Print
Word
PDFfair for all,’ he mumbles stolidly to his clever
grumbling mate, Jukes, during a dead lull in the storm—’they
are only Chinamen. Give them the same chance
with ourselves’ ... ’Couldn’t
let that go on in my ship, if I knew she hadn’t
five minutes to live. Couldn’t bear it,
Mr. Jukes.’ He does not know whether the
ship will be lost or not—(and we do not
know whether mankind will be lost or not)—what
he does know is how he must act. But also he
never loses hope. ‘She may come out of it
yet’: that is the kind of answer the taciturn
man gives when driven to speech. The chief mate,
locked in his captain’s arms to brace himself
against the hurricane, scarcely able to make the other
hear in the terrific gale though he shouts close to
his head, gets back such answers, and with them the
power to endure. He tells him the boats are gone:
the captain yells back sensibly, ‘Can’t
be helped.’
And so noble is the power with which Conrad uses our tongue, the tongue he has made his own by adoption and genius, that I must let him speak for himself, and can find no better close for my own lame words. Jukes has been shouting to his captain again:
’And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man’s voice—the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when heavens fall and justice is done—again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far—“All right."’
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 72: Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, Bk. 8, c. 5.]
[Footnote 73: By M.P. Follett (Longmans).]
[Footnote 74: Professor A.C. Bradley, to whom also is due the passage about Schubert and the parallel drawn between Beethoven, Hegel, and Wordsworth.]
[Footnote 75: From The Will to Believe, quoted in Bridges’ The Spirit of Man, No. 425.]
