I BECAME MASTER of the Nellie on 17 June, 1924, not quite two months before Conrad died. All things considered, he was lucky to have survived so long after that disastrous journey up the Congo in 1890, where a parasite-bearing mosquito descended from the green air somewhere near Matadi and infected his aristocratic blood. Of course, you know as well as I do that he hardly got off scot-free from that quixotic adventure. I have friends who live with the lingering effects of malaria but none who suffers from malarial gout, a filthy disease he fought with a great deal of courage, his other ailments filling in when it was resting. As a consequence, visiting Conrad was always an uncertain business. You never knew whether he would be up to it or, if his physical problems were in remission, if his mercurial mood would let him tolerate company. I remind you of this because I had been eager to see him even before Harrison and I fell to reminiscing about the old days. Coming into possession of the Nellie added a new urgency. The boat had a special meaning to Conrad and me that you don’t know about, Ford. I thought that, all things considered, he would be pleased, but I wanted to surprise him and so I wrote, saying only that I was back in London, newly retired. Rather than proposing a meeting time, I asked him to write to me at my post office address and set a date.
I started my restoration project the next day. A number of things needed attention, the bad patch on the deck being particularly offensive since it was in exactly the spot where we used to gather our chairs in a circle and swap yarns. I spent that morning at a lumberyard going through all the teak, sighting down the planks to make sure they had been properly dried and were not warped, finally choosing a dozen. Over the next week I worked until dark ripping out the rotten boards with the help of a man from the lumberyard, who saved me from hurting my back. The rest I did alone. Planing the wood, drilling holes for dowels, laying the planks in was painstaking work that called on all my carpentry skills. As I recall, I had just put on the first coat of sealant when I received a letter from Conrad saying that he and Jessie were coming up to London in a few days to consult with their doctors and would be staying at the Brown Hotel. I rang him as soon as they arrived, using the telephone at a nearby ship chandler’s shop. The news about Jessie was alarming. She had gotten increasingly lame and there was some doubt whether the treatments would have a lasting effect. Conrad had his own problems, but for all that he was eager to see me and we agreed to meet the next morning.
“In your rooms?” he said.
“Not exactly. On my boat. I bought the Nellie.”
I explained what had happened and he was politely enthusiastic, saying that he was happy for me and Harrison. It would indeed have been terrible if she had fallen into some stranger’s hands. His feelings about the Nellie were very complex, the boat having become something of a personal icon to him as a writer. She was also linked to an old anxiety of his that went back a quarter of a century, almost to the beginning of our friendship, regarding a matter concerning the two of us and his character Charlie Marlow. It had never meant much to me, but vexed him deeply, so much so that whenever we saw each other, or spoke on the phone after a long absence, he needed to be reassured that I had kept my mouth shut. He asked again while we were on the phone, not in so many words—he never did—falling back on indirection that would have made Henry James proud. I answered in kind, peppering my response with pronouns. “Good, good, good,” he said. Then he asked how he could find the Nellie and was clearly pleased when I told him that she was tied up at her old slip. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “There’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time.” There was a sense of urgency in his voice, but when I inquired what it was he told me it was too complicated to discuss on the phone and rang off.
I returned to the docks and went back to work brushing on a second coat of sealant, remembering how the old gang used to sit there talking their hearts out. When my turn came I would go on and on about my latest voyage, sometimes for hours, without a break except for a drink, while Conrad sat in his steamer chair listening with half-closed eyes, a thoughtful expression on his face as he took in every word. I won’t claim that I had a presentiment about his visit the next day, Ford, but I wondered if his story was connected to that time.
IN THE MORNING I heated water in the kettle and got some toast and marmalade down my throat along with a cup of Turkish coffee—the British mania for tea always left me cold, that watery treacle not being my idea of a proper drink. Fortified, I pushed open the cabin door and stepped outside into a heavy fog, which I greeted as a blessing since it kept the heat at bay. In the gloom I heard the voices of men on nearby boats, the creak of spars, the dull slap of anchor chains and then the distant call of a foghorn. I had been at work an hour or so replacing brass fittings when I heard Conrad impatiently call my name from the dock. He couldn’t see the Nellie nor could I see him so I shouted. A minute later he emerged, trailing wisps of fog like gauze. He had aged badly. His pointed beard was mostly gray and his eyes, half-obscured beneath the heavy folds of his lids, looked watery though still intense. Despite the obvious wear and tear, he had kept up his appearance as well as his famous accountant in Heart of Darkness. In his well-cut dark suit with waistcoat and matching cap, he could have been a baron on vacation from his estate outside Warsaw, an effect made even more credible by his monocle. He stepped onto the gangway, supporting himself with a silver-handled blackthorn walking stick, looking at me fondly with an expression that was both familiar and a bit strange, a kind of serenity gracing his eyes and manner I had not seen before. When he stepped aboard he held out his hand.
“My dear faller,” he said warmly, “I’ve missed you. Perhaps now that you’ve retired we can see more of each other.”
I said nothing would please me more and then unfolded two steamer chairs, which I placed close to the hallowed spot on the deck. While I described my narrow escape from the barge he leaned back so that his face was bathed in the weak sunlight beginning to color the fog, his arms resting heavily on those of the chair, a perfect picture of a man aged beyond his years. A mild wind blew away the fog between the Nellie and the nearby boats lying at anchor. Farther out the swells caught glints of the sun, the whole reach of the Thames dotted with oblongs of light like a rush of spawning salmon. He wanted to hear about my plans for the Nellie, of which he approved. He even made a few additional suggestions. Though he clearly enjoyed the technical conversation, it did not take me long to realize what was on his mind. The look in his eyes was as good as a signal flag.
“The old thing?” I said.
He nodded.
“You amaze me. I thought you’d have let it go by now.”
“You know me better than that, Malone.”
“Well,” I replied, “I needn’t tell you what I think about it.”
Ignoring my sarcasm, he went on.
“Marlow and I,” he said, “have parted company forever.”
When I asked if that was what he was so eager to tell me, he said no, though in the long run the two were related.
“So it’s still an issue,” I said.
“Because of its nature.”
I will explain this business with Marlow in due time, Ford, but as it is secondary to the story he soon began to tell, I think I should go on. It will make more sense that way.
In the past, when our conversation had taken such a depressingly familiar turn, he had invariably drifted into one of those black moods that left him inaccessible, but while all the signs were there that day, he was not giving in to them. To the contrary, I had the impression of a man in repose whose confidence had weathered an unpleasant admission, and was struck again by the serenity I had noticed as he came up the gangway.
He withdrew a pipe and a leather tobacco pouch from his pocket and carefully filled the bowl. Once it was going, he took several deep puffs and watched the smoke drift leeward. By then the fog had dissipated and we could see the smokestacks of large ships, along with the odd mast and sail. Conrad pointed skyward with the stem of his pipe.
“ ‘The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.’ Wonderful image. I’ve always been shamelessly jealous of Stephen Crane.”
From far down the estuary came the sound of a foghorn quickly answered by another. Those invisible vessels calling out their warnings reminded me of times when I stood blind on a bridge, attentive to the trumpeting of another ship while staring into the impenetrable fog, on the lookout for the vaguest shape, the slightest hint of darkness that would be the bow of a vessel making toward mine, a perfectly natural memory that I thought no more of until it came back several hours later tinged with the color of Stephen’s sun.
Conrad tamped the bowl of his pipe with a silver tool and regarded me soberly over the match flame.
“It’s unique, Jack, the red of soldier’s blood and the blood of Christ and sacrifice and rage, all that and more. The color stays in your mind like the sun does after you’ve looked at it, glowing after you’ve closed your eyes. What’s more, he doesn’t force it on you, doesn’t have to. The red is perfectly natural, the result of smoke in the air, the color of battle.”
I said, “I’ve always wondered if the book would have been better if he had actually been in the war.”
“I don’t think so,” he responded. “His imagination gave him a color that was more true than what he would have seen. This story of mine has color too, a soft yellow that surrounds everything. You know how it is sometimes when you try to remember the beginning of a story. It’s hazy like the fog out there. You think it could have been this or that. The roots of this one are very clear, mon vieux, a beautiful view in the Carpathian Mountains.” He made a sweeping gesture with his pipe as if he were sketching a mountain valley. “A place of small farms and pastures, absolutely bucolic. I have never seen a place so at one with that word.”