lasted as long as a day or as little as an hour. Our talk then was all of ships until we returned to port and slipped into rambling conversations fueled by nostalgia and whisky, conversations that did not last as long as a performance of the shadow puppets in Batavia, but often went on into the small hours of the night. The old gang was an interesting lot, intelligent men who had seen things in life worth sharing and thinking about afterward. The quality of those conversations kept Conrad and me coming back to the
Nellie
over the years whenever we were in the city at the same time. And in these conversations, too, lies some of the story I want to tell.

AFTER I HAD
returned to my bungalow in Batavia from the mountains of Panchuk, I felt that I was at last onto something, Ford, a way into the layers and years of history between Conrad and me. I sat
down and jotted some notes. It seemed that I could begin this story either in Singapore or, marching forward in time, a few years later in London. And then it occurred to me that I might jump ahead many years to the last conversation I had with my old friend Hans Viereck, who knew everything about my relationship with Conrad except the final outcome. I wanted expressly to talk with him about Conrad and his wartime encounter with a British naval officer David Fox-Bourne, captain of HMS
Brigadier,
a man whose fate echoed eerily with certain events in
Lord Jim.

I had gone to visit Viereck in the hope that with the aid of his considerable wisdom he might see Conrad's last days and last acts more clearly than I did and help me understand them. While we sat on his veranda with the distant lights of Denpasar floating in the humid air, I told him everything, going on for what must have been upward of an hour. When I finished, Viereck nodded and stroked his voluminous white beard. From a nearby grove of hardwood trees came the call of nocturnal birds. “I see,” he said. “It is your opinion that Conrad's conscience was clear at the end?”

“Absolutely.”

A monkey leapt from a tree onto the railing and sat there while Viereck took a nut from the bowl on the table, which the creature grabbed and cracked with his teeth. In the lamplight, his gums were pink. At that point, a woman materialized out of the gloom, walking silently on bare feet. Viereck rolled up his sleeve. I watched her swab his arm and give him an injection. After withdrawing the needle, she wrapped the syringe in a white cloth and handed him a dish containing some pills. He took them with wine as she was leaving. “You know, Malone,” he said, “with something like this a man has no choice. None in the least. He can put it off but time will run out.” In thrall to the drugs, he soon drifted into silence. Within minutes the woman returned and helped him into the house.

I HAVE NOW
given you my beginnings with Conrad and my beginnings with this story, Ford. I'd like to see you after you have read this, after you have had time to reflect and give me your impression of what it adds up to. I doubt you would fancy a voyage to Indonesia, though if you do I promise to show you things worth seeing in Batavia and out in the country. You would enjoy Panchuk. I, on the other hand, would be happy to return for a while to England. We might even take the train down to Kent as we used to do on occasion to see Conrad and persuade whoever now lives at the Pent to let us in for a look around. Who knows? Our voices might even be heard echoing faintly in the parlor.

S
INCE WE POSSESS
the leasehold on the Pent until the story's told, we might as well make ourselves comfortable in the big fireside chairs with white fleur-de-lis. From where we sit opposite the bow window we can see the oak trees that line the road back to Stanford. I pour a little whisky in our glasses, ask if you remember the heat that gripped London in the summer of 1924.

“Bloody awful,” you say.

It was. The sky rusty red at dawn, baking to a yellow haze soon after the sun came up, the motionless thick air that coated your throat and stung your eyes solidifying as the day wore on, hardening like plaster, humidity like the tropics. The only people who did not appear to suffer were members of a religious sect roaming Hyde Park, carrying signs inscribed with verses from the Book of Revelations warning that the Apocalypse was nigh, the lot licking their lips in anticipation of fire and brimstone raining down on the infidels through which they would walk untouched.

I remember the weather so well because I was outside every day. After retiring from the sea earlier that year, I had taken rooms in a Chelsea boardinghouse near the Embankment while I looked for a boat to live on, the feel of the sea beneath my feet a spiritual requirement in the same way that daily chants are for a monk. I have few needs of this kind and will not burden you with them, but living on a boat, however modest, was crucial to my well-being. It still is. I keep a converted junk in a slip at the old port and divide my time between it and the bungalow.

In any case, I was having a devilishly hard time finding a decent vessel. I visited every dock in the city whose name is remotely familiar to you and something was always wrong. Either the price was too high or the feel of the boat was off. The search led me into warrens, backwaters, abandoned channels trapped between old brick buildings where even at noon there were shadows, the water oily and viscous, clotted with debris, the boats advertised as being fresh as the day they were christened frequently half-submerged with such bad rot that their frames showed like bones through gaps in the hulls. It wasn't as though I were looking for the
Golden Hind.
My needs were modest. The problem was that anything in good condition cost at least four times what I could afford, and so I began inspecting converted barges.

For a man who had spent his life on fairly elegant ships the barges were an affront, like an insult hurled your way by an unkempt stranger on the street. With the heat getting worse, I dragged myself from one to another, working up a good-sized case of resentment, a perfect match for the weather. One afternoon I went to look at a seiner, a dark brown, snub-nosed thing, far from pretty but clean belowdecks, with spacious quarters done up in a light-colored wood and a serviceable galley, the best thing I had seen that I could afford. I told the agent I was interested and set out for the Port Authority to find the owner, one M. Simmons, who worked there as a clerk.