UNDER THE DIM glow of that red sun Conrad began talking about visiting Poland in 1914, looking so intently over the half-obscured waters of the great river that I thought he might be trying to see the spires and steeples of his homeland. I was immediately caught up and quite forgot about the color of the sun, which, in retrospect I now realize, he had intentionally called to my attention. Not until an hour later did I understand that it was implicated in his story, something I am sure you will pick up on and hold in your mind as you read. Your way with signs has always seemed to set you and Conrad apart from your contemporaries.

But to get on with the story. Conrad said that he had decided on the visit after Pinker, his agent, sold the serial rights of Victory for the hefty sum of a thousand pounds, far more than he had expected. Twenty-one years had gone by since he had seen Poland and he was yearning to make a pilgrimage to the haunts of his early life for himself and also for his son, Borys. It seemed to be a propitious time. Conrad was a successful writer going home to render his account to whoever was still alive and remembered him, present himself to them and to the land for which he harbored an almost mystical attachment. And yet, proud as he was, he felt a certain trepidation. He was not sure what his feelings would be when he opened a door or turned into a familiar street and encountered a stranger who would come into focus with a name as suddenly as a landscape does when one adjusts binoculars. He had the rather odd notion that he might sense his own life going backward at such a moment, repossessed by the past.

When Conrad and his family left Harwich for Hamburg in late July 1914, traveling with old Polish friends, he knew that the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated in Sarajevo a month earlier; that, only days before he sailed, Austria-Hungary had delivered an ultimatum to Serbia. But those events were like distant thunder, he said, unnerving, but not enough to worry about, certainly not enough to force a postponement of the visit. Only full-scale war could do that, and no one was predicting such a dire turn of events.

From Hamburg they traveled by train across Germany. When they reached the border with Poland, Conrad said that he felt as if his spirit was infused with the rolling farmland, a sensation that deepened over the hours, preparing the way for his first glimpse of Cracow, whose spires rose dark against the waning light. Through the window of the cab they took from Central Station he watched the lights of the city coming on, the streetlights running off in the distance, the lights of shops and apartments in the old buildings where he could see people inside, Cracow sparkling like a Christmas tree, a shower of stars, fireworks.

He rose early the next morning and left while Jessie and Borys were still asleep. As he pushed open the intricate metal doors of the Hotel Pod Roza and stepped outside he felt like Rip van Winkle. Nothing had changed. He walked a mile or so and then returned for Borys, taking him to the old Florian Gate, where they sat a while on a bench watching the pigeons in the Great Square, then on to Poselska Street, where he had followed the funeral cortege of his father, Apollo. They went on to St. Mary’s Church and down the street, the stained stone buildings impregnated with so many memories that he felt as if he were walking past pictures in a museum dedicated to his family’s life. At the university they walked through the great courtyard into the Jagellon Library, where they were met by a man who knew not only Conrad’s work but his father’s as well. Saying there was something on the second floor that Conrad would find interesting, the librarian guided them up the ornate old staircase and into a small room where he removed from a cabinet a collection of manuscripts and letters written by Apollo. Conrad spent half an hour reading them, translating fiery political writings for Borys—grandfather, son, and grandson together awhile in that quiet old building, reunited by language and memory.

That day and the next were colored by the powerful experience in the Jagellon Library. Apollo’s voice seemed to echo in his head as he herded his family from one site to another. And then, overnight, everything changed. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. A few days later, on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and sent troops into France.

Over the next few days Cracow became a military depot, its once peaceful streets jammed with lorries and soldiers, the incessant noise drowning out the sound of cathedral bells except very early in the morning and late at night, when they sounded as if they were tolling the loss of a way of life that would come no more. In the Hotel Pod Roza a steady stream of guests descended the stairs to the lobby, which was chest-deep in luggage, the guests waiting in long lines to pay their bills while others stood at the curb outside, frantically hailing cabs. Conrad wanted to return to Britain but Jessie could hardly walk and Borys had caught a cold and was running a temperature. Even if they had been well enough to travel, the long journey across Europe was too hazardous to risk and so, standing at the reception desk in the lobby, surrounded by all that noise and confusion, he placed a call to his aunt who lived in the resort town of Zakopané, a four-hour trip by rail, asking her to take them in until the situation stabilized enough so he could make plans to go home.

When the train pulled away from the platform in Central Station the next morning Conrad told Jessie and Borys that his family had stayed in the country often when he was a child and that everything would be fine. They could relax in the pine-scented air and be treated to wonderful stories his aged aunt was very likely still capable of telling. And while he truly believed they might enjoy themselves, Conrad said that for him the journey to Zakopané was the saddest of his life, every mile reminding him of the pleasure he had taken as a boy, the places he remembered best, a valley with a river, a series of hills sheered off eons ago by a glacier that left a pale palisade, a millhouse on a stream, all mocking him with their old purity as if he were traveling through ghosts. He kept his thoughts to himself, entertaining Jessie and Borys like a tour guide, pointing out the attractions one by one, talking about his feelings toward them when he was a child, relieved when they reached a bend and all those old vistas were left behind.

But his spirits improved when the Villa Konstantynowka came into view an hour later. He had hired a coach at the train station to take them the rest of the way and as they entered the valley he saw the house and felt again the excitement he had experienced as a boy at its wondrous shape. An elaborate mansard roof graced the villa’s three stories like a collection of tents you would imagine appropriate to a Mongol lord. It swept upward from the eaves in elegant curves, terminating in a sharp peak of copper shingles that had long ago developed a turquoise patina. On each floor tall windows rounded at the top reflected the trees on the property so that the house appeared to be inhabited by poplars, firs, and pines and also tiny white clouds in patches of mountain blue sky. “I used to sit by the window in the attic,” Conrad said, “reading stories of Polish heroes and imagining myself doing battle on horseback with invaders down in the valley, returning triumphant to the safety of the villa, which I, of course, thought of as a castle.”

His aunt had been alone since his uncle Charles had died some years back and was delighted with the company, making a fuss over the three of them as if they were all children. The villa seemed like a safe haven, immune from the dangers he had worried over all the way from Cracow. Of course, it was an illusion. The war was expanding alarmingly fast, according to reports on the radio they listened to in the living room filled with dark old furniture. He felt himself slipping into depression fueled by anger over what was happening to Poland and his inability to do anything about it.

For relief, he took long walks soon after he awoke. The exercise was salutary, but what brought him the greatest solace was the familiar view of houses scattered among stands of alders, deep green pastures above the treeline dotted with grazing sheep, a view that swept aside the uncertainty of the present and returned him to the happier days of childhood. The magic of images, he told me, was never more powerful than those seen in the fresh cold air of morning, the equal of Proust’s madeleine or Balzac’s fermenting apples. The view was a transforming lens, a time machine that revealed a world steeped in tradition, impervious to change, the world children know.

As he was resting on a rock one morning, gazing down into the valley where farmers were working in the fields, a scene that put him in mind of Millet’s “Gleaners,” ageless people working ageless land, flesh and earth hardly distinguishable one from the other, he saw a line of lorries on the road that ran through the valley, saw them stop, saw soldiers get out and go into the fields and wrest horses from the farmers’ plows, tying each animal to a towline and leading them into the next field. It was like watching paralysis set in. The valley had been full of movement, alive. With each theft it was losing its vitality. The abandoned plows leaning forward on their traces looked like the bleached skulls found in deserts. That was how the war started for him, with the pillaging of the sacrosanct fields of his youth, the destruction of memory.

They stayed on in the villa for several days, unsure what to do until a friend of his aunt’s with ties to the government called to warn her that British subjects were in danger. At midnight they left in an open carriage with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, driving thirty miles in a snowstorm to a railway station where he was able to buy tickets to Cracow. It took eighteen hours to cover the fifty miles back to the city in the train, which reeked of disinfectants and threatened to roll off the tracks at every turn. Once there, they spent a long time in the station restaurant, waiting for room on a train bound for Vienna, which they reached the next day. Conrad’s gout was so bad that he had to stay in bed for five days before they continued on to Genoa and booked passage on a Dutch mail boat that took them to England, where he was forced to stay in bed most of a fortnight. Yet the pain in his leg was less agonizing than what he felt in his heart, for he could not forget the humiliation of being run off in the middle of the night, forced to travel in freezing weather, wondering on the train if soldiers were going to stomp into the car at the next station, demand their papers, throw them into jail.

Returning with his tail between his legs was bad enough, and it was made worse by the son et lumiére of patriotic outrage, headlines blaring the latest news, the country poised for invasion. Daily reports of Armageddon across the Channel sent his emotions spinning in half a dozen directions. Against Jessie’s protests he volunteered, reasoning that a man with knowledge of the sea could be useful in any number of ways, but he was informed by the services that he was too old. You can imagine how well that sat with him, especially when his friends—including you—turned up in uniform to say good-bye. It made no difference that your jackets bulged with ample middle-aged waistlines, or that many of you had no useful military experience; in his eyes you were all resplendent good soldiers off to do your duty until the last parade while the war passed him by like a diabolical cabdriver speeding past a quay. His sense of uselessness came to a head one day in Hyde Park, a bright, sunny day that had put a bit of a spring into his step before he came upon an old man sitting on a bench wearing the uniform of an army pensioner, a relic of the Boer War taking the sun with his eyes closed and no doubt dreaming of past glories. He saw himself reflected in that old chap and it hurt to feel so diminished when he had more adventures to his credit by the time he was twenty-five than most men experience in a lifetime. And then Borys joined the army and that was damned near the coup de grâce.

“I felt that I was sending him off to do my part,” Conrad said gloomily. Of course, he was proud of Borys, but with the pride came fear for his son’s safety that stayed close to his heart until the war ended. When Borys paid a brief surprise visit home a few days before shipping out to France, Conrad insisted that he spend most of the time upstairs with Jessie. Later, when he came down, Conrad looked at him and said, “Look here, boy, in case you should get yourself knocked on the head out there, I should at least like to know where your remains are disposed of.” He then put a piece of paper down on the table and wrote out a code he had invented to confound the army censors that would let Borys indicate in letters he sent home exactly where he was at the front.

He tried to console himself with the thought that he had done everything possible to lend a hand in the war effort. The only discernible effect was that the thorn plunged deeper into his side. He tried throwing himself into his writing. It should have been a propitious time, he said, that period being the first in his career when he did not have to worry about money, a situation he had dreamed of more or less constantly since he had quit the sea. He started The Shadow Line and did a few stories but the work was halting and he took little pleasure in it. It was not because his imagination flagged or that he lacked energy: His mind was overflowing with characters and stories. The problem was that his conscience got in the way. Writing when so many people were being slaughtered, when continental Europe was buried beneath a pall of smoke, seemed indecent. “It was terrible,” he said, looking at me gravely, “to feel that way about your craft. I can’t remember it now without a shudder.” I saw the pain in his eyes as he leaned forward and took his drink from the table between us. He continued after a while, saying that it became very clear that the only subject he could deal with was the war itself but he could not bring himself to invent something for fear of trivializing what was happening in the trenches and on the seas. A tone came into his voice that I could not identify at the time but which I was able to later, at the end of the day, his words coming back to me in all their irony.

And that was when his luck unexpectedly changed. He had been seeing something of Lord Northcliffe socially, and it occurred to him that the old boy might be willing to use his influence to involve him in the war effort. To that end, he wrote a long letter offering his services in whatever capacity might be useful. A few weeks later Northcliffe called, saying that he would like Conrad to visit some naval installations to observe and make recommendations for improvements. Of course, the lord was throwing an old sea dog a soft bone to chew, probably for no other purpose than to silence the supporters Conrad had enlisted to pester him, but the motive made no difference. Conrad had begun to feel more and more like an invalid, snapping at Jessie for nothing, falling into those black depressions. He leapt at the chance.

He was waiting for the inspection tour to begin when an assistant to Northcliffe offered him a chance to make a flight from the Royal Naval air station at Yarmouth. He had never flown and would not have gone out of his way to do so. Airplanes fascinated him from a technical perspective. He admired their sleek design, but entrusting his life to one of those fragile structures of wood and cloth and metal called for a leap of faith greater than he possessed. He went up only because he wanted to avoid being thought a coward. The takeoff was thrilling, the rush of the plane down the runway, the deafening roar of the engines, and then he was looking down at the receding airfield, the tiny shapes of men and planes that brought on a bout of vertigo and with it the purest fear he had experienced in a long time. He thought he might have to keep his eyes closed or fixed on the back of the pilot’s head for the duration of the flight, but then he glimpsed the countryside, the distant hills, and was enchanted, filled with a sudden sense of enormous privilege, even of power, the kind of emotion generally reserved for dreams. The sky was new, the land below, the sea in the distance. He felt the depression that had gripped him since returning from Poland peeling off as if it were an old skin; the flight seemed like a preparation, a purifying ritual. When they landed he was ready to engage whatever came his way.

A week later he was invited to Granton Harbour near Edinburgh to spend a day on a vessel assigned to mending torpedo nets, but the weather was terrible, a gale threatened the ship, and there was an hour or so when he doubted that he would see his family again. It was, all in all, an inauspicious beginning of his tour. Though the officers treated him respectfully, he could see in their eyes that they felt put upon having to waste time escorting an ancient mariner with political connections. But what put him off were the ships themselves. The net tender was the only one that put to sea. The rest were tied down like Gulliver by the Lilliputians, ungainly things rocked by the slightest movement, long narrow hotels essentially useless for anything other than providing roofs for their crews. They reminded him of the old soldier in the park, and he felt equally useless as he went about their decks, looking for something to comment on. He began to think that it might be better to accept his age and infirmities and quit his sentimental romanticizing when he received word that he was to go on patrol aboard the minesweeper Brigadier, which was docked at Lowestoft, and that there would be further assignments on such vessels.

Over the next few weeks he put Jessie to no end of trouble, demanding meat at every meal, eggs, milk, second helpings. He took long walks in the morning, which were followed by brisk exercises in the yard, and was more fit than he had been in years the evening he arrived at Lowestoft. An orderly met him at the station and drove him out to the port, showing him to his quarters in a barracks. The room was on the spartan side—bed, chair, chest of drawers, nothing else—but to Conrad it was fit for an admiral. The fact of the matter was that he would have been happy sleeping on a bed of nails. On the way in from the station the orderly said that the Brigadier would be patrolling shipping lanes where the Germans were laying mines to block British supply routes. There had been considerable activity during the last fortnight or so and it was well within the realm of possibility that she would have some business with a few of the bloody things. Conrad asked the man what the minesweeper did when she came upon a mine and the young fellow replied, “Well, sir, we cut them loose and blow them to smithereens. Sometimes we’re right on top of one before we see it.” In the quiet of his room that night, in the general quiet that descends on military posts after the day’s work is done, he imagined muffled roars followed by plumes of spray discolored with smoke and bits of steel, a baptism of fire.

HE SLEPT BETTER than he had in months, waking early, around six o’clock, excited and eager. As a veteran of the war his zeal may strike you as naive, Ford, even repugnant, but you must remember that he had lived every moment since being run out of Poland in a state of anger and frustration. In any case, when he raised the curtain, fog obscured the port and all but the masts of the ships, the visibility so poor he could only guess at the character of the vessels and nothing of the sea behind the heavy bank. He dressed quickly and went outside, hoping that the Brigadier’s captain, David Fox-Bourne, was not so timid that he would be cowed by a little weather. The fog moved on the wind, the billows surging this way and that, tumbling over themselves and flattening out, signs to an old sailor that it was very heavy and unlikely to break up soon. The orderly had given him instructions on how to find the officers’ mess. As he went along the path, sailors emerged from the fog walking briskly, the way men do on the way to work, and that cheered him. A bit of fog was not going to deter the Royal Navy.

In the mess he gave his name to the steward, who escorted him to a table reserved for senior men and introduced him as the admiral’s guest. He was ready for them to react more or less as their brother officers had done earlier in the tour, and in that he was wrong. Several knew his work and everyone greeted him with the deference due a personage. A few had seen something of the Eastern seas while sailing on merchant vessels, a fact that put him at ease and in a pleasant frame of mind. It felt good to be with his own kind, members of the clan who were sailors first before they were naval officers, sharing beliefs that knew no boundaries of rank or class.

They were reminiscing about Singapore when the city was little more than a pirate’s den, exchanging knowing looks, laughing the way older men do at the memory of indiscretions committed in the past, when a young ensign with pink cheeks who was probably about the age they had been in China appeared in the doorway and spoke to the steward, who directed him to their table, where he announced that Captain Fox-Bourne had sent him to escort Mr. Joseph Conrad to the Brigadier. His name was Geoffrey Whelan. He was excessively polite to Conrad on the way down to the dock, calling him “sir” and awkwardly entertaining him with facts about the ships, which at that distance were no more than indistinct presences in the mist. When they were close enough to make out the name of the Brigadier emblazoned in black letters on her bow, Whelan cleared his throat and said, stammering rather badly, his cheeks darkening to a deep crimson, that it was an extraordinary honor to talk to him. He had read all of Conrad’s work, every word, and many of his classmates at Cambridge had too. The fact of the matter, said Whelan, was that he had literary ambitions of his own and it would mean the world to him if Conrad would agree to take a look at a few pages. When Conrad suggested that he bring something to his quarters after they had returned to port, Whelan beamed bright as a lighthouse.

Whether out of gratitude or in response to orders, he gave Conrad the grand tour of the minesweeper, keeping up a constant patter as they walked the length of her, explaining that she was classified as a sloop of the Arabis type and lay low in the water due to her exceptional weight of 1,250 tonnes. Whelan then led him down a flight of stairs to the engine room, which was immaculate and gleaming, a far cry from those in most of the ships Conrad had commanded, but equally noisy so that the ensign had to shout to be heard. She was powered by Yarrow boilers feeding two screws through vertical triple expansion engines whose torque he would feel as soon as they were under way. Back on deck Whelan partly removed the canvas shrouds of the two four-inch guns located fore and aft, adding that they had never been fired in battle. Neither the Brigadier nor any of the other Lowestoft sweepers had sighted a German ship, seeing only their filthy handiwork bobbing on the sea. Whelan’s pride in the minesweeper suggested that she was his first ship and he was impatient for her to distinguish herself, a feeling Conrad understood, for despite her odd looks, a sort of cross between the old river gunboats deployed on the China Sea and the Roi des Beiges, he knew she was lovely to Whelan.

Up on the bridge four officers hovered over a chart. The tallest looked up as they entered, his insignia identifying him as the captain. Fox-Bourne had a shock of blond hair and ruddy cheeks above a jaw-line beard, a grin at odds with his military bearing. As Whelan was leaving, Conrad reminded him of his promise to bring some pages by his quarters.

“Absolutely, sir. That’s not something I’d forget.”

“Nice young chap,” Conrad said after he was gone.

“He is,” Fox-Bourne said affectionately. “He’ll go places. Of course, he hasn’t been worth a fig since he heard you were coming. Practically bowled him over. I must apologize on that score: I’m afraid I haven’t read your work. We may have some luck with the bloody mines, but I should warn you there’s a chance the only thing we’ll turn up in the nets is an old boot or a grouper. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

Conrad went out the door to the railed walk that ran the width of the bridge. It was cold and as he turned up the collar of his coat he noticed that Whelan was supervising a gang of sailors casting off the lines. In the time he had been aboard the fog had thickened and while he could see Whelan and the men perfectly well, the dock was little more than a hazy black shape and the buildings beyond them had virtually disappeared. As soon as the last of the thick hawsers was let go he felt a vibration beneath his feet. The pitch of the big engines deepened, and the Brigadier slipped away from the dock, quickly plunging into the fog.