Conrad To-morrow

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4554-4763-3
Verlag: Seltzer Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 315 Seiten

Classic Conrad short story. 'What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place.He had come to settle there under circumstances not at all myste- rious--he used to be very communicative about them at the time--but extremely morbid and un- reasonable.He was possessed of some little money evidently, because he bought a plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages run up very cheaply.He occupied one of them himself and let the other to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil, the retired boat-builder--a man of evil repute as a domestic tyrant.' According to Wikipedia: 'Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language-a fact that is remarkable, as he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a strong Polish accent). He became a naturalized British subject in 1886. Conrad is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino and J. M. Coetzee.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Conrad, Joseph

Leseproben

TO-MORROW BY JOSEPH CONRAD
  published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books   Recommended stories and story collections by Joseph Conrad: Amy Foster End of the Tether Falk A Point of Honor A Set of Six (collection of stories) Tales of Hearsay (collection of stories) Tales of Unrest (collection of stories) Tomorrow Twixt Land and Sea (collection of stories) Within the Tides (collection of stories) Youth   feedback welcome: [e-mail]   visit us at samizdat.com   What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place.  He had come to settle there under circumstances not at all myste- rious--he used to be very communicative about them at the time--but extremely morbid and un- reasonable.  He was possessed of some little money evidently, because he bought a plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages run up very cheaply.  He occupied one of them himself and let the other to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil, the retired boat-builder--a man of evil repute as a domestic tyrant.   These cottages had one wall in common, shared in a line of iron railing dividing their front gar- dens; a wooden fence separated their back gardens. Miss Bessie Carvil was allowed, as it were of right, to throw over it the tea-cloths, blue rags, or an apron that wanted drying.   "It rots the wood, Bessie my girl," the captain would remark mildly, from his side of the fence, each time he saw her exercising that privilege.   She was a tall girl; the fence was low, and she could spread her elbows on the top.  Her hands would be red with the bit of washing she had done, but her forearms were white and shapely, and she would look at her father's landlord in silence--in an informed silence which had an air of knowledge, expectation and desire.   "It rots the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd. "It is the only unthrifty, careless habit I know in you.  Why don't you have a clothes line out in your back yard?"   Miss Carvil would say nothing to this--she only shook her head negatively.  The tiny back yard on her side had a few stone-bordered little beds of black earth, in which the simple flowers she found time to cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly overgrown, as if belonging to an exotic clime; and Captain Hagberd's upright, hale person, clad in No. 1 sail-cloth from head to foot, would be emer- ging knee-deep out of rank grass and the tall weeks on his side of the fence.  He appeared, with the col- our and uncouth stiffness of the extraordinary ma- terial in which he chose to clothe himself--"for the time being," would be his mumbled remark to any observation on the subject--like a man roughened out of granite, standing in a wilderness not big enough for a decent billiard-room.  A heavy figure of a man of stone, with a red handsome face, a blue wandering eye, and a great white beard flowing to his waist and never trimmed as far as Colebrook knew.   Seven years before, he had seriously answered, "Next month, I think," to the chaffing attempt to secure his custom made by that distinguished local wit, the Colebrook barber, who happened to be sit- ting insolently in the tap-room of the New Inn near the harbour, where the captain had entered to buy an ounce of tobacco.  After paying for his pur- chase with three half-pence extracted from the cor- ner of a handkerchief which he carried in the cuff of his sleeve, Captain Hagberd went out.  As soon as the door was shut the barber laughed.  "The old one and the young one will be strolling arm in arm to get shaved in my place presently.  The tailor shall be set to work, and the barber, and the candlestick maker; high old times are coming for Colebrook, they are coming, to be sure.  It used to be 'next week,' now it has come to 'next month,' and so on--soon it will be next spring, for all I know."   Noticing a stranger listening to him with a va- cant grin, he explained, stretching out his legs cyn- ically, that this queer old Hagberd, a retired coast- ing-skipper, was waiting for the return of a son of his.  The boy had been driven away from home, he shouldn't wonder; had run away to sea and had never been heard of since.  Put to rest in Davy Jones's locker this many a day, as likely as not. That old man came flying to Colebrook three years ago all in black broadcloth (had lost his wife lately then), getting out of a third-class smoker as if the devil had been at his heels; and the only thing that brought him down was a letter--a hoax probably.  Some joker had written to him about a seafaring man with some such name who was sup- posed to be hanging about some girl or other, either in Colebrook or in the neighbourhood.  "Funny, ain't it?"  The old chap had been advertising in the London papers for Harry Hagberd, and offer- ing rewards for any sort of likely information. And the barber would go on to describe with sar- donic gusto, how that stranger in mourning had been seen exploring the country, in carts, on foot, taking everybody into his confidence, visiting all the inns and alehouses for miles around, stopping people on the road with his questions, looking into the very ditches almost; first in the greatest excite- ment, then with a plodding sort of perseverance, growing slower and slower; and he could not even tell you plainly how his son looked.  The sailor was supposed to be one of two that had left a tim- ber ship, and to have been seen dangling after some girl; but the old man described a boy of fourteen or so--"a clever-looking, high-spirited boy."  And when people only smiled at this he would rub his forehead in a confused sort of way before he slunk off, looking offended.  He found nobody, of course; not a trace of anybody--never heard of anything worth belief, at any rate; but he had not been able somehow to tear himself away from Cole- brook.   "It was the shock of this disappointment, per- haps, coming soon after the loss of his wife, that had driven him crazy on that point," the barber suggested, with an air of great psychological in- sight.  After a time the old man abandoned the ac- tive search.  His son had evidently gone away; but he settled himself to wait.  His son had been once at least in Colebrook in preference to his na- tive place.  There must have been some reason for it, he seemed to think, some very powerful induce- ment, that would bring him back to Colebrook again.   "Ha, ha, ha!  Why, of course, Colebrook. Where else?  That's the only place in the United Kingdom for your long-lost sons.  So he sold up his old home in Colchester, and down he comes here. Well, it's a craze, like any other.  Wouldn't catch me going crazy over any of my youngsters clear- ing out.  I've got eight of them at home."  The barber was showing off his strength of mind in the midst of a laughter that shook the tap-room.   Strange, though, that sort of thing, he would confess, with the frankness of a superior intelli- gence, seemed to be catching.  His establishment, for instance, was near the harbour, and whenever a sailorman came in for a hair-cut or a shave--if it was a strange face he couldn't help thinking di- rectly, "Suppose he's the son of old Hagberd!" He laughed at himself for it.  It was a strong craze.  He could remember the time when the whole town was full of it.  But he had his hopes of the old chap yet.  He would cure him by a course of judicious chaffing.  He was watching the progress of the treatment.  Next week--next month--next year!  When the old skipper had put off the date of that return till next year, he would be well on his way to not saying any more about it.  In other matters he was quite rational, so this, too, was bound to come.  Such was the barber's firm opin- ion.   Nobody had ever contradicted him; his own hair had gone grey since that time, and Captain Hag- berd's beard had turned quite white, and had ac- quired a majestic flow over the No. 1 canvas suit, which he had made for himself secretly with tarred twine, and had assumed suddenly, coming out in it one fine morning, whereas the evening before he had been seen going home in his mourning of broadcloth.  It caused a sensation in the High Street--shopkeepers coming to their doors, people in the houses snatching up their hats to run out-- a stir at which he seemed strangely surprised at first, and then scared; but his only answer to the wondering questions was that startled and evasive, "For the present."   That sensation had been forgotten, long ago; and Captain Hagberd himself, if not forgotten, had come to be disregarded--the penalty of daili- ness--as the sun itself is disregarded unless it makes its power felt heavily.  Captain Hagberd's movements showed no infirmity: he walked stiffly in his suit of canvas, a quaint and remarkable fig- ure; only his eyes wandered more furtively perhaps than of yore.  His manner abroad had lost its ex- citable watchfulness; it had become puzzled and diffident, as though he had suspected that there was somewhere about him something...