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Within the Tides

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Within the Tides




"You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely. I've got to
a point that I don't care what happens to me. I would shoot you
now for tuppence.

"At this the cur dodges under the table. Then Cloete goes out, and
as he turns in the street--you know, little fishermen's cottages,
all dark; raining in torrents, too--the other opens the window of
the parlour and speaks in a sort of crying voice -

"You low Yankee fiend--I'll pay you off some day.

"Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that
the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it."


My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his
black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.

"I don't quite understand this," I said. "In what way?"

He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that
Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to
his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it.
Enough to keep her comfortable. George Dunbar's half, as Cloete
feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the
medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to
go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.

"I am curious," I said, "to learn what the motive force of this
tragic affair was--I mean the patent medicine. Do you know?"

He named it, and I whistled respectfully. Nothing less than
Parker's Lively Lumbago Pills. Enormous property! You know it;
all the world knows it. Every second man, at least, on this globe
of ours has tried it.

"Why!" I cried, "they missed an immense fortune."

"Yes," he mumbled, "by the price of a revolver-shot."

He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States,
passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock. The night before he
sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for
a drink. "Funny chap, Cloete. We sat all night drinking grogs,
till it was time for him to go on board."

It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this
story, with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine
man stranger to all moral standards. Cloete concluded by remarking
that he, had "had enough of the old country." George Dunbar had
turned on him, too, in the end. Cloete was clearly somewhat
disillusioned.

As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End
hospital or other, and on his last day clamoured "for a parson,"
because his conscience worried him for killing an innocent man.
"Wanted somebody to tell him it was all right," growled my old
ruffian, contemptuously. "He told the parson that I knew this
Cloete who had tried to murder him, and so the parson (he worked
among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about it. That skunk of
a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . . Promised to
be good and so on. . . Then he went crazy . . . screamed and threw
himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can
guess all that--eh? . . . till he was exhausted. Gave up. Threw
himself down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray. So he says.
Tried to think of some prayer for a quick death--he was that
terrified. Thought that if he had a knife or something he would
cut his throat, and be done with it. Then he thinks: No! Would
try to cut away the wood about the lock. . . He had no knife in his
pocket. . . he was weeping and calling on God to send him a tool of
some kind when suddenly he thinks: Axe! In most ships there is a
spare emergency axe kept in the master's room in some locker or
other. . . Up he jumps. . . Pitch dark. "Pulls at the drawers to
find matches and, groping for them, the first thing he comes upon--
Captain Harry's revolver. Loaded too. He goes perfectly quiet all
over. Can shoot the lock to pieces. See? Saved! God's
providence! There are boxes of matches too. Thinks he: I may
just as well see what I am about.

"Strikes a light and sees the little canvas bag tucked away at the
back of the drawer. Knew at once what that was. Rams it into his
pocket quick. Aha! says he to himself: this requires more light.
So he pitches a lot of paper on the floor, set fire to it, and
starts in a hurry rummaging for more valuables. Did you ever? He
told that East-End parson that the devil tempted him. First God's
mercy--then devil's work. Turn and turn about. . .

"Any squirming skunk can talk like that. He was so busy with the
drawers that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens.
He looks up and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in
the lock) and Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce
in the light of the burning papers. His eyes were starting out of
his head. Thieving, he thunders at him. A sailor! An officer!
No! A wretch like you deserves no better than to be left here to
drown.

"This Stafford--on his death-bed--told the parson that when he
heard these words he went crazy again. He snatched his hand with
the revolver in it out of the drawer, and fired without aiming.
Captain Harry fell right in with a crash like a stone on top of the
burning papers, putting the blaze out. All dark. Not a sound. He
listened for a bit then dropped the revolver and scrambled out on
deck like mad."

The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.

"What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people
the captain committed suicide. Pah! Captain Harry was a man that
could face his Maker any time up there, and here below, too. He
wasn't the sort to slink out of life. Not he! He was a good man
down to the ground. He gave me my first job as stevedore only
three days after I got married."

As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide
seemed to be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively
for his material. And then it was not worth many thanks in any
case.

For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in
our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious
continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo. This story to
be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South
Seas. But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the
consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak--
just as it was told to me--but unfortunately robbed of the striking
effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever
followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port of
London.

Oct. 1910.




THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES--A FIND




This tale, episode, experience--call it how you will--was related
in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own
confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad
age--unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the
majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is
practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember
with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have
observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people
at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very
failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes
of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms,
fascinating if you like, but--so to speak--naked, stripped for a
run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the
immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of
thing, under the gathering shadows.

I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man
to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder
of his posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because
the experience was simply that of an abominable fright--terror he
calls it. You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in
the very first lines was in writing.

This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title. The
title itself is my own contrivance, (can't call it invention), and
has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here.
As to the witches that's merely a conventional expression, and we
must take our man's word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street
which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last
stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least
twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very
small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some
premonition of that fact which made me say: "But I must have the
box too." The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic
gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my
curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was
not attractive at first sight. But in one place the statement that
in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye.
Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily
reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being
weak and the power of imagination strong.

In another place the phrase: "At night we stood in again,"
arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. "Let's
see what it is all about," I thought, without excitement.

Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other
line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone
of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest
subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively
appearance. "In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old," he begins
earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible
industry. Don't imagine, however, that there is anything archaic
in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the
world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for
shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or
at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our
bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough
to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred
young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

If this isn't progress! . . . Why immense! We have moved on, and
so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance
and simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch. And of
course no motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere,
now. This one, the one of the title, was situated in Spain. That
much I discovered only from internal evidence, because a good many
pages of that relation were missing--perhaps not a great misfortune
after all. The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate
detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that coast--
presumably the north coast of Spain. His experience has nothing to
do with the sea, though. As far as I can make it out, he was an
officer on board a sloop-of-war. There's nothing strange in that.
At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of our men-of-
war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of Spain-
-as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to
perform. A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be
expected from our man, only, as I've said, some of his pages (good
tough paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in
wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it
is to be seen clearly that communication with the shore and even
the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to
obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to
patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of the province.
Something of the sort. All this can be only inferred from the
preserved scraps of his conscientious writing.

Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a member of
the ship's company, having the rating of the captain's coxswain.
He was known on board as Cuba Tom; not because he was Cuban
however; he was indeed the best type of a genuine British tar of
that time, and a man-of-war's man for years. He came by the name
on account of some wonderful adventures he had in that island in
his young days, adventures which were the favourite subject of the
yarns he was in the habit of spinning to his shipmates of an
evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very strong,
and of proved courage. Incidentally we are told, so exact is our
narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length
of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared for and
sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad
back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy
of some.

Our young officer dwells on the manly qualities of Cuba Tom with
something like affection. This sort of relation between officer
and man was not then very rare. A youngster on joining the service
was put under the charge of a trustworthy seaman, who slung his
first hammock for him and often later on became a sort of humble
friend to the junior officer. The narrator on joining the sloop
had found this man on board after some years of separation. There
is something touching in the warm pleasure he remembers and records
at this meeting with the professional mentor of his boyhood.

We discover then that, no Spaniard being forthcoming for the
service, this worthy seaman with the unique pigtail and a very high
character for courage and steadiness had been selected as messenger
for one of these missions inland which have been mentioned. His
preparations were not elaborate. One gloomy autumn morning the
sloop ran close to a shallow cove where a landing could be made on
that iron-bound shore. A boat was lowered, and pulled in with Tom
Corbin (Cuba Tom) perched in the bow, and our young man (Mr. Edgar
Byrne was his name on this earth which knows him no more) sitting
in the stern sheets.

A few inhabitants of a hamlet, whose grey stone houses could be
seen a hundred yards or so up a deep ravine, had come down to the
shore and watched the approach of the boat. The two Englishmen
leaped ashore. Either from dullness or astonishment the peasants
gave no greeting, and only fell back in silence.

Mr. Byrne had made up his mind to see Tom Corbin started fairly on
his way. He looked round at the heavy surprised faces.

"There isn't much to get out of them," he said. "Let us walk up to
the village. There will be a wine shop for sure where we may find
somebody more promising to talk to and get some information from."

"Aye, aye, sir," said Tom falling into step behind his officer. "A
bit of palaver as to courses and distances can do no harm; I
crossed the broadest part of Cuba by the help of my tongue tho'
knowing far less Spanish than I do now. As they say themselves it
was 'four words and no more' with me, that time when I got left
behind on shore by the Blanche, frigate."

He made light of what was before him, which was but a day's journey
into the mountains. It is true that there was a full day's journey
before striking the mountain path, but that was nothing for a man
who had crossed the island of Cuba on his two legs, and with no
more than four words of the language to begin with.

The officer and the man were walking now on a thick sodden bed of
dead leaves, which the peasants thereabouts accumulate in the
streets of their villages to rot during the winter for field
manure. Turning his head Mr. Byrne perceived that the whole male
population of the hamlet was following them on the noiseless
springy carpet. Women stared from the doors of the houses and the
children had apparently gone into hiding. The village knew the
ship by sight, afar off, but no stranger had landed on that spot
perhaps for a hundred years or more. The cocked hat of Mr. Byrne,
the bushy whiskers and the enormous pigtail of the sailor, filled
them with mute wonder. They pressed behind the two Englishmen
staring like those islanders discovered by Captain Cook in the
South Seas.

It was then that Byrne had his first glimpse of the little cloaked
man in a yellow hat. Faded and dingy as it was, this covering for
his head made him noticeable.

The entrance to the wine shop was like a rough hole in a wall of
flints. The owner was the only person who was not in the street,
for he came out from the darkness at the back where the inflated
forms of wine skins hung on nails could be vaguely distinguished.
He was a tall, one-eyed Asturian with scrubby, hollow cheeks; a
grave expression of countenance contrasted enigmatically with the
roaming restlessness of his solitary eye. On learning that the
matter in hand was the sending on his way of that English mariner
toward a certain Gonzales in the mountains, he closed his good eye
for a moment as if in meditation. Then opened it, very lively
again.

"Possibly, possibly. It could be done."

A friendly murmur arose in the group in the doorway at the name of
Gonzales, the local leader against the French. Inquiring as to the
safety of the road Byrne was glad to learn that no troops of that
nation had been seen in the neighbourhood for months. Not the
smallest little detachment of these impious polizones. While
giving these answers the owner of the wine-shop busied himself in
drawing into an earthenware jug some wine which he set before the
heretic English, pocketing with grave abstraction the small piece
of money the officer threw upon the table in recognition of the
unwritten law that none may enter a wine-shop without buying drink.
His eye was in constant motion as if it were trying to do the work
of the two; but when Byrne made inquiries as to the possibility of
hiring a mule, it became immovably fixed in the direction of the
door which was closely besieged by the curious. In front of them,
just within the threshold, the little man in the large cloak and
yellow hat had taken his stand. He was a diminutive person, a mere
homunculus, Byrne describes him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet
assertive attitude, a corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over
his left shoulder, muffling his chin and mouth; while the broad-
brimmed yellow hat hung on a corner of his square little head. He
stood there taking snuff, repeatedly.

"A mule," repeated the wine-seller, his eyes fixed on that quaint
and snuffy figure. . . "No, senor officer! Decidedly no mule is to
be got in this poor place."

The coxswain, who stood by with the true sailor's air of unconcern
in strange surroundings, struck in quietly -

"If your honour will believe me Shank's pony's the best for this
job. I would have to leave the beast somewhere, anyhow, since the
captain has told me that half my way will be along paths fit only
for goats."

The diminutive man made a step forward, and speaking through the
folds of the cloak which seemed to muffle a sarcastic intention -

"Si, senor. They are too honest in this village to have a single
mule amongst them for your worship's service. To that I can bear
testimony. In these times it's only rogues or very clever men who
can manage to have mules or any other four-footed beasts and the
wherewithal to keep them. But what this valiant mariner wants is a
guide; and here, senor, behold my brother-in-law, Bernardino, wine-
seller, and alcade of this most Christian and hospitable village,
who will find you one."

This, Mr. Byrne says in his relation, was the only thing to do. A
youth in a ragged coat and goat-skin breeches was produced after
some more talk. The English officer stood treat to the whole
village, and while the peasants drank he and Cuba Tom took their
departure accompanied by the guide. The diminutive man in the
cloak had disappeared.

Byrne went along with the coxswain out of the village. He wanted
to see him fairly on his way; and he would have gone a greater
distance, if the seaman had not suggested respectfully the
advisability of return so as not to keep the ship a moment longer
than necessary so close in with the shore on such an unpromising
looking morning. A wild gloomy sky hung over their heads when they
took leave of each other, and their surroundings of rank bushes and
stony fields were dreary.

"In four days' time," were Byrne's last words, "the ship will stand
in and send a boat on shore if the weather permits. If not you'll
have to make it out on shore the best you can till we come along to
take you off."

"Right you are, sir," answered Tom, and strode on. Byrne watched
him step out on a narrow path. In a thick pea-jacket with a pair
of pistols in his belt, a cutlass by his side, and a stout cudgel
in his hand, he looked a sturdy figure and well able to take care
of himself. He turned round for a moment to wave his hand, giving
to Byrne one more view of his honest bronzed face with bushy
whiskers. The lad in goatskin breeches looking, Byrne says, like a
faun or a young satyr leaping ahead, stopped to wait for him, and
then went off at a bound. Both disappeared.

Byrne turned back. The hamlet was hidden in a fold of the ground,
and the spot seemed the most lonely corner of the earth and as if
accursed in its uninhabited desolate barrenness. Before he had
walked many yards, there appeared very suddenly from behind a bush
the muffled up diminutive Spaniard. Naturally Byrne stopped short.

The other made a mysterious gesture with a tiny hand peeping from
under his cloak. His hat hung very much at the side of his head.
"Senor," he said without any preliminaries. "Caution! It is a
positive fact that one-eyed Bernardino, my brother-in-law, has at
this moment a mule in his stable. And why he who is not clever has
a mule there? Because he is a rogue; a man without conscience.
Because I had to give up the macho to him to secure for myself a
roof to sleep under and a mouthful of olla to keep my soul in this
insignificant body of mine. Yet, senor, it contains a heart many
times bigger than the mean thing which beats in the breast of that
brute connection of mine of which I am ashamed, though I opposed
that marriage with all my power. Well, the misguided woman
suffered enough. She had her purgatory on this earth--God rest her
soul."

Byrne says he was so astonished by the sudden appearance of that
sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of the speech,
that he was unable to disentangle the significant fact from what
seemed but a piece of family history fired out at him without rhyme
or reason. Not at first. He was confounded and at the same time
he was impressed by the rapid forcible delivery, quite different
from the frothy excited loquacity of an Italian. So he stared
while the homunculus letting his cloak fall about him, aspired an
immense quantity of snuff out of the hollow of his palm.

"A mule," exclaimed Byrne seizing at last the real aspect of the
discourse. "You say he has got a mule? That's queer! Why did he
refuse to let me have it?"

The diminutive Spaniard muffled himself up again with great
dignity.

"Quien sabe," he said coldly, with a shrug of his draped shoulders.
"He is a great politico in everything he does. But one thing your
worship may be certain of--that his intentions are always rascally.
This husband of my defunta sister ought to have been married a long
time ago to the widow with the wooden legs." {1}

"I see. But remember that; whatever your motives, your worship
countenanced him in this lie."

The bright unhappy eyes on each side of a predatory nose confronted
Byrne without wincing, while with that testiness which lurks so
often at the bottom of Spanish dignity -

"No doubt the senor officer would not lose an ounce of blood if I
were stuck under the fifth rib," he retorted. "But what of this
poor sinner here?" Then changing his tone. "Senor, by the
necessities of the times I live here in exile, a Castilian and an
old Christian, existing miserably in the midst of these brute
Asturians, and dependent on the worst of them all, who has less
conscience and scruples than a wolf. And being a man of
intelligence I govern myself accordingly. Yet I can hardly contain
my scorn. You have heard the way I spoke. A caballero of parts
like your worship might have guessed that there was a cat in
there."

"What cat?" said Byrne uneasily. "Oh, I see. Something
suspicious. No, senor. I guessed nothing. My nation are not good
guessers at that sort of thing; and, therefore, I ask you plainly
whether that wine-seller has spoken the truth in other
particulars?"

"There are certainly no Frenchmen anywhere about," said the little
man with a return to his indifferent manner.

"Or robbers--ladrones?"

"Ladrones en grande--no! Assuredly not," was the answer in a cold
philosophical tone. "What is there left for them to do after the
French? And nobody travels in these times. But who can say!
Opportunity makes the robber. Still that mariner of yours has a
fierce aspect, and with the son of a cat rats will have no play.
But there is a saying, too, that where honey is there will soon be
flies."

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