Tales of Hearsay by Joseph Conrad ~ Full Audiobook [drama]
00:00Tales of hearsay,The Warrior's Soul,1917, read by Peter Dan.The old officer with long white mustachesgave rein to his indignation.Is it possible that you youngstersshould have no more sense than that?Some of you had better wipe the milk
00:18off your upper lip before you start to pass judgmenton the few poor stragglers of a generationwhich has done and suffered not a little in its time.His heroes, having expressed much compunction,the ancient warrior became appeased, but he was not silenced.I am one of them, one of the stragglers, I mean, he went on patiently.And what did we do? What have we achieved?He, the great Napoleon, started upon us to emulate the Macedonian Alexander,
00:47with a ruck of nations at his back.We opposed empty spaces to French impetuosity.Then we offered them an interminable battleso that their army went at last to sleep in its positions,lying down on the heaps of its own dead.Then came the wall of fire in Moscow.It toppled down on them.Then began the long rout of the Grand Army.
01:09I have seen it stream on,like the doomed flight of haggard spectral sinnersacross the innermost frozen circle of Dante's inferno,ever widening before their despairing eyes.They who escaped must have had souls doubly riveted inside their bodiesto carry them out of Russia through that frost.fit to split rocks. But to say that it was our fault that a single one of them got away is mereignorance. Why, our own men suffered nearly to the limit of their strength, their Russian strength.
01:42Of course our spirit was not broken, and then our cause was good, it was holy, but that did nottemper the wind much to men and horses. The flesh is weak, good or evil purpose, humanity has topay the prize. Why, in that very fight for that little village of which I have been telling you,we were fighting for the shelter of those old houses as much as victory, and with the Frenchit was the same. It wasn't for the sake of glory or for the sake of strategy. The French knewthat they would have to retreat before morning, and we knew perfectly well that they would go.As far as the war was concerned, there was nothing to fight about. Yet our infantry and theirsfought like wildcats, or like heroes, if you like that better, amongst the houses.
02:29Hot work enough, while the supports out in the open stood freezing in a tempestuous north wind,which drove the snow on earth and the great masses of clouds in the sky at a terrific pace.The very air was inexpressibly somber by contrast with the white earth.I've never seen God's creation look more sinister than on that day.We, the cavalry, we were only a handful, had not much to be.to do except turn our backs to the wind and receive some stray French round shot.This, I may tell you, was the last of the French guns, and it was the last time they had theirartillery in position. Those guns never went away from there either. We found them abandoned
03:10next morning. But that afternoon they were keeping up an infernal fire on our attacking column.The furious wind carried away the smoke and even the noise, but we could see the constant flickerof the tongues of fire along the French front.Then a driving flurry of snow would hide everythingexcept the dark red flashes in the white swirl.At intervals when the line cleared we could see awayacross the plain to the right a somber column moving endlesslythe great rout of the Grand Army creeping on and on all the time
03:42while the fight on our left went on with a great din and fury.The cruel whirlwind of snow swept over that scene of death and desolation.and then the wind fell as suddenly he said it had arisen in the morning.Presently we got orders to charge the retreating column,I don't know why, unless they wanted to prevent us from getting frozen in our saddlesby giving us something to do.We changed front, half right, and got into motion at a walkto take that distant dark line in flank.
04:12It might have been half-past two in the afternoon.You must know that so far in this campaign,my regiment had never been on the main line of Napoleon's advance,All these months since the invasion, the army we belonged to had been wrestling with Udano in the north.We had only come down lately, driving him before us to the Beresina.This was the first occasion then that I and my comrades had a close view of Napoleon's grand army.It was an amazing and terrible sight.I'd heard of it from others.
04:44I'd seen the stragglers from it, small bands of marauders, parties of prisoners in the distance.But this was the very column.itself, a crawling, stumbling, starved, half-demented mob. It issued from the forest a mile awayand its head was lost in the murk of the fields. We rode into it at a trot, which was the most wecould get out of our horses, and we stuck in that human mass as if in a moving bog. There was noresistance. I heard a few shots, half a dozen perhaps. Their very senses seemed frozen withinthem. I had time for a good look while riding at the head of my squadron. Well, I assure you, there were menwalking on their outer edge so lost to everything but their misery that they never turned
05:28their heads to look at our charge. Soldiers! My horse pushed over one of them with his chest.The poor wretch had a dragoon's blue cloak all torn and scorched, hanging from his shoulders,and he didn't even put his hand out to snatch at my bridle and save himself. He just wentdown. Our troopers were pointing and slashing. Well, and of course at first I myself,what would you have? An enemy's an enemy. Yet a sort of sickening awe crept into my heart.There was no tumult, only a low, deep murmur dwelt over them, interspersed with louder criesand groans, while that mob kept on pushing and surging past us, sightless and without feeling.A smell of scorched rags and festering wounds hung in the air.
06:16My horse staggered in the eddies of swaying men.But it was like cutting down galvanised corpses that didn't care.Invaders, yes, God was already dealing with them.I touched my horse with the spurs to get clear.There was a sudden rush and a sort of angry moanwhen our second squadron got into them on our right.My horse plunged and somebody got hold of my leg.As I had no mind to get pulled out of the saddle,
06:44I gave a backhanded slash without a hand.looking. I heard a cry and my leg was let go suddenly. Just then I caught sight of the subaltern ofmy troop at some little distance from me. His name was Tomasov. That multitude of resurrected bodieswith glassy eyes was seething round his horse as if blind, growling crazily. He was sitting erect inhis saddle, not looking down at them, and sheathing his sword deliberately. This Thomasov,well, he had a beard. Of course,We all had beards then.Circumstances, lack of leisure, want of razors, too.
07:22No, seriously, we were a wild-looking lot in thoseUnforgotten Days, which so many, so very many of us did not survive.You know our losses were awful, too.Yes, we looked wild.De Rousse Sauvage, what?So he had a beard, this Thomasov, I mean.But he did not look savage.He was the youngest of us all, and that meant real youth.
07:44At a distance he passed muster fairly wellWhat with the grime and the particular stamp of that campaign on our facesBut directly you were near enough to have a good look into his eyesThat was where his lack of age showedThough he was not exactly a boyThose same eyes were blueSomething like the blue of autumn skiesDreamy and gay too
08:06Innocent believing eyesA top knot of fair hair decorated his browLike a gold diadem in what one would call normal timesYou may think I am talking of him as if he were the hero of a novel.Why, that's nothing to what the adjutant discovered about him.He discovered that he had a lover's lips, whatever that may be.If the adjutant meant a nice mouth, why it was nice enough,but of course it was intended for a sneer.
08:34That adjutant of ours was not a very delicate fellow.Look at those lover's lips, he would exclaim in a loud tone while Tomasov was talking.Domesov didn't quite like that sort of thing,but to a certain extent he had laid himself open to banterby the lasting character of his impressionswhich were connected with the passion of loveand perhaps were not of such a rare kind as he seemed to think them.What made his comrades tolerant of his rhapsodies
09:01was the fact that they were connected with France, with Paris.You of the present generation,you cannot conceive how much prestige there was then in those namesfor the whole world.Paris was the centre of wonder for all human beings gifted with imagination.There we were, the majority of us, young and well-connected,but not long out of our hereditary nests in the provinces.Simple servants of God, mere rustics, if I may say so.
09:30So we were only too ready to listen to the tales of France from our comrade Thomasov.He had been attached to our mission in Paris the year before the war.high protections very likely or maybe sheer luck.I don't think he could have been a very useful member of the missionbecause of his youth and complete inexperience.And apparently all his time in Paris was his own.The use he made of it was to fall in love,to remain in that state, to cultivate it,
09:59to exist only for it in a manner of speaking.Thus it was something more than a mere memorythat he had brought with him from France.Memory as a fugitive.thing. It can be falsified, it can be effaced, it can even be doubted. Why, I myself came to doubtsometimes that I too have been in Paris in my turn, and the long road there with battles forits stages would appear still more incredible if it were not for a certain musket-ball which Ihave been carrying about my person ever since, a little cavalry affair which happened in
10:30Silesia at the very beginning of the Leipzig campaign. Passages of love, however, are moreimpressive, perhaps, than passages of danger. You don't go affronting love in troops, as it were.They are rarer, more personal, and more intimate. And remember that with Thomas off, all that wasvery fresh yet. He had not been home from France three months when the war began.His heart, his mind were full of that experience. He was really awed by it, and he was simpleenough to let it appear in his speeches. He considered himself a sort of privileged person,not because a woman had looked at him with favour,but simply because, how shall I say it,
11:11he had had the wonderful illumination of his worship for her,as if it were heaven itself that had done this for him.Oh, yes, he was very simple,a nice youngster, yet no fool,and with that utterly inexperienced, unsuspicious and unthinking.You'll find one like that here and there in the provinces.He had some poetry in him too,that could only be natural, something quite his own, not acquired.
11:38I suppose Father Adam had some poetry in him of that natural sort.For the rest, Unros Sauvage, as the French sometimes called us,but not of that kind which they maintain eats tallow candle for a delicacy.As to the woman, the French woman,well, though I have also been in France with a hundred thousand Russians,I've never seen her.Very likely she was not in Paris then.And in any case, hers were not the doors that would fly open before simple fellows of my sort, you understand.
12:10Gilded salons were never in my way.I could not tell you how she looked, which is strange considering that I was, if I may say so,Thomasov's special confidant.He very soon got shy of talking before the others.I suppose the usual campfire comments jarred his fine feelings,but I was left to him and truly I had to submit.You can't very well expect a youngster in Tomasov's state to hold his tongue altogether, and I,I suppose you will hardly believe me, I am by nature a rather silent sort of person.
12:44Very likely my silence appeared to him sympathetic.All the months of September our regiment, quartered in villages, had come in for an easy time.It was then that I heard most of that, you can't call it a story.The story I have in my mind is not in that.outpourings, let us call them.I would sit quite content to hold my peace, a whole hour perhaps,while Tomasov talked with exultation,and when he was done I would still hold my peace,
13:15and then there would be produced a solemn effect of silence,which I imagine pleased Tomasov in a way.She was, of course, not a woman in her first youth, a widow maybe.At any rate, I never heard Thomasov mention her husband.She had a salon, something.something very distinguished, a social centre in which she queened it with great splendour.Somehow, I fancy her court was composed mostly of men, but Tomasov, I must say, kept suchdetails out of his discourse as wonderfully well. Upon my word I don't know whether her hair was
13:49dark or fair, her eyes brown or blue, what was her stature, her features, or her complexion.His love soared above mere physical impressions. He never described it to me inset terms, but he was ready to swear that in her presence everybody's thoughts and feelingswere bound to circle around her. She was that sort of woman. Most wonderful conversationson all sorts of subjects went on in her salon. But through them all, they flowed unheard likea mysterious strain of music, the assertion, the power, the tyranny of sheer beauty. So,apparently, the woman was beautiful. She detached all these talking people from their lifeinterests and even from their vanities. She was a secret delight and a secret trouble.
14:37All the men when they looked at her felt a brooding as if struck by the thought that theirlives had been wasted. She was the very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadnessand torment to the hearts of men. In short, she must have been an extraordinary woman,or else Tomasov was an extraordinary young fellow to feel in that way and to talk like this about her.I told you the fellow had a lot of poetry in himand observed that all this sounded true enough.It would be just about the sorcery a womanvery much out of the common wood exercise, you know.
15:10Poets do get close to truth somehow.There is no denying that.There is no poetry in my composition, I know,but I have my share of common shrewdness,and I have no doubt that the lady was kind to the youngsteronce he did find his way inside her salon.He's getting in as the real mum.However, he did get in the innocent, and he found himself in distinguished company there amongst
15:34men of considerable position. And you know what that means? Thick waist, bald heads, teeth that are not,as some satirist puts it. Imagine amongst them a nice boy, fresh and simple, like an applejust off the tree. A modest, good-looking, impressionable, adoring young barbarian. My word,what a change, what a relief for jaded feelings,and with that, having in his nature that dose of poetrywhich saves even a simpleton from being a fool.He became an artlessly, unconditionally devoted slave.He was rewarded by being smiled on
16:14and in time admitted to the intimacy of the house.It may be that the unsophisticated young barbarian amused the exquisite lady.Perhaps, since he didn't feed on tallow canhe satisfied some need of tenderness in the woman.You know, there are many kinds of tendernesshighly civilised women are capable of.Women with heads and imagination, I mean,and no temperament to speak of, you understand.
16:41But who is going to fathom their needs or their fancies?Most of the time they themselves don't know much about their innermost moodsand blunder out of one into another,sometimes with catastrophic results?And then who is more surprised than they?However, Tomasov's case was in its nature quite idyllic.The fashionable world was amused.His devotion made for him a kind of social success.
17:06But he didn't care.There was his one divinity and there was the shrinewhere he was permitted to go in and out without regard for official reception hours.He took advantage of that privilege freely.Well, he had no official duties, you know.The military mission was supposed to be more complex.than anything else, the head of it being a personal friend of our emperor Alexander,and he too was laying himself out for success in fashionable life exclusively, as it seemed.
17:36As it seemed.One afternoon, Tomasov called on the mistress of his thoughts earlier than usual.She was not alone.There was a man with her, not one of the thick-wasted, bald-headed personages,but a somebody all the same, a man over 30, a French officer, who, to someextent was also a privileged intimate.Tomasov was not jealous of him, such a sentiment would have appeared presumptuous to thesimple fellow. On the contrary, he admired that officer. You have no idea of the French military
18:09men's prestige in those days, even with us Russian soldiers who had managed to face themperhaps better than the rest. Victory had marked them on the forehead, it seemed forever.They would have been more than human if they had not been conscious of it, but they were goodcomrades and had a sort of brotherly feeling for all who bore arms, even if it was against them.And this was quite a superior example, an officer of the Major General's staff and a man of thebest society besides. He was powerfully built and thoroughly masculine, though he was ascarefully groomed as a woman. He had the courteous self-possession of a man of the world.His forehead, white as alabaster, contrasted impressively with the healthy colour of his face.
18:52I don't know whether he was jealous of Tomasov,but I suspect that he might have been a little annoyed at himas at a sort of walking absurdity of the sentimental order.But these men of the world are impenetrable,and outwardly he condescended to recogniseTomasov's existence even more distinctly than was strictly necessary.Once or twice he had offered him some useful worldly advicewith perfect tact and delicacy.
19:18Tomasov was completely conquered by that evidence of kindnessunder the cold polish of the best society.Thomasov, introduced into the Petit Salon,found these two exquisite people sitting on a sofa togetherand had the feeling of having interrupted some special conversation.They looked at him strangely, he thought,but he was not given to understand that he had intruded.After a time the lady said to the officer,
19:44his name was de Castile,I wish he would take the trouble to ascertain the exact truth as to that rumour."'It's much more than a mere rumour,' remarked the officer."'But he got up submissively and went out."'The lady turned to Thomas off and said,"'You may stay with me.'"'This express command made him supremely happy,"'though as a matter of fact he had had no idea of going.
20:09"'She regarded him with her kindly glances,"'which made something glow and expand within his chest."'It was a delicious feeling,"'even though it did cut one's breath short now and then.ecstatically he drank in the sound of her tranquil seductive talk full of innocent gaiety and of spiritual quietudehis passion appeared to him to flame up and envelop her in blue fiery tongues from head to foot and over her headwhile her soul reposed in the centre like a big white rose hmm good this he told me many other things like thatbut this is the one I remember.
20:48He himself remembered everythingbecause these were the last memories of that woman.He was seeing her for the last time,though he did not know it then.Monsieur de Castel returned,breaking into that atmosphere of enchantment,Tomasov had been drinking ineven to complete unconsciousness of the external world.
21:07Domesov could not help being struckby the distinction of his movement,the ease of his manner,his superiority to all the other men he knew,and he suffered from it.It occurred to him that these two brilliant beings on the sofawere made for each other.De Castel, sitting down by the side of the lady,
21:25murmured to her discreetly,There is not the slightest doubt that it is true,and they both turned their eyes to Thomasov.Roused thoroughly from his enchantment,he became self-conscious,a feeling of shyness came over him.He sat smiling faintly at them.The lady, without taking her eyes off the bow,
21:44blushing Tomasov said with a dreamy gravity quite unusual to her,I should like to know that your generosity can be supreme, without a flaw.Love at its highest should be the origin of every perfection.Tomasov opened his eyes wide with admiration at this, as though her lips had been droppingreal pearls. The sentiment, however, was not uttered for the primitive Russian youth,but for the exquisitely accomplished man of the world, de Castel.Tomasov could not see the effect it produced because the French officer lowered his headand sat there contemplating his admirably polished boots.
22:22The lady whispered in a sympathetic tone,You have scruples?De Castel, without looking up, murmured.It could be turned into a nice point of honour.She said vivaciously,That surely is artificial.I am all for natural feelings.I believe in nothing else.
22:41But perhaps your conscience.He interrupted her.Not at all. My conscience is not childish.The fate of those people is of no military importance to us.What can it matter?The fortune of France is invincible.Well then, she uttered meaningly, and rose from the couch.The French officer stood up too.
23:03Tomasov hastened to follow their example.He was pained by his state of utter mental darkness.While he was raising the lady's white hand to his lips,He heard the French officers say, with marked emphasis,If he has the soul of a warrior,at that time you know, people really talked in that way.If he has the soul of a warrior,he ought to fall at your feet in gratitude.
23:26Tomasov felt himself plunged into even denser darkness than before.He followed the French officer out of the room and out of the house,for he had a notion that this was expected of him.It was getting dusk, the weather was very bad,and the street was quite deserted.The Frenchman lingered in it strangely, and Tomasov lingered too without impatience.He was never in a hurry to get away from the house in which she lived.And besides, something wonderful had happened to him.
23:54The hand he had reverently raised by the tips of its fingers had been pressed against his lips.He had received a secret favour.He was almost frightened.The world had reeled, and it had hardly steadied itself yet.De Castel stopped short at the corner of the Quarthe.quiet street.I don't care to be seen too much with you in the lighted thorough affairs, Monsieur Thomasov,he said in a strangely grim tone.
24:20Why? asked the young man too startled to be offended.From prudence, answered the other curtly,so we will have to part here,but before we part I'll disclose to you something of which you will see at once the importance.This, please note, was an evening in late March of the year 1812.For a long time already there,had been talk of a growing coolness between Russia and France.The word war was being whispered in drawing rooms louder and louder,
24:48and at last was heard in official circles.Thereupon the Parisian police discovered that our military envoyhad corrupted some clerks at the Ministry of Warand had obtained from them some very important confidential documents.The wretched men, there were two of them,had confessed their crime and were to be shot that night.Tomorrow all the town would be talking of the air.affair. But the worst was that the Emperor Napoleon was furiously angry at the discovery and had made
25:17up his mind to have the Russian envoy arrested. Such was De Castel's disclosure, and though he had spokenin low tones, Tomasov was stunned as by a great crash. Arrested, he murmured desolately,yes, and kept as a state prisoner with everybody belonging to him. The French officerseized Tomasov's arm above the elbow and pressed it hard.And kept in France, he repeated into Thomasov's very ear,and then, letting him go, stepped back a space and remained silent.And it's you, you who are telling me this?cried Tomasov, in an extremity of gratitude that was hardly greater than his admiration
25:57for the generosity of his future foe.Could a brother have done for him more?He sought to seize the hand of the French officer,but the latter remained wrapped up closely in his cloak.possibly in the dark he had not noticed the attempt.He moved back a bit, and in his self-possessed voice of a man of the world,as though he was speaking across a card table or something of the sort,he called Thomasov's attention to the fact that if he meant to make use of the warning,
26:24the moments were precious.Indeed, they are, agreed the Ord Thomasov.Goodbye then. I have no word of thanks to equal your generosity,but if ever I have an opportunity, I swear it, you may command my life,But the Frenchman retreated, had already vanished in the dark, lonely street.Domesov was alone, and then he did not waste any of the precious minutes of that night.See how people's mere gossip and idle talk pass into history.In all the memoirs of the time, if you read them, you will find it stated that our envoy
26:59had a warning from some highly placed woman who was in love with him.Of course it's known that he had successes with women, and in the highest spheres too,but the truth is that the person who warned him was no other than our simple Thomasov,an altogether different sort of lover from himself.This then is the secret of our emperor's representatives escape from arrest.He and all his official household got out of France all right as history records.And amongst that household there was our Thomasov, of course.He had, in the words of the French officer, the soul of a warrior,
27:34and what more desolate prospect for a man with such a soul than to be imprisoned on the eve of war,to be cut off from his country in danger, from his military family, from his duty, from honour,and, well, from glory too.Tomasov used to shudder at the mere thought of the moral torture he had escaped,and he nursed in his heart a boundless gratitude to the two people who had saved him from that cruel ordeal.They were wonderful.For him, love and friendship were about.but two aspects of exalted perfection.
28:07He had found these fine examples of it,and he vowed them indeed a sort of cult.It affected his attitudetowards Frenchmen in general,great patriot as he was.He was naturally indignantat the invasion of his country,but this indignation had no personal animosity in it.
28:25His was fundamentally a fine nature.He grieved at the appalling amount of human sufferinghe saw around him.Yes, he was in full compassionfor all forms of mankind's misery in a manly way.Less fine natures than his own did not understand this very well.In the regiment they had nicknamed him the Humane Tomasov.He didn't take offence at it.
28:50There is nothing incompatible between humanity and a warrior's soul.People without compassion are the civilians,government officials, merchants and such like.As to the ferocious talk one hears from a lot of decent people in wartime,well, the tongue is an unruly member at best, and when there is some excitement going on,there is no curbing its furious activity.So, I had not been very surprised to see our Thomas off sheath deliberately his sword,right in the middle of that charge, you may say.
29:21As we rode away after it, he was very silent.He was not a chatterer as a rule, but it was evident that this close view of the Grand Armyhad affected him deeply, like some sight not of this earth.I'd always been a pretty tough individual myself.Well, even I.And there was that fellow with a lot of poetry in his nature.You may imagine what he made of it to himself.We rode side by side without opening our lips.
29:48It was simply beyond words.We established our bivouac along the edge of the forestso as to get some shelter for our horses.However, the boisterous north wind had dropped as quickly as it had sprung upand the great winter stillness lay on the landfrom the Baltic to the Black Sea.One could almost feel its cold, lifeless immensityreaching up to the stars.
30:11Our men had lighted several fires for their officersand had cleared the snow around them.We had big logs of wood for seats.It was a very tolerable bivouac upon the wholeeven without the exultation of victory.We were to feel that later,but at present we were oppressedby our stern and arduous task.
30:29There were three of us round my fire.The third one was that adjutant.He was perhaps a well-meaning chap,but not so nice as he might have beenhad he been less rough in mannerand less crude in his perceptions.He would reason about people's conductas though a man were as simple a figure
30:46as, say, two sticks laid across each other,whereas a man is much more like the sea,whose movements are too complicated to explain,and whose depths may bring up God only knows whatat any moment.We talked a little about that charge, not much.That sort of thing does not lend itself to conversation.Tomasov muttered a few words about a mere butchery.
31:10I had nothing to say.As I told you, I had very soon let my sword hang idle at my wrist.That starving mob had not even tried to defend itself, just a few shots.We had two men wounded, two, and we had charged the main column of Napoleon's Grand Army.Tomasov muttered wearily.What was the good of it?I did not wish to argue, so I only just mumbled.Ah, well.
31:36But the adjutant struck in unpleasantly.Why, it warmed the men a bit.It has made me warm.That's a good enough reason.But our Thomasov is so humane,and besides he has been in love with the Frenchwoman,and thick as thieves with a lot of Frenchmen,so he is sorry for them.
31:53Never mind, my boy.We are on the parish,road now and you shall soon see her. This was one of his usual, as we believed them,foolish speeches. None of us but believed that the getting to Paris would be a matter of years,of years, and lo, less than 18 months afterwards, I was roped of a lot of money in a gamblinghell in the Palais Royal. Truth, being often the most senseless thing in the world,is sometimes revealed to fools. I don't think that adjutant of ours believed in his own words.He just wanted to tease Thomasov from Habit, purely from Habit.
32:29We, of course, said nothing, and so he took his head in his hands and fell into a doze as he lay on a log in front of the fire.Our cavalry was on the extreme right wing of the army, and I must confess that we guarded it very badly.We had lost all sense of insecurity by this time, but still we did keep up a pretence of doing it in a way.Presently a trooper rode up leading a horse, and Tomasov mounted stiffly and wentoff on a round of the outposts, of the perfectly useless outposts.The night was still, except for the crackling of the fires.The raging wind had lifted far above the earth,and not the faintest breath of it could be heard.
33:10Only the full moon swam out with a rush into the skyand suddenly hung high and motionless overhead.I remember raising my hairy face to it for a moment.Then, I verily believe, I dozed off, too, bent double on my logwith my head towards the fierce blaze.You know what an impermanent thing such slumber is?One moment you drop into an abyss,and the next you are back in the world
33:34that you would think too deep for any noisebut the trumpet of the last judgment,and then off you go again.Your very soul seems to slip down into a bottomless black pit,then up once more into a startled consciousness.A mere plaything of cruel sleep one is then,tormented both ways.However, when my orderly appeared before me, repeating,
33:58Won't Your Honor be pleased to eat?Won't Your Honor be pleased to eat?I managed to keep my hold of it.I mean that gaping consciousness.He was offering me a sooty pot containing some grainboiled in water with a pinch of salt.A wooden spoon was stuck in it.At that time these were the only rations we were getting regularly.
34:19Mere chicken food confound it.But the Russian soldier is wonderful.Well, my fellow waited till I had feasted and then went away, carrying off the empty pot.I was no longer sleepy. Indeed, I had become awake with an exaggerated mental consciousnessof existence extending beyond my immediate surroundings. Those are but exceptional moments with mankind,I'm glad to say. I had the intimate sensation of the earth in all its enormous expansewrapped in snow, with nothing showing on it but trees with their straight stalk-like trunksand their funeral verger. And in this aspect of general mourning, I seem to hear the size of mankind
35:00falling to die in the midst of a nature without life. They were Frenchmen. We didn't hate them.They did not hate us. We had existed far apart, and suddenly they had come rolling in with armsin their hand, without fear of God, carrying with them other nations, and all to perish togetherin a long, long trail of frozen corpses. I had an actual vision of that trail, a pathetic multitudeof small, dark mounds, stretching away under the moonlight in a clear, still and pitiless atmosphere,a sort of horrible peace. But what other peace could there be for them? What else did they deserve?I don't know by what connection of emotions there came into my head the thought that the earth was a pagan planet and not a fit abode for Christian virtues.You may be surprised that I should remember all this so well. What is a passing emotion or half-formed thought to last in so many years of a man's changing in consequential life?
36:04But what has fixed the emotion of that evening in my recollection so that the slightest shadows remain indelible was an event of strange,finality, an event not likely to be forgotten in a lifetime, as you shall see.I don't suppose I had been entertaining those thoughts more than five minutes when somethinginduced me to look over my shoulder. I can't think it was a noise, the snow deadened allthe sounds. Something it must have been, some sort of signal reaching my consciousness.Anyway, I turned my head, and there was the event approaching me, not that I knew it or hadthe slightest premonition. All I saw in the distance were two figures approaching in the moonlight.One of them was our Tomasov. The dark mass behind him which moved across my sight were the
36:53horses which his orderly was leading away. Tomasov was a very familiar appearance in long boots,a tall figure ending in a pointed hood. But by his side advanced another figure. I mistrusted myeyes at first. It was amazing. It had a shining, crested hallowed.helmet on its head and was muffled up in a white cloak. The cloak was not as white as snow,nothing in the world is. It was white, more like mist, with an aspect that was ghostly andmarshal to an extraordinary degree. It was as if Tomasov had got hold of the god of war himself.I could see at once that he was leading this resplendent vision by the arm. Then I saw that he washolding it up. While I stared and stared they crept on, for indeed they were creeped.
37:40and at last they crept into the light of our bivouac fire and passed beyond the log I was sitting on.The blaze played on the helmet. It was extremely battered and the frost-bitten face full of sores under it was framed in bits of mangy fur.No god of war this, but a French officer.The great white cuirassiers cloak was torn, burnt full of holes.His feet were wrapped up in old sheepskins over remnants of boots.They looked monstrous and he tottered on them, sustained by Tomasov,who lowered him most carefully onto the log on which I sat.My amazement knew no bounds.
38:20You brought in a prisoner, I said to Tomasov, as if I could not believe my eyes.You must understand that unless they surrendered in large bodies we made no prisoners.What would have been the good?Our Cossacks either killed the stragglers or else let them alone, just as it happened.It came really to the same thing.in the end. Tomasov turned to me with a very troubled look. He sprang up from the ground somewhereas I was leaving the outpost, he said. I believe he was making for it, for he walked blindly into myhorse. He got hold of my leg, and of course none of our chaps dared touch him then. He had a narrow
38:58escape, I said. He didn't appreciate it, said Tomasov, looking even more troubled than before.He came along holding to my stirrup leather. That's what made me so late.He told me he was a staff officer, and then talking in a voice such, I suppose, as the damned alone use, a croaking of rage and pain, he said he had a favour to beg of me, a supreme favour. Did I understand him, he asked, in a sort of fiendish whisper.Of course I told him that I did. I said, yes, I ve compran. Then he said, do it, now, at once, in the pity of your heart.Tomasov ceased and stared queerly at me above the head of the prisoner.I said, what did he mean?That's what I asked him, answered Tomasov in a day's tone,and he said that he wanted me to do him the favour to blow his brains out.
39:51As a fellow soldier, he said,as a man of feeling, as a humane man.The prisoner sat between us like an awful gashed mummy as to the face,a martial scarecrow, a grotesque horror of a,rags and dirt with awful living eyes, full of vitality, full of unquenchable fire,in a body of horrible affliction, a skeleton at the feast of glory.And suddenly those shining, unextinguishable eyes of his became fixed upon Tomasov.He, poor fellow, fascinated, returned the ghastly stare of a suffering soul in that mere husk of a man.
40:30The prisoner croaked at him in French,I recognize you, you know. You are her Russian youngster. You are very grateful. I call on you to pay the debt.Pay it, I say, with one liberating shot. You are a man of honour. I have not even a broken sabre.All my being recoils from my own degradation. You know me. Thomasov said nothing.Haven't you got the soul of a warrior? The Frenchman asked in an angry whisper, but with something of amocking intention in it.I don't know, said Port Thomas off.What a look of contempt that scarecrow gave him out of his unquenchable eyes.
41:13He seemed to live only by the force of infuriated and impotent despair.Suddenly he gave a gasp and fell forward, writhing in the agony of cramp in all his limbsand not unusual effect of the heat of a campfire.It resembled the application of some horrible torture.But he tried to fight against the pain atfirst. He only moaned low while we bent over him so as to prevent him rolling into the fireand muttered feverishly at intervals. Doe-mo, too-e-moe! Till, vanquished by the pain, he screamedin agony, time after time, each cry bursting out through his compressed lips. The adjutant
41:51woke up on the other side of the fire and started swearing awfully at the beastly row thatFrenchman was making. What's this? More of your infernal humanity, Thomasoff, he yelled at us.Why don't you have him thrown out of this to the devil on the snow? As we paid no attention to hisshouts, he got up, gursing, shockingly, and went away to another fire. Presently the French officerbecame easier. We propped him against the log and sat silent on each side of him till thebugles started their call at the first break of day. The big flames kept up all through the night,on the livid sheet of snow, while the frozen air all round rang with the brazen notes of cavalry trumpets.The Frenchman's eyes, fixed in a glassy stare, which for a moment made us hope that he had died quietly sitting there between us too,
42:41stirred slowly to right and left, looking at each of our faces in turn.Thomas off and I exchanged glances of dismay.Then de Castel's voice, unexpected in its renewed strength and ghastly self-possession,made us shudder inwardly."'Bonieu, monsieur.'His chin dropped on his breast.Thomasov addressed me in Russian."'It is he, the man himself.'
43:08I nodded, and Thomasov went on in a tone of anguish."'Yes, he, brilliant, accomplished, envied by men, loved by that woman.This horror, this miserable thing that cannot die, look at his eyes.It's terrible.'I did not look, but I understood what Tomasov meant.We could do nothing for him.This avenging winter of fate held both the fugitives and the pursuers in its iron grip.Compassion was but a vain word before that unrelenting destiny.
43:41I tried to say something about a convoy being no doubt collected in the village,but I faltered at the mute glance Tomasov gave me.We knew what those convoys were like, appalling mobs of hopeless wretches driven on bythe butts of Cossacks' lances back to the frozen inferno, with their faces set away from their homes.Our two squadrons had been formed along the edge of the forest. The minutes of anguish were passing.The Frenchman suddenly struggled to his feet. We helped him almost without knowing what we were doing.Come, he said in measured tones. This is the moment. He paused for a long time, then with the samedistinctness went on,
44:23On my word of honour, all faith is dead in me.His voice lost suddenly its self-possession.After waiting a little while he added in a murmur,and even my courage, upon my honour.Another long pause ensued before,with a great effort, he whispered hoarsely.Isn't this enough to move a heart of stone,am I to go on my knees to you?
44:49Again a deep silence fell upon the three,of us. Then the French officer flung his last word of anger at Thomas of...Milk-sop! Not a feature of the poor fellow moved. I made up my mind to go and fetch a coupleof our troopers to lead that miserable prisoner away to the village. There was nothing else for it.I had not moved six paces towards the group of horses and orderlies in front of our squadron when...But you have guessed it. Of course. And I too, I guessed it, for I give you my word thatthe report of Thomasov's pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable.The snow certainly does absorb sound. It was a mere feeble pop.
45:31Of the orderlies holding our horses, I don't think one turned his head round.Yes, Thomasov had done it. Destiny had led that de Castel to the man who could understandhim perfectly. But it was poor Tomasov's lot to be the predestined victim.You know what the world's justice and mankind's judgmentalike. They fell heavily on him with a sort of inverted hypocrisy. Why, that brute of an adjutanthimself was the first to set going horrified allusions to the shooting of a prisoner in coldblood. Tomasov was not dismissed from the service, of course, but after the siege of Danzig,he asked for permission to resign from the army and went away to bury himself in the depths of
46:15his province, where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.Yes, he had done it.And what was it?One warrior's soul, paying its debt a hundredfold to another warrior's soul,by releasing it from a fate worse than death, the loss of all faith and courage.You may look on it in that way?I don't know.And perhaps poor Tomasov did not know himself.
46:42But I was the first to approach that appalling dark group on the snow.The Frenchman extended rigidly on his back,Tomasov kneeling on one knee.rather nearer to the feet than to the Frenchman's head.He had taken his cap off and his hair shone like goldin the light drift of flakes that had begun to fall.He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly contemplative attitude,and his young, ingenuous face with lowered eyelids
47:09expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror,but was set in the repose of a profound,as if endless and endlessly silent meditation.End of The Warrior's Soul, 1917.There's something else here now.Something new.From, exclusively on Paramount Plus,it's the series Stephen King calls Scariery as Hell.
47:37Everything here is impossible, but it's also real.Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now.We're running out of time, and we still don't know the rules.Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch.Saving those children is how we all go home.from binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus.Prince Roman, in Tales of Hearsay by Joseph Conrad.This Libravox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan.
48:08Prince Roman, 1911.Events which happened 70 years ago are perhaps rather too far off to be dragged aptly into a mere conversation.Of course, the year 1831 is for us an historical date, one of these fatal years.which in the presence of the world's passive indignation andeloquent sympathies we had once more to murmurWoe wictes and count the cost in sorrow.Not that we were ever very good at calculating either in prosperity or in adversity.That's a lesson we could never learn to the great exasperation of our enemies
48:45who have bestowed upon us the epithet of incorrigible.The speaker was of Polish nationality, that nationality not so muchalive as surviving which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking, hoping and suffering in its grave,railed in by a million of bayonets and triple sealed with the seals of three great empires.The conversation was about aristocracy. How did this nowadays discredited subject come up?It is some years ago now and the precise recollection has faded,but I remember that it was not considered practically as an ingredient.in the social mixture, and I verily believed that we arrived at that subject
49:29through some exchange of ideas about patriotism, a somewhat discredited sentiment,because the delicacy of our humanitarians regarded it as a relic of barbarianism.Yet neither the great Florentine painter who closed his eyes in death thinking of his city,nor St Francis blessing with his last breath the town of Assisi were barbarians.It requires a certain greatness of soul,interpret patriotism worthily, or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the vulgarrefinement of modern thought, which cannot understand the august simplicity of a sentimentproceeding from the very nature of things and men.
50:10The aristocracy we were talking about was the very highest, the great families of Europe,not impoverished, not converted, not liberalised, the most distinctive and specialised classof all classes, for which even ambition itself does not exist.among the usual incentives to activity and regulators of conduct.The undisputed right of leadership, having passed away from them,we judge that their great fortunes, their cosmopolitanism, brought about by wide alliances,their elevated station in which there is so little to gain and so much to lose,must make their position difficult in times of political commotion or national upheaval.
50:50No longer born to command, which is the very essence of aristotle,it becomes difficult for them to do aught else but hold aloof from the great movements of popular passion.We had reached that conclusion when the remark about far-off events was made,and the date of 1831 mentioned. And the speaker continued.I don't mean to say that I knew Prince Roman at that remote time.I begin to feel pretty ancient, but I'm not so ancient as that.In fact, Prince Roman was married the very year my father was born.It was in 1828. The 19th century was young yet, and the prince was even younger than the century,
51:30but I don't know exactly by how much. In any case, his was an early marriage. It was an idealalliance from every point of view. The girl was young and beautiful, an orphan aress of a greatname and of a great fortune. The prince, then an officer in the guards, and distinguished amongsthis fellows by something reserved and reflective in his character, had fallen headlong inlove with her beauty, her charm, and the serious qualities of her mind and heart.He was a rather silent young man, but his glances, his bearing, his whole person, expressedhis absolute devotion to the woman of his choice, a devotion which she returned in her own frankand fascinating manner. The flame of this pure young passion promised to burn forever, and for a season
52:17it lit up the dry, cynical atmosphere of the great world of St. Petersburg.The Emperor Nicholas himself, the grandfather of the present man,the one who died from the Crimean War,the last perhaps of the autocrats with a mystical belief in the divine character of his mission,showed some interest in this pair of married lovers.It is true that Nicholas kept a watchful eye on all the doings of the great Polish nobles.The young people, leading a life appropriate to their station,were obviously wrapped up in each other,
52:48and society, fascinated by the sincerity of a feeling,moving serenely among the artificialities of its anxious and fastidious agitation,watched them with benevolent indulgence and an amused tenderness.The marriage was the social event of 1828 in the capital.Just 40 years afterwards, I was staying in the country house of my mother's brotherin our southern provinces.It was the dead of winter,The great lawn in front was as pure and smooth as an alpine snowfield,
53:20a white and feathery level sparkling under the sunas if sprinkled with diamond dust, declining gently to the lake,a long, sinuous piece of frozen water looking bluish and more solid than the earth.A cold, brilliant sun glided low above an undulating horizon of great folds of snow,in which the villages of Ukrainian peasants remained out of sight,like clusters of boats hidden in the hollows of a running sea,and everything was very still.I don't know now how I managed to escape at 11 o'clock in the morning from the schoolroom.
53:54I was a boy of eight.The little girl, my cousin, a few months younger than myself,though hereditarily more quick-tempered, was less adventurous.So I had escaped alone,and presently I found myself in the great stone-paved hallwarmed by a monumental stove of white tiles,a much more pleasant locality than the schoolroom,which for some reason or other, perhaps hygienic,
54:17was always kept at a low temperature.We children were aware that there was a guest staying in the house.He had arrived the night before,just as we were being driven off to bed.We broke back through the line of beaters to rushand flatten our noses against the dark window paint,but we were too late to see him alight.We had only watched in a ruddy glare
54:39the big travelling carriage on sleigh-runners,harnessed with six horses, a black mass against the snow, going off to the stables,preceded by a horseman carrying a blazing ball of toe and resin in an iron basket at the end of along stick swung from his saddlebow. Two stable boys had been sent out early in the afternoonalong the snow tracks to meet the expected guest at dusk and light his way with these road torches.At that time you must remember there was not a single mile of railways in our southern provinces.My little cousin and I had no knowledge of trains and enginesexcept from picture books as of things rather vague, extremely remote
55:19and not particularly interesting, unless to grown-ups who travelled abroad.Our notion of princes, perhaps a little more precise,was mainly literary and had a glamour reflected from the light of fairy tales,in which princes always appear young, charming, heroic and fortunate.Yet, as well as any other children, we could draw,a firm line between the real and the ideal.We knew that princes were historical personages.And there was some glamour in that fact, too.
55:50But what had driven me to roam cautiously over the houselike an escaped prisoner was the hope of snatching an interviewwith a special friend of mine, the head forester,who generally came to make his report at that time of the day.I earned for news of a certain wolf.You know, in a country where wolves are to be found,every winter almost brings forward an individual eminent by the audacity of his misdeeds,by his more perfect wolfishness, so to speak.
56:18I wanted to hear some new thrilling tale of that wolf, perhaps the dramatic story of his death.But there was no one in the hall.Deceived in my hopes, I became suddenly very much depressed.Unable to slip back in triumph to my studies, I elected to stroll spiritlessly into the billiard-room,where certainly I had no business.There was no one there either,and I felt very lost and desolateunder its high ceiling,
56:45all alone with the massive English billiard table,which seemed in heavy, rectilinear silenceto disapprove of that small boy's intrusion.As I began to think of retreat,I heard footsteps in the adjoining drawing-room,and before I could turn tail and flee,my uncle and his guest appeared in the doorway.To run away after having been seen
57:06would have been highly improper, so I stood my ground. My uncle looked surprised to see me.The guest by his side was a spare man, a average stature, buttoned up in a black frock-coat,and holding himself very erect with a stiffly soldier-like carriage.From the folds of a soft white cambric neckcloth peeped the points of a collar close againsteach shaven cheek. A few wisps of thin grey hair were brushed smoothly across the top of hisbald head. His face, which must have been to be in.beautiful in its day had preserved in age the harmonious simplicity of its lines.What amazed me was its even, almost death-like pallor. He seemed to me to be prodigiously old.
57:50A faint smile, a mere momentary alteration in the set of his thin lips, acknowledged my blushingconfusion, and I became greatly interested to see him reach into the inside breast pocket of hiscoat. He extracted therefrom a lead pencil and a block of detachable pages, which hehanded to my uncle with an almost imperceptible bow.I was very much astonished, but my uncle received it as a matter of course.He wrote something at which the other glanced and nodded slightly.A thin, wrinkled hand, the hand was older than the face,patted my cheek and then rested on my head lightly.
58:27An unringing voice, a voice as colourless as the face itself,issued from his sunken lips, while the eyes, darkened still,looked down at me kindly.And how old is this shy little boy?Before I could answer, my uncle wrote down my age on the pad.I was deeply impressed.What was this ceremony?Was this personage too great to be spoken to?
58:52Again he glanced at the pad and again gave a nod,and again that impersonal mechanical voice was heard.He resembles his grandfather.I remembered my paternal grandfather.He had died not long before.He too was prodigiously old, and to me it seemed perfectly natural that two such ancient and venerable person should have known each other in the dim ages of creation before my birth.But my uncle obviously had not been aware of the fact, so obviously that the mechanical voice explained,Yes, yes, comrades in 31, he was one of those who knew.
59:31Old times, my dear sir, old times.He made a gesture as he was a gesture, as he was one of those who knew.as if to put aside an importunate ghost.And now they were both looking down at me,I wondered whether anything was expected from me.To my round questioning eyes, my uncle remarked,He's completely deaf,and the unrelated, inexpressive voice said,
59:53Give me your hand.Acutely conscious of inky fingers, I put it out timidly.I had never seen a deaf person before and was rather startled.He pressed it firmly and then gave me a final pass.on the head. My uncle addressed me weightily. You have shaken hands with Prince RomanS. It's something for you to remember when you grow up. I was impressed by his tone.I had enough historical information to know vaguely that the Prince's Scounted amongst the sovereign princes of Ruthenia until the union of all Ruthenian
01:00:29lands to the Kingdom of Poland when they became great Polish magnates sometimeat the beginning of the 15th century.But what concerned me mostwas the failure of the fairy tale glamour.It was shocking to discover a princewho was deaf, bald, meagreand so prodigiously old.It never occurred to me
01:00:49that this imposing and disappointing manhad been young, rich, beautiful.I could not know that he had been happyin the felicity of an ideal marriage,uniting two young hearts,two great names and two great fortunes,happy with a happiness which, as in fairy tales, seem destined to last forever.But it did not last forever.
01:01:11It was fated not to last very long, even by the measure of the days allotted to men's passage on this earth,where enduring happiness is only found in the conclusion of fairy tales.A daughter was born to them, and shortly afterwards the health of the young princess began to fail.For a time she bore up with smiling intrepidity, sustained by the feeling that now her existence,was necessary for the happiness of two lives.But at last, the husband, thoroughly alarmed by the rapid changes in her appearance,obtained an unlimited leave and took her away from the capital to his parents in the country.The old prince and princess were extremely frightened at the state of their beloved daughter-in-law.
01:01:52Preparations were at once made for a journey abroad,but it seems as if it were already too late, and the invalid herself opposed the project with gentle obstinacy.Thin and pale in the great armchair, where the insidious and obscure nervous melody made her appear smaller and more frail every day,without effacing the smile of her eyes or the charming grace of her wasted face,she clung to her native land and wished to breathe her native air.Nowhere else could she expect to get well so quickly, nowhere else would it be so easy for her to die.She died before her little girl was two years old.The grief of the husband was terrible
01:02:33and the more alarming to his parentsbecause perfectly silent and dry-eyed.After the funeral,while the immense bareheaded crowd of peasantssurrounding the private chapel on the grounds was dispersing,the prince, waving away his friends and relations,remained alone to watch the masons of the estateclosing the family vault.
01:02:53When the last stone was in position,he uttered a groan,the first sound of pain which had escaped him for days,and walking away with lowered head shut himself up again in his apartments.His father and mother feared for his reason.His outward tranquility was appalling to them.They had nothing to trust to, but that very youth,which made his despair so self-absorbed and so intense.
01:03:19Old Prince John, fretful and anxious, repeated,"'Poor Roman should be roused somehow, he's so young.But they could find nothing to rouse him with.'and the old princess, wiping her eyes, wished in her heart he were young enough to come and cry at her knee.In time, Prince Roman, making an effort, would join now and again the family's circle,but it was as if his heart and his mind had been buried in the family vault with the wife he had lost.He took to wandering in the woods with a gun, watched over secretly by one of the keepers,who would report in the evening that his serenity has never fired a shot all day.
01:03:57Sometimes, walking to the stables in the morning,he would order, in subdued tones, a horse to be saddled,wait, switching his boot till it was led up to him,then mount without a word and ride out of the gates at a walking pace.He would be gone all day.People saw him on the roads,looking neither to the right nor to the left,white-faced, sitting rigidly in the saddle
01:04:20like a horseman of stone on the living mount.The peasants working in the fields,the great unhedged fields, looked after him from the distance,and sometimes some sympathetic old woman on the threshold of a low, thatched hut,was moved to make the sign of the cross in the air behind his back,as though he were one of themselves, a simple village soul, struck by a sore affliction.He rode looking straight ahead, seeing no one,as if the earth were empty and all mankind buried in that grave
01:04:51which had opened so suddenly in his path to swallow up his happiness.What were men to him with their sorrows, joys, labours and passions,from which she, who had been all the world to him, had been cut off so early?They did not exist, and he would have felt as completely lonely and abandonedas a man in the toils of a cruel nightmare if it had not been for this countrysidewhere he had been born and had spent his happy, boyish years.He knew it well.Every slight rise crowned with trees amongst the ploughed fields,
01:05:23every dell concealing a village.The dammed streams made a chain of lakes set in the green meadows.Far away to the north the great Lithuanian forest faced the sun,no higher than a hedge, and to the south the way to the plains,the vast brown spaces of the earth touched the blue sky.And this familiar landscape associated with the days without thought and without sorrow,this land, the charm of which he felt without even looking at it,his pain, like the presence of an old friend who sits silent and disregarded by one in some
01:05:59dark hour of life. One afternoon it happened that the prince, after turning his horse's headfor home, remarked a low dense cloud of dark dust cutting off slantwise a part of the view.He reigned in on a knoll and peered. There were slender gleams of steel here and there in that cloud,and it contained moving forms which revealed themselves at last as a long line of peasant.carts full of soldiers, moving slowly in double fire under the escort of mounted Cossacks.It was like an immense reptile creeping over the fields, its head dipped out of sight in a slight hollow,and its tail went on writhing and growing shorter, as though the monster were eating its way slowly into the very heart of the land.The prince directed his way through a village lying a little off the track.
01:06:49The roadside in, with its stable, buyer and barn under one of the land.barn under one enormous thatched roof resembled a deformed, hunch-backed, ragged giant, sprawlingamongst the small huts of the peasants. The innkeeper, a portly dignified Jew, clad in a blacksatin coat reaching down to his heels and girt with a red sash, stood at the door, stroking his long,silvery beard. He watched the prince approach and bowed gravely from the waist, not expectingto be noticed even, since it was well known that the young lord had no eyes for anything oranybody in his grief. It was quite a shock for him when the prince pulled up and asked,What's all this, Yankle? That is, please, your serenity, that is a convoy of foot-soldiers they are
01:07:35hurrying down to the south. He glanced right and left cautiously, but as there was no one near,but some children playing in the dust of the village street, he came up close to the stirrup.Doesn't your serenity know? It has begun already down there. All the landowners greatand smaller out in arms, and even the common people have risen. Only yesterday the saddler fromGrodeck, it was a tiny mountain town nearby, went through here with his two apprentices on hisway to join. He left even his cart with me. I gave him a guide through our neighbourhood.You know your serenity, our people, they travel a lot, and they see all that's going on, and theyknow all the roads. He tried to keep down his excitement for the Jew, uncle, innkeeper and tenant
01:08:22all the mills on the estate was a Polish patriot, and in a still lower voice. I was already a marriedman when the French and all the other nations passed this way with Napoleon. That was a greatharvest for death, you? Perhaps this time God will help. The prince nodded, perhaps, and falling intodeep meditation he let his horse take him home. That night he wrote a letter, and early in themorning sent a mounted express to the post town. During the day he came out of his taciturnityto the great joy of the family circle and conversed with his father of recent events, the revolt inWarsaw, the flight of the Grand Duke Constantine, the first slight successes of the Polish army,at that time there was a Polish army, the risings in the provinces. Old Prince John, moved and uneasy,
01:09:16speaking from a purely aristocratic point of view, mistrusted the popular origins.of the movement, regretted its democratic tendencies, and did not believe in the possibility of success.It was sad, inwardly agitated.I am judging all this calmly. There are secular principles of legitimacy and order which have beenviolated in this reckless enterprise for the sake of the most subversive illusions,though of course the patriotic impulses of the heart."Prince Roman had listened in a thoughtful attitude. He took advantage of the poorto tell his father quietly that he had sent that morning a letter to St. Petersburg,
01:09:56resigning his commission in the guards. The old prince remained silent. He thought that heought to have been consulted. His son was also ordnance officer to the emperor, and he knew thatthe Tsar would never forget this appearance of defection in a Polish noble. In a discontented tone,he pointed out to his son that as it was he had an unlimited leave, the right thing wouldhave been to keep quiet. They had too much tact at her.court to recall a man of his name, or at worst some distant mission might have been asked for,to the Caucasus, for instance, away from this unhappy struggle, which was wrong in principle,and therefore destined to fail. Presently you shall find yourself without any interest in life
01:10:38and with no occupation, and you shall need something to occupy you, my poor boy. You have acted rashly,I fear. Prince Roman murmured, I thought it better. His father faltered. His father faltered,under his steady gaze.Well, well, perhaps,but as ordnance officer to the Emperorand in favour with all the Imperial family.Those people had never been heard ofwhen our house was already illustrious,
01:11:04the young man let fall disdainfully.This was the sort of remarkto which the old Prince was sensible.Well, perhaps it is better,he conceded at last.The father and son parted affectionately for the night.The next day Prince Romanseemed to have fallen back into the depths of his indifference. He rode out, as usual.
01:11:27He remembered that the day before he had seen a reptile-like convoy of soldiery, bristling withbayonets, crawling over the face of that land which was his. The woman he loved had been his too.Death had robbed him of her. Her loss had been to him a moral shock, that had opened his heartto a greater sorrow, his mind to a vaster thought, his eyes to all the past and to the existenceof another love fraught with pain,but as mysteriously as imperativeas that lost one to which he had entrusted his happiness.That evening he retired earlier than usual
01:12:02and rang for his personal servant.Go and see if there is light yetin the quarters of the master of the horse.If he is still up, ask him to come and speak to me.While the servant was absent on this errand,the prince tore up hastily some papers,locked the drawers of his desk,and hung a medallion,
01:12:20containing the miniature of his wiferound his neck against his breast.The man the prince was expectingbelonged to that pastwhich the death of his love had called to life.He was of a family of small nobleswho for generations had been adherents,servants and friends of the prince's es.
01:12:39He remembered the times before the last partitionand had taken part in the struggles of the last hour.He was a typical old pole of that classwith a great capacity for emotion,for blind enthusiasm, with martial instincts and simple beliefs,and even with the old-time habit of larding his speech with Latin words.And his kindly shrewd eyes, his ruddy face, his lofty browand his thick grey, pendant, moustache were also very typical of his kind.
01:13:09Listen, Master Francis, the prince said familiarly and without preliminaries.Listen, old friend, I'm going to vanish from here quietly.I go where something louder than my grief and yet something with a voice very like it calls me.I confide in you alone.You will say what's necessary when the time comes.The old man understood.His extended hands trembled exceedingly.But as soon as he found his voice, he thanked God aloud for letting him live long enough to see
01:13:40the descendant of the illustrious family in its youngest generation.Give an example, Coram Gentibus, of the love of his country and of vattingin the field. He doubted not of his dear prince attaining a place in council and in war,worthy of his high birth. He saw already that, in full gory, of family glory, a fuget patri des serenitas.At the end of the speech he burst into tears and fell into the prince's arms.The prince quieted the old man, and when he had him seated in an armchair and comparativelycomposed, he said, don't misunderstand me, Master Francis.You know how I loved my wife.
01:14:20A loss like that opens one's eyes to unsuspected truths.There is no question here of leadership and glory.I mean to go alone and to fight obscurely in the ranks.I am going to offer my country what is mine to offer.That is my life,as simply as the saddler from Grodeck who went through yesterday with his apprentices.The old man cried out at this.That could never be. He could not allow it.
01:14:46But he had to give way before the end.arguments in the express will of the prince.Ah, if you say that it is a matter of feeling and conscience, so be it,but you cannot go utterly alone.Alas, that I am too old to be of any use.Creepid verba dolour, my dear prince,at the thought that I am over seventy and have no more a count in the worldthan a cripple in the church porch.
01:15:10It seems that to sit at home and pray to God for the nationand for you is all I am fit for.But there is my son, my youngest,son, Peter. He will make a worthy companion for you. And as it happens, he's staying with me here.There has not been for ages a Prince S, hazarding his life without a companion of our name to rideby his side. You must have by you somebody who knows who you are, if only to let your parentsand your old servant hear what is happening to you. And when does your princely mightiness meanto start? In an hour, said the prince, and the old man hurried off to warn his son.
01:15:48Prince Roman took up a candlestick and walked quietly along a dark corridor in the silent house.The head nurse said afterwards that waking up suddenly she saw the prince looking at his child,one hand shading the light from its eyes.He stood and gazed at her for some time, and then, putting the candlestick on the floor,bent over the cot and kissed lightly the little girl who did not wake.He went out noiselessly, taking the light away with him.She saw his face perfectly wellbut she could read nothing of his purpose in it.
01:16:21It was pale but perfectly calmand after he turned away from the cothe never looked back at at once.The only other trusted personbesides the old man and his son Peterwas the Jew uncle.When he asked the prince where precisely he wanted to be guidedthe prince answered to the nearest party.
01:16:41A grandson of the Jew, a lanky youthconducted the two young men by littleknown paths across woods and morasses, and led them in sight of the few fires of a smalldetachment camped in a hollow. Some invisible horses neighed, a voice in the dark, cried,Who goes there? And the young Jew departed hurriedly, explaining that he must make haste hometo be in time for keeping the Sabbath. Thus, humbly, and in accord with the simplicity of thevision of duty he saw, where death had removed the brilliant bandage of happiness from his eyes,did Prince Roman bring his offering to his country.
01:17:17His companion made himself known as the son of the master of the horse to Princess S,and declared him to be a relation, a distant cousin from the same parts as himself,and, as people presumed, of the same name.In truth, no one inquired much.Two more young men clearly of the right sort had joined, nothing more natural.Prince Roman did not remain long in the South.One day, while scouting with several others,they were ambushed near the entrance of a village
01:17:46by some Russian infantry.The first discharge laid lower good many,and the rest scattered in all directions.The Russians, too, did not stay,being afraid of a return in force.After some time,the peasants coming to view the sceneextricated Prince Roman from under his dead horse.
01:18:05He was unhurt,but his faithful companion had been one of the first to fall.The prince helped the peasantsbury him and the other dead. Then, alone, not certain where to find the body of partisanswhich was constantly moving about in all directions, he resolved to try and join the mainPolish army facing the Russians on the borders of Lithuania. Disguised in peasant clothesin case of meeting some marauding Cossacks, he wandered a couple of weeks before he cameupon a village occupied by a regiment of Polish cavalry on outpost duty. On a bench before a peasant
01:18:40hut of a better sort, sat an elderly officer whom he took for the colonel. The prince approachedrespectfully, told his story shortly, and stated his desire to enlist, and when asked his nameby the officer, who had been looking him over carefully, he gave, on the spur of the moment,the name of his dead companion. The elderly officer thought to himself,he is the son of some peasant proprietor of the liberated class. He liked his appearance.And can you read and write, my good fellow, he asked.Yes, Your Honor, I can, said the prince.Good, come along inside the hut. The regimental adjutant is there.
01:19:19He will enter your name and administer the oath to you.The adjutant stared very hard at the newcomer, but said nothing.When all the forms had been gone through and the recruit gone out, he turned to his superior officer.Do you know who that is?Who? That Peter? A likely chap.That's Prince Romanes.Nonsense.But the adjutant was positive.
01:19:45He had seen the prince several timesabout two years before in the castle in Warsaw.He had even spoken to him onceat a reception of officers held by the Grand Duke.He's changed.He seems much older, but I am certain of my man.I have a good memory for faces.The two officers looked at each other in silence.
01:20:05He's sure to be recognised sooner or later,murmured the adjutant. The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. It's no affair of ours. If he has a fancyto serve in the ranks, as to being recognised, it's not so likely. All our officers and men comefrom the other end of Poland. He meditated gravely for a while, then smiled. He told me hecould read and write. There's nothing to prevent me making him a sergeant at the first opportunity.He's sure to shape all right. Prince Roman, as a non-commissioned officer, surpassed the Colonelexpectations. Before long, Sergeant Peter became famous for his resourcefulness and courage.It was not the reckless courage of a desperate man. It was a self-possessed, as if
01:20:49conscientious valour which nothing could dismay, a boundless but equable devotion, unaffected by time,by reverses, by the discouragement of endless retreats, by the bitterness of waning hopes,and the horrors of pestilence added to the toils and perils of war. It was in thisthat the cholera made its first appearance in Europe. It devastated the camps of both armies,affecting the firmest minds with the terror of a mysterious death, stalking silently between thepiled-up arms and around the bivouac fires. A sudden shriek would wake up the harassed soldiers,and they would see in the glow of embers one of themselves writhe on the ground like a wormtrodden on by an invisible foot, and before the dawn broke he would be stiff and cold. Parties so visited
01:21:37have been known to rise like one man,abandon the fire,and run off into the night in mute panic.Or a comrade talking to you on the marchwould stammer suddenly in the middle of a sentence,roll a frighted eyes,and fall down with distorted face and blue lips,breaking the ranks with the convulsions of his agony.
01:21:56Men were struck in the saddle,on sentry duty, in the firing line,carrying orders, serving the guns.I have been told that in a battalionforming under fire with perfect steadiness for the assault of a village,three cases occurred within five minutes at the head of the column,and the attack could not be delivered because the leading companies scattered all over the fieldslike chaff before the wind.
01:22:20Sergeant Peter, young as he was, had a great influence over his men.It was said that the number of desertions in the squadron in which he servedwas less than in any other in the whole of that cavalry division.Such was supposed to be the compelling example of one,man's quiet intrepidity in facing every form of danger and terror. However that may be,it was liked and trusted generally. When the end came and the remnants of that army corps,hard-pressed on all sides, were preparing to cross the Prussian frontier, Sergeant Peterhad enough influence to rally round him a score of troopers. He managed to escape with him at
01:22:59night from the hemmed-in army. He led this band through 200 miles of country, covered by numerousRussian detachments and ravaged by the cholera.But this was not to avoid captivity,to go into hiding and try to save themselves.No, he led them into a fortresswhich was still occupied by the Polesand where the last stand of the vanquished revolutionwas to be made.
01:23:23This looks like mere fanaticism,but fanaticism is human.Man has adored ferocious divinities.There is ferocity in every passion,even in love itself.The religion of undying hope resembles the mad cult of despair, of death, of annihilation.The difference lies in the moral motive springing from the secret needsin the unexpressed aspiration of the believers.
01:23:50It is only to vain men that all is vanity, and all is deception,only to those who have never been sincere with themselves.It was in the fortress that my grandfather found himself together with Sergeant Peter.My grandfather was a neighbour of the...Yes, family in the country, but he did not know Prince Roman, who, however, knew his nameperfectly well. The prince introduced himself one night as they both sat on the ramparts,leaning against a gun carriage. The service he wished to ask for was, in case of his beingkilled, to have the intelligence conveyed to his parents. They talked in low tones,
01:24:27the other servants of the peace lying about near them. My grandfather gave the required promiseand then asked frankly, for he was greatly interested by the disclosure so unexpectedly made.But tell me, Prince, why this request? Have you any evil forebodings as to yourself?Not in the least. I was thinking of my people. They have no idea where I am, answered Prince Roman.I'll engage to do as much for you if you like. It's certain that half of us at least shall be killed before the end,so there's an even chance of one of us surviving the other.My grandfather told him where, as he supposed, his wife and children were then.From that moment till the end of the siege, the two were much together.
01:25:11On the day of the great assault, my grandfather received a severe wound.The town was taken.Next day, the citadel itself, its hospital full of dead and dying,its magazines empty, its defenders having burnt their last cartridge, opened its gates.During all the campaign, the prince exposing,his person conscientiously on every occasion had not received a scratch.No one had recognised him, or at any rate had betrayed his identity.Till then, as long as he did his duty, it had mattered nothing who he was.
01:25:45Now, however, the position was changed.As ex-guardsman and as late ordnance officer to the Emperor,this rebel ran a serious risk of being given special attentionin the shape of a firing squad at ten paces.For more than a month he remained lost in thethe miserable crowd of prisoners packed in the casemates of the citadel with just enough foodto keep body and soul together, but otherwise allowed to die from wounds, privation and diseaseat the rate of 40 or so a day. The position of the fortress being central, new parties,
01:26:19captured in the open in the course of a thorough pacification, were being sent in frequently.Amongst such newcomers there happened to be a young man, a personal friend of the prince from hisschool days. He recognised him, and in the extremity of his dismayed, cried aloud,My God, Roman, you are here. It is said that years of life, embittered by remorse,paid for this momentary lack of self-control. All this happened in the main quadrangle ofthe citadel. The warning gesture of the prince came too late. An officer of the gendarmeson guard had heard the exclamations. The incident appeared to him worth inquiring into.The investigation which followed was not very arduous because the prince, asked categorically for his real name, owned up at once.
01:27:08The intelligence of the Prince Es being found among the prisoners were sent to St. Petersburg.His parents were already there living in sorrow, in certitude and apprehension.The capital of the empire was the safest place to reside in for a noble whose son had disappeared so mysteriously from home in a time of rebellion.The old people had not heard from him or of him for months.They took care not to contradict the rumours of suicide from despair circulating in the great world,which remembered the interesting love match, the charming and frank happiness brought to an end by death.But they hoped secretly that their son survived,and that he had been able to cross the frontier with that part of the army which had surrendered to the Prussians.
01:27:53The news of his captivity was a crushing blow.directly nothing could be done for himbut the greatness of their nameof their positiontheir wide relations and connections in the highest spheresenabled his parents to act indirectlyand they moved heaven and earth as the saying isto save their son from the consequences of his madness
01:28:14as poor Prince John did not hesitate to express himselfgreat personages were approached by society leadershigh dignitaries were interviewedpowerful officials were induced to take an interest in that affair.The help of every possible secret influence was enlisted.Some private secretaries got heavy bribes.The mistress of a certain senator obtained a large sum of money.But, as I have said, in such a glaring case,
01:28:43no direct appeal could be made and no open steps taken.All that could be done was to incline by private representationthe mind of the President of the Military Commissionto the side of clemency.He ended by being impressed by the hints and suggestions,some of them from very high quarters,which he received from St. Petersburg.And, after all, the gratitude of such great nobles as the Prince's S
01:29:08was something worth having from a worldly point of view.He was a good Russian, but he was also a good-natured man.Moreover, the hate of Poles was not at that time a cardinal articleof patriotic creed as it became some thirty years later,He felt well disposed at first sight towards the young man, bronzed, thin-faced, worn out by months of hard campaigning, the hardships of the siege and the rigors of captivity.The commission was composed of three officers. It sat in the citadel in a bare-vaulted room behind a long black table.Some clerks occupied the two ends, and besides the gendarmes who brought in the prince, there was no one else there.within those four sinister wall, shutting out from him all the sights and sounds of liberty,
01:29:56all hopes of the future, all consoling all-allusions, alone in the face of his enemies,erected for judges, who can tell how much love of life there was in Prince Roman,how much remained in that sense of duty revealed to him in sorrow,how much of his awakened love for his native country,that country which demands to be loved as no other country has ever beenloved, with the mournful affection one bears to theunforgotten dead, and with the unextinguishablefire of a hopeless passion which only a living, breathing,
01:30:30warm ideal can kindle in our breasts for our pride,for our weariness, for our exaltation, for our undoing.There is something monstrous in the thought of such an exactiontill it stands before as embodied in the shape of a fidelitywithout fear and without reproach.nearing the supreme moment of his lifethe prince could only have had the feeling that it was about to endhe answered the questions put to him clearly
01:30:58concisely with the most profound indifferenceafter all these tense months of actionto talk was a weariness to himbut he concealed it lest his foes should suspect in his mannerthe apathy of discouragement or the numbness of a crushed spiritthe details of his conduct could have no importanceone way or another. With his thoughts these men had nothing to do. He preserved a scrupulouslycourteous tone. He had refused the permission to sit down. What happened at this preliminary
01:31:31examination is only known from the presiding officer. Pursuing the only possible course in thatglaringly bad case, he tried from the first to bring to the prince's mind the line ofdefence he wished him to take. He absolutely framed his question so as to put the right answerin the culprit's mouth, going so far as to suggest the very words. How, distracted by excessive griefafter his young wife's death, rendered irresponsible for his conduct by his despair,in a moment of blind recklessness, without realizing the highly reprehensible nature of the act,nor yet its danger and its dishonour, he went off to join the nearest rebels on a sudden impulse,and that now, penitently, but Prince Roman was silent.
01:32:17The military judges looked at him hopefully.In silence he reached for a pen and wrote on a sheet of paper he found under his hand,I joined the National Rising from Conviction.He pushed the paper across the table.The president took it up, showed it in turn to his two colleagues sitting to his right and left,then, looking fixedly at Prince Roman, let it fall from his hand.And the silence remained unbroken till he spoke to the gendarmes, ordering them to remove the prisoner.Such was the written testimony of Prince Roman in the supreme moment of his life.
01:32:53I have heard that the princes of the S family, in all its branches,adopted the last two words from conviction for the device under the armorial bearings of their house.I don't know whether the report is true, my uncle could not tell me.He remarked only that, naturally, it was not to be seen on Prince Roman's own seal.He was condemned for life to Siberia,Mirren minds. Emperor Nicholas, who always took personal cognizance of all sentences on Polishnobility, wrote with his own hand in the margin,The authorities are severely warned to take care that this convict walks in chains like any other
01:33:32criminal every step of the way. It was a sentence of deferred death. Very few survived entommentin these minds for more than three years. Yet, as he was reported as still alive at the end of that time,he was allowed on a petition of his parentsand by way of exceptional graceto serve as common soldier in the Caucasus.All communication with him was forbidden.He had no civil rights.For all practical purposes
01:34:00except that of suffering, he was a dead man.The little child he had been so carefulnot to wake up when he kissed her in her cotinherited all the fortune after Prince John's death.Her existence saved those immense estatesfrom confiscation.It was twenty-five years before Prince Roman, stone deaf, his health broken, was permitted to return to Poland.His daughter married splendidly to a Polish-Austrian Grand Sineur,
01:34:29and moving in the cosmopolitan sphere of the highest European aristocracy,lived mostly abroad in Nice and Vienna.He, settling down on one of her estates, not the one with the palatial residence,but another where there was a modest little house, saw very little of her.But Prince Roman did not shut himself up as if his work was done.There was hardly anything done in the private and public life of the neighbourhoodin which Prince Roman's advice and assistants were not called uponand never in vain.
01:35:01It was well said that his days did not belong to himself but to his fellow citizens,and especially he was the particular friend of all returned exiles,helping them with purse and advice, arranging their affairsand finding them means of livelihood.I heard from my uncle many tales of his devoted activity,in which he was always guided by a simple wisdom,a high sense of honour,and the most scrupulous conception of private and public probity.
01:35:29He remains a living figure for me because of that meeting in a billiard-room,when, in my anxiety to hear about a particularly wolfish wolf,I came in momentary contact with a man who was pre-eminently a manamongst all men capable of feeling deeply,of believing steadily.of loving ardently.I remember to this day the grasp of Prince Roman's bony wrinkled hand, closing on my small, inky paw,and my uncle's half-serious, half-amused way of looking down at his trespassing nephew.
01:36:03They moved on and forgot that little boy, but I did not move.I gazed after them, not so much disappointed as disconcerted by this prince,so utterly unlike a prince in a fairy tale.They moved very slowly across the room.Before reaching the other door, the prince stopped, and I heard him.I seemed to hear him now, saying,I wish you would write to Vienna about filling up that post.He's a most deserving fellow, and your recommendation would be decisive.
01:36:36My uncle's face turned to him, expressed genuine wonder.It said, as plainly as any speech could say,what better recommendation than a father's can be needed?The prince was quick at reading expressions.Again he spoke with the toneless accent of a manwho had not heard his own voice for years,for whom the soundless world is like an abode of silent shades.And to this day I remember the very words.
01:37:04I ask you because, you see,my daughter and my son-in-law don't believe meto be a good judge of men.They think that I let myself beguided too much by mere sentiment.End of Prince Roman, 1911.The Tale, in Tales of Hearsay, by Joseph Conrad.This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan.
01:37:30The Tale, 1917.Outside the large single window,the crepuscular light was dying out slowly in a great square gleam without colour,framed rigidly in the gathering shades of the room.It was a long room.The irresistible tide of the night ran into the most distant part of it,where the whispering of a man's voice,passionately interrupted and passionately renewed,
01:37:57seemed to plead against the answering murmurs of infinite sadness.At last, no answering murmur came.His movement, when he rose slowly from his kneesby the side of the deep, shadowy couch,holding the shadowy suggestion of a reclining woman,revealed him tall under the low ceiling,and somber all over,except for the crude discord of the white collar
01:38:19under the shape of his head,and the faint, minute spark of a brass buttonhere and there on his uniform.He stood over her a moment,masculine and mysterious in his immobility,before he sat down on a chair nearby.He could see only the faint oval of her upturned face,and extended on her black dress,
01:38:39her pale hands, a moment before abandoned to his kisses, and now as if too weary to move.He dared not make a sound, shrinking as a man would do from the prosaic necessities of existence.As usual, it was the woman who had the courage.Her voice was heard first, almost conventional, while her being vibrated yet with conflicting emotions.Tell me something, she said.The darkness hit his surprise, and the darkness hit his surprise,than his smile. Had he not just said to her everything worth saying in the world,and that not for the first time?
01:39:17What am I to tell you, he asked in a voice credibly steady.He was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone which had easedthe strain. Why not tell me a tale? A tale? He was really amazed. Yes, why not?These words came with a slight petulance,the hint of a loved woman's capricious will,which is capricious only because it feels itself to be a law,embarrassing sometimes, and always difficult to elude.Why not, he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent,
01:39:53as though he'd been asked to give her the moon.But now he was feeling a little angry with herfor that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotionas easily as out of a splendid gown.He heard her say, a little unsteadily, with a sort of fluttering intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly's flight.You used to tell your simple and professional tales very well at one time, or well enough to interest me.You had a sort of art in the days before the war.Really, he said with involuntary gloom.
01:40:32But now you see the war is great.going on, he continued, in such a dead, equable tone that she felt a slight chill fall over hershoulders, and yet she persisted, for there's nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman'scaprice. It could be a tale, not of this world, she explained. You want a tale of the other,the better world, he asked, with a matter-of-fact surprise. You must evoke for that taskthose who have already gone there. No, I don't mean that. I mean another, I'm.some other world, in the universe, not in heaven.I am relieved, but you forget that I have only five days leave.
01:41:14Yes, and I've also taken a five days leave from my duties.I like that word. What word? Duty.It is horrible sometimes.Oh, that's because you think it's narrow, but it isn't.It contains infinities and so on.What is this jargon?He disregarded the interjected scorn.An infinity of absolution, for instance, he continued.
01:41:44But as to this, another world, who's going to look for it and for the tale that is in it?You, she said, with a strange, almost rough sweetness of assertion.He made a shadowy movement of assent in his chair,the irony of which not even the gathered darkness could render mysterious.As you will. In that world then, there was once upon a time a commanding officer and a northman.Put in the capitals, please, because they had no other names. It was a world of seas and continents and islands.Like the earth, she murmured bitterly.Yes, what else could you expect from sending a man made of our common tormented clay on a voyage of discovery?
01:42:28What else could he find? What else could you understand or careful, or feel thethe existence of even. There was comedy in it and slaughter. Always like the earth, she murmured,always. And since I could find in the universe only what was deeply rooted in the fibers of my being,there was love in it too, but we won't talk of that. No, we won't, she said, in a neutraltone which concealed perfectly her relief or her disappointment. Then, after a pause, she added,it's going to be a comic story.Well, he paused too.Yes, in a way, in a very grim way.
01:43:10It will be human, and as you know, comedy is but a matter of the visual angle.And it won't be a noisy story.All the long guns in it will be dumb, as dumb as dumb as so many telescopes.Ah, there are guns in it then, and may I ask, where?A float.You remember that the world of which we speak,its seas. A war was going on in it. It was a funny work, and terribly in earnest. Its war wasbeing carried on over the land, over the water, under the water, up in the air, and even under
01:43:43the ground. And many young men in it, mostly in wardrooms and mess rooms, used to say toeach other, pardon the unparliamentary words, they used to say, it's a damned badwar, but it's better than no war at all. Sounds flippant, doesn't it?He heard a nervous, impatient sigh in the depths of the couch while he went on without a pause.And yet there is more in it than meets the eye, I mean more wisdom.Flippancy, like comedy, is but a matter of visual first impression.That world was not very wise, but there was in it a certain amount of common working sagacity.That, however, was mostly worked by the neutrals in diverse ways, public and private,
01:44:27which had to be watched, watched by acute minds and also by actual sharp eyes.They had to be very sharp indeed, too, I assure you.I can imagine, she murmured appreciatively.What is there that you can't imagine, he pronounced soberly?You have the world in you.But let us go back to our commanding officer,who of course commanded a ship of a sort.My tales, if often professional, as you remarked just now,
01:44:56have never been technical.so I'll just tell you that the ship was of a very ornamental sort oncewith lots of grace and elegance and luxury about heryes onceshe was like a pretty woman who had suddenly put on a suit of sackclothand stuck revolvers in her beltbut she floated lightly she moved nimblyshe was quite good enough
01:45:18that was the opinion of the commanding officersaid the voice from the couchit washe used to be sent out with her along certain coastto see what he could see, just that.And sometimes he had some preliminary information to help him,and sometimes he had not.And it was all one, really.
01:45:38It was about as useful as information trying to conveythe locality and intentions of a cloud,of a phantom taking shape here and there,and impossible to seize, would have been.It was in the early days of the war.What at first used to amaze the commanding officerwas the unchanged face of the waters,with its familiar expression,
01:45:59neither more friendly nor more hostile.On fine days the sun strikes sparksupon the blue. Here and therea peaceful smudge of smoke hangs in the distance,and it is impossible to believe that the familiar clear horizontraces the limit of one great circular ambush.Yes, it is impossible to believe,till some day you see a ship not your own ship.
01:46:23That isn't so impressive, but some ship in companyblow up all of a sudden and plop under almost before you know what has happened to her.Then you begin to believe.Henceforth you go out for the work to see, what you can see,and you keep on at it with the conviction that someday you will die from something you have not seen.One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces,counting the dead fall into their hands,looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer
01:46:56and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it, the taste of primitive passion,the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one's hand, the direct call and the straight response.Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matterwith the world. She interrupted, stirring a little. Oh yes, sincerity, frankness, passion,three words of your gospel, don't I know them?Think, isn't it ours?Believed in common?He asked, anxiously,
01:47:33yet without expecting an answer,and went on at once.Such were the feelings of the commanding officer.When the night came trailing over the sea,hiding what looked like the hypocrisy of an old friend,it was a relief.The knight blinds you frankly,and there are circumstances when the daylight
01:47:51may grow as odious to one as falsehood itself,night is all right. At night the commanding officer could let his thoughts get away. I won't tell you where.Somewhere where there was no choice but between truth and death. But thick weather, though it blindedone, brought no such relief. Mist is deceitful. The dead luminosity of the fog is irritating.It seems that you ought to see. One gloomy, nasty day, the ship was steaming along her beat in sight of arocky dangerous coast that stood out intensely black like an India ink drawing on grey paper.Presently the second in command spoke to his chief. He thought he saw something on the water,to seawood, small wreckage perhaps. But there shouldn't be any wreckage here, sir, he remarked.
01:48:43No, said the commanding officer. The last reported submarine's ships were sunk a long way to thewestward, but one never knows. There may have been others since then not reported.nor seen, gone with all hands.That was how it began.The ship's course was altered to pass the object close,for it was necessary to have a good look at what one could see.Close but without touching,for it was not advisable to come in contact with objects of any form whatever
01:49:12floating casually about.Close but without stopping or even diminishing speed,for in those times it was not prudent to linger on any particular spot,even for a moment.I may tell you at once that the object was not dangerous in itself.No use in describing it.It may have been nothing more remarkable than, say,a barrel of a certain shape and colour,
01:49:35but it was significant.The smooth bow wave hovered up as if for a closer inspection,and then the ship, brought again to her course,turned her back on it with indifference,while twenty pairs of eyes on her deck stared in all directions,trying to see what they could see.The commanding officer and his second in command discussed the object with understanding.It appeared to them to be not so much a proof of the sagacity as of the activity of certain neutrals.
01:50:05This activity had in many cases taken the form of replenishing the stores of certain submarines at sea.This was generally believed, if not absolutely known.But the very nature of things in those early days pointed that way.The object, looked at closely and turned away from, with apparent indifference,put it beyond doubt that something of the sort had been done somewhere in the neighbourhood.The object in itself was more than suspect,but the fact of its being left in evidence roused other suspicions.Was it the result of some deep and devilish purpose?
01:50:41As to that, all speculation soon appeared to be a vain thing.Finally, the two officers came to the conclusion that it was left there,likely by accident, complicated possibly by some unforeseen necessity,such perhaps as the sudden need to get away quickly from the spot or something of that kind.Their discussion had been carried on in curt weighty phrases,separated by long, thoughtful silences,and all the time their eyes roamed about the horizonin an everlasting, almost mechanical effort of vigilance.
01:51:15The younger man summed up grimly.Well, it's evidence, that's what this is, evidence of what we were pretty certain of before,and plain too.And much good it will do to us, retorted the commanding officer.The parties are miles away, the submarine devil only knows where, ready to kill,and the noble neutral slipping away to the eastward, ready to lie.The second-in-command laughed a little at the tone,but he guessed that the neutral wouldn't even have to lie very much.
01:51:48Fellows like that, unless caught in the very act, felt themselves pretty safe.They could afford to chuckle.That fellow was probably chuckling to himself.It's very possible he had been before at the gameand didn't care a rap for the bit of evidence left behind.It was a game in which practice made one bold and successful too.And again he laughed faintly.But his commanding officer was in revolt against the murderous stealthiness of methods
01:52:15and the atrocious callousness of complicitiesthat seem to taint the very source of men's deep emotionsand noblest activities,to corrupt their imagination,which builds up the final conceptions of life and death.He suffered...The voice from the sofa interrupted the narrator.How well I can understand that in him.
01:52:37He bent forward slightly.Yes, I too.Everything should be open in love and war.open as the day, since both are the call of an ideal which it is so easy, so terribly easy to degrade in the name of victory.He paused, then went on.I don't know that the commanding officer delved so deeply as that into his feelings, but he did suffer from them, a sort of disenchanted sadness.It is possible even that he suspected himself of folly.Man is various, but he had no time for much introspect.
01:53:14because from the south-west a wall of fog had advanced upon his ship.Great convolutions of vapours flew over, swirling about masts and funnel,which looked as if they were beginning to melt.Then they vanished.The ship was stopped, all sounds ceased, and the very fog became motionless,growing denser and as if solid in its amazing, dumb immobility.The men at their stations lost sight of each other.Footstep sounded stealthy, rare voices, impersonal and remote, died out without resonance.
01:53:49A blind white stillness took possession of the world.It looked too as if it would last for days.I don't mean to say that the fog did not vary a little in its density,now and then it would thin out mysteriously,revealing to the men a more or less ghostly presentment of their ship.Several times the shadow of the coast itself swam darkly before their eyes.through the fluctuating opaque brightness of the great white cloud clinging to the water.Taking advantage of these moments, the ship had been moved cautiously nearer the shore.
01:54:23It was useless to remain out in such thick weather. Her officers knew every nook and cranny of thecoast along their beat. They thought that she would be much better in a certain cove. It wasn't alarge place, just ample room for a ship to swing at her anchor. She would have an easier timeof it till the fog lifted it.up. Slowly, with infinite caution and patience, they crept closer and closer, seeing no more of the cliffsthan an evanescent dark loom with a narrow border of angry foam at its foot. At the moment of anchoring,the fog was so thick that for all they could see they might have been a thousand miles out in theopen sea, yet the shelter of the land could be felt. There was a peculiar quality in the stillness
01:55:06of the air. Very faint, very elusive, the wash of the ripple.against the encircling land reached their ears with mysterious sudden pauses.The anchor dropped, the lads were laid in.The commanding officer went below into his cabin,but he had not been there very long when a voice outside his door requested his presence on deck.He thought to himself, what is it now?He felt some impatience of being called out again to face the wearisome fog.He found that it had thinned again a little and had taken on a gloomy,
01:55:41from the dark cliffs which had no form, no outline,but asserted themselves as a curtain of shadows all round the ship,except in one bright spot, which was the entrance from the open sea.Several officers were looking that way from the bridge.The second in command met him with a breathlessly whispered informationthat there was another ship in the cove.She has been made out by several pairs of eyes only a couple of minutes before.She was lying at anchor very near the entrance,
01:56:11a mere vague blot on the fog's brightness,and the commanding officer, by staring in the direction,pointed out to him by eager hands,ended by distinguishing it at last himself,indubitably a vessel of some sort.It's a wonder we didn't run slap into herwhen coming in, observed the second in command.Send a boat on board before she vanishes, said the commanding officer.
01:56:37He surmised that this was a coaster,there could hardly be anything else.but another thought came into his head suddenly.It is a wonder, he said to his second in command,who had rejoined him after sending the boat away.By that time both of them had been struck by the factthat the ship so suddenly discoveredhad not manifested her presence by ringing her bell.
01:57:00We came in very quietly, that's true, concluded the younger officer,but they must have heard our leadsman at least.We couldn't have passed her more than fifty yards off,the closest shave. They may even have made us out since they were aware of something coming in.And the strange thing is that we never heard a sound from her. The fellows on board must have beenholding their breath. Aye, said the commanding officer thoughtfully. In due course, the boarding-boatreturned, appearing suddenly alongside as though she had borrowed her way under the fog. The officerin charge came up to make his report, but the commanding officer didn't give him time to begin.
01:57:39He cried from a distance.Coaster, isn't she?No, sir. A stranger. A neutral, was the answer.No, really? Well, tell us all about it. What is she doing here?The young man stated then that he had been told a long and complicated story of engine troubles.But it was plausible enough from a strictly professional point of view and it had had the usual features.Disablement, dangerous drifting along the shore,Weather more or less thick for days, fear of a gale, ultimately a resolve to go in and anchor anywhere on the coast and so on.
01:58:18Fairly plausible.Engines still disabled, inquired the commanding officer.No, sir, she has steam on them.The commanding officer took his second aside.By Jovey said you were right.They were holding their breaths as we passed them.They were.But the second in command had his doubts now.
01:58:39A fog like this does muffle small sounds, sir, he remarked.And what could his object be, after all?To sneak out unnoticed, answered the commanding officer.Then why didn't he? He might have done it, you know.Not exactly unnoticed, perhaps.I don't suppose he could have slipped his cable without making some noise.Still, in a minute or so, he would have been lost to view,clean gone before we had made him out fairly.
01:59:05Yet he didn't.They looked at each other.The commanding officer shook his head.Such suspicions as the one which had ended his headare not defended easily.He did not even state it openly.The boarding officer finished his report.The cargo of the ship was of a harmless and useful character.
01:59:25She was bound to an English port.Papers and everything in perfect order,nothing suspicious to be detected anywhere.Then, passing to the men,he reported the crew on deck as the usual lot.engineers are the well-known type and very full of their achievement in repairing the engines,the mate, surly, the master, rather a fine specimen of a northman, civil enough, but appeared to havebeen drinking, seemed to be recovering from a regular bout of it.
01:59:53I told him I couldn't give him permission to proceed. He said he wouldn't dare to move his shipher own length out in such weather as this, permission or no permission.I left a man on board, though.Quite right.The commanding officer, after communing with his suspicions for a time, called his second aside.What if she were the very ship which had been feeding some infernal submarine or other, he said in an undertone?The other started, then, with conviction.She would get off scot-free, you couldn't prove it, sir.
02:00:27I want to look into it myself.From the report we've heard, I'm afraid you couldn't even make a case for reasonable suspicion, sir.I'll go on board all the same.He had made up his mind.Curiosity is the great motive power of hatred and love.What did he expect to find?He could not have told anybody, not even himself.What he really expected to find there was the atmosphere,
02:00:53the atmosphere of gratuitous treachery,which in his view nothing could excuse,for he thought that even a passion of unrighteousnessfor its own sake could not excuse that.but could he detect it, sniff it, taste it, receive some mysterious communication which would turnhis invincible suspicions into a certitude strong enough to provoke action with all its risks?The master met him on the after-deck, looming up in the fog amongst the blurred shapes of the usualship's fittings. He was a robust northman, bearded, and in the force of his age, a round leather
02:01:29cap fitted his head closely. His hands were rammed.deep into the pockets of his short leather jacket.He kept them there while he explained that at sea he lived in the chart roomand led the way there, striding carelessly.Just before reaching the door under the bridge he staggered a little,recovered himself, flung it open and stood aside,leaning his shoulders as if involuntarily against the side of the houseand staring vaguely into the fog-filled space.
02:01:58But he followed the commanding officer at once,flung the door to, snapped on the electric light,and hastened to thrust his hands back into his pockets,as though afraid of being seized by them,either in friendship or in hostility.The place was stuffy and hot.The usual chart rack overhead was full,and the chart on the table was kept unrolled
02:02:18by an empty cup standing on a saucer half full of some spilt dark liquid.The slightly nibbled biscuit reposed on the chronometer case.There were two settees,and one of them had been made up into a bed with a pillow and some blankets,which were now very much tumbled.The Northman let himself fall on it,his hands still in his pockets.Well, here I am, he said with a curious air
02:02:43of being surprised at the sound of his own voice.The commanding officer from the other setteeobserved the handsome, flushed face.Drops of fog hung on the yellow beardand moustaches of the Northman.The much darker eyebrows ran together in a puzzled frownand suddenly he jumped up.What I mean is that I don't know where I am. I really don't, he burst out with extreme earnestness.
02:03:08Hang at all, I got turned around somehow. The fog has been after me for a week, more than a week,and then my engines broke down. I would tell you how it was. He burst out into loquacity.It was not hurried, but it was insistent. It was not continuous for all that. It was broken bythe most queer, thoughtful pauses. Each of these pauses,lasted no more than a couple of seconds,and each had the profundity of an endless meditation.When he began again,nothing betrayed in him the slightest consciousness of these intervals.
02:03:42There was the same fixed glance,the same unchanged earnestness of tone.He didn't know.Indeed, more than one of these pausesoccurred in the middle of a sentence.The commanding officer listened to the tale.It struck him as more plausible than simple truthis in the habit of being,
02:03:59but that perhaps was prejudice.All the time the Northman was speaking,the commanding officer had been aware of an inward voice,a grave murmur in the depths of his own self,telling another tale as if on purpose to keep alive in himhis indignation and his anger with that baseness of greedor of mere outlook which lies often at the root of simple ideas.It was the story that had been already told
02:04:24to the boarding officer an hour or so before.The commanding officer nodded,slightly at the Northman from time to time.The latter came to an end and turned his eyes away.He added, as an afterthought,wasn't it enough to drive a man out of his mind with worry?And it's my first voyage to this part, too.And the ship's my own.
02:04:46Your officer has seen the papers.She isn't much as you can see for yourself,just an old cargo boat,bare living for my family.He raised a big arm to point at a row of photographsplastering the bulkhead. The movement was ponderous, as if the arm had been made of lead.The commanding officer said carelessly,You'll be making a fortune yet for your family with this old ship.
02:05:11Yes, if I don't lose her, said the Northman gloomily.I mean, out of this war, added the commanding officer.The Northman stared at him in a curiously unseeing and at the same time interested manneras only eyes of a particular blue shade can stare."'And you wouldn't be angry at it?' he said."'Would you? You are too much of a gentleman."'We didn't bring this on you?"'And suppose we sat down and cried,
02:05:38"'what good would that be?"'Let those cry who made the trouble,' he concluded with energy."'Time's money, you say."'Well, this time is money."'Oh, isn't it?'"'The commanding officer tried to keep under the feeling of immense disgust."'He said to himself that it was unreasonable.men were like that, moral cannibals feeding on each other's misfortunes.
02:06:03He said aloud,You've made it perfectly plain how it is that you are here.Your logbook confirms you very minutely.Of course, a logbook may be corked, nothing easier.The Northman never moved a muscle.He was gazing at the floor.He seemed not to have heard.He raised his head after a while.
02:06:23But you can't suspect me of anything, he muttered negligently.The commanding officer thought,Why should he say this?Immediately afterwards, the man before him added,My cargo is for an English port.His voice had turned husky for the moment.The commanding officer reflected,That's true, there can be nothing.
02:06:45I can't suspect him.Yet why was he lying with steam up in this fog,and then, hearing us come in,why didn't he give some sign of life?Why?Could it be anything else but a guilty conscience?He could tell by the leadsman that this was a man of war.Yes, why?
02:07:03The commanding officer went on thinking,suppose I ask him and then watch his face.He will betray himself in some way.It's perfectly plain that the fellow has been drinking.Yes, he has been drinking, but he'll have a lie ready all the same.The commanding officer was one of those men who are made morallyand almost physically uncomfortable by the mere thought of having to beat down a lie.He shrank from the act in scorn and disgust, which were invincible because more temperamental than moral.
02:07:33So, he went out on deck instead and had the crew mustered formally for his inspection.He found them very much what the report of the boarding officer had led him to expect,and from their answers to his questions he could discover no flaw in the logbook story.He dismissed them.His impression of them was, a picked lot, a been promised a fistful of money,each of this came off, all slightly anxious, but not frightened. Not a single one of them likely togive the show away. They don't feel in danger of their life. They know England and English ways toowell. He felt alarmed at catching himself thinking as if his vaguest suspicions were turning
02:08:14into a certitude, for indeed there was no shadow of reason for his inferences. There was nothingto give away. He returned to the chart room. The Northman had lingered behind him. The Northman had lingeredbehind there, and something subtly different in his bearing, more bold in his blue, glassy stare,induced the commanding officer to conclude that the fellow had snatched at the opportunity to takeanother swig at the bottle he must have had concealed somewhere. He noticed, too, that the Northman,on meeting his eyes, put on an elaborately surprised expression. At least it seemed elaborated.Nothing could be trusted. And the Englishman felt himself with astonishing conviction,faced by an enormous lie, solid like a wall, with no way round to get at the truth,
02:09:00whose ugly, murderous face he seemed to see peeping over at him with a cynical grin."'I dare say,' he began suddenly, "'you are wondering at my proceedings, though I am not detaining you, am I?"'You wouldn't dare to move in this fog.'"'I don't know where I am,' the Northman ejaculated earnestly."'I really don't.'"'He looked around as of the very chart-room fittings,strange to him. The commanding officer asked him whether he had not seen any unusual objectsfloating about while he was at sea. Object, what object? We were groping blind in the fog for days.
02:09:38We had a few clear intervals, said the commanding officer, and I'll tell you what we have seenand the conclusion I've come to about it. He told him in a few words. He heard the sound of asharp breath in-drawn through closed teeth. The Northman with his hand on thethe table stood absolutely motionless and dumb. He stood as if thunderstruck. Then he produced a fat to a smile,or at least so it appeared to the commanding officer. Was this significant or of no meaning whatever?He didn't know, he couldn't tell. All the truth had departed out of the world, as if drawn in,absorbed in this monstrous villainy this man was or was not guilty of."'Shutings too good for people that conceive neutrality in this pretty way,' remarked the commanding officer after a while.
02:10:29"'Yes, yes, yes,' the Northman assented hurriedly, then added an unexpected and dreamy voiced."'Perhaps.'"'Was he pretending to be drunk, or only trying to appear sober?'His glance was straight, but it was somewhat glazed.His lips outlined themselves firmly under his yellow moustache, but they twitched.Did they twitch?And why was he drooping like this in his attitude?There's no perhaps about it, pronounced the commanding officer sternly.
02:11:00The Northman had straightened himself, and unexpectedly he looked stern too.No, but what about the tempters? Better kill that lot off.There's about four, five, six million of them, he said grimly.But in a moment changed into a whining key.But I had better hold my tongue.You have some suspicious.No, I have no suspicions, declared the commanding officer.He never faltered. At that moment he had the certitude. The air of the chart room was thick with guilt and falsehood,
02:11:34braving the discovery, defying simple right, common decency, all humanity of feeling,every scruple of conduct. The Northman drew a long breath. Well, we know that your English aregentlemen, but let us speak the truth.Why should we love you so very much?You haven't done anything to be loved?We don't love the other people, of course.They haven't done anything for that either.A fellow comes along with a bag of gold.
02:12:04I haven't been in Rotterdam my last voyage for nothing.You may be able to tell something interesting then to our peoplewhen you come into port, interjected the officer.I might, but you keep some people at your pay at Rotterdam.Let them report.I am a new.neutral, am I not? Have you ever seen a poor man on one side and a bag of gold on the other?Of course, I couldn't be tempted. I haven't the nerve for it. Really, I haven't. It's nothing to me.
02:12:34I am just talking openly for once.Yes, and I'm listening to you, said the commanding officer quietly.The Northman leaned forward over the table. Now that I know you have no suspicience, I talk.You don't know what a poor man is. I have.do. I am poor myself. This old ship, she isn't much, and she is mortgaged too. Bear living,no more. Of course I wouldn't have the nerve, but a man who has nerve, see, the stuff he takesaboard looks like any other cargo, packages, barrels, tins, copper tubes, what not. He doesn'tsee it work. It isn't real to him, but he sees the gold. That's real. Of course nothing could induce me,
02:13:21I suffer from an internal disease.I would either go crazy from anxiety or take to drink or something.The risk is too great.Why, ruin!It should be death.The commanding officer got up after this curt declaration,which the other received with a hard stare,oddly combined with an uncertain smile.
02:13:44The officer's gorge rose at the atmosphere of murderous complicitywhich surrounded him, denser, more impenetrable,accurate than the fog outside."'He's nothing to me,' murmured the Northman, swaying visibly."'Of course not,' assented the commanding officer,"'with a great effort to keep his voice calm and low."'The certitude was strong within him."'But I'm going to clear all you fellows off this coast at once,
02:14:11"'and I will begin with you."'You must leave in half an hour.'"'By that time the officer was walking along the deck"'with that Northman at his elbow.What, in this fog? The latter cried out, huskily.Yes, you'll have to go in this fog.But I don't know where I am, I really don't.The commanding officer turned round. A sort of fury possessed him.
02:14:35The eyes of the two men met. Those of the Northmen expressed a profound amazement.Oh, you don't know how to get out.The commanding officer spoke with composure, but his heart was beating with anger and dread.I will give you your course.Steer south by east-half-east for about four miles,and then you will be clear to haul to the eastward for your port.The weather will clear up before very long.Must I? What could induce me? I haven't the nerve.
02:15:05And yet you must go, unless you want to...I don't want to, panted the northman. I've enough of it.The commanding officer got over the side.The northman remained still as if rooted to the deck.Before his boat reached his ship, the commanding officer heard the steamer beginning to pick up her anchor.Then, shadowy in the fog, she steamed out on the given cause.Yes, he said to his officers, I let him go.The narrator bent forward towards the couch where no movement betrayed the presence of a living person.
02:15:42Listen, he said forcibly.That course would lead the northman straight into a deadly ledge of rock,and the commanding officer gave it to him.He steamed out, ran on it and went down.So he had spoken the truth.He did not know where he was.But it proves nothing.Nothing either way.
02:16:02It may have been the only truth in all his story,and yet he seems to have been driven out by a menacing stare,nothing more.He abandoned all pretence.Yes, I gave that course to him.It seemed to me a supreme test.I believe, no, I don't believe, I know.At the time I was certain, they all went down,
02:16:25and I don't know whether I have done stern retribution or murder,whether I have added to the corpses that littered the bed of the unreadable sea,the body of men completely innocent or basely guilty.I don't know, I shall never know.He rose.The woman on the couch got up and threw her arms round his neck.Her eyes put two gleams in the deep shadow of the room.She knew his passion for truth, his horror of deceit, his humanity.
02:16:57Oh, my poor, poor...I shall never know, he repeated sternly,disengaged himself, pressed her hands to his lips, and went out.End of The Tale, 1917.The Black Mate, in Tales of hearsay by Joseph Conner.This Libravox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan, The Black Mate, 1884.A good many years ago there were several ships loading at the jetty, London dock.I am speaking here of the 80s of the last century, of the time when London had plenty of fine
02:17:38ships in the docks, though not so many fine buildings in its streets.The ships at the jetty were fine enough, they lay one behind the other, and the sameCaffire, third from the end, was as good as the rest of them, and nothing more.Each ship at the jetty had, of course, her chief officer on board, so had every other ship in dock.The policemen at the gates knew them all by sight, without being able to say at once, without thinking, to what ship any particular man belonged.As a matter of fact, the mates of the ships then lying in the London dock were like the majority of officers in the merchant service,a steady, hard-working, staunch, unromantic-looking set of men,belonging to various classes of society,
02:18:22but with a professional stamp obliterating the personal characteristics,which were not very marked, anyhow.This last was true of them all,with the exception of the mate of the sapphire.Of him the policeman could not be in doubt.This one had a presence.He was noticeable to them in the street from a great distance,and when in the morning he strode down the jetty to his ship,
02:18:47the lumpers and the dock labourers rolling the balesand trundling the cases of cargo on their hand-truckswould remark to each other,here's the black mate coming along.That was the name they gave him,being a gross lot who could have no appreciation of the man's dignified bearing,and to call him black was the superficial impressionism of the ignorant.Of course Mr Bunter, the mate of the sapphire,
02:19:12was not black. He was no more black the newer eye, and certainly as white as any chief mate of a shipin the whole of the port of London. His complexion was of a sort that did not take the tan easily,and I happened to know that the poor fellow had had a month's illness just before he joined thesapphire. From this you will perceive that I knew Bunter. Of course I knew him. And what's more,I knew his secret at the time, this secret which, never mind just now.Returning to Buntar's personal appearance, it was nothing but ignorant prejudice on the part of the foreman Stevador to say, as he did in my hearing, I bet he's a foreigner of some sort.A man may have black hair without being set down for a dago. I've known a West Country sailor, bosun of a fine ship, who looked more Spanish than any Spaniard afloat I've ever met. He looked like a Spaniard in a picture.Competent authorities tell us that this earth is to be finally the inheritance.
02:20:11of men with dark hair and brown eyes.It seems that already the great majority of mankind is dark-haired in various shades.But it is only when you meet one that you notice how men with really black hair, black as ebony, a rare.Banta's hair was absolutely black, black as a raven's wing.He wore, too, all his beard, clipped but a good length all the same,and his eyebrows were thick and bushy.Add to this steely blue eyes,which in a fairhead man would have been nothing so extraordinary,
02:20:44but in that sombre framing made a startling contrast,and you will easily understand that Banta was noticeable enough.If it had not been for the quietness of his movements,for the general soberness of his demeanour,one would have given him credit for a fiercely passionate nature.Of course he was not in his first youth,but if the expression, in the force of his age, has any meaning,he realised it completely.
02:21:09He was a tall man too, though rather spare.Seeing him from his poop, indefatigably busy with his duties,Captain Ashton of the clipper ship Elsinor, lying just ahead of the Sapphire,remarked once to a friend that Johns has got somebody there to hustle his ship along for him.Captain Johns, master of the sapphire, having commanded ships for many years,was well known without being much respected or liked.In the company of his fellows he was either neglected or chaffed.The chaffing was generally undertaken by Captain Ashton, a cynical and teasing sort of man.
02:21:46It was Captain Ashton who permitted himself the unpleasant joke of proclaiming once in companythat Johns is of the opinion that every sailor above 40 years of age ought to be poisoned, shipmasters in actual command accepted.It was in a city restaurant where several well-known shipmasters were having lunch together.There was Captain Ashton,Flored and Jovial in a large white waistcoatand with a yellow rose in his buttonhole.Captain Sellers in a sack coat,thin and pale-faced,
02:22:17with his iron-grey hair tucked behind his earsand, but for the absence of spectacles,looking like an ascetical mild man of books.Captain Hell, a bluff sea dog with hairy fingers,in blue serge in a black felt hat,pushed far back off his crimson forehead.There was also a very young shipman.with a little fair moustache and serious eyes,
02:22:38who said nothing and only smiled faintly from time to time.Captain Johns, very much startled,raised his perplexed and credulous glance,which, together with a low and horizontally wrinkled brow,did not make a very intellectual ensemble.This impression was by no means mended by the slightly pointed form of his bald head.Everybody laughed outright,and thus guided Captain Johns ended by smiling rather
02:23:05sourly and attempted to defend himself. It was all very well to joke, but nowadays when shipsto pay anything at all had to be driven hard on the passage and in harbour, the sea was no placefor elderly men. Only young men and men in their prime were equal to modern conditions of pushand hurry. Look at the great firms. Almost every single one of them was getting rid of men showingany signs of age. He, for one, didn't want any oldsters on board his ship. And indeed,in this opinion Captain Johns was not singular.There was, at that time, a lot of semen with nothing against them but that they were grizzled,wearing out the soles of their last pair of boots on the pavement of the city in the heartbreaking search for a berth.
02:23:50Captain Johns added, with a sort of ill-humoured innocence, that from holding that opinionto thinking of poisoning people was a very long step.This seemed final, but Captain Ashton would not let go, his joke.Oh yes, I'm sure you would. You said distinctly, of no use. What's to be done with men who are of no use?You're a kind-hearted fellow, Johns. I'm sure that if only you thought it over carefully, you would consent to have them poisoned in some painless manner.Captain Sellers twitched his thin, sinuous lips. Make ghosts of them, he suggested pointedly.At the mention of ghosts, Captain Johns became shy in his perplexed.sly and unlovely manner. Captain Ashton winked,
02:24:38Yes, and then perhaps you would get a chance to have a communication with the world of spirits.Surely the ghosts of seamen should haunt ships. Some of them would be sure to call on an old shipmate.Captain Sellers remarked drily,Don't raise his hopes like this, it's cruel. He won't see anything. You know John's that nobody has ever seen a ghost.At this intolerable provocation, Captain Johns came out of his reserve.With no perplexity whatever, but with a positive passion of credulity,giving momentary luster to his dull little eyes,he brought up a lot of authenticated instances.
02:25:16There were books and books full of instances.It was merest ignorance to deny supernatural apparitions.Cases were published every month in a special newspaper.Professor Cranks saw Ghosts Daily,and Professor Cranks was no special.small potatoes either, one of the biggest scientific men living. And there was that newspaper fellow,what's his name, who had a girl ghost visitor. He printed in his papers things she said to him,and to say there were no ghosts after that. Why they've been photographed, what more proof do you want?
02:25:50Captain Johns was indignant. Captain Bell's lips twitched, but Captain Ashton protested now.For goodness sake, don't keep him going with that. And by the by, John,who's that hairy pirate you've got for your new mate?Nobody in the dock seems to have seen him before.Captain Johns, pacified by the change of subjects,answered simply that Willie, the tobacconist at the corner of Fenshirt Street,had sent him along.Willie, his shop and the very house in Fentchert Street, I believe, are gone now.
02:26:20In his time, wearing a careworn, absent-minded look on his pasty face,Willie served with tobacco many southern-going ships out of the port of London.At certain times of the day the shop would be full of shipmasters.They sat on casks, they lounged against the counter.Many a youngster found his first lift in life there.Many a man got a sorely needed berth by simply dropping in for four pennyworth of bird's eye at an auspicious moment.Even Willie's assistant, a red-headed, uninterested, delicate-looking young fellow,would hand you across the counter sometimes a bit of valuable intelligence with your box of cigarettes,
02:26:58in a whisper, lips hardly moving. Thus,the belladonna, south dock, second officer wanted. You may be in time for it if you hurry up.And didn't one just fly?Oh, well he sent him, said Captain Ashton. He's a very striking man.If you were to put a red sash round his waist and a red handkerchief round his head,he would look exactly like one of them buccaneering chaps that made men walk the plankand carried women off into captivity. Look out, John's he's.don't cut your throat for you and run off with the sapphire? What ship has he come out of last?
02:27:35Captain Johns, after looking up credulously as usual, wrinkled his brow and said placidly that the manhad seen better days. His name was Banta. He's had command of a Liverpool ship, the Samaria, some yearsago. He lost her in the Indian Ocean and had his certificate suspended for a year. Ever since then,he's not been able to get another command. He's been knocking about in the same. He's been knocking aboutin the Western Ocean trade lately.That accounts for him being a stranger to everybody about the docks,Captain Ashton concluded, as they rose from table.Captain Johns walked down to the dock after lunch.
02:28:12He was short of stature and slightly bandy.His appearance did not inspire the generality of mankind with esteem,but it must have been otherwise with his employers.He had the reputation of being an uncomfortable commander,meticulous in trifles,always nursing a grievance of some sort, and incessantly nagging.He was not a man to kick up a row with you and be done with it,but to say nasty things in a whining voice,
02:28:37a man capable of making one's life a perfect miseryif he took a dislike to an officer.That very evening I went to see Bunter on boardand sympathised with him on his prospects for the voyage.He was subdued.I suppose a man with a secret locked up in his breast loses his buoyancy.and there was another reason why I could not expect Bunter to show a great elasticity of spirit.For one thing he had been very seedy lately, and besides, but of that later.
02:29:08Captain Jones had been on board that afternoon and had loitered and dodged about his chief matein a manner which had annoyed Bunter exceedingly.What could he mean, he asked with calm exasperation.One would think he suspected I had stolen something and tried to see in what pocket I had stowed it away,or that somebody told him I had a tail and he wanted to find out how I managed to conceal it.I don't like to be approached from behind several times in one afternoon in that creepy wayand then to be looked up at suddenly in front from under my elbow.Is it a new sort of peepo game? It doesn't amuse me. I'm no longer a baby.
02:29:46I assured him that if anyone were to tell Captain Johns that he, Banta, had a tail,John's would manage to get himself to believe the story in some mysterious manner.He would. He was suspicious and credulous to an inconceivable degree.He would believe any silly tale, suspect any man of anything,and crawl about with it and ruminate the stuff,and turn it over and over in his mind in the most miserable inwardly whining perplexity.He would take the meanest possible view in the endand discover the meanest possible course of action
02:30:18by a sort of natural genius for that sort of thing.Bunter also told me that the mean creature had crept all over the ship on his little bandy legs,taking him along to grumble and whine to about a lot of trifles,crept about the docks like a wretched insect, like a cockroach, only not so lively.Thus did the self-possessed Bunter express himself with great disgust.Then, going on with his usual stately deliberation, made sinister by the frownof his jet-black eyebrows. And the fellow is mad, too. He tried to be sociable for a bit andcould find nothing else but to make big eyes at me and asked me if I believed in communications
02:30:59beyond the grave. Communications beyond, I didn't know what he meant at first. I didn't knowwhat to say. A very solemn subject, Mr. Buntar, says he. I've given a great deal of study to it.Had John's lived on sure he would have been the predestant prey of fraudulent mediums,or even if he had had any decent opportunities between the voyages.Luckily for him, when in England, he lived somewhere far away in Leytonstone,with a maiden sister ten years older than himself,a fearsome varago twice his size before whom he trembled.It was said she bullied him terribly in general,
02:31:38and in the particular instance of his spiritualistic leanings, she had her own views.These leanings were to her simply satanic.She was reported as having declared that,With God's help, she would prevent that fool from giving himself up to the devils.It was beyond doubt that John's secret ambitionwas to get into personal communication with the spirits of the deadif only his sister would let him.But she was adamant.
02:32:05I was told that while in London he had to account to herfor every penny of the money he took with him in the morningand for every hour of his time,and she kept the bank book too.Bunter, he had been a wild youngster, but he was well connected, had ancestors,there was a family tomb somewhere in the home counties.Bunter was indignant, perhaps on account of his own dead.Those steely blue eyes of his flashed with positive ferocity out of that black-bearded face.
02:32:34He impressed me, there was so much dark passion in his leisurely contempt.The cheek of the fellow, enter into relations witha mean little cat like this, it would be an impudent intrusion. He wants to enter. What is it? A new sort ofsnobbishness or what? I laughed outright at this original view of spiritism or whatever theghost craze is called. Even Bunter himself condescended to smile, but it was an austere,quickly vanished smile. A man in his almost, I may say, tragic position couldn't be expected,you understand? He was really worried. He was ready eventually to put up with any dirtytrick in the course of the voyage. A man could not expect much consideration should he find
02:33:21himself at the mercy of a fellow like John's. A misfortune is a misfortune and there's an end of it.But to be bored by mean, low-spirited, inane ghost stories in the John's style all the way outto Calcutta and back again was an intolerable apprehension to be under.Spiritism was indeed a solemn subject to think about in that light, dreadful even.Poor fellow. Little we both thought that before very long he himself. However, I could give himno comfort. I was rather appalled myself. Butler had also another annoyance that day.A confounded birthing-master came on board on some pretense or other, but in reality, Banta thought,simply impelled by an inconvenient curiosity, inconvenient to Banda, that is.
02:34:10After some beating about the bush, that man suddenly said,I can't help thinking I've seen you before somewhere, Mr. Mate.If I heard your name, perhaps Bundo.That's the worst of a life with a mystery in it.He was much alarmed.It was very likely that the man had seen him before.Worst luck to his excellent memory.Banda himself could not be expected to remember every country.
02:34:34casual doc wallop he might have had to do with. Banta braced it out by turning upon the man,making use of that impressive black as night sternness of expression his unusual hair furnished himwith. My name's Banta, sir. Does that enlighten your inquisitive intellect? And I don't ask whatyour name may be. I don't want to know. I've no use for it, sir. An individual who calmly tellsme to his face that he is not sure if he has seen me before either means to be impudent or is nobetter than a worm, sir. Yes, I said a worm, a blind worm. Brave Bunter, that was the line to take.He fairly drove the beggar out of the ship as if every word had been a blow. But the pertinacity of thatbrass-bound Paul Pry was astonishing. He cleared out of the ship, of course, before Buntas-eye,
02:35:27not saying anything, and only trying to cover up his retreat by a sickly smile. But once on the jetty,he turned deliberately round and set himself to stare in dead earnest at the ship.He remained planted there like a mooring post, absolutely motionless,and with his stupid eyes winking no more than a pair of cabin port-holes.What could Bunter do? That was awkward for him, you know.He could not go and put his head into the bread-locker.What he did was to take up a position above the mizzen-riggingand stare back as unwinking as the other.
02:36:01So they remained, and I don't know which of them grew.Giddy first, but the man on the jetty, not having the advantage of something to hold on to,got tired the soonest, flung his arm, giving the contest up, as it were, and went away at last.Bunt had told me he was glad the sapphire, that gem amongst ships, as he alluded to her sarcastically,was going to see next day. He had had enough of the dock. I understood his impatience.He had stilled himself against any possible worry the voyage might bring, though it is clearenough now that he was not prepared for the extraordinary experience that was awaiting him alreadyand in no other part of the world than the Indian Ocean itself, the very part of the world where the
02:36:43poor fellow had lost his ship and had broken his luck, as it seemed for good and all at the same time.As to his remorse in regard to a certain secret action of his life, well, I understand that a manof Buntus fine character would suffer not a little. Still, between ourselves and without theslightest wish to be cynical, it cannot be denied that with the noblest of us the fear of beingfound out enters for some considerable part into the composition of remorse.I didn't say this in so many words to Bunter, but as the poor fellow harped a bit on it,I told him that there were skeletons in a good many honest cupboards, and that, as to his ownparticular guilt, it wasn't writ large on his face for everybody to see, so he needn't
02:37:28worry as to that. And besides, he would be gone to see in about twelvehours from now. He said there was some comfort in that thought, and went off then to spend the lastevening for many months with his wife. For all his wildness, Bunda had made no mistake in his marrying.He had married a lady, a perfect lady. She was a dear little woman, too. As to a pluck,I who know what times they had to go through, I cannot admire her enough for it. Real hard-wearingevery day and day after day pluck that only a woman is capable of when she is of the right sort,the undismayed sort, I would call it. The black mate felt this parting with his wifemore than any of the previous ones in all the years of bad luck. But she was of the undismayed kind,
02:38:17and showed less trouble in her gentle face than the black-haired, buccaneer-like, but dignifiedmate of the sapphire. It may be that her conscience was less disturbed than her husband's.Of course, his life had no secret places for her,but a woman's conscience is somewhat more resourceful in finding good and valid excuses.It depends greatly on the person that needs them, too.They had agreed that she should not come down to the dock to see him off.I wonder you care to look at me at all, said the sensitive man,and she did not laugh.
02:38:52Banda was very sensitive.He left her rather brusquely at the last.He got on board in good time and predicted.the usual impression on the mud pilot in the broken-down straw hat who took the sapphire out of dock.The riverman was very polite to the dignified, striking-looking chief mate.The five-inch manila for the check-rope, Mr Bunter, thank you, Mr Bunter, please.The sea-pilot who left the gem of ships heading comfortably down Channel loft overtold some of his friends that this voyage the sapphire had for chief mate a man who seemed a jolly sight too good for old John's.
02:39:29"'Punters his name. I wonder where he's sprung from."'Never seen him before in any ship I piloted in or out all these years."'He's the sort of man you don't forget. You couldn't."'A thorough good sailor, too."'And won't old John's just worry his head off,"'unless the old fool should take fright at him,"'for he does not seem the sort of man that would let himself be put upon"'without letting you know what he thinks of you.
02:39:53"'And that's exactly what old John's would be more afraid of than anything else.as this is really meant to be the record of a spiritualistic experience which came, if not precisely, to Captain Johns himself at any rate to his ship,there is no use in recording the other events of the passage out. It was an ordinary passage, the crew was an ordinary crew, the weather was of the usual kind.The blackmate's quiet, sedate method of going to work had given a sober tone to the life of the ship.Even in gales of wind, everything went on quietly somehow.There was only one severe blow which made things fairly lively for all hands, for full four and twenty hours,that was off the coast of Africa after passing the Cape of Good Hope.At the very height of it several heavy seas were shipped with no serious results,
02:40:43but there was a considerable smashing of breakable objects in the pantry and in the staterooms.Mr Bunter, who was so greatly respected on board, found himself treated scurvely,by the Southern Ocean, which, bursting open the door of his room like a ruffianly burglar,carried off several useful things and made all the others extremely wet.Later, on the same day, the Southern Ocean caused the sapphire to lurch over in such an unrestrainedfashion that the two drawers fitted under Mr. Bunter's sleeping berth flew out altogether,spilling all their contents. They ought, of course, to have been locked, and Mr. Bunterhad only to thank himself for what had happened. He ought to have turned the
02:41:24the key on each before going out on deck.His consternation was very great.The steward, who was paddling about all the time with swabs,trying to dry out the flooded cuddy, heard him exclaim,hello!In a startled and dismayed tone.In the midst of his work, the steward felt a sympathetic concern for the mate's distress.Captain Johns was secretly glad when he heard of the damage.
02:41:49He was indeed afraid of his chief mate,as the sea pilot had ventured to foretell,and afraid of him for the very reason the sea pilot had put forward as likely.Captain Johns, therefore, would have liked very muchto hold that black mate of his at his mercy in some way or other.But the man was irreproachable, as near absolute perfection as could be,and Captain Johns was very much annoyed,and at the same time congratulated himself on his chief officer's efficiency.
02:42:18He made a great show of living sociably with himon the principle that the more friendly you are with a man, the more easily you may catch him tripping,and also for the reason that he wanted to have somebody who would listen to his stories of manifestations,apparitions, ghosts, and all the rest of the imbecile spook law.He had it all at his fingers' ends, and he spun these ghostly yarns in a persistent,colourless voice, giving them a futile turn, peculiarly his own.I like to converse with my officers, he used to say.are masters that hardly ever open their mouths from beginning to end of a passage for fear of losing
02:42:55their dignity. What's that, after all, this bitter position a man holds? His sociability was mostto be dreaded in the second dog watch, because he was one of those men who grow livelytowards the evening, and the officer on duty was unable then to find excuses for leaving the poop.Captain Johns would pop up the companion suddenly, and sidling up in his creeping way to poor buntar ashe walked up and down, would fire into him some spiritualistic proposition, such asspirits, male and female, show a good deal of refinement in a general way, don't they?To which Bunter, holding his black whiskered head high, would mutter, I don't know.Ah, that's because you don't want to. You're the most obstinate, prejudiced man I've ever met,
02:43:42Mr Bunter. I told you, you may have any book out of my bookcase. You may just go into mystateroom and help yourself to any volume.And if Bunter protested that he was too tired in his watchers below to spare any time forreading, Captain Johns would smile nastily behind his back, and remarked that, of course,some people needed more sleep than others to keep themselves fit for their work.If Mr. Bunter was afraid of not keeping properly awake one on duty at night, that was anothermatter.But I think you borrowed a novel to read from the second mate the other day, a trashy, peasant,
02:44:17of lies, Captain John sighed.I'm afraid you're not a spiritually minded man, Mr. Bunter.That's what's the matter.Sometimes he would appear on deck in the middle of the night,looking very grotesque and bandy-legged in his sleeping suit.At that sight, the persecuted Bunter would wring his hand stealthilyand break out into moisture all over his forehead.After standing sleepily by the binnacle,
02:44:43scratching himself in an unpleasant manner,Captain John's was sure to start onsome aspect or other of his only topic. He would, for instance, discourse on the improvement ofmorality to be expected from the establishment of general and close intercourse with the spirits ofthe departed. The spirits, Captain John's thought, would consent to associate familiarly witha living if it were not for the unbelief of the great mass of mankind. He himself would not care tohave anything to do with a crowd that would not believe in his, Captain John's, existence. Then why should aspirit, this was asking too much.
02:45:21He went on breathing hard by the binnacle and trying to reach round his shoulder blades,then with a thick, drowsy severity declared,"'incradulity, sir, is the evil of the age.It rejected the evidence of Professor Kranks and of the journalist chap,that resisted the production of photographs.For Captain Johns believed firmly that certain spirits had been photographed,he had read something of it in the papers,and the idea of it having been done had got a tremendous hold on him
02:45:50because his mind was not critical.Bunter said afterwards that nothing could be more weird than this little manswathed in a sleeping suit three sizes too large for him,shuffling with excitement in the moonlight near the wheeland shaking his fist at the serene sea.Photographs! Photographs! he would repeatin a voice as creaky as a rusty hinge.The very helmsman just behind him got uneasy
02:46:16at that performance, not being capable of understanding exactly what the old man was kickingup a row with the mate about. Then John's, after calming down a bit, would begin again.The sensitised plate can't lie, no, sir. Nothing could be more funny than this ridiculouslittle man's convictions, his dogmatic tone. Bunter would go on swinging up and down the pooplike a deliberate dignified pendulum. He said not a word. But the poor fellow had not atrifle on his conscience, as you know, and to have imbecile ghosts ram down his throat likethis on top of his own worry nearly drove him crazy. He knew that on many occasions he was on the vergeof lunacy, because he could not help indulging in half-delirious visions of Captain John's being
02:47:02picked up by the scruff of the neck and dropped over the taffrail into the ship's wake.The sort of thing no sane, Salaman would think of doing to a cat or any other animal, anyhow.He imagined him bobbing up, a tiny black speck left farstern on the moonlit ocean.I don't think that even at the worst moments Banta really desired to drown, Captain Johns.I fancy that all his disordered imagination longed for was merely to stop the ghostly inanityof the skipper's talk. But all the same, it was a dangerous form of self-indulgence.Just picture to yourself that ship in the Indian Ocean, on a clear tropical night,
02:47:41with a sails full and still, the watch on deck stowed away out of sight, andAnd on her poop, flooded with moonlight, the stately black mate, walking up and down with measured,dignified steps, preserving an awful silence, and that grotesquely mean little figure in striped flannelette,alternately creaking and droning of personal intercourse beyond the grave. It makes me creepy all overto think of, and sometimes the folly of Captain John's would appear clothed in a sort of weirdutilitarianism. How useful it would be if the spirits of the departed could be induced to take apractical interest in the affairs of the living. What a help, say, to the police, for instance, in thedetection of crime. The number of murders at any rate would be considerably reduced, he guessed
02:48:29with an air of great sagacity. Then he would give way to grotesque discouragement. Where was the useof trying to communicate with people that had no faith, and more likely than not would scorn the offeredinformation. Spirits had their feelings. They were all feelings in a way. But he was surprised at theforbearance shown towards murderers by their victims. That was the sort of apparition that no guiltyman would dare to poo-poo. And perhaps the undiscovered murderers, whether believing or not,were haunted. They wouldn't be likely to boast about it, would they? For myself, he pursued in asort of vindictive, malevolent wine, if anybody murdered me, I would not let him forget. He would notget it. I would weather him up. I would terrify him to death. The idea of his skipper's ghost,
02:49:19terrifying anyone, was so ludicrous that the black mate, little disposed to mirth as he was,could not help giving vent to a weary laugh. And this laugh, the only acknowledgement of a longand earnest discourse, offended Captain John's. What's there to laugh at in this conceitedmanner, Mr Bunter, he snarled? Supernatural visitations have terrified better men than you."'Don't you allow me enough soul to make a ghost of?'"'I think it was the nasty tone that caused Bunter to stop short and turn about."'I shouldn't wonder,' went on the angry phonetic of spiritism,"'if you weren't one of them people that take no more account of a man
02:49:58"'than if he were a beast, you would be capable,"'I don't doubt, to deny the position of an immortal soul to your own father.'"'And then Bunter, being bored beyond endurance"'and also exasperated by the private worry,lost his self-possession.He walked up suddenly to Captain Johns,and stooping a little to look close into his face,said in a low, even tone,
02:50:21You don't know what a man like me is capable of.Captain John threw his head back,but was too astonished to budge.Bunter resumed his walk,and for a long time his measured footstepand the low wash of the water alongsidewere the only sounds which troubled the silencebrooding over the great waters.
02:50:39then Captain Johns cleared his throat uneasilyand after sidling away towards the companion for greater safetyplucked up enough courage to retreat under an act of authorityraise the starboard clue of the mainsail and lay the yards dead square Mr Bunterdon't you see the wind is nearly right aftBunter at once answeredAye aye sirthough there was not the slightest necessity to touch the yards
02:51:04and the wind was well out on the quarterWhile he was executing the order, Captain John's hung on the companion steps, growling to himself,Walk this poop like an admiral, and don't even notice when the yards weren't trimming,loud enough for the helmsman to overhear.Then he sank slowly backwards out of the man's sight,and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he stood still and thought,He's an awful ruffian with all his gentlemanly airs.No more gentleman-mates for me.
02:51:34Two nights afterwards he was slumbering peacefully in his berth when a heavy thumping just above his head,a well-understood signal that he was wanted on deck, made him leap out of bed, brought awake in a moment.What's up? he muttered, running out barefooted. On passing through the cabin, he glanced at the clock.It was the middle watch. What on earth can the mate want me for, he thought.Bolting out of the companion, he found a clear, dewy, moonlit night and a strong, steady,breeze. He looked around wildly. There was no one on the poop except the helmsman who addressedhim at once. It was me, sir. I let go the wheel for a second to stamp over your head. I'm afraidthere's something wrong with the mate. Where's he got to? asked the captain sharply.
02:52:21The man, it was obviously nervous, said, the last I saw of him was as he fell down the portpoop ladder. Fell down the poop ladder? What did he do that for? What made him? I don't know. INo, sir. He was walking the port side. Then, just as he turned towards me to come aft,You saw him, interrupted the captain? I did. I was looking at him, and I heard the crash, too,something awful, like the mainmast going overboard. It was as if something had struck him.Captain Johns became very uneasy and alarmed.Come, he said sharply, did anybody strike him? What did you see?Nothing, sir, so help me. There was nothing to see. He just gave a little sort of
02:53:04Hello, threw his hands before him, and over he went, crash.I couldn't hear anything more, so I'd just let go the wheel for a second to call you up.You're scared, said Captain Johns.I am, sir, straight.Captain John stared at him.The silence of his ship driving on her way seemed to contain a danger, a mystery.He was reluctant to go and look for his mate himself in the shadows of the main deck,so quiet, so still.
02:53:32All he did was to advance to the break of the poop and call for the watch.As the sleepy men came trooping aft, he shouted to them fiercely.Look at the foot of the port poop ladder, some of you.See the mate lying there?Their startled exclamations told him immediately that they did see him.Somebody even screeched out emotionally.He's dead!Mr Bunter was laid in his bunk, and when the lamp in his room was lit,
02:53:58he looked indeed as if he were dead,but it was obvious also that he was.was breathing yet. The steward had been roused out, the second mate called and sent on deckto look after the ship, and for an hour or so Captain Johns devoted himself silently to therestoring of consciousness. Mr. Bunter at last opened his eyes, but he could not speak. He wasdazed and inert. The steward bandaged a nasty scalp wound while Captain Johns held anadditional light. They had to cut away a lot of Mr. Bunter's jet black hair to make a good dressing.done, and after gazing for a while at their patient, the two left the cabin.
02:54:37"'A rum go, this, steward,' said Captain John's in the passage."'Yes, sir.'"'A sober man that's right in his head does not fall down a poop-ladder like a sack of potatoes."'The ship's as steady as a church.'"'Yes, sir. A fit of some kind, I shouldn't wonder.'"'Well, I should. He doesn't look as if he was subject to fits and giddiness."'Why, the man's in the prime of his life. I wouldn't have had another kind ofmate, not if I knew it. You don't think he has a private store of liquor, do you, eh?
02:55:07He seemed to me a bit strange in his manner several times lately. Off his feed, too, a bit, I noticed.Well, sir, if he ever had a bottle or two of grog in his cabin, that must have gone a long time ago.I saw him throw some broken glass overboard after the last gale we had, but that didn't amount toanything. Anyway, sir, you couldn't call Mr. Bunter a drinking man. No, concededthe captain reflectively. And the steward, locking the pantry door, tried to escape out of the passage,thinking he could manage to snatch another hour of sleep before it was time for him to turn outfor the day. Captain John shook his head. There's some mystery there. There's specialprovidence that he didn't crack his head like an egg-shell on the quarter-deck mooring bit, sir.
02:55:55The men tell me he couldn't have missed them by more than an inch. And the steward vanishedskillfully. Captain John spent the rest of the night and the whole of the ensuing day between hisown room and that of the mate. In his own room he sat with his open hands reposing on his knees,his lips pursed up, and the horizontal furrows on his forehead marked very heavily.Now and then, raising his arm by a slow, as if cautious movement, he scratched lightly the topof his bald head. In the mate's room he stood for long periods of time with his hand to his lips,gazing at the half-conscious man.For three days Mr Bunter did not say a single word.
02:56:36He looked at people sensibly enoughbut did not seem able to hear any questions put to him.They cut off some more of his hairand swathed his head in wet cloths.He took some nourishment and was made as comfortable as possible.At dinner on the third daythe second mate remarked to the captain in connection with the affair,these half-round brass plates on the steps of poop ladders
02:56:58are beastly dangerous things.Are they? retorted Captain John sourly.It takes more than a brass plateto account for an able-bodied mancrashing down in this fashion like a felled ox.The second mate was impressed by that view.There was something in that, he thought.And the weather fine, everything dry,
02:57:18and the ship going along as steady as a church,pursued Captain Johns gruffly.As Captain Johns continued to look extremely sour,the second mate did not open his lips,any more during the dinner. Captain Johns was annoyed and hurt by an innocent remark,because the fitting of the aforesaid brass plates had been done at his suggestion onlythe voyage before, in order to smarten up the appearance of the poop-bladders.On the fourth day Mr. Bunter looked decidedly better, very languid yet, of course,
02:57:48but he heard and understood what was said to him and even could say a few words in a feeble voice.Captain John's coming in contemplated him attentivelywithout much visible sympathyWell, can you give us an account of this accident, Mr. Bunter?Bunter moved slightly his bandaged headand fixed his cold blue stare on Captain John's faceas if taking stock and appraising the value of every featurethe perplexed forehead, the credulous eyes, the inane droop of the mouth
02:58:18and he gazed so long that Captain Johns grew restiveand looked over his shoulder at the door.No accident, breathed out Bunter in a peculiar tone.You don't mean to say you've got the falling sickness, said Captain Johns.How would you call it signing as chief mate of a clipper ship with a thing like that on you?Bunter answered him only by a sinister look.The skipper shuffled his feet a little.Well, what made you have that tumble then?
02:58:48Bunter raised himself a little, and looking straight into Captain John'seyes said in a very distinct whisper,You were right.He fell back and closed his eyes.Not a word more could Captain Johns get out of him,and the steward coming into the cabin, the skipper withdrew.But that very night, unobserved,Captain Johns, opening the door cautiously,
02:59:12entered again the mate's cabin.He could wait no longer.The suppressed eagerness, the excitement expressed in all his mean,creeping little person, did not escape.The Cape the chief mate, who was lying awake, looking frightfully, pulled down and perfectly impassive.You're coming to gloat over me, I suppose, said Banta without moving, and yet making a palpable hit.Bless my soul! exclaimed Captain Johns with a start, and assuming a sober demeanour.That's a thing to say.
02:59:44Well, gloat then. You and your ghosts, you've managed to get over a live man.This was said by Banta without stirring in a low voice and with not much expression.Do you mean to say, inquired Captain John's in awestruck whisper,that you had a supernatural experience that night?You saw an apparition then on board my ship.Reluctance, shame, disgust would have been visible on poor Buntas's countenanceif the great part of it had not been swathed up in cotton wool and bandages.His ebony eyebrows more scy eyebrows more scorn.
03:00:19sinister than ever amongst all that lot of white linen, came together in a frown as he made a mightyeffort to say, yes, I have seen. The wretchedness in his eyes would have awakened the compassion of anyother man than Captain Johns. But Captain Johns was all agog with triumphant excitement. He was justa little bit frightened, too. He looked at that unbelieving scoffer laid low, and did not evendimly guess at his profound humiliating distress. He was not generally capable of taking much partin the anguish of his fellow creatures. This time, moreover, he was excessively anxious to know whathad happened. Fixing his credulous eyes on the bandaged head, he asked, trembling slightly,and did it knock you down? Come, am I the sort of man to be knocked down by a ghost,
03:01:12protested buntar in a little stronger tone? Don't you remember?what you said yourself the other night?Better men than me?Ah, you'll have to looka long time before you find a better manfor a mate of your ship.Captain Johns pointeda solemn finger at Bunter's bed place.
03:01:31You've beenterrified, he said. That's what'sthe matter. You've been terrified.Why, even the manat the wheel was scared, though he couldn't seeanything. He felt thesupernatural. You arepunished for your incredulity,
03:01:46Mr Banta. You were terrified.And suppose I was, said Bunter.Do you know what I have seen?Can you conceive the sort of ghost that would haunt a man like me?Do you think it was a ladyish afternoon call,another cup of tea, please, apparition that visit your Professor Cranksand that journalist chap you're always talking about?No, I can tell you what it was like.
03:02:12Every man has his own ghosts.You couldn't conceive.Bunter stopped out of breath, and Captain John's remarked with the glow of inward satisfaction reflected in his tone,"'I've always thought that you were the sort of man that was ready for anything,from pitch and toss to willful murder as the saying goes.Well, well, so you were terrified.'"'I stepped back,' said Bunter curtly."'I don't remember anything else.'
03:02:40"'The man at the wheel told me you went backwards as if something had hit you.'It was a sort of inward blow, explained Bunter.Something too deep for you, Captain Johns, to understand.Your life and mine haven't been the same.Aren't you satisfied to see me converted?And you can't tell me any more? asked Captain Johns anxiously.No, I can't. I wouldn't.There would be no use if I did.
03:03:10That sort of experience must be gone through.Say I am being punished.Well, I take my punishment, but talk of it I won't.Very well, said Captain Johns, you won't.But mind, I can draw my conclusions from that.Draw what you like, but be careful what you say, sir.You don't terrify me, you aren't a ghost.One word.
03:03:35Has it any connection with what you said to me on that last nightwhen we had a talk together on spiritualism?Bunter looked weary and puzzled.What did I say?You told me that I couldn't know what a man like you was capable of.Yes, yes, enough.Very good, I am fixed then, remarked Captain Johns.All I say is that I am jolly glad not to be you,
03:04:01though I would have given almost anythingfor the privilege of personal communication with the world of spirits.Yes, sir, but not in that way.Paul Buntar moaned pitifullyand has made me feel 20 years olderCaptain Johns retired quietlyHe was delighted to observe this overbearing ruffianhumbled to the dust by the moralising agency of the spirits
03:04:26The whole occurrence was a source of pride and gratificationAnd he began to feel a sort of regard for his chief mateIt is true that in further interviewsBunter showed himself very mild and deferentialHe seemed to cling to his captain for spiritual protection.He used to send for him and say,I feel so nervous,and Captain Johns would stay patiently for hours in the hot little cabin
03:04:50and feel proud of the call.For Mr Bunter was ill,and could not leave his birth for a good many days.He became a convinced spiritualist,not enthusiastically,that could hardly have been expected from him,but in a grim, unshakable way.He could not be called exactly,
03:05:08friendly friendly to the disembodied habitants of our globe as Captain Johns was,but he was now a firm, if gloomy, recruit of spiritualism.One afternoon, as the ship was already well to the north of the Gulf of Bengal,the steward knocked at the door of the captain's cabin and said without opening it,The mate asks if he could spare him a moment, sir. He seems to be an estate in there.Captain Johns jumped up from the couch at once. Yes, tell him I'm coming.He thought, could it be possible there had been another spiritual manifestation in the daytime, too?He reveled in the hope. It was not exactly that, however. Still, Banta, whom he saw sitting
03:05:51collapsed in a chair, he had been up for several days, but not on deck as yet. Poor Bunter hadsomething startling enough to communicate. His hands covered his face. His legs were stretchedstraight out dismally."'What's the news now?'"'Croaked Captain Johns, not unkindly,"'because in truth it always pleased him to see Bunter,"'as he expressed it, tamed."'News!' exclaimed the crushed skeptic through his hands.
03:06:19"'Aye, news enough, Captain Johns."'Who will be able to deny the awfulness, the genuineness?'"'Another man would have dropped dead."'You want to know what I had seen?"'All I can tell you is that since I've seen it,"'my hair is turning white.'Bunda detached his hands from his face, and they hung on each side of his chair as if dead.He looked broken in the dusky cabin.
03:06:44You don't say, stammered out Captain Johns.Turned white. Hold on a bit. I'll light the lamp.When the lamp was lit, the startling phenomenon could be seen plain enough.As if the dread, the horror, the anguish of the supernatural were being exhaled through the paws of his skin,a sort of silvery mist seemed to cling to the cheeks,and the head of the mate. His short beard, his cropped hair, were growing, not black, but grey,almost white. When Mr. Bunter, thin-faced and shaky, came on deck for duty, he was clean-shavenand his head was white. The hands were all struck. Another man, they whispered to each other.
03:07:27It was generally and mysteriously agreed that the mate had seen something, with the exception of the manat the wheel at the time, who maintained that the mate was struck by something.This distinction hardly amounted to a difference. On the other hand, everybody admitted that,after he picked up his strength a bit, he seemed even smarter in his movements than before.One day in Calcutta, Captain Johns, pointing out to a visitor his white-headed chief matestanding by the main hatch, was heard to say, irracularly,that man's in the prime of life. Of course, while Buntar was away,I called regularly on Mrs Bunter every Saturday
03:08:05just to see whether she had any use for my services.It was understood I would do that.She had just his half pay to live onthat amounted to about a pound a week.She had taken one room and acquired little square in the East End.And this was affluence to what I had heardthat the couple were reduced to for a timeafter Bunter had to give up the Western Ocean trade.
03:08:27He used to go as mate of all sorts of hard packetsafter he lost his ship and his luck together.It was affluence at that time when Bunter would start at seven o'clock in the morningwith but a glass of hot water and a crust of dry bread.It won't stand thinking about, especially for those who know Mrs. Bunter.I had seen something of them too at that time,and it just makes me shudder to remember what that born lady had to put up with.Mnuff!
03:08:54Dear Mrs. Bunter used to worry a good deal after the Sapphire left for Calcutta.She would say to me,It must be so awful for poor Winston.Winston is Banta's name,and I tried to comfort her the best I could.Afterwards she got some small children to teach in a familyand was half the day with them,and the occupation was good for her.
03:09:16In the very first letter she had from Calcutta,Banta told her he had had a fall down the poop ladderand cut his head, but no bones broken, thank God.And that was all.Of course she had other letters from him.but that vagabond buntar never gave me a scratch of the pen the solid eleven months.I supposed, naturally, that everything was going on all right.Who could imagine what was happening?
03:09:41Then one day, dear Mrs Bunter got a letter from a legal firm in the city,advising her that her uncle was dead,her old curmudgeon of an uncle, a retired stockbroker,a heartless, petrified antiquity that had lasted on and on.He was nearly 90, I believe,and if I were to meet his venerable ghost this minute I would try to take him by the throat and strangle him.The old beast would never forgive his niece for marrying Banta,and years afterwards when people made a point of letting him know that she was in London,
03:10:12pretty nearly starving at 40 years of age, he only said,Serve the little fool right.I believe he meant her to starve,and lo and behold, the old cannibal died in testate,with no other relatives but that very identical little fool.The Buntas were wealthy people now.Of course, Mrs Bunter wept as if her heart would break.In any other woman it would have been mere hypocrisy.
03:10:37Naturally, too, she wanted to cable the news to her Winston in Calcutta,but I showed her, gazette in hand, that the ship was on the homeward-bound list for more than a week already.So we sat down to wait and talked meantime of dear old Winston every day.There were just 100 such days before the Sapphire got reported,well in the chops of the channel by an incoming mailboat.I'm going to Dunkirk to meet him, says she.The sapphire had a cargo of jute for Dunkirk.Of course I had to escort the dear lady in the quality of her ingenious friend.
03:11:14She calls me our ingenious friend to this day,and I've observed some people, strangers, looking hard at mefor the signs of the ingenuity, I suppose.After settling Mrs. Bunter in a good hotel in Duncirk,I walked down to the docks, late afternoon it was,and what was my surprise to see the ship actually fast alongside?Either John's or Bunter or both must have been driving her hard up channel.Anyway, she had been in since the day before last,
03:11:43and her crew was already paid off.I met two of her apprenticed boys going off home on leavewith their dunnage on a Frenchman's barrow, as happy as larks,and I asked them if the mate was on board.There he is, on the key, looking at the morrow.says one of the youngsters as he skipped past me.He may imagine the shock to my feelings when I beheld his white head.I could only manage to tell him that his wife was at an hotel in town.
03:12:10He left me at once to go and get his hat on board.I was mightily surprised by the smartness of his movements as he hurried up the gangway.Whereas the blackmate struck people as deliberate and strangely stately in his gate for a man in the prime of life,this white-headed chap seemed the most wonderfully alert of old men.I don't suppose Bunter was any quicker on his pins than before,it was the colour of the hair that made all the difference in one's judgment.The same with the eyes.Those eyes that looked at you so steely, so fierce and so fascinating
03:12:43out of a bush of a buccaneer's black hairnow had an innocent, almost boyish expressionin their good-humoured brightness under those white eyebrows.I led him without any delay into Mrs Buntar's private sitting-room.After she had dropped a tear over the late cannibal,given a hug to her Winston,and told him that he must grow his moustache again,the dear lady tucked her feet upon the sofa,
03:13:07and I got out of Buntar's way.He started at once to pace the room, waving his long arms.He worked himself into a regular frenzy,and tore John's limb from limb many times over that evening.Failed down.Of course I fell down by slipping backwards on that fool's patent brass plates.Upon my word, I'd been walking that poop in charge of the ship,and I didn't know whether I was in the Indian Ocean or in the moon.
03:13:33I was crazy.My head spun round and round with sheer worry.I had made my last application of your chemist's wonderful stuff.This, to me, all the store of bottles you gave me got smashed when those drawers fell out in the last gale.I had been getting some dry things to change when I heard the...cry, all hands on deck, and made one jump of it without even pushing them in properly.Ass, when I came back and saw the broken glass and the mess, I felt ready to faint.No, look here, deception is bad, but not to be able to keep it up after one has been forced
03:14:08into it. You know that since I've been squeezed out of the Western Ocean packets by youngermen, just on account of my grizzled muzzle, you know how much chance I had to ever get a ship,and not a soul to turn to.We've been a lonely couple, we too.She threw away everything for me,and to see her want a piece of dry bread.He banged with his fist,fit to split the Frenchman's table in two.
03:14:33I would have turned into a sanguineary piratefor her, let alone cheating my way into a berth by dyeing my hair.So when you came to me with your chemist's wonderful stuff,he checked himself.By the way, that fellow's got a fortunewhen he likes to pick it up. It is a wonderful stuff. You tell him saltwater can do nothing to it.It stays on as long as your hair will. All right, I said, go on. Thereupon he went for Johns againwith a fury that frightened his wife and made me laugh till I cried. Just you try to think what it
03:15:07would have meant to be at the mercy of the meanest creature that ever commanded a ship. Just fancywhat a life that crawling Johns would have led me. And I knew that in a week or so the white hair wouldbegin to show, and the crew, did you ever think of that? To be shown up as a low fraud before allhands? What a life for me till we got to Calcutta. And once there, kicked out, of course,half pay stopped. Annie here alone without a penny, starving, an eye on the other side of theearth, ditto, you see? I thought of shaving twice a day, but could I shave my head too? No way,no way at all, unless I dropped John's overboard, and even then.Do you wonder now that with all these things boiling in my head I didn't know where I was putting my foot that night?
03:15:56I just felt myself falling, then crash, and all dark.When I came to myself, that bang on the head seemed to have steadied my wit somehow.I was so sick of everything that for two days I wouldn't speak to anyone.They thought it was a slight concussion of the brain.Then the idea dawned upon meAs I was looking at that ghost-ridden, wretched foolAh, you love ghosts, I thoughtWell, you shall have something from beyond the grave.
03:16:26I didn't even trouble to invent a story.I couldn't imagine a ghost if I wanted to.I wasn't fit to lie connectedly if I had tried.I just bullied him on to it.Do you know, he got quite by himself,a notion that at some time or otherI had done somebody to death in some way,and that, oh, the horrible man, cried Mrs. Bunter from the sofa.
03:16:48There was silence.And didn't he bore my head off on the home passage?Began Bunter again in a weary voice.He loved me, he was proud of me.I was converted.I had had a manifestation.Do you know what he was after?He wanted me and him to make a seance in his own words
03:17:08and to try to call up that ghost,the one that had turned my hair white,the ghost of my supposed victim,and as he said,talk it over with him, the ghost,in a friendly way.Or else Bunter, he says,you may get another manifestation
03:17:23when you least expect itand tumble overboard, perhaps, or something.You ain't really safetill we pacify the spirit world in some way.Can you conceive a lunatic like that?No? Say.I said nothing,but Mrs. Bunter did in a very decided tone.
03:17:42"'Winston, I don't want you to go on board that ship again any more.'"'My dear,' says he,"'I have all my things on board yet."'You don't want the things. Don't go near that ship at all.'He stood still, then, drooping his eyes with a faint smile, said slowly in a dreamy voice,"'The haunted ship."'And your last,' I added."'We carried him off as he stood by the night train.
03:18:09"'He was very quiet, but crossing the channel,as we two had a smoke on deck,he turned to me suddenly,and grinding his teeth, whispered,He'll never know how near he wasto being dropped overboard.He meant Captain Johns.I said nothing.
03:18:25But Captain Johns, I understand,made a great to do about the disappearanceof his chief mate.He set the French police scouring the countryfor the body.In the end, I fancy he got wordfrom his owner's officeto drop all the fuss.
03:18:38That was all right.I don't suppose he ever understood.understood anything of that mysterious occurrence.To this day he tries at times,he's retired now and his conversation is not very coherent,he tries to tell the story of a black mate he once had,a murderer's gentlemanly ruffian with raven black hairwhich turned white all at once in consequence of a manifestation from beyond the grave.
03:19:03An avenging apparition.What with reference to black and white hair,to poop ladders and to his own feelings and views,it is difficult to make head or tail of it.If his sister, she's very vigorous still, should be present,she cuts all this short, peremptorily.Don't you mind what he says.He's got devils on the brain.
03:19:26End of the Black Mate, 1884.End of Tales of Hearsay by Joseph Conrad.
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