Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad - Part 1 of 2

Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad, read by Donald Miller. Kennedy is a country doctor and lives in Colebrook on the shores of East Bay. The high ground, rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the little town, crowds the quaint high street against the wall, which defends it from the sea. Beyond the sea wall, there occurs for miles in a vast and regular sweep the barren beach of Shingle, with the village of Brunsett standing out darkly across the water, a spire and a clump of trees, and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse, looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the vanishing point of the land. The country at the back of Brunsett is low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occasionally a big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes use of the anchoring ground a mile and a half due north from you, as you stand at the back door of the ship inn in Brunsett. A dilapidated windmill nearby, lifting its shattered arms from a mound of no loftier than a rubbish heap, and a martello tower squatting at the water's edge half a mile to the south of the Coast Guard cottages, are familiar to the skippers of small craft. These are the official sea marks for the patch of trustworthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures six with a tiny anchor engraved among them, and the legend, mud, and shells overall. The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending along this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tents and flowing lines closing the view. In this valley down to Brunsett, Colebrook, and up to Darnford, the market town 14 miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as a surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the companion of a famous traveler. In the days when there were continents with unexplored interiors, his papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific societies, and now he had come to a country practice from choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeased curiosity which believes that there is a particle of general truth in every mystery. A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his patience to keep me company, he took me on his rounds. Thirty miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes, I waited for him on the roads. The horse reached after the leafy twigs, and sitting in the dog cart, I could hear Kennedy's laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size. A brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a pair of gray, profoundly attentive eyes. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience in listening to their tales. One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses climbing on the rickety trellis work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old apple trees. And as the bobtailed, long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand, covered by a thick, dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the hedge. How's your child, Amy? I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to make in the squat figure the scanty, dusty, brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young, with a distinct catch in her breath. Her voice sounded low and timid. He's well, thank you. We trotted again. A young patient of yours, I asked, and the doctor, flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, Her husband used to be. She seems a dull creature, I remarked listlessly. Precisely, said Kennedy. She is very passive. It's enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind, an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet, which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who, from a small farmer, has sunk into a shepherd. The beginning of his misfortunes, dating from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father, a well-to-do, apoplectic grisier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences, and from the fear of the incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads. The tired chestnut dropped into a walk, and the rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road, as I had seen it, times innumerable, touch the distant horizon of the seas. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood and toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge of a copse, a wagon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge. Raised above our heads upon the skyline, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants, drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on the background of the infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his carter's whip quivered high up in the blue. Kennedy Discoursed She's the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barnes Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant's wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don't know what induced me to notice her at all. There are facts that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness, and their whole aspect, as walking in a mist you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The only particularity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer, which passes away with the first word. When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once, but her heart was of the kindest. She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries, and as to Mrs. Smith's gray parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard, stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith, this was another evidence of her stupidity. On the other hand, her want of charm, and view of Smith's well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass, helping a toad in difficulties. If it's true, as some German fellow has said, that without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering, and to be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the matter, for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape. How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook, or perhaps Stanford. She lived for four years with the Smiths, New Barnes is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields, hollows, rises, at the trees and hedges, at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same, day after day, month after month, year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large gray hat trimmed with a black feather, I've seen her in that finery, seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp over three fields, and along two hundred yards of road, never further. There stood Foster's Cottage. She would help her mother to give their tea to the young children, wash up the cookery, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm. That was all, all the rest, all the change, all the relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately, perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell. It was love as the ancients understood it, an irresistible and fateful impulse, a possession. Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky, and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute. With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the grasslands framed in the countercarps of the rising ground took on a gorgeous and somber aspect, a sense of penetrating sadness like that inspired by a grave strain of music disengaged itself from the silence of the fields. The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an overburdened earth had weighted their feet. Yes, said the doctor, to my remark, one would think the earth is under a curse, since all of her children, these that cling to her the closest, are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait, as if their very hearts were loaded with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen amongst these heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight like a pine, with something striving upwards in his appearance, as though the heart within him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the force of the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the soles of his feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He vaulted over the stiles, paced these slopes with long, elastic stride, that made him noticeable at a great distance, and had lustrous black eyes. He was so different from the mankind around, that with his freedom of movement, his soft, a little startled glance, his olive complexion and graceful bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature of a woodland creature. He came from there, the doctor pointed with his whip, and from the summit of the descent, seen over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the side of the road, appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an immense edifice inland with bands of dark ripple, with still trails of glitter ending in a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky. The light blur of smoke from an invisible steamer faded on the great clearness of the horizon like the mist of a breath on a mirror, and inshore, the white sails of a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves slowly from under the branches, floated clear of the foliage of the trees. Shipwrecked in the bay, I asked? Yes, he was a castaway, a poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to America, and washed ashore here in a storm. And from him, who knew nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was some time before he learned its name, and for all I know, he might have expected to find wild beasts or wild men here. When crawling in the dark over the seawall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was another miracle he didn't get drowned. But he struggled instinctively, like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field. He must have been, indeed, a tougher fiber than he looked to withstand without expiring such buffetings. The violence of his exertions and so much fear, later on his broken English that resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world, and truly, he would add, how was he to know? He fought his way against the rain and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep huddled close under the lee of a hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleeding in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on these shores. It must have been two in the morning then, and this all we know of the manner of his landing, though he did not arrive unattended by any means. Only his grisly company did not begin to come ashore till much later in the day. The doctor gathered the rains, clicked his tongue. We trotted down the hill, then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the high street. We rattled over the stones and were home. Late in the evening, Kennedy broke a spell of moodiness that had come over him. Returned to the story, smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end. A reading lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk, and sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendor of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below. Never a sign of life, but the scent of climbing jasmine, and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness. The relations of shipwrecks in the olden times tell us of much suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die miserably from starvation on a barren coast. Others suffered violent death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion, dislike, or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers, shipwrecked in all the parts wild of the world, there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers, cast out by the sea, in the bright of this bay, almost within sight from his very window. He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time, we discovered he did not even know the ship's had names, like Christian people, and when one day, from the top of the Talford Hill, he held the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before, and probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled together with many others on board an emigrant ship lying at the mouth of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the tween deck, and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber dwelling, he would say, with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very cold, damp and somber, with places in the manner of wooden boxes, where people had to sleep one above another, and it kept on rocking, always, at once and all time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before, keeping his vandal and his stick by his side. People groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked, and everything was being shaken, so that in one's little box one dared not lift one's head. He had lost touch with his only companion, a young man from the valley, he said, and all the time a great noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell, boom, boom. An awful sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him negligent in his prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening. It seemed always to be night in that place. Before that, he had been traveling a long, long time on the iron track. He looked out the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly round and round about him till his head swam. It gave me to understand that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitude of people, whole nations, all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was made to get out of the carriage and slept through a night on a bench in a house of bricks, with his bundle under his head, and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain pine he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam machines rolled in at one end and out at the other. People swarmed more than you can see on a feast day round the miraculous holy image in the yard of the Carmelite convent down in the plains where, before he left his home, he drove his mother in a wooden cart, a pious old woman who wanted to offer prayers and make a vow for his safety. He could not give me an idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom and clang of iron the place was, but someone had told me it was called Berlin. Then they rang the bell, and another steam machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its flatness, without a single bit of hill to be seen anywhere. One more night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a little straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad, muddy river, flowing not between hills, but between houses, that seemed immense. There was a steam machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed tight. Only now there were with them many women and children who made much noise. A cold rain fell. The wind blew in his face. He was wet through, and his teeth shattered. He and the young man from the same valley took each other by the hand. They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly the steam machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the water. The walls were smooth and black, and there up rose, growing from the roof as it were, bear trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high. That's how it appeared to him then, for he had never seen a ship before. This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America. Voices shouted. Everything swayed. There was a ladder dipping up and down. He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water below, which made a great splashing. He got separated from his companion, and when he descended into the bottom of that ship, his heart seemed to melt suddenly within him. It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact for good and all with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns and the foothills of his country. They would arrive on market days, driving in a peasant's cart, and would set up an office in an inn or some other Jew's house. There were three of them, of whom one with a long beard looked venerable, and they had the red cloth collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like government officials. They sat proudly behind a long table, and in the next room, so that the common people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning telegraph machine through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military service to do. But the American Kaiser would not take everybody, oh no. He himself had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on his behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he being young and strong. However, many able young men backed out, afraid of the great distance. Besides, those only who had some money could be taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot of money to get to America. But then, once there, you had three dollars a day, and if you were clever, you could find places where true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father's house was getting over full. Two of his brothers were married and had children. He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His father sold an old cow, a pair of pie-balled mountain ponies of his own raising, and cleared a plot of fair pasture land on the sunny slope of a pine clad pass to a Jew innkeeper in order to pay the people of the ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time. He must have been a real adventurer at heart for how many of the greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the mirage or true gold far away. I have been telling you more or less, in my own words, what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him. He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious baby talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency, but always with that singing soft and the same time-vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words as if they had been the words of an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end with many emphatic shakes of his head upon that awful sensation of his heart melting within him. Directly he set his foot on board that ship. Afterwards there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as to facts. No doubt he must have been abominably seasick and abominably unhappy. This soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus out of his knowledge and feeling bitterly as he lay in his emigrant bunk his utter loneliness, for his was a highly sensitive nature, the next thing we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in Hammond's pig pound by the side of the road to Norton, six miles, as the crow flies, from the ocean. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak. They seemed to have seared into his soul a somber sort of wonder and indignation. Through the rumors of the countryside, which lasted for a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the walls of weather-bored cottages and by a voice crying piercingly strange words in the night. Several of them turned out even, but no doubt he had fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other in the darkness. A sort of frenzy must have helped him up the steep Norton hill. It was he, no doubt, who early in the following morning had been lying in a swoon, I should say, on the roadside grass by the brinsette carrier, who actually got down to have a nearer look, but drew back intimidated by the perfect immobility and by something queer in the aspect of that tramp sleeping so still under the showers. As the day advanced, some children came dashing into school at Norton in such a fright that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a horrid-looking man on the road. He edged away, hanging his head for a few steps and then suddenly ran off with extraordinary fleetness. The driver of Mr. Bradley's milk cart made no secret of it that he had lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gypsy-type fellow who, jumping at a turn of the road by the vents, made a snatch at the pony's bridle. And he caught him a good one, too, right over the face, he said, that made him drop down in the mud a jolly psych quicker than he had jumped up. But it was a good half a mile before he could stop the pony. Maybe that, in his desperate endeavors to get help and in his need to get in touch with someone, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also, three boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and muddy, and it seemed very drunk in the narrow deep lane by the lime kilns. All this was the talk of three villages for days. But we have Mrs. Fins, the wife of Smith's wagoner, unimpeachable testimony that she saw him get over the low wall of Hammond's Pig Pound and lurch straight at her, babbling aloud in a voice that was enough to make one die of fright. Having the baby with her in a perambulator, Mrs. Fins called out to him to go away, and as he persisted in coming nearer, she hit him courageously with her umbrella, over the head, and without once looking back, ran like the wind with the perambulator as far as the first house in the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones. And the old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field. They saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above his head in the direction of the new barn's farm. From that moment he is plainly in the toils of his obscure and touchy destiny. There is no doubt, after this, of what happened to him. All is certain now. Mrs. Smith's intense terror, Amy Foster's stolid conviction, held against the other's nervous attack that the man meant no harm. Smith's exasperation on his return from Danford Market at finding the dog barking himself into a fit, the back door locked, his wife in hysterics, and for an unfortunate dirty tramp supposed to be, even then, lurking in his stackyard. Was he? He would teach him to frighten women. Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the sight of some nondescript and miry creature sitting cross-legged amongst a lot of loose straw and swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage made him pause. Then this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud and filth from head to foot. Smith, alone amongst the stacks with this apparition, and the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread of an inexplicable strangeness. But one that being, parting with his back hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glistening, wild, black and white eyes. The weirdness of this silent encounter fairly staggered him. He had admitted since, for the story has been a legitimate subject of conversation about here for years, that he made more than one step backwards. Then a sudden burst of rapid senseless speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic. In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith had not in his heart given up his secret conviction of the man's essential insanity this very day. As the creature approached him, jabbering in a most discomposing manner, Smith, unaware that he was being addressed as Gracious Lord and Endured in God's Name to afford food and shelter, kept on speaking firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other yard. At last, watching his chance by a sudden charge, he bundled him headlong into the wood lodge and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow. Through the day he was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs where she had locked herself in her bedroom, but Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door, wringing her hands and muttering, I dare say Smith had a rough time of it that evening with one noise after another, and this insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through the door only added to his irritation. He couldn't possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic with the sinking of a ship in East Bay, of which there had been a rumor in the Danford marketplace, and I dare say the man inside had been very near to insanity on that night. Before his excitement collapsed and he became unconscious, he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, rolling on some dirty sacks and biting his fists with rage, cold, hunger, amazement, and despair. He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night before in East Bay was the Hamburg emigrant ship Herzogen Sophia Dorothea of appealing memory. A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus immigration agencies among the Sklavonian peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people's homesteads, and they were in league with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window, reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzet Coast Guard Station. I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a background of ragged, slatey clouds like another in a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzet church tower. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge. About that time the Coast Guard men thought they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring ground. In a moment they vanished, but it is clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the bay on that awful blind night, had rammed the German ship amid ships, a breach, as one of the divers told me afterwards, that you could sail a Thames barge through, and then had gone out either scatheless or damaged, who shall say, but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal to perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.