Classic Audiobook Collection - The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad audiobook. Genre: drama In this psychologically charged, letter-driven novella by Joseph Conrad (in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford), an unnamed lawyer sets down a private record that is part love letter, part confession, and part argument with his own conscience. Over a handful of tense days in early 20th century England, he writes to a woman he desires but cannot openly claim, even as another, darker secret tightens around him: he has abused a position of trust, gambling away money placed under his care through his power of attorney for a young man, Edward Burden, whose future depends on the very funds now at risk. With indictment and disgrace looming, the narrator dissects his choices with ruthless intelligence and startling self-justification, weighing honor against survival, freedom against imprisonment, and remorse against pride. As his correspondence grows more urgent, the book becomes a close study of how a respectable life can fracture from the inside, and how a single hidden act can warp love into obsession and duty into betrayal. Is the real crime the deed itself, or the evasions that follow? For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:10:59) Chapter 01 (00:33:48) Chapter 02 (00:43:11) Chapter 03 (00:48:13) Chapter 04 (01:03:49) Chapter 05 (01:20:09) Chapter 06 (01:36:21) Chapter 07 (01:46:44) Chapter 08 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Section 0 Preface by Joseph Conrad For years, my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost. If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to my notice by my collaborator. I always regarded it as something in the nature of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover that it was rounded.

But I need not have been, rounded as it is in form, using the word form in its simplest sense, printed form. It remains yet a fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. it could never have become anything else. And even as a fragment, it is but a fragment of something that might have been, of a mere intention. But as it stands, what impresses me most is the amount this fragment contains of the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its origin, the time when the English Review was founded.

It emerges from the depth of a past as distant, from us now as the square-skirted long frock-coats in which unscrupulous cultivated, high-minded juicer like ours here attended to their strange business activities, and cultivated the little blue flower sentiment. No doubt our man was conceived for purposes of irony, but our conception of him, I fear, is too fantastic. Yet, the most fantastic thing of all, as it seems to me, is that we too, who had so often discussed soberly the limits and the methods

of literary composition, should have believed for a moment that a piece of work in the nature of an analytical confession, produced inarticulo mortis, as it were, could have been developed and achieved in collaboration. What optimism! But it did not last long. I seem to remember a moment when I burst into earnest entreaties that all those people should be thrown overboard without much ado. This, I believe, is the real nature of the crime. Overboard.

The neatness and dispatch with which it is done in Chapter 8 were wholly the act of my collaborator's good nature in the face of my panic. After signing these few prefatory words, I will pass the pen to him in the hope that he may be moved to contradict. me on every point of fact, impression, and appreciation. I said the hope. Yes, eager hope, for it would be delightful to catch the echo of a desperate, earnest, eloquent, and funny quarrels

which enlivened those old days. The pity of it that there comes a time when all the fun of one's life must be looked for in the past. June 1924. Preface. By Ford Maddox Hofer. No, I find nothing to contradict. For the existence of this story, having been recalled to my mind by a friend, the details of its birth and its attendant circumstances remained for me completely forgotten, a dark, blind spot on the brain. I cannot remember the houses in which the writing took place, the view from the windows, the pen, a tablecloth. At a given point in my life, I forgot, literally, all the books I had ever written. But if nowadays I reread one of them, though I possess next to none and ever re-read few,

nearly all the phrases come back startlingly to my memory, and I see glimpses of Kent, of Sussex, of Carcasson, of New York even, and fragments of furniture, mirrors, who knows what, so that if I didn't happen to retain almost by a miracle from me of retention, the marked-up copy of romance from which was made the analysis lately published in a certain periodical, I am certain that I could have identified the phrases exactly as they stand. Looking at the book now, I can hear our voices as we read one passage or another aloud, for purposes of correction. Moreover, I could say,

this passage was written in Kent and hammered over in Sussex. This written in Sussex and worked on in Kent. Or this again was written in the downstairs cafe and hammered in the sitting room on the first floor of an hotel that faces the sea on the Belgian coast.

But of the nature of a crime, no phrase at all suggests either the tones of a voice or the color of a day. when an old friend last year on a parisian boulevard said isn't there a story by yourself and collaborator buried in the so-and-so i repudiated the idea with a great deal of heat eventually i had to admit thee as it were dead fact and having admitted that to myself and my collaborator having corroborated it i was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story republished in a definite and acknowledged form. One may care infinitely little for the fate of one's work,

and yet be almost hypochondriically anxious as to the form its publication shall take, if the publication is likely to occur posthumously. I became at once dreadfully afraid that some philologist of that posterity for which one writes might in the course of his hyena occupation disinter these poor bones, and attributing sentence one to writer A and sentence two to B, more at least one of our memories.

With the nature of those crimes, one is only too well acquainted. Besides, though one may never read comments one desires to get them over, it is indeed agreeable to hear a storm rage in the distance and rumble eventually away. let me however since my collaborator wishes it and in the name of fun that is today hardly an echo differ from him for a shade as to the nature of those passages of time i protest against the word quarrels there were not any and i should like to make the note that our collaboration was almost purely oral we wrote and read aloud the one to the other possibly in the end we even wrote we even wrote to read aloud the one to the other, for it strikes me very forcibly, but the nature of a crime is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type. Anyhow, as the memory comes back to me overwhelmingly, I would read on and read on.

One begins with a fine propulsion. Sometimes that would last to the end, but as often as not by a real telepathy. with my eyes on the page and my voice going on, I would grow aware of an exaggerated stillness on the part of my collaborator in the shadows. It was an extraordinary kind of stillness, not of death, not of an ice age. Yes, it was the stillness of a prisoner on the rack

determined to conceal an agony. I would read on my voice gradually sticking to my jaws. When it became unbearable, I glance up. On the other side of the hearth, I would have a glimpse of a terribly sick man, of a convulsed face, of fingers contorted. Yido-forks beneath the pen-forteur looked like that. You are to remember that we were very serious about writing.

I would read on, after a long time it would come, Oh, oh. oh my god my dear ford my dear falla that in those days was the fashionable pronunciation of fellow for myself i would listen always with admiration always with an admiration that i have never since recaptured and if there were admirableness that did not seem to me to fit in with the given scene i could at least at the end of the reading say with perfect sincerity Wonderful. How you do things, before beginning on. But don't you perhaps think? And I really do not believe that either my collaborator or myself ever made an objection, which was not jointly sustained.

That's not quarrels. When I last looked through the bound proofs of romance, I was struck with the fact that, whereas my collaborator eliminated almost every word of action, and 80% of the conversations by myself, I supplied almost all the descriptive passages of the really collaborated parts, and such softer sentiment as was called for. And my collaborator let them get through. All this took place long ago, most of it in another century, during another rain,

Wilson earlier, but not less haughty and proud generation, were passing away. End of Section Zero, read by Mark Leder. Chapter 1 of The Nature of a Crime This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. read by mark leader the nature of a crime by joseph conrad and ford maddox ford chapter one you are i suppose by now in rome it is very curious how present to me are both rome and yourself there is a certain hill you and that is a curious part of it will never go there yet that yesterday, late in the evening, I stood upon its summit, and you came walking from a place below.

It is always midday there. The seven pillars of the forum stand on high. Their capitals link together and form one angle of a square. At their bases there lie some detritus, a broken marble lion, and I think, but I am not certain, the bronze she will, suckling but two bronze children. Your dress brushed the herbs. It was gray and tenuous. I suppose you do not know how you look when you are unconscious of being looked at, but I looked at you for a long time, at my hue. I saw your husband yesterday at the club, and he said that you would not be returning till the end of April. When I got back to my chambers, I found a certain level.

I'll tell you about it afterwards, but I forbid you to look at the end of what I am writing now. There's a piece of news coming. I would break it to you if I could, but there's no way of breaking the utterly unexpected. Only, if you read this through, you will gather from a tenor, from the tone of my thoughts, a little inkling, a small preparation for my disclosure. Yes, it is a disclosure. briefly then it was this letter a business letter that set me thinking that made that hill rise before me yes i stood upon it and there before me lay rome beneath a haze in the immense sea of plains i have often thought of going to rome of going with you in a leisurely autumn of your life and mine now since i have received that letter i know that i shall not never see any other room than that from an imagined hilltop. And when in the wonderful light and shadelessness of that noon, last evening, you came from a

grove of silver poplars. I looked at you, my you, for a very long while. You had, I think, a parasol behind your head. You moved slowly, you looked up at the capitals of those seven pillars. and I thought that I should never, since you will not return before the end of April. Never see you again. I shall never see again the you that every other man sees. You understand everything so well that already you must understand the nature of my disclosure. It is, of course, no disclosure to tell you that I love you. A very great reverence is due to youth.

and a very great latitude is due to the dead, for I am dead. I have only lived through you for how many years now, and I shall never speak with you again. Some sort of burial will have been given to me before the end of April. I am a spirit. I have ended my relations with the world. I have balanced all my books. My will is made.

Only I have nothing to leave. save to you, to whom I leave all that is now mine in the world. My memory. It's very curious, the world now. I walked slowly down here from Gordon Square. I walked slowly, for all my work is done. On the way I met Graydon Banks, the K.C. It would have astonished him if he could have known how unreal he looked to me.

He's six feet high, and upon his left cheek there is a brown, mole. I found it difficult to imagine why he existed. And all sorts of mists hurried past him. It was just outside the Natural History Museum. He said that his Seaford railway bill would come before committee in June. And I wondered, what is June? I laughed and thought, Why, June will never come. June will never come. Imagine that for a moment. We have. We have discussed the ethics of suicide. You see why June will never come. You remember that ring I always wear, the one with a bulging greenish stone? Once or twice, you've asked me what stone it was. You thought I know that it was in bad taste, and I told you I wore it for the sake of associations.

I know you thought, but no, there has never been any woman but you. You must have felt a long time but there was not, that there could not have been another woman. The associations of the ring are not with the past of a finished affection, or hate, or passion to all these forms of unrest that have a term in life. They looked forward to where there is no end. Whether there is rest in it, God only knows. If it were not bad taste to use big words and extremities, I would say there was eternity in the ring.

eternity which is the negation of all that life may contain of losses and disappointments. Perhaps you've noticed that there was one note in our confidence that never responded to your touch. It was that note of universal negation contained within the glass film of the ring. It is not you who brought the ring into my life. I had it made years ago. It was in my nature always to anticipate. a touch on my shoulder, to which the only answer could be an act of defiance. And the ring is my weapon. I shall raise it to my teeth, bite through the glass. Inside there is poison. I haven't concealed anything from you, have I? And with the great

wisdom for which I love you, you've tolerated these other things. You would have tolerated this too you who have met so many sinners and have never sinned. Ah, my dear one, that is why I have so loved you. From our two poles we've met upon one common ground of skepticism, so that I am not certain whether it was you or I who first said, believe nothing, be harsh to no one. But at least we have suffered. One does not drag around with one such a cannonball as I. I have done all these years without thinking some wise thoughts. And well, I know that in your dreary and terrible life, you've gained your great wisdom. You have been envied.

You too have thought. Is any prospect fair to those among its trees? And I have been envied for my gifts, for my talents, for my wealth, for my official position, for the letters after my name, for my great. and empty house for my taste in pictures, for my opportunities. Great criminals and the very patient learn one common lesson. Believe in nothing, be harsh to no one. But you cannot understand how immensely leisurely I feel.

It's one o'clock at night. I cannot possibly be arrested before eleven tomorrow morning. i have ten hours in which without the shadow of a doubt i can write to you i can put down my thoughts to sultorily and lazily i have half a score hours in which to speak to you the stress of every secret emotion makes for sincerity in the end silence is like a dam when the flood is at its highest the dam gives way i am not conceited enough to think that i can sweep you along terrified in the rush of my confidences. I have not the elemental force. Perhaps it is just that form of greatness that I've lacked all my life, that profound quality which the Italians call terabilitia. There is nothing overpowering or terrible in the confession of a love too great to be kept within the bounds of the banality, which is the safeguard of our daily life.

men have been nerved to crime for the sake of a love that was theirs. The call of every great passion is to unlawfulness. But your love was not mine, and my love for you was vitiated by that conventional reverence, which as to nine parts in ten is genuine, but as to the last tenth, a solemn sham, behind which hide all the timidities of a humanity no longer in its youth. I have been of my time, altogether of my time, lacking courage for a swoop as a bird respects a ragged and nerveless scarecrow. Altogether, a man of my time.

Observe, I do not say our time, you are of all time, you are the loved woman of the first cry that broke the silence, and of the last song that shall mark the end. of this ingenious world to which love and suffering have been given, but which has in the course of ages invented for itself all the virtues and all the crimes. And being of this world and of my time, I have set myself to deal ingeniously with my suffering and my love. Now everything is over, even regrets. Nothing remains a finite things but a few days of life and my confession to make to you, to you alone of all the world.

It is difficult. How am I to begin? Would you believe it? Every time I left your presence, it was with the desire, with the necessity to forget you. Would you believe it? This is the great secret, the heart of my confession. but distance did not count. No walls could make me safe, no solitude could defend me,

and having no faith in the consolations of eternity, I suffer too cruelly from your absence. If there had been kingdoms to conquer, a crusade to preach, but no, I should not have had the courage to go beyond the sound of your voice. You might have called to me any time. You never did. Never.

And now it is too late. Moreover, I am a man of my time. The time is not of great deeds, but of colossal speculations. The moments when I was not with you had to be got through somehow. I dared not face them empty-handed, less from sheer distress I should go mad and begin to execrate you. Action? What form of action could remove me far enough from?

you, whose every thought was referred to your existence. And as you were to me a soul of truth and serenity, I tried to forget you in lies and excitement. My only refuge from a tyranny of my desire was in abasement. Perhaps I was mad. I gambled. I gambled first with my own money, and then with money that was not mine. You know my connections with the great burdened fortune. I was trustee under my friends Alexander Burden's will. I gambled with a determined recklessness, with closed eyes. You understand now the origin of my houses, of my collections, of my reputation, of my taste for magnificence, which you deigned sometimes to mock indulgently,

with an exquisite flattery, as at something not quite, quite worthy of me. It was like a breakneck ride on a wild horse, and now the fall has come. It was sudden. I am alive, but my back is broken. Edward Burden is going to be married. I must pay back what I've borrowed from the trust. I cannot. Therefore, I am dead. A mouse has just come out from beneath one of the deedbox. It looks up at me. It may have been eating some of the papers in the large cupboard. Tomorrow morning, I shall tell Saunders to get a cat.

I have never seen a mouse here before. I have never been here so late before. At times of pressure, as you know, I have always taken my papers home, so that these late hours have been, as it were, the prerogative of the mouse. no i shall not get a cat to that extent i am still a part of the world i am master of the fate of mice i have then ten hours lest the time it has taken me to chronicle the mouse in which to talk to you it's strange when i look back on it that in all the years we have known each other seven years three months and two days. I have never had so long as ten hours in which I might talk to you. The longest time was when we came back from Paris together. When your husband was in such a state that he could neither see nor hear.

I've seen him, by the by, every day since you've been gone. He's really keeping away from it wonderfully well. In fact, I should say that he is not once actually succumbed. I fancy really that your absence is good for him in a way. It creates a new set of circumstances, and a change is said to be excellent aid in the breaking of the habit. He has, I mean, to occupy himself with some of the things innumerable as they are that you do for him. I find that he has even had his pass-book from the bank, and has compared it with his counterfoils. I haven't on account of this improvement yet been around to his chemists,

but I shall certainly tell them that they must surreptitiously decrease the strength of it. That was the longest time we have ever really talked together. And when I think that in all these years I haven't once so much has held your hand for a moment longer than the strictest of etiquette demanded. And I loved you within the first month. I wonder why that is. fancy perhaps habit perhaps a kind of idealism a kind of delicacy a fastidiousness as you know very well it is not on account of any moral scruples i break off to look through what i have already written to you there is first the question of why i never told you my secret then the question of what my secret really is i have started so many of what my secret really is i have started so many

many questions that have not followed one of them out to the very end. But all questions resolve themselves into the one question of our dear and inestimable relationship. I think it has been one of the great charms of our relationship that all our talks have been just talks. We have discussed everything under the sun, but we have never discussed anything or phone. We have strayed into all sorts of books.

byways and have never got anywhere. I try to remember how many evenings in the last five years we have not spent together. I think they must be less than a hundred in number. You know how occasionally your husband would wake out of his stupors, or walk in his stupor and deliver one of his astonishingly brilliant disquisitions. But remember how always, whether he talked of free love or the improvement in the breed of carriage horses, how he always thrashed his subject out to the bitter end. It was not living with a man, it was assisting at a performance.

And when he was sunk into his drugs or when he was merely literary, or when he was away, how lazily we talked. I think no two minds were ever so fitted one into another as yours and mine. It is not, of course, that we agree on all subjects, or perhaps upon any. in the whole matter of conduct we are so absolutely different. You are always for circumspection, for a careful preparation of the ground, for patience, and I am always ready to act, and afterwards draw the moral from my own actions.

But somehow, in the end, it is all worked out in our being in perfect agreement. Later I will tell you why that is. Let me return to my mouse, for you will observe that the whole question revolves really around that little allegorical might. It is an omen, it is a symbol, it is a little herald of the providence that I do not believe in, of the providence you so implicitly seek to obey,

for instinctively you believe in. Providence, in God, if you will. I as instinctively disbelieve. Intellectually, of course, you disbelieve in a God. You say that it is impossible for reason to accept an overlord. I, that reason forces want to accept an overlord. I, that reason forces want to believe in an omnipotent ruler. Only I am unable to believe. We, my dear, are in our ourselves evidence of a design and creation, for we are the last word of creation. It has taken all the efforts, all the birth pangs of all the ages to evolve, you and me. And being evolved, we are intellectually, so perfectly and so divinely fashioned to dovetail together.

And physically, too, are we not divinely meant the one for the other? Do we not react to the same causes? Should not we survive the same hardships or succumb to the same stresses? Since you've been away, I've gone looking for people. Men, women, children, even animals. That could hold my attention for a minute. There has not been one. And what purer evidence of design could you ask for than that?

I have made this pact with the providence that I argue for, with the providence in whose existence I cannot believe. that if from under the castle of black metal boxes the mouse reappears and challenges death, then there is no future state. And since I can find no expressions save in you, if we are not reunited, I shall no longer exist. So my mouse is the sign, the arbitrament, a symbol of an eternal life or the herald of nothingness.

will make to you the confession that since this fancy, this profound truth has entered my mind, I have not raised my eyes from the paper. I dread. I suppose it is dread, to look across the ring of light that my lamp casts. But now I will do so. I will let my eyes travel across the bundles of dusty papers on my desk. Do you know I have left them just as they were, the day when you came to ask me to take your railway tickets? I will let my eyes travel across that rampart of blue and white dockets. The mouse is not there.

But that is not an end of it. I am not a man to be ungenerous in my dealings with the omnipotent. I snatch no verdict. End of chapter one. Read by Mark Leader. Chapter 2 of The Nature of a Crime. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, visit Libravox.org. Read by Mark Leder. The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Chapter 2 Last night, it was very late, and I grew tired. So I broke off my letter. Perhaps I was really afraid of seeing that mouse again. Those minute superstitions are curious things.

I noticed when I looked at the enumeration of these pages tonight, I began to write upon the 13th sheet, and that gives me a vague dissatisfaction. I read, by the by, a paragraph in the newspaper. It dealt with half-mad authors. One of these the writer said was Zola. He was stated to be half mad because he added together the numbers on the backs of cabs passing him in the street. Personally, I do that again and again, and I know very well that I do it in order to dull my mind.

It is a sort of narcotic. Johnson, we know, touched his street posts in a certain order. That, too, was to escape from miserable thoughts. And we all know how, as children, we have obeyed mysterious promptings to step upon the lines between the paving stones in the street. But the children have their futures. It is well that they should propitiate the mysterious omnipotent one. In their day, too, Johnson and Zola had their futures. It was well that Johnson should touch against the evil chance, that Zola should rest his mind against new problems.

In me it is mere imbecility, for I have no future. Do you find it difficult to believe that? You know the burdens, of course, but I think you do not know that for the last nine years I have administered the burden estates all by myself. The original trustees were old Lady Burden and I, but nine years ago Lady Burden gave me a power of attorney, and since then I have acted alone. It was just before then that I had bought the houses in Gordon Square,

the one I live in, the one you live in, and the seven others. Well, rightly speaking, those houses have been bought with burden money and all my pictures, all my prints, all my books, my furniture, my reputation is a connoisseur, my governorship of the two charities. all the me that people envy have been bought with the burden money. I assure you that at times I have found it a pleasurable excitement. You see, I have wanted you sometimes so terribly, so terribly that the juggling with the burdened accounts

has been as engrossing a narcotic as to Zola was the adding up of the numbers upon the backs of cabs. Mere ordinary work would never have held my thought. Under old Burden's will, young Edward Burden comes of age when he reaches the age of 25 or when he marries with my consent. Well, he will reach the age of 25 and he will marry on April 5. On that day, the solicitors of his future wife will make their scrutiny of my accounts. It is regarded, you understand, as a mere formality. But it amuses me to think of the faces of Coke and Coke when they come to certain figures.

It was an outlaw of some sort, was it not, who danced and sang beneath the gallows? I wonder now what sort of traitor, outlaw, or stealthy politician I should have made in the Middle Ages. It is certain that, save for this one particular of property, I should be in very truth, illustrious. No doubt the state shall come at last, in which there shall no more be any property. I was born before my time. For it is certain that I am illustrious, save in that one respect. Today, young Edward Burton came to the office to introduce me to his fiancée. You observe that I have robbed her.

The burden property is really crippled. They came, this bright young couple, to get a check from me with which, to purchase a motor car. They are to try several cars in the next three weeks. On the day before the wedding, they are to choose one that will suit them best. And on the wedding day, in the evening, they are to start for Italy. They will be coming towards you. Then no doubt, too, a telegram will reach them to say that in all probability motor cars will be things not for them for several years to come. What a crumbling of their lives. It was odd how I felt towards her. You know his pompous high far and the shine all over him, the grave, weighty manner. He held his hat, a wonderful, shiny,

good hat, before his mouth for all the world as if he had been in church. He made even a speech in introducing Miss Avery's to me. You see, in a sense, he was in a temple. My office enshrined a deity, a divinity, the law, property, the rights of man is maintained by an august constitution. I am for him such a wonderfully safe man. My dear one, you cannot imagine how I feel towards him. A little like a deity, a little like an avenging,

Providence. I imagine that the real deity must feel towards some of his worshippers, much as I feel towards this phoenix of the divines. The deity is, after all, the supreme artist, and the supreme quality of art is surprise. Imagine then the feeling of a deity towards some of those who most confidently enter his temple. Just imagine his attitude towards those who deal in the obvious platitudes that honesty is the best policy, or genius, the capacity for taking pains. So for days the world appears to them. Then suddenly, honesty no longer pays. The creature amassing with his infinite pains data for his great work is discovered to have produced the work of an infinite dullness. That is the all-suffering deity manifesting himself to his worshippers.

For assuredly a day comes, when two added to two no longer results in four. That day will come on April 5 for Edward Burden. After all he has done nothing to make two and two become for. He has not even checked his accounts. Well, for some years now, I've been. I've done, been doing as much as that. But with his fiancée it is different. She is a fair, slight girl with eyes that dilate under all sorts of emotion. In my office she appears not a confident worshipper, but a rather frightened fawn led before an anthropomorphic deity. And strangely enough, though young Burton who trusts me inspires me with a sardonic dislike, I felt myself saying to poor little thing that faced me. Why? I have wronged you, and I regretted it.

She, you see, has, after all, given something towards a right to enjoy the burden estates and the burdened wealth. She has given her fragile beauty, her amiability, her worship, no doubt, of the intolerable Edward. And all this payment in the proper coin. So she has, in a sense, right? Good night, dear one. I think you have it in your power. You might have it in your power to atone to this little creature. Tomorrow, I will tell you why and how. End of chapter two, read by Mark Leder. Chapter 3 of The Nature of a Crime. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org Read by Mark Leader

The Nature of a Crime By Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Chapter 3 I wrote last night that you have something in your power. If you wished it, you could make me live on. I am confident that you will not wish it, for you will understand that capriciously or intolerably I am tired of living this life. I desire you so terribly that now, even the excitement of fooling burden, no longer hypnotizes me into an acceptance of life without you. Frankly, I am tired out.

If I had to go on living any longer, I should have to ask you to be mine. in one form or other. With that, and with my ability, for, of course, I have great ability. I could go on fooling burden forever. I could restore. I could make sounder than ever it was that preposterous going concern the burden estate.

Unless I like to let them, I think but the wife's solicitors will not discover what I have done. for, frankly, I have put myself out in this matter in order to be amusing to myself and ingenious. I have forged whole builder's estimates for repairs that were never executed. I have invented whole hosts of defaulting tenants. It has not been latterly for money that I've done this. It has been simply for the sheer amusement of looking at Edward Burden and saying to myself, Ah, you trust me, my sleek friend. Well.

But indeed, I fancy that I am rich enough to be able to restore to them all that I have taken. And looking at Edward Burton's little fiancé, I was almost tempted to set upon that weary course of juggling. But I am at the end of my tether. I cannot live without you longer. and I do not wish to ask you. Later I will tell you, or no. I will tell you now. You see, my dear thing,

it is a question of going one better. It would be easy enough to deceive your husband. It would be easier still to go away together. I think that neither you nor I have ever had any conscientious scruples, But analyzing the matter down to its very depths, I think we arrive at this, that without the motives for self-restraint that other people have, we're anxious to show more self-restraint than they. We are doing certain work not for payment, but for sheer love of work. Do I make myself clear? For myself, I have a great pride in your image. I can say to myself,

Here is a woman, my compliment. She has no respect for the law. She does not value what a respect for the law would bring her. Yet, she remains purer than the purest of the makers of law. And I think it is the converse of that feeling that you have for me. If you desire me to live on, I will live on. I am so swayed by you that if you desire me to break away from this ideal of you

the breath of a command will send me round to your side I am ready to give my life for this ideal nay more I am ready to sacrifice you to it since I know that life for you will remain a very bitter thing I know a little what renunciation means and I am asking you to bear it for the sake of my ideal of you for assuredly, unless I can have you, I must die

and I know that you will not ask me to have you and I love you and bless you for it. End of chapter three, read by Mark Leader. Chapter 4 of the nature of a crime This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit Libravox.org. Read by Mark Leader.

The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddoch, Chapter 4. I've just come in from Tristan and Isolda. I had to hurry and be there for the first one. notes because you, my you, would I felt be sitting beside me as you have so often? That, of course, is passion, the passion that makes us unaccountable in our actions. I found you naturally, but I found too something else. It is always a little puzzled me why we return to Tristan. There are passages in that thing as intolerable as anything in any of the Germanic master's scores.

But we are held simply by the idea of the love filter. It's that alone that interests us. We do not care about the initial amenities of Tristan and the Primadana. We do not believe in Marx's psychologizing. But from the moment when those two dismal marionettes have drained, unconsideringly the impossible cup, they become suddenly alive. And we see two human beings under the grip of a passion.

acting as irrationally as I did when I promised my cabman five shillings to get me to a theater in time for the opening bars. It is, you see, the love filter that performs this miracle. It interests. It is real to us because every human being knows what it is to act irrationally, under the stress of some passion or other. We are drawn along irresistibly. We commit the predestined, follies or the predestined heroisms. The other side of our being acts in contravention of all our rules of conduct or of intellect. Here, in Tristan, we see such madness justified with a concrete

substance, an herb, a root. We see a vision of a state of mind in which morality no longer exists. We are given a respite, a rest, an interval in which no standard of conduct oppressive us. It is an idea of an appeal more universal than any other in which the tired imagination of humanity takes refuge. The thought that somewhere in the world there should be something that I could give to you or you to me that would leave us free to do what we wish without the drag of the thought of what we owe to each other, to the world. And after all, what greater gift could one give to another. It would be the essential freedom. For assuredly, the filter could do no more than put it in a man's power to do what he would do if he were let loose. He would not bring out more than he had in him,

but he would fully and finally express himself. Something unexpected has changed the current of my thoughts. Nothing can change their complexion, which is governed not by what others do but by the action which I must face presently. And I don't know why I should use the word unexpected, unless because at the moment I was very far from expecting that sort of perplexity. The correct thing to say would be that something natural has happened. Perfectly natural. Asceticism is the last thing that one could expect from the burdens. Alexander Burden, the father, was an exuberant millionaire. in no vulgar way, of course.

He was exuberant with restraint, not for show, with the magnificence which was for private satisfaction mainly. I'm talking here of the ascetic temperament which is based on renunciation, not of mere simplicity of tastes, which is simply scorned for certain orders of sensations. There have been millionaires who have lived simply.

There have been millionaires who have lived sordidly, but miserliness is one of the supreme forms of sensualism. Poor burden had a magnificent physique. The reserved abilities of generations of impoverished burdens starved for want of opportunities matured in his immense success and all their starved appetites too. But all the reserve quality of obscure burdens has been exhausted in him.

There was nothing to come to his son, who at most could have been a great match and is today looked upon in that light, I suppose, by the relations of his future life. I don't know in what light that young man looks upon himself. His time of trial is coming. Yesterday at 8 in the evening, he came to see me. I thought at first he wanted some money urgently.

But very soon I reflected that he need not have looked so embarrassed in that case. And presently I discovered that it was not money that he was in need of. He looked as though he had come with that characteristic gravity of his, so unlike his father, to seek absolution at my hands. But that intention he judged more decorous, I suppose, to present to me as a case of conscience. Of course, it was the case of a girl, not his fiancée. At first I thought he was in an old.

scrape, nothing of the kind. The excellent creature who had accepted his protection for some two years past, how dull they must have seemed to her, was perhaps for that reason perfectly resigned to forego that advantage. At the same time, she was not too proud to accept a certain provision, compensation, whatever you like to call it. I had never heard of anything so proper in my life. He need not have explained the matter to me at all, but evidently he had made up his mind to indulge in the luxury of a conscience. To indulge that sort of conscience lead to one almost as far as indulged passion, only I cannot help thinking on a more sordid road. A luxury snatched from the fire is in a way purified, but to find this one he had gone apparently to the bottom of his heart. I don't charge him with a particularly odious degree of corruption,

but I perceived clearly that what he wanted really was to project the sinful effect of that irregular connection, let us call it, into his regulated, reformed, I may say, lawfully blessed state, for the sake of retrospective enjoyment, I suppose. This rather subtle, if unholy, appetite, he was pleased to call the voice of his conscience. I listened to his dialectic exercises till the great word that was sure to come out sooner or later

was pronounced. It seems, he said, with every appearance of distress, that from a strictly moral point of view, I ought to make a clean breast of it to Annie. I listened to him, and by heaven, listening to him, I do feel like the godhead of whom I have already written, to you. You know, positively, he said that at the very moment of his fall, he had thought of what

I should think of him. And I said, my good Edward, you are the most debauched person I have ever met. His face fell. His soft lips dropped right down into a horseshoe. He'd come to me as one of those bland optimists would go to his deity. He expected to be able to say, I have sinned, and to be able to hear the deity say, That's all right. Your very frank confession does you infinite credit. His deity was, in fact, to find him some way out of his moral hole. I was to find him some genial excuse,

to make him feel good in his excellent digestion once more. That was absolutely his point of view, for at my brutal pronouncement he stuttered, But surely the faults of youth? And surely there are plenty of others. I shook my head at him and panic was dropping out of his eyes. Can't I marry Annie honorably he quavered? I took a sinister delight in turning the knife inside him.

I was going to let him go anyhow. The sort of cat that I am always lets its mice go. That mouse, by the by-by, has never. again put in an appearance. My dear fellow, I said, does not your delicately let you see the hole you put me into? It's to my interest that you should not marry Miss Avery's, and you ask me to advise you on the point. His mouth dropped open. Positively, he had never considered that when he married, I lost the confounded three hundred a year for administering the burdened trust.

I sat and smiled at him To give him plenty of time To let his mind agonize over his position Oh hang it he said And his silly eyes rolled round my room Looking for that providence That he felt ought to intervene in his behalf When they rested on me again I said

There go away Of course it's the fault of your youth Of course every man that's fit to call himself a man has seduced the clergyman's daughter. He said, Oh, but there was not anything common about it. No, I answered. You had an uncommonly good time of it with your moral scruples. I envy you the capacity. You'll have a duller one with Miss Avery's, you know. That was too much for him to take in, so he smoothed his hat.

When you said I was debauched, You were only laughing at me. That was hardly fair. I'm tremendously in earnest. You're only play-acting compared with me, I answered. He had the air of buttoning his coat after putting a check into his breast pocket. He had got, you see, the check he expected. My applause of his successful seduction, my envy of his good fortune.

That was what he had come for. And he got it. He went away with it pretty bare-facedly, but he stopped at the threshold to let drop. Of course, if I had known you would be offended by my having recourse to Annie's solicitors for the settlement, I told him I was laughing at him about that, too. It was the correct thing to do, you know, with the words he shut the door upon. The ass. The phrase of his, that he had thought of me at the moment of his fall,

gives you at once the measure of his respect for me. But it gave me much more. It gave me my cue. It put it into my head to say he was debauched. And indeed that is debauchery. For it is the introduction of one's morals into the management of one's appetite that makes an indulgence of them a debauchery.

Had my friend Edward regarded his seduction as the thing he so much desired me to tell him it was, a thing of youth, high spirits, a thing we all do. Had he so regarded it, I could not really have called it debauchery, but, and this is the profound truth, the measure of debauchery is the amount of joy we get from the indulgence of our appetites, and the measure of joy we get is the amount of excitement. If it brings into play not only all our physical, but all our moral nature, then we have the crucial point beyond which no man can go. It isn't, in fact, the professional seducer, the artist in seduction that gets pleasure from the pursuit of his avocation, any more than it is the professional musician who gets thrills from the performance of music. You cannot figure to yourself the violinist as he fiddles the most complicated passage of a concerto, when he really surmounts the difficulty by dint of using all his knowledge and all his

skill, you cannot imagine him thinking of his advisor, his mother, his God, and all the other things that my young friend says he thought about. And it is the same with the professional seducer. He may do all that he knows to bring his object about, but that is not debauchery. It is by comparison, a joyless occupation. It is drinking when you are thirsty. Putting it in terms of the most threadbare allegory, you cannot imagine that Adam got out of the fall, the pleasure, that Edward Burden got out of his bite of the apple. But Edward Burton, whilst he shilly-shallied with shall I and chant I could deliciously introduce into the matter all his human relationships. He could think of me, of his mother, of the fact that potentially he was casting to the winds the very cause

for his existence. For assuredly, if Edward Burton have a cause for existence, it is that he should not morally or physically do anything that would unfit him to make a good marriage. So we had, along with what's physical pleasure there might be, the immense excitement of staking his all along with a tremendous elation of a debate within himself that went before. For he was actually staking his all upon the chance that he could both take what he desired and afterwards reconcile it with his conscience to make a good match. Well, he has staked and won. That is the true debauchery.

That, in a sense, is the compensatory. joy that Puritanism gets. End of chapter four. Read by Mark Leader. Chapter 5 of The Nature of a Crime. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Read by Mark Leader. The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Kahn. Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Chapter 5. I have just come in. Again, you will not guess from where. From choosing a motor car with burden and his fiancé. It seems incredible that I should be called upon to preside at these preparations for my own execution.

I looked at hundreds of these shiny engines with the monstrously inflated white wheels and gave a half amused, but I can assure you a half interested, attention to my own case. For one of these will one day, and soon now, be arrested in a long rush by my extinction. In it there will be seated by two young people who went with me through the garages. They will sit in some sort of cushioned ease. The cushions will be green or red or blue in shiny leather. I think, however, that they will not be green, because Miss Avery's let slip to me in a little flutter of shy confidence. The words, oh, don't let's have green, because it's an unlucky color.

Edward Burden, of course, suppressed her with a hurried whisper as if, in thus giving herself away to me, she must be committing a sin against the house of burden. That naturally is the burden tradition. A burden's wife must possess frailties, but she must feign perfection even to a trusted advisor of the family. She must not confess to superstitions. It was amusing the small incident because it was the very first attempt that little Miss Avery's has ever made to get near me. God knows what Edward may have made me appear to her. But I fancy that whatever Edward may have said, she had pierced through that particular

veil. She realizes with her intuition that I am dangerous. She is alarmed and possibly fascinated because she feels that I am not straight, that I might in fact be a woman or a poet. Burden, of course, has never got beyond seeing that I dress better than he does and choose a dinner better than his Uncle Darlington. I came, of course, out of the motor car ordeal with flying colors. On these lines. I lived, in fact, up to my character for being orthodox in the matter of comfort. I even suggested two little mirrors, like those which were so comforting to us all when we sat in handsome cabs. That struck burden as being the height of ingenuity, and I know it proved to Miss Avery's most finely that I am dangerous, since no woman ever looks in those little mirrors

without some small motive of a coquetry. It was just after that that she said to me, don't you think but the little measures on the tops of the new canisters are extravagant for china tea? That, of course, admitted me to the peculiar intimacy that women allow to other women, or to poets, or to dangerous men. Edward, I know, dislikes the drinking of china tea

because it is against the principle of supporting the British flag. But Miss Avery's in her unequal battle with this youth of the classical features slightly vulgarized called me in to show a sign of sympathy to give at least the flicker of the other side of the woman, the poet, or the pessimist among men. She asked me, in fact, not to take up the cudgels to the extent of saying that China tea is the thing to drink, that would have been treason to Edward. But she desired that her instinct should be acknowledged to the extent of saying that the measures of canisters

should be contrived to suit the one kind of tea as well as the other. In his blind sort of way, Edward caught the challenge in the remark, and his straight brows lowered a very little. If you don't have more than three pounds of china tea in the house in a year, it won't matter about the measures, he said. We never use more at Shackleton. But it makes the tea too strong, Edward. Then you need not fill the measure, he answered.

Oh, I wish, he said to me, that you tell Edward not to make me make tea at all. I dread it. The servants do it so much better. So, I asked, Edward has arranged everything down to the last detail? It would look to me for approval and applause. You see, Annie has had so little experience, and I've had to look after my mother's house for years.

His heir said, Yes, you'll see our establishment will be run on the very best lines. Don't you admire the way I'm taming her already? I gave him, of course, a significant glance. Heaven knows why, for it is absolutely. true that I am tired of appearing reliable, to Edward Burton or anyone else in the world. What I want to do is simply to say to Edward Burden, No, I don't at all admire your dragging down a little bundle of ideals and sentiments to your own fatted calf's level.

I suppose I have in me something of the poet. I can imagine that if I had to love or to marry this little Avery's girl, I should try to find out what was her tiny vanity, and I should minister to it. In some way, I should discover from her that she considered herself charming, or discreet, or tasteful, or frivolous beyond all her fellows. And having discovered it, I should bend all my energies to giving her opportunities for displaying her charm, her discreetness, or her coquetry, with a woman of larger and finer mold, with you, I should no doubt bring into play my own idealism. I should invest her with the attributes that I consider the most desirable in the world.

But in either case, I cannot figure myself dragging her down to my own social or material necessities. That is what Edward Burden is doing for little Miss Avery's. I don't mean to say that he does not idealize her, but he sees her transfigured as the dispenser of his special brand of tea or the mother of a sort of child that he was. And that seems to me a very valid reason why women, if they were wise, should trust their fortunes cold-bloodedly and upset reason to the class of dangerous men that now allure them and that they flee from. They flee from them, I am convinced, because they fear for their worldly material fortunes. They fear, that is, to say, that the poet is

not a stable man of business. They recognize that he is a gambler, and it seems to them that it is folly to trust to a gambler for lifelong protection. In that, they are perhaps right, but I think, that no woman doubts her power to retain a man's affection, so that it is not to the reputation for matrimonial instability that the poet owes his disfavor. Woman lives, in short, to play with this particular fire, since to herself she says, Here is a man who has broken the hearts of many women. I will assay the adventure of taming him. And if she considers the adventure a dangerous one,

that renders the contest only the more alluring, since at heart every woman, like every poet, is a gambler. In that perhaps she is right. But it seems to me that women make a great mistake in the value of the stakes they are ready to pay in order to enter this game. They will stake, that is to say, their relatively great coin, their sentimental lives. But they hoard with closed fingers the three-penny bit, which is merely the material future. They prefer, that is to say, to be rendered the mere presiding geniuses of well-loaded boards.

It is better to be a lady, which you will remember philologic, means a loaf cutter than to be an ideal. And in this, they are obviously wrong. If a woman can achieve the obvious miracle of making a dangerous man stable in his affections, she may well be confident that she can persuade him to turn his serious attention to the task of keeping a roof over her head. Certainly, I know, if I were a woman, which of the two types of men I would choose? upon the lowest basis it is better for all purposes of human contracts to be married to a good liar than to a bad one.

For a lie is a figurative truth, and it is the poet who is the master of these illusions. Even in a matter of marital relations, it is probable that the poet is as faithful as the Edward Burdens of this world. Only the Edward Burdens are more skillful at concealing from the rest of the, of the world their pleasant vices. I doubt whether they are as skillful as concealing them from the woman concerned, from the woman with her intuition, her power to seize fine shades of coolness and her awakened self-interest. Imagine the wife of Edward Burden saying to him,

You have deceived me! Imagine then the excellent youth crimsoning, stuttering. He's been taught all his life the truth must be. prevail, though the skies fall, and he stammeres, Yes, I have betrayed you. And that is tragedy, though in the psychological sense, and that is the important one. Edward Burden may have been as faithful as the Ravens who live for 15 decades with the same mate. He will, in short, blunder into a tragic false position,

and he will make the tragedy only the more tragic in that all the intellectual powers he may possess will be in the direction of perpetuating the dismal position. He will not be able to argue that he has not been unfaithful, but he will be able to find a hundred arguments for the miserable woman prolonging her life

with him. Position, money, the interests of the children, the feelings of her family and of his, all these considerations will make him eloquent to urge her to prolong her misery, and probably she will prolong it. This, of course, is due to the excellent Edward's lack of an instinctive sympathy. The poet with a truer vision will in the same case be able to face his Miss Avery's saying,

You have deceived me, with a different assurance. Supposing the deflection to have been of the momentary kind, he will be able to deny with a good conscience, since he will be able to deny with a good conscience, he will be aware of himself in his feelings. He will at least be able to put the case in its just light. Or, if the deflection be really temperamental, really permanent, he will be unable it being his business to look at the deeper verities, to lie himself out of the matter.

He will break, strictly, and sharply. Or if he do not, it may be taken as a sign that his Miss Avery's is still a value to him, that she in fact is still the woman that it is his desire to have for his companion. This is true, of course, only in the large sense, since obviously there are poets whose reverence for position, the interest of children, or the feelings of their friends and relatives may outweigh their hatred of a false position. These, however, are poets in the sense that they write verse.

I am speaking of those who live the poet's life. To such, a false position is too intolerable to be long maintained. But this again is only one of innumerable side issues. Let me return to my main contention that a dinner of herbs with a dangerous man is better than having to consume the flesh of stalled oxen with Edward Burden. Perhaps that is only a way of saying

that you would have done better to entrust yourself to me than to But no, your husband is a better man than Edward Burden. He has at least had the courage to revert to his passion. I went this afternoon to your chemists and formally notified them that if they supplied him with more than the exactly prescribed quantity of that stuff, I, as holding your power of attorney, should do all if the law allows me to do against them. Even to the dullest of men, marrying is for the most part an imaginative act. I mean marrying as a step in life sanctioned by law, custom, and that general consent of mankind,

which is the hallmark of every irrational institution. By irrational, I do not mean wrong or stupid. Marriage is august by the magnitude of the issues it involves, balancing peace and strife on the fine point of a natural impulse refined by the need of a tangible ideal. I am not speaking here of mere domestic peace or strife, which for most people that count are a question of manners and a mode of life. And I am thinking of the peace mostly, the peace of the soul which yearns for some sort of certitude in this earth, the peace of the heart which yearns for conquest, the peace of the senses that dreads deception,

the piece of the imaginative faculty, which in its restless quest of a high place of rest, is sported on by these great desires and that great fear. And even Edward Burden's imagination is moved by these very desires and that very fear, or else he would not have dreamt of marrying. I repeat, marriage is an imaginative institution. It's true that his imagination is a poor thing, but it is genuine, nevertheless.

The faculty of which I speak is of one kind in all of us. Not to everyone is given that depth of feeling, that faculty of absolute trust which will not be deceived, and the exulting masterfulness of the senses which are the mark of a fearless lover. Fearless lovers are rare, if obstinate, and sensual fools are countless as grains of sand by the seashore. I can imagine that correct young man perfectly capable of setting himself deliberately to worry a distracted girl and to surrender. End of Chapter 5, read by Mark Leder. Chapter 6 of The Nature of a Crime. This is a Libre of Ox recording.

All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, visit Libravox.org. Read by Mark Leader The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Chapter 6 I don't know why, tonight, in particular, the fact that I am a dead man occurs to me very insistently. I had forgotten this for two whole days. If anyone very dear to you has ever been in extremis at a distance

and you have journeyed to be at the last bedside, you will know how possible this is, how for hours at a time the mind will go wandering away from the main fact that is drawing you onwards till suddenly it comes back. Someone is dying at a distance. And I suppose one's eye is, the nearest friend that one has, and my eye is dying at a distance.

At the end of a certain number of days is the deathbed towards which I am hurrying. It is a fact which I cannot grasp. But one aspect grows more clear to me every time I return to this subject. You remember that when we have discussed suicide, we have agreed that to the man of action, death is a solution. To the man of thought, it is none. For the man of action expresses himself in action, and death is the negation of action. The man of thought sees the world only in thoughts, and over-thought death exercises no solution of continuity.

If one dies, one's actions cease, one's problem continues. For that reason, it is only insofar as I am a man of action that I shall be dying. You understand what I mean, for I do not mean that it is my action. that have killed me. It is simply because I have taken refuge from my thoughts in action, and because after April 5 that refuge will be closed to me that I take refuge in a final action, which, properly speaking, is neither action nor refuge. And perhaps I am no man of action at all, since the action in which I have taken refuge is properly speaking, no action at all,

but merely the expression of a frame of mind. I have gambled, that is to say, I have not speculated, for the speculator acts for gain, the gambler in order to interest himself. I have gambled to escape from you. I have tried to escape from my thoughts of you into divining the undivinable future, for that is what gambling is.

You try for a rise, You try for a fall, and the rise or the fall may depend on the momentary madness of a dozen men who declare a war, or upon the rain from heaven which causes so many more stalks of wheat to arise, upon so many million square inches of earth. The point is that you make yourself dependent upon caprice, upon the caprice of the weather or upon the movement in the minds of men more insane than yourself. Today, I've entered upon what is the biggest gamble of my whole life. Certain men who believe in me, they are not Edward Burdens.

Nevertheless, they believe in me, have proposed to me to form a corner in a certain article which is indispensable to the daily life of the city. I do not tell you what it is because you will assuredly witness the effects of this inspiration. You will say that when this is accomplished, it will be utterly unlawful. uninteresting. And that is literally true. When it is done, it will be uninteresting. But in the multiplicity of things that will have to be done before the whole thing is done, in the waiting for things to take effect, in the failures perhaps more than in the successes, since the failures will imply new devising, in all the meticulous thought readings that will be necessary,

the interest will lie, and in the men with whom one is brought into contact, the men with whom one struggles, the men whom one must bribe or trick. And you will say, how can I, who am to die in 14 days, embark upon an enterprise that will last many months or many years? That, I think, is very simple. It is my protest against being called a man of action, the misconception that I have had to resent all my life. And this is a thought, not an action, a thought made up of an almost infinite number of erring calculations. You have probably forgotten that I have founded two towns upon the south coast, originated four railways in tropical climates, and one in the west of England,

and opened up heaven knows how many minds of one kind or another. And upon my soul, I'd forgotten these things, too, until I began to cast about in my mind. And now I go to my death unmindful of these glories insofar as they are concrete. In that sense, my death is utter. It is a solution. But insofar as they are my refuges from you, they remain problems to which if my ghost is to escape you, I must return again and again. In dying, I surrender to you, and thus for the inner self of myself, death is no ending, but the commencement of who. who knows what tortures. It is only in the latent hope that death is the negation of consciousness

that I shall take my life. For death, though it can very certainly end no problem, may at least make us unconscious of how eventually the problem solves itself. Back you see is really the crux of the whole thing. That is why the man of action will take refuge in death, the man of thought, never. But I, I am the man of neither the one nor the other. I am the man of love, which partakes of action and of thought, but which is neither.

The lover is perhaps the eternal doubter, simply because there is no certain panacea for love. Travel may cure it, but travel may cause to arise homesickness, which of all forms of love is the most terrible. to mix with many other men may cure it, but again to the man who really loves, it may be a cause for still more terrible unrest, since seeing other men and women may set one always comparing the beloved object with the same thing. And indeed, the form that it takes with me,

for with me love takes the form of a desire to discuss. The form which it takes with me renders each thing that I see, each man with whom I speak the more torturing, since always I desire to adjust my thoughts of them by your thoughts. I went down the other day, before I had begun to write these letters to you, and before I knew death impended so nearly over me, to the sea at P.

I was trying to get rid of you. I sat in the moonlight and saw the smacks come home, visible for a minute in the track of the moon and then no more than their lights in the darkness. The fishermen talked of death by drowning mostly. The passage of the boats across that trail of light suggested reflections, no doubt, trite. But without you to set my thoughts by,

I could get no more forward. I went round and round in a ring from the corpses fished up in the nets to the track of the moon. And since walking up and down on the parade brought me no nearer to you, I did not even care to move. I neither meditated nor walked,

neither thought nor acted. And that is real torture. It was the next morning that I heard that young Burden desired that his fiancé solicitors should scrutinize the accounts of the burdened trust. and death loomed up before me. You will ask, why death?

Why not some alternative? Flight or prison? Well, prison would be an unendurable traveling through time, flight and equally unendurable traveling through time with space added. Both these things are familiar. Death alone, in spite of all the experience that humanity has had of death, is the utterly unfamiliar. For a gambler, it is a coup, alluring beyond belief, as we know neither what we stake nor what we stand to win. I personally stand to win a great deal, since life holds nothing

for me, and I stake only my life, and what I seek is only forgetfulness of you, or some sort of eventual and incomprehensible union with you. For the union with you that I seek is a queerer, sort of thing. Hardly at all, I think, a union of the body, but a sort of consciousness of our thoughts proceeding onwards together. That we may find in the unending afterwards, or we may find the herb oblivion. Either of these things I desire. For insofar as we can dogmatize about death, we may lay it down that death is the negation of action, but is powerless against thought. I do not desire action And at the same time

I do not fear thought For it is not my thoughts of you that I fear Left alone with them I can say What is she more than any other material object It is my feelings that wear out my brain My feelings that make me know That you are more than every material object living or still And more than every faith dead or surviving

for feeling is neither thought nor action. It is the very stuff of life itself. And if death be the negation of life, it may well be the end of consciousness. The worst that death can do to me is to deliver me up forever to unsatisfied longings for you. Well, that is all that life is done. That is all that life can do for me. But life can do so much more that is worse. believe me when I say that I dread imprisonment, and believe me when I say that I do not dread disgrace. For you knew very well that it is true when I say that I positively chuckled at the thought of the shock my fall would give to all these unawakened intelligences of this world.

You know how I despise Edward Burdened for trusting in me. You know how I have always despised other people who trusted in established reputation. I don't mean to say that I should not have liked to keep the game up. Certainly I should, since in gambling it is more desirable to win than to lose. And it is more amusing to fool fools than to give them eye-opiners. But I think that in gambling it is only a shade less desirable, per se, to lose than to win. The main point is the sensation of either, and the only valid objection to losing is that If one loses too often, one has at last no longer the wherewithal to gamble.

Similarly, to give people eye-opiners is, per se, nearly as desirable as to fool them. It is not quite so desirable, since the game itself is the fooling. But the great objection in my case is that the eye-opener would once and for all put an end to the chance of my ever fooling them again. That, however, is a very small matter, and what I dread is not that. If people no longer trusted in me, I could no doubt still find an outlet for my energies with those who sought to take advantage of my abilities, trusting to themselves to rest from me a sufficient share of the plunder that they so ardently desire, that I so really have no use for.

No, I seek in death a refuge from exposed, Not because exposure would cripple my energies. It would probably help them. And not because exposure would mean disgrace. I should probably find ironical satisfaction in it. But simply because it would mean imprisonment. That I dread beyond belief. I clenched my fingers when in conversation I hear the words,

A long sentence. For that would mean my being delivered up for a long time. Forever to you. I write forever advisedly and after reflection, since a long subjection without relief to that strain would leave upon my brain a wound that must prove ineffaceable. For to be alone and to think, those are my terrors. One reads that men who have been condemned for long years

to solitary imprisonment go mad. But I think that even though, that sad gift from omnipotent fate would not be mine. As I figure the world to myself, fate is terrible only to those who surrender to her. If I surrendered to the extent of living to go to prison, then assuredly the future must be uniformly heavy, uniformly doomed in my eyes. For I would as soon be mad as anything else I can think of, but I should not go mad. go mad because of the opportunities they miss, because the world changes outside their prison walls, or because their children starve. But I have no opportunities to miss or take.

The changes of the world to me are nothing, and there's no soul between whom and starvation I could stand. We'll stand about making this final disposition of my properties. Let me tell you finally what I have done in regard to your husband himself. It is a fact, and this I have been keeping up my sleeve as a final surprise for you, that he is almost cured. But I have just received an incomprehensible note from Edward Burden. He asks me for some particulars as to his confounded estate, and whether I can lend him some thousands of pounds at short notice. Heaven knows what new scrape this is that he's in. Of course, this may precipitate my crash. But whatever happens,

I shall find time to write my final words to you, and nothing else really matters. End of Chapter 6, read by Mark Leader. Chapter 7 of The Nature of a Crime. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Read by Mark Leader. The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford.

Chapter 7 I haven't yet discovered what Edward Burden is doing. I have found him a good round sum upon mortgage. The irony of the position being that the money is actually his, whilst the mortgage does not actually exist. He says that what he is doing with the money will please me. I suppose that means that he's embarking upon some years. sort of speculation which he imagines that I would favor.

It is odd that he should think that I find gratification in his imitating myself. But why should I concern myself with this thing at all? Nothing in the world can ever please or displease me anymore. For I have taken my resolve. This is my last night upon earth. When I lay down this pen again, I shall never take up any pen more, for I have said all that I can say to you. I am utterly tired out.

Tonight I shall make up into a parcel all these letters. I must sit through the night because it is only tomorrow morning that I shall be able to register the parcel to you. And registering it will be my last act upon the habitable globe. For biting through the glass in the ring will be not an act, but the commencement of a new train of thought. Or perhaps only my final action will come to an end when you read these words in Rome. Or will that be only thought, the part of me that lives, pleading to you to give your thoughts for company? I feel too tired to think the matter out.

Let me then finish with this earth. I told you when I finished writing last night that Robert is almost cured. I would not have told you this for the sake of arrogating to myself the position of a savior. But I imagine that you would like the cure to go on, and in the case of some accident after my death, it might go all to pieces once more. Quite simply, then, I have been doing two things. In the first place, I have persuaded your chemists to reduce very gradually the strength of chloral, so that the bottles contain nearly half water, and Robert perceives no difference.

Now, of course, it's very important that he shall not know of a trick that is being so beneficently played on him, so that, in case he should go away, or for one reason or another change as chemists, it must be carefully seen to that instead of pure chloral, he obtains the exactly diluted mixture. In this way, he may be brought gradually to drinking almost pure water. But that alone would hardly be satisfactory. comparatively involuntary cures of little value in comparison with an effort of the will. You may conceivably expel nature with a fork, but nothing but a passion will expel a passion. The only point to be proved is whether there exists in your husband any other passion for the sake of which

he might abandon his passion for the clearness of vision which he always says his chloral gives him. He has not, of course, the incentives usual to men. You cannot, in fact, get him along ordinary lines. But apart from his physical craving for the drug, he has that passion for clearness of intellect that he says the drug gives him. And it is through that that at last I have managed to hit his pride. For I have put it to him very strongly

that one view of life is just as good as another. No better, no worse, but just the same. And I have put it to him that his use of chloral simply limits for him a number of views of life that he might conceivably have. And when you come to think of all the rhapsodies of his that we have listened to, I think that that piece of special pleading is sufficiently justified. I do indeed honestly believe that, for what it is worth, he's on the road to salvation.

He means to make a struggle, to attempt the great feat of once more seeing life with the eyes that fate originally gave to him. This is my legacy to you. If you ask me why I have presented you with this man's new identity, since it will mean a new identity, I must answer that I simply don't know. Why have we kept him alive all these years? I've done it no doubt because I had nothing to give you. But you? If you have loved me, you must have wished him. I won't say dead, but no more there. Yet you have tried too, and I suppose this answer to the riddle is simply the answer to the whole riddle of our life. We have tried to play a supremely difficult game simply because it's sanctified our love. For after all, sanctification arises from difficulties. Well, we have made our way. We have made our way. We have made our way. very straight, and we have so narrowed the door of entrance that it has vanished altogether.

We have never had any hope of a solution that could have satisfied us. If we had cared to break the rules of the game, I suppose we could have done it easily enough, and we could have done it the more easily since neither you nor I ever subscribed to those rules. If we had not, it was, I think, simply because we sought the difficulty which sank Has it been a very imbecile proceeding? I am most uncertain, for it is not a thing to be very proud of, to be able to say that for a whole lifetime one has abstained from that which one most desired. On the other hand, we have won a curious and difficult game. Well, there it is, and there is your legacy.

I do not think that there is anything else for me to write about. You will see that in my will. I have left everything I possess to Edward Burden. This is not because I wish to make him reparation, and it's not because I wish to avoid scandal. It's simply because it may show him one very simple thing. It will show him how very nearly I might have made things come right. I've been balancing my account.

very carefully, and I find that, reckoning things reasonably against myself, Edward Burton will have a five-pound note with which to buy himself a mourning ring. The being forced to attend to my accounts will make him gasp a good deal. It will certainly shake his belief in all accepted reputations, for he will look on the faces of many men each as solid as the Bank of England, and he will think, I wonder if you are like. His whole world will crumble,

not because I have been dishonest, since he is cold-blooded enough to believe that all men may be dishonest. But he will tremble because I've been able to be so wildly dishonest and yet to be so successfully respectable. He won't even dare to expose me, since if he did that,

half of the shares which he will inherit from me would suffer an eclipse of dissoning. reputability, would tumble to nothingness in value, and would damage his poor pocket. He will have to have my estate set down at a high figure. He will have to be congratulated on his fortunate inheritance, and he will have, sedulously, to compound my felony. You will wonder how I can be capable of this final cruelty, the most cruel thing that perhaps ever one man did to another. I will tell you why it is.

It is because I hate all the Edward burdens of the world. Because being the eternal halves of the world, they have made their idiotic rules of the game. And you and I suffer. You and I, the eternal have-nots. And we suffer not because their rules bind us, but because being the finer spirits, we are forced to set ourselves rules that are still more strict

in order that in all things we may be the truly gallant. But why do I write? You will wonder how I am capable of this. You will have understood. You who understand everything, 8 in the morning. Well, now we pause. I am going to register the parcel containing all these letters to you. We part.

And it is as if you were dropping back the lost uridacy of the world into an utter blackness. For in a minute you will be no more than part of my past. Well then. Good night. End of chapter 7. Read by Mark Leader Chapter 8 of The Nature of a Crime This is a Libravox recording.

All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Read by Mark Leader. The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Chapter 8 You will have got the telegram. I sent you long before you got the parcel of letters. You will have got the note I wrote you by the same post as the letters themselves. If I have taken these three days to myself before again

writing to you, it has been because I have needed to recover my power of thinking. Now, in a way, I have recovered it, and it is only fair to say that I have devoted all my thoughts to how a new situation affects you and you and your relations to me. It places me in your hands. Let that be written first and foremost. You have to decree my life or my death, for I take it that now we can never get back again into our old position. I have spoken, you have heard me speak. The singular unity the silence of our old life is done with for good. There's perhaps no reason why this should not be so. Silence is no necessary part of our relationship. But it has seemed to make a rather exquisite bond between us. It must, if I am to continue to live. It must be replaced by some other bond.

In our silence we have seemed to speak in all sorts of strange ways. We have perhaps read each other's thoughts. I have seen words form themselves upon your lips. But now you must. There is no way out of it. You must write to me. You must write to me fully, all your thoughts. You must, as I have done, find the means of speech, or I can no longer live.

I am reprieved. I don't know if, in my note to you, I have been. explained exactly what had happened. It was in this way. I was anxious to be done with my world very early, and as soon as eight o'clock struck, I set out for the post office at the corner to register that parcel of letters for you. Till the task was accomplished, the last I was to perform on earth. I noticed nothing. I was simply in a hurry. But having given the little faggot into the hands of a sleepy girl, I said to myself suddenly, now I am dead. I began suddenly, as they say of young children, to notice. A weight that I had never felt before seemed to fall away from me.

I noticed precisely that the girl clerk was sleepy, that as she reached up one hand to take the parcel over the brass caging, she placed the other over her mouth to hide a yawn. And out on the pavement, it was most curious what had befallen the world. It had lost all interest, but it had become fascinating, vivid. I had not, you see, any senses left, but my eyesight and hearing. Vivid. That's the word. I watched the newsboy, throw his paper down an area, and it appeared wonderfully interesting to discover that that was how one's papers got into the house. I watched a milkman go up some doorsteps to put a can of milk beside a boot scraper, and I was wonderfully interested to see a black cat follow him.

They were the clearest moments I have ever spent upon the earth, those when I was dead. They were so clear because nothing else weighed on my attention, but just those little things. It was an extraordinary or luxuriant feeling. That, I imagine, must have been a very. have been how Adam and Eve felt before they had eaten of the fruit of knowledge. Supposing I had tacitly arranged with myself that I would die in the street, I think I would still have walked home simply to dally longer with that delightful feeling of sheer curiosity, for it was sheer curiosity to see how this world, which I had never looked at,

really performed before utterly unbiased eyes. That was why, when I got home, I sent away the messenger that brought to me Edward Burden's letter. There was to be no answer. Whatever Burden's query might be, I was not going to commit myself to any other act. My last was that of sending off the parcel to you. My opening Burden's letter when the messenger had gone was simply a part of my general curiosity. I wanted to see how a burden letter would look, with an overdoin letter. no longer had any bearings at all for me.

It was as if I were going to read a letter from that dear Edward to a man I did not know upon a subject of which I had never heard. And then I was reprieved. The good Edward, imagining that I was hurt at his having proposed to allow his wife's solicitors to superintend my stewardship, the good Edward in his concern had positively insisted that all the deed should be returned to me absolutely unchecked. He said that he had had a hard fight for it, and that the few thousands he had borrowed from me had represented his settlement, which he had thus paid in specie. It chimed in wonderfully with his character when I come to think of it. Of course he was disciplining Miss Avery's representatives, just,

as he had disciplined her in the matter of china tea, of which I have written to you. And he had imagined that I was seriously hurt. Can you figure to yourself such an imbecile? But if you permit me to continue to live, you will be saving the poor fool from the great shock I had prepared for him, the avalanche of discovery, the earthquake of uncertainty. For he says in that so kind way of his, is that, having thus shown his entire confidence in me,

in the fact that is that Providence is on the side of all burdens, he will choose a time in the future convenient for me when he will go thoroughly with me into his accounts. And inasmuch as his wedding tour will take him all around the world, I have at least a year in which to set things straight. And of course, I can put off his scrutiny indefinitely, or deceive him forever. I did not think all these things at once.

In fact, when I had read his letter so strong within me was the feeling that it was only a mental phenomenon, a thing that had no relation with me. The feeling of finality was so strong upon me that I actually found myself sitting in that chair before I realized what had occurred. What had occurred was that I had become utterly and for good

your property. In that sense only am I reprieved. As far as Edward Burden is concerned, I am entirely saved. I stand before you and ask you to turn your thumb up or down. For having spoken as I have

to you, I have given you a right over me. Now but the pressing necessity from my death is over, I have to ask you whether I shall plunge into new adventures that will lead me to death, or whether I am to find some medium in which we may lead a life of our own in some way together.

I was about to take my life to avoid prison. Now, prison is no more a part of my scheme of existence. But I must now have some means of working towards you, or I must run some new and wild risk to push you out of my thoughts. I don't, as you know, ask you to be my mind. secret mistress, I don't ask you to elope with me. But I ask that you must belong to me as much in thought as I have in this parcel of letters been revealed and given over to you. Otherwise, I must once more gamble. And having tasted of gambling in the shadow of death, I must gamble forever

in that way. I must, I mean, feel that I am coming towards you or committing crime that I may forget you. My dear, I am a very tired man. If you knew what it was to long for you as I have longed for you all these years, you would wonder that I did not sitting in that chair, put the ring up to my teeth in spite of Burden's letter, and end it. I have an irresistible longing for rest. Or perhaps it is only your support. To think that I must face forever, or for as long as it lasts, this troublesome excitement of avoiding thoughts of you, that was almost unbearable. I resisted because I had written these letters to you.

I love you, and I know you love me. Yet without them, I would have inflicted upon you the wound of my death. Having written them, I cannot face the cruelty to you. I mean that if I had died without your knowing why, it would have been only a death grievous to you. Still, it is the duty of humanity and of you with humanity to bear and to forget deaths. But now that you must know,

I could not face the cruelty of filling you with the pain of unmerited remorse. for I know that you would have felt remorse, and it would have been unmerited, since I gave you no chance or any time to stretch out your hands to me. Now I give it to you, and wait for your verdict. For the definite alternatives are these. I will put Burdens Estate absolutely clear within the year, and work out in order to make safe money,

the new and comparatively so much. scheme of which I've written to you, that I will do if you'll consent to be mine to the extent of sharing our thoughts alone. Or, if you will not, I will continue to gamble more wildly than ever with the burdened money, and that in the end means death, and a refuge from you. So then, I stand reprieved And the final verdict is in your hands End of Chapter 8 Read by Mark Leader

End of the Nature of a Crime By Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford