Joseph Conrad - The Nigger Of The Narcissus
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Joseph Conrad >> The Nigger Of The Narcissus
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12 THE NIGGER
of THE NARCISSUS
A TALE OF THE FORECASTLE
BY JOSEPH CONRAD
COPYRIGHT, 1897, 1914,
BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
TO
EDWARD GARNETT
THIS TALE
ABOUT MY FRIENDS
OF THE SEA
TO MY READERS IN AMERICA
From that evening when James Wait joined the ship--late for the muster
of the crew--to the moment when he left us in the open sea, shrouded in
sailcloth, through the open port, I had much to do with him. He was in
my watch. A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no
chums. Yet James Wait, afraid of death and making her his accomplice was
an impostor of some character--mastering our compassion, scornful of our
sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions.
But in the book he is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship's
collective psychology and the pivot of the action. Yet he, who in the
family circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the
Nigger, remains very precious to me. For the book written round him
is not the sort of thing that can be attempted more than once in a
life-time. It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an
artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to
stand or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound
affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea--the
moulders of my youth, the companions of the best years of my life.
After writing the last words of that book, in the revulsion of feeling
before the accomplished task, I understood that I had done with the sea,
and that henceforth I had to be a writer. And almost without laying down
the pen I wrote a preface, trying to express the spirit in which I was
entering on the task of my new life. That preface on advice (which I now
think was wrong) was never published with the book. But the late W. E.
Henley, who had the courage at that time (1897) to serialize my "Nigger"
in the _New Review_ judged it worthy to be printed as an afterword at
the end of the last instalment of the tale.
I am glad that this book which means so much to me is coming out again,
under its proper title of "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" and under the
auspices of my good, friends and publishers Messrs. Doubleday, Page &
Co. into the light of publicity.
Half the span of a generation has passed since W. E. Henley, after
reading two chapters, sent me a verbal message: "Tell Conrad that if
the rest is up to the sample it shall certainly come out in the _New
Review_." The most gratifying recollection of my writer's life!
And here is the Suppressed Preface.
1914.
JOSEPH CONRAD.
PREFACE
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should
carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined
as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to
the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one,
underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in
its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and
in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and
essential--their one illuminating and convincing quality--the very truth
of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist,
seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the
world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts--whence,
presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our
being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They
speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to
our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our
prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism--but always
to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their
concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and
the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions,
with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious
aims.
It is otherwise with the artist.
Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within
himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be
deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is
made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which,
because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out
of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the
vulnerable body within a steel armour. His appeal is less loud, more
profound, less distinct, more stirring--and sooner forgotten. Yet its
effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations
discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist
appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to
that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more
permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder,
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity,
and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all
creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that
knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity
in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in
fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all
humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can
in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which
follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few
individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the
simple and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the
belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of
splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only
a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive then, may be held to
justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply
an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here--for the avowal is not
yet complete. Fiction--if it at all aspires to be art--appeals to
temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like
all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable
temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events
with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere
of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an
impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made
in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective,
is not amenable to persuasion. All art,' therefore, appeals primarily to
the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words
must also make its appeal through the senses, if its highest desire is
to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously
aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to
the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts. And it is
only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of
form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged
care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to
plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be
brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface
of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless
usage.
The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on
that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering,
weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker
in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in
the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand
specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly
improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must
run thus:--My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the
written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to
make you _see_. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed,
you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement,
consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. To snatch in a
moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase
of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in
tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and
without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a
sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and
through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of
its truth--disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within
the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that
kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to
such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret
or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders
that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious
origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to
each other and all mankind to the visible world. It is evident that he
who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot
be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft.
The enduring part of them--the truth which each only imperfectly
veils--should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions,
but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial
senti-mentalism (which like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to
get rid of,) all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship,
abandon him--even on the very threshold of the temple--to the
stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the
difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art
for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality.
It sounds far off. It has ceased' to be a cry, and is heard only as a
whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging.
Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch
the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to
wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements
of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up,
hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be
told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift
a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real
interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his
agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a
brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure.
We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and
perhaps he had not the strength--and perhaps he had not the knowledge.
We forgive, go on our way--and forget.
And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short,
and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel
so far, we talk a little about the aim--the aim of art, which, like life
itself, is inspiring, difficult--obscured by mists--It is not in the
clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one
of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is
not less great, but only more difficult.
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of
the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to
glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of
sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a
smile--such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only
for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and
the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is
accomplished--behold!--all the truth of life is there: a moment of
vision, a sigh, a smile--and the return to an eternal rest.
1897. J. C.
THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS"
CHAPTER ONE
Mr. Baker, chief mate of the ship _Narcissus_, stepped in one stride out
of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck. Above his
head, on the break of the poop, the night-watchman rang a double stroke.
It was nine o'clock. Mr. Baker, speaking up to the man above him,
asked:--"Are all the hands aboard, Knowles?"
The man limped down the ladder, then said reflectively:--
"I think so, sir. All our old chaps are there, and a lot of new men has
come.... They must be all there."
"Tell the boatswain to send all hands aft," went on Mr. Baker; "and tell
one of the youngsters to bring a good lamp here. I want to muster our
crowd."
The main deck was dark aft, but halfway from forward, through the open
doors of the forecastle, two streaks of brilliant light cut the shadow
of the quiet night that lay upon the ship. A hum of voices was
heard there, while port and starboard, in the illuminated doorways,
silhouettes of moving men appeared for a moment, very black, without
relief, like figures cut out of sheet tin. The ship was ready for sea.
The carpenter had driven in the last wedge of the mainhatch battens,
and, throwing down his maul, had wiped his face with great deliberation,
just on the stroke of five. The decks had been swept, the windlass oiled
and made ready to heave up the anchor; the big tow-rope lay in long
bights along one side of the main deck, with one end carried up and hung
over the bows, in readiness for the tug that would come paddling and
hissing noisily, hot and smoky, in the limpid, cool quietness of the
early morning. The captain was ashore, where he had been engaging some
new hands to make up his full crew; and, the work of the day over,
the ship's officers had kept out of the way, glad of a little
breathing-time. Soon after dark the few liberty-men and the new hands
began to arrive in shore-boats rowed by white-clad Asiatics,
who clamoured fiercely for payment before coming alongside the
gangway-ladder. The feverish and shrill babble of Eastern language
struggled against the masterful tones of tipsy seamen, who argued
against brazen claims and dishonest hopes by profane shouts. The
resplendent and bestarred peace of the East was torn into squalid
tatters by howls of rage and shrieks of lament raised over sums ranging
from five annas to half a rupee; and every soul afloat in Bombay Harbour
became aware that the new hands were joining the _Narcissus_.
Gradually the distracting noise had subsided. The boats came no longer
in splashing clusters of three or four together, but dropped alongside
singly, in a subdued buzz of expostulation cut short by a "Not a
pice more! You go to the devil!" from some man staggering up the
accommodation-ladder--a dark figure, with a long bag poised on the
shoulder. In the forecastle the newcomers, upright and swaying amongst
corded boxes and bundles of bedding, made friends with the old hands,
who sat one above another in the two tiers of bunks, gazing at their
future shipmates with glances critical but friendly. The two forecastle
lamps were turned up high, and shed an intense hard glare; shore-going
round hats were pushed far on the backs of heads, or rolled about on the
deck amongst the chain-cables; white collars, undone, stuck out on each
side of red faces; big arms in white sleeves gesticulated; the growling
voices hummed steady amongst bursts of laughter and hoarse calls. "Here,
sonny, take that bunk!... Don't you do it!... What's your last ship?...
I know her.... Three years ago, in Puget Sound.... This here berth
leaks, I tell you!... Come on; give us a chance to swing that chest!...
Did you bring a bottle, any of you shore toffs?... Give us a bit of
'baccy.... I know her; her skipper drank himself to death.... He was a
dandy boy!... Liked his lotion inside, he did!... No!... Hold your row,
you chaps!... I tell you, you came on board a hooker, where they get
their money's worth out of poor Jack, by--!..."
A little fellow, called Craik and nicknamed Belfast, abused the ship
violently, romancing on principle, just to give the new hands something
to think over. Archie, sitting aslant on his sea-chest, kept his knees
out of the way, and pushed the needle steadily through a white patch
in a pair of blue trousers. Men in black jackets and stand-up collars,
mixed with men bare-footed, bare-armed, with coloured shirts open
on hairy chests, pushed against one another in the middle of the
forecastle. The group swayed, reeled, turning upon itself with the
motion of a scrimmage, in a haze of tobacco smoke. All were speaking
together, swearing at every second word. A Russian Finn, wearing a
yellow shirt with pink stripes, stared upwards, dreamy-eyed, from under
a mop of tumbled hair. Two young giants with smooth, baby faces--two
Scandinavians--helped each other to spread their bedding, silent, and
smiling placidly at the tempest of good-humoured and meaningless curses.
Old Singleton, the oldest able seaman in the ship, set apart on the deck
right under the lamps, stripped to the waist, tattooed like a cannibal
chief all over his powerful chest and enormous biceps. Between the blue
and red patterns his white skin gleamed like satin; his bare back was
propped against the heel of the bowsprit, and he held a book at
arm's length before his big, sunburnt face. With his spectacles and a
venerable white beard, he resembled a learned and savage patriarch, the
incarnation of barbarian wisdom serene in the blasphemous turmoil of
the world. He was intensely absorbed, and as he turned the pages an
expression of grave surprise would pass over his rugged features. He was
reading "Pelham." The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of
Southern-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon. What ideas
do his polished and so curiously insincere sentences awaken in the
simple minds of the big children who people those dark and wandering
places of the earth? What meaning can their rough, inexperienced souls
find in the elegant verbiage of his pages? What excitement?--what
forgetfulness?--what appeasement? Mystery! Is it the fascination of
the incomprehensible?--is it the charm of the impossible? Or are those
beings who exist beyond the pale of life stirred by his tales as by an
enigmatical disclosure of a resplendent world that exists within the
frontier of infamy and filth, within that border of dirt and hunger, of
misery and dissipation, that comes down on all sides to the water's edge
of the incorruptible ocean, and is the only thing they know of life, the
only thing they see of surrounding land--those life-long prisoners of
the sea? Mystery! Singleton, who had sailed to the southward since the
age of twelve, who in the last forty-five years had lived (as we had
calculated from his papers) no more than forty months ashore--old
Singleton, who boasted, with the mild composure of long years well
spent, that generally from the day he was paid off from one ship
till the day he shipped in another he seldom was in a condition to
distinguish daylight--old Singleton sat unmoved in the clash of voices
and cries, spelling through "Pelham" with slow labour, and lost in an
absorption profound enough to resemble a trance. He breathed regularly.
Every time he turned the book in his enormous and blackened hands the
muscles of his big white arms rolled slightly under the smooth skin.
Hidden by the white moustache, his lips, stained with tobacco-juice that
trickled down the long beard, moved in inward whisper. His bleared eyes
gazed fixedly from behind the glitter of black-rimmed glasses. Opposite
to him, and on a level with his face, the ship's cat sat on the barrel
of the windlass in the pose of a crouching chimera, blinking its green
eyes at its old friend. It seemed to meditate a leap on to the old man's
lap over the bent back of the ordinary seaman who sat at Singleton's
feet. Young Charley was lean and long-necked. The ridge of his
backbone made a chain of small hills under the old shirt. His face of a
street-boy--a face precocious, sagacious, and ironic, with deep downward
folds on each side of the thin, wide mouth--hung low over his bony
knees. He was learning to make a lanyard knot with a bit of an old
rope. Small drops of perspiration stood out on his bulging forehead; he
sniffed strongly from time to time, glancing out of the corners of
his restless eyes at the old seaman, who took no notice of the puzzled
youngster muttering at his work.
The noise increased. Little Belfast seemed, in the heavy heat of the
forecastle, to boil with facetious fury. His eyes danced; in the crimson
of his face, comical as a mask, the mouth yawned black, with strange
grimaces. Facing him, a half-undressed man held his sides, and, throwing
his head back, laughed with wet eyelashes. Others stared with amazed
eyes. Men sitting doubled up in the upper bunks smoked short pipes,
swinging bare brown feet above the heads of those who, sprawling below
on sea-chests, listened, smiling stupidly or scornfully. Over the white
rims of berths stuck out heads with blinking eyes; but the bodies were
lost in the gloom of those places, that resembled narrow niches for
coffins in a whitewashed and lighted mortuary. Voices buzzed louder.
Archie, with compressed lips, drew himself in, seemed to shrink into
a smaller space, and sewed steadily, industrious and dumb. Belfast
shrieked like an inspired Dervish:--"... So I seez to him, boys, seez
I, 'Beggin' yer pardon, sorr,' seez I to that second mate of that
steamer--'beggin' your-r-r pardon, sorr, the Board of Trade must 'ave
been drunk when they granted you your certificate!' 'What do you say,
you------!' seez he, comin' at me like a mad bull... all in his white
clothes; and I up with my tar-pot and capsizes it all over his blamed
lovely face and his lovely jacket.... 'Take that!' seez I. 'I am a
sailor, anyhow, you nosing, skipper-licking, useless, sooperfloos
bridge-stanchion, you! That's the kind of man I am!' shouts I.... You
should have seed him skip, boys! Drowned, blind with tar, he was! So..."
"Don't 'ee believe him! He never upset no tar; I was there!" shouted
somebody. The two Norwegians sat on a chest side by side, alike and
placid, resembling a pair of love-birds on a perch, and with round eyes
stared innocently; but the Russian Finn, in the racket of explosive
shouts and rolling laughter, remained motionless, limp and dull, like
a deaf man without a backbone. Near him Archie smiled at his needle. A
broad-chested, slow-eyed newcomer spoke deliberately to Belfast during
an exhausted lull in the noise:--"I wonder any of the mates here are
alive yet with such a chap as you on board! I concloode they ain't that
bad now, if you had the taming of them, sonny."
"Not bad! Not bad!" screamed Belfast. "If it wasn't for us sticking
together.... Not bad! They ain't never bad when they ain't got a
chawnce, blast their black 'arts...."
He foamed, whirling his arms, then suddenly grinned and, taking
a tablet of black tobacco out of his pocket, bit a piece off with
a funny show of ferocity. Another new hand--a man with shifty eyes and
a yellow hatchet face, who had been listening open-mouthed in the shadow
of the midship locker--observed in a squeaky voice:--"Well, it's a
'omeward trip, anyhow. Bad or good, I can do it on my 'ed--s'long as
I get 'ome. And I can look after my rights! I will show 'em!" All the
heads turned towards him. Only the ordinary seaman and the cat took no
notice. He stood with arms akimbo, a little fellow with white eyelashes.
He looked as if he had known all the degradations and all the furies. He
looked as if he had been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as
if he had been scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth...
and he smiled with a sense of security at the faces around. His ears
were bending down under the weight of his battered felt hat. The torn
tails of his black coat flapped in fringes about the calves of his legs.
He unbuttoned the only two buttons that remained and every one saw that
he had no shirt under it. It was his deserved misfortune that those rags
which nobody could possibly be supposed to own looked on him as if they
had been stolen. His neck was long and thin; his eyelids were red; rare
hairs hung about his jaws; his shoulders were peaked and drooped like
the broken wings of a bird; all his left side was caked with mud
which showed that he had lately slept in a wet ditch. He had saved his
inefficient carcass from violent destruction by running away from an
American ship where, in a moment of forgetful folly, he had dared to
engage himself; and he had knocked about for a fortnight ashore in the
native quarter, cadging for drinks, starving, sleeping on rubbish-heaps,
wandering in sunshine: a startling visitor from a world of nightmares.
He stood repulsive and smiling in the sudden silence. This clean white
forecastle was his refuge; the place where he could be lazy; where he
could wallow, and lie and eat--and curse the food he ate; where he could
display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where
he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully--and
where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there
a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival
testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? A taciturn
long-armed shellback, with hooked fingers, who had been lying on his
back smoking, turned in his bed to examine him dispassionately, then,
over his head, sent a long jet of clear saliva towards the door. They
all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that
dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with
both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the
man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out
and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can't do
most things and won't do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and
self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that
knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance,
and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits
together a ship's company. The independent offspring of the ignoble
freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude
of the sea.
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