JOSEPH CONRAD
mote in the dust-cloud of six million of fighting particles, still tossed East or West in the lurid tempest, or already snapped up, an unconsidered trifle, in the jaws of war, his very humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting-cap and a green overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting cloud-horizon of the ashy-green North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one, for far away there to the West, in the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in the winter of 1881, not of war truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements which were very angry indeed.
There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night—or a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea is also called the German Ocean)—when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than to float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable manner. There were on board besides myself, seventeen men, all good and true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a long time moved in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses, than the green overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.
“That's a very nice gentleman.” This information, together with the fact that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by
[ 85 ]
