Joseph Conrad

“ I've never cared for her. The climate don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will have to go, too! I will see to it. Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall sell this hotel and start another somewhere else."
He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it was true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. ”

“ Nothing was changed except that there was a different man at the wheel. He looked ill. His whole figure drooped, and he seemed rather to cling to the spokes than hold them with a controlling grip. I said to him:
"You are not fit to be here."
"I can manage, sir," he said feebly.
As a matter of fact, there was nothing for him to do. The ship had no steerage way. She lay with her head to the westward, the everlasting Koh-ring visible over the stern, with a few small islets, black spots in the great blaze, swimming before my troubled eyes. ”

“ Devil only knew what he would do if he learned there was a woman about. And how could he begin to tell of it? He couldn't confess his sudden escapade.
"We'll pull it off, sir," he said, with perfectly acted cheerfulness. He experienced gusts of awful joy expanding in his heart and hot like a fanned flame.
"We must," pronounced Mr. Jones. "This thing, Martin, is not like our other tries. I have a peculiar feeling about this. It's a different thing. It's a sort of test."
Ricardo was impressed by the governor's manner; for the first time a hint of passion could be detected in him. ”

“ On the contrary, he ought to be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at all.
"Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir," he said cheerily to his motionless principal in the stern-sheets. "All our troubles are over--for a time, anyhow. Ain't it luck to find a white man on this island? I would have just as soon expected to meet an angel from heaven--eh, Mr. Jones? Now then--ready, sir? one, two, three, up you go!"
Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more unexpected than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the wharf by the side of Heyst. ”

“ My sleeping-suit was just right for his size. A well-knit young fellow of twenty-five at most. He caught his lower lip with the edge of white, even teeth.
“Yes,” I said, replacing the lamp in the binnacle. The warm, heavy tropical night closed upon his head again.
“There’s a ship over there,” he murmured.
“Yes, I know. The Sephora. Did you know of us?”
“Hadn’t the slightest idea. I am the mate of her———” He paused and corrected himself. “I should say I was.”
“Aha! Something wrong?”
"Yes. Very wrong indeed. I’ve killed a man.” ”

“ I have never felt that I was very useful, but I live in hopes of seeing all the Ministries destroyed, finances and all. The greatest joy of my life has been to hear what your brother has done."
She directed her round eyes again to the sunshine outside, while the cat reposed within her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-like meditation.
"Yes! I rejoiced," she began again. "For me there is a heroic ring about the very name of Haldin. They must have been trembling with fear in their Ministries--all those men with fiendish hearts. ”

“ His sight plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the greater part of which was hidden from him by the planking of the jetty. His eyes fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the tiller in a queer, uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow. Another man, more directly below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale to gunwale, half off the after thwart, his head lower than his feet. This second man glared wildly upward, and struggled to raise himself, but to all appearance was much too drunk to succeed. ”

“ Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists—in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young—this influence is to be detected. ”

“ She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise, but her expression was serious.
"No," she replied. "It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there, and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream--the first I've had, too, since--"
"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.
"I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what dreams mean, for a shilling."
"Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?" inquired Heyst jocularly. ”

“ What moves such a man to write is the obscure, inner necessity that Joseph Conrad has told us of, and what rewards him when he has done is his own searching and accurate judgment, his own pride and delight in a beautiful piece of work. ”

“ His impulse of fear and apparent horror did not dismay her in the least. Her face was grave and her eyes looked seriously at him. Her fingers touched the hair of his temple, ran in a light caress down his cheek, twisted gently the end of his long moustache: and while he sat in the tremor of that contact she ran off with startling fleetness and disappeared in a peal of clear laughter, in the stir of grass, in the nod of young twigs growing over the path; leaving behind only a vanishing trail of motion and sound. ”

“ He never stirred a limb, hardly breathed, but stood in stiff immobility, absorbing the delight of her close contact by every pore.
“Closer! Closer!” he murmured.
Slowly she raised her arms, put them over his shoulders, and clasping her hands at the back of his neck, swung off the full length of her arms. Her head fell back, the eyelids dropped slightly, and her thick hair hung straight down: a mass of ebony touched by the red gleams of the fire. He stood unyielding under the strain, as solid and motionless as one of the big trees of the surrounding forests ”

“ But it does bother us a good deal. We have nourished ourself, in the main, upon the work of two modern writers: Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; we like to apply as a test such theories as we have been able to glean from those writers. Faulty and erring as we are, we always rise from Mr. Conrad's books purged and, for the moment, strengthened. Apparent in him are that manly and honourable virtue, that strict saline truth and scrupulous regard for life, that liberation from cant, which seem to be inbred in those who have suffered the exacting discipline of the hostile sea. ”

“ I repeated Heyst. She noted the anxiety in his tone, and turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.
"It must have been something--to startle you," she said. In the depth of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam of white teeth.
"It was only a single word--and some of his gestures. He had been making a good deal of noise. I wonder we didn't wake you up. How soundly you can sleep! I say, do you feel all right now?"
"As fresh as can be," she said, treating him to another deep gleam of a smile. "I heard no noise, and I'm glad of it. ”

“ No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad’s faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any work of 27art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged, incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured into a friend’s ear in a moment of sudden confidence. ”

“ He made a point of that. ‘But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.’ ‘Here!’ I interrupted. ‘You can never tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz,’ he said, youthfully solemn and reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods, and had started for the interior with a light heart and no more idea of what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything. ‘I am not so young as I look. ”

“ He pressed my arm lightly above the elbow. “Well, then—you were right.”
‘There was elation and pride, there was awe almost, in that low exclamation. “Jove!” he cried, “only think what it is to me.” Again he pressed my arm. “And you asked me whether I thought of leaving. Good God! I! want to leave! Especially now after what you told me of Mr. Stein’s . . . Leave! Why! That’s what I was afraid of. It would have been—it would have been harder than dying. No—on my word. Don’t laugh. I must feel—every day, every time I open my eyes—that I am trusted—that nobody has a right—don’t you know? Leave! ”

“ It is not pride. . . . Yes! I am proud to know I understood him better than anyone on earth—he told me so himself. And since his mother died I have had no one—no one—to—to—'
"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. ”

“ His head rolled from shoulder to shoulder. His eyelids began to beat rapidly. “And the pumps———pumps, Mr. Baker.” He peered as though the face within a foot of his eyes had been half a mile off. “Keep the men on the move to———to get her along,” he mumbled in a drowsy tone, like a man going off into a doze. He pulled himself together suddenly. “Mustn't stand. Won't do,” he said with a painful attempt at a smile. He let go his hold, and, propelled by the dip of the ship, ran aft unwillingly, with small steps, till he brought up against the binnacle stand. ”

“ He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity of the black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist received the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears. He checked himself, passed his hand over his forehead, confused, like a man who has been dreaming aloud.
“Where could a student be running if not to his lectures in the morning? At night it’s another matter. I did not care if all the house had been there to look at me. But I don’t suppose there was anyone. It’s best not to be seen or heard. ”

“ There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad. Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon [87] him too suddenly, or his boyhood sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through the immense forces surrounding the world. ”

“ The dusk deepened. The pages written over and torn out of his notebook were the first-fruit of his “mission.” No dream that. They contained the assurance that he was on the eve of real discoveries. “I think there is no longer anything in the way of my being completely accepted.”
He had resumed his impressions in those pages, some of the conversations. He even went so far as to write: “By the by, I have discovered the personality of that terrible N.N. A horrible, paunchy brute. If I hear anything of his future movements I shall send a warning.” ”

“ Prettier. It’s only the people....” She ceased on an uncertain note. The crested wave of enchantment seemed to have passed over his head, ebbing out faster than the sea, leaving the dreary expanses of the sand. He felt a chill at the roots of his hair.
“What people?” he asked.
“They are so changed. Listen, to-night while you were away—why did you go away?—I caught those two in the kitchen, saying nothing to each other. That Peyrol—he is terrible.” ”

“ We felt as though we three had been called to the very gate of Infernal Regions to judge, to decide the fate of a wanderer coming suddenly from a world of sunshine and illusions.
“By Jove, he seems to have a great idea of our power,” whispered Hollis, hopelessly. And then again there was a silence, the feeble plash of water, the steady tick of chronometers. Jackson, with bare arms crossed, leaned his shoulders against the bulkhead of the cabin. He was bending his head under the deck beam; his fair beard spread out magnificently over his chest; he looked colossal, ineffectual, and mild. ”

“ Even his sunken eyelids drooped within the bony sockets. Only his thin, waspish, beautifully pencilled eyebrows, drawn together a little, suggested the will and the power to sting—something vicious, unconquerable, and deadly.
“Fruits! Swindler!” repeated Heyst, without heat, almost without contempt. “You are giving yourself no end of trouble, you and your faithful henchman, to crack an empty nut. There are no fruits here, as you imagine. There are a few sovereigns, which you may have if you like; and since you have called yourself a bandit—”
“Yaas!” drawled Mr. Jones. ”