All posts tagged Evans

The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie (1931)

The Major blushed like a girl.
(Chapter 1)

There were all the usual laughs, whispers, stereotyped remarks.
(Chapter 2)

‘I think,’ said Inspector Narracott deliberately, ‘that there’s a lot more in this case than meets the eye.’ (Chapter 4)

‘It’s always what you don’t expect in this life that happens, isn’t it, Mr Narracott?’
(The wisdom of Mrs Belling, landlady of the Three Crowns, Chapter 6)

‘That’s a rum go,’ ejaculated the Superintendent.
(Middle class slang, Chapter 10)

‘A lot of chuckleheads the police are, and so I’ve said before now.’
(Working class slang, Mrs Belling, Chapter 12)

Mr Curtis thoughtfully removed an aged pipe from the right side of his mouth to the left side. ‘Women,’ he said, ‘talk a lot.’
(One of the oldest tropes in literature, the hen-pecked husband, Chapter 13)

‘I hate a slobbering female,’ said Miss Percehouse. ‘I like one who gets up and does things.’
(No-nonsense old spinster Miss P, Chapter 17)

She paused, lost in thought. Two very different theories stretched out in opposite directions.
(Emily Trefusis, who emerges as the intellectual heroine of the story, Chapter 17)

‘Brian,’ said Emily thoughtfully, ‘is – well, a person to be reckoned with. He is rather unscrupulous, I should think, and if he wanted anything, I don’t think he would let ordinary conventional standards stand in his way. He’s not plain tame English.’
(Christie’s comic view of her compatriots, Chapter 25)

‘Never part with information unnecessarily. That’s my rule,’ said Inspector Narracott.
(Wise words, Chapter 26)

‘It just shows,’ said Charles, ‘that you never know.’
(Chapter 25)

Freelance detectives

Indeed, you never do know about people’s private lives and secret motivations… except that, in Agatha Christie novels and others of her ilk, in fact you do know. You very much do find out whodunnit, who was jealous of who, who fancied who, as well as a hundred and one other loose ends which by the story’s conclusion are all tied up neatly with a bow.

After a pleasurable day or two of being teased about the mystery, and trying to work it out from the plethora of clues packed into the narrative whodunnit – in the last chapter all is revealed, all is explained, there is closure for everyone, including the reader.

From one point of view, the main thing which distinguishes Christie’s books is who does the revealing and explaining. She is, of course, famous for the series of novels featuring Hercule Poirot as investigator, and the separate series featuring Miss Jane Marple in the same role. But alongside these she published 20 or so novels throughout her career without one of her two star sleuths – detective and crime novels which instead featured freelancers, amateurs, people caught up in a murder situation who find they have a gift for investigation, for interviewing people, for putting evidence together, and developing their own theories.

The Sittaford Mystery is one such ‘freelance’ detective story and the spirited amateur who emerges as its heroine is the wife of the initial suspect, a clever and very determined young woman named Emily Trefusis.

The background

The village of Sittaford is situated on the edge of Dartmoor. It is mid-winter and the moor and village are both deep in snow. The village is dominated by Sittaford House which was built ten years ago by Captain Joseph Trevelyan after he retired from the Royal Navy. He is wealthy and built his big house right on the shoulder of the moor under the shadow of Sittaford Beacon. He had purchased a large tract of land on which he first built the big house with all modern conveniences, then he had built six small bungalows, each in a quarter acre of ground, along the lane leading from the house down to the small village. The cottages are inhabited thus:

  • Number 1 – Major Burnaby, Trevelyan’s oldest friend and sporting partner
  • Number 2 – Captain Wyatt ‘a tall thin man with a very brown complexion, bloodshot eyes and grey hair. He was propped up with a crutch on one side’
    • Wyatt’s miserable-looking native servant, Abdul, ‘a tall Indian in a turban’
  • Number 3 – Mr Rycroft, a dapper little gentleman whose cottage is stuffed with books about ornithology and criminology
  • Number 4 – stern, strict Miss Caroline Percehouse, ‘a spinster of uncertain years and temper who had come down here to die… six years ago’ but has revived in the clear moorland air
    • currently being visited by her empty-headed young nephew, Ronnie Garfield
  • Number 5 – Curtis, retired gardener at Sittaford House, with his garrulous wife Mrs Curtis, who lets rooms to outsiders
  • Number 6 – Mr Duke, a shy retiring man with a military manner that nobody knows anything about

The village itself consists of three picturesque but dilapidated cottages, a forge, and a combined post office and sweet shop. The nearest town is Exhampton, six miles away. The nearest city is Exeter, a train ride away.

The setup

A few months before the story commences Captain Trevelyan was contacted by an estate agent acting on behalf of a colonial widow, one Mrs Willett from South Africa, who was looking for an isolated country house and had always had an interest in mysterious Dartmoor. Through the estate agent she made a very generous offer to Captain Trevelyan, a rather greedy man, and so the deal was done whereby Mrs Willett and her grown-up daughter Violet, leased Sittaford Hall for the winter while the Captain moved into a bungalow into Exhampton, six miles away.

The village is a small place and pretty much everyone gossiped and speculated about Mrs Willett’s real reasons for moving to such an isolated spot.

The séance

Meanwhile Mrs W and her daughter set about trying to make herself popular with the locals, hosting dinners and teas. On the Friday night in question they invite four local middle class characters to tea, being Captain Trevelyan’s long-standing friend, Major Burnaby, Mr Rycroft, Mr Ronnie Garfield and Mr Duke. Afterwards they go to play bridge but six is too many so someone playfully suggests they hold a séance.

So they select a small round table, turn the lights off, sit round it holding hands, amid much joking and irony and scoffing until – as always happens in fictions like this – the table really does begin to move and really indicates that a spirit from the other side wishes to speak to them.

The murder

Long story short, the message that comes through is that Captain Trevelyan is dead, murdered! Someone looks at their watch and sees that the time is precisely 5.25pm.

This breaks up the séance but also upsets his old friend Major Burnaby who, after some fretting, announces that he is setting off the six miles to Exhampton. He insists he will walk there because a) he is fit as a fiddle and despises cars etc b) it’s coming on to snow again and the road is already impassable to vehicles.

A few hours later, about 8pm, in the middle of the blizzard which has arrived as forecast, Major Burnaby arrives at Captain Trevelyan’s rented house, Hazelmoor. When nobody answers the door, he fetches the local police and the local doctor, Dr Warren a doctor and they enter the house through the open study window at the back. Here they find Captain Trevelyan’s dead body on the floor. Dr Warren estimates the time of death at between 5 and 6 pm. the cause of death is a fracture of the base of the skull and the implement is one of the long sand-filled draught excluders used around the house, which is full of sand.

Who murdered Captain Trevelyan, and why, and what on earth has a séance got to do with it? It takes 200 pages for the reader to find out but along the way two notable things happen: 1) the reader is introduced to an extraordinary number of characters who each have complicated backstories, often with secrets and lies of their own; 2) as already stated, although a detective inspector, Inspector Narracott is put on the case, and proceeds with admirable efficiency, his work is paralleled by the rise of the novel’s heroine, tough, committed and clever young Emily Trefusis.

Who she? Well the police quickly find out that on the day of his murder Captain Trevelyan had been visited by the eldest son of his hard-up sister Jennifer, one James Pearson. Soon after the estimated time of the murder this young man packed his bags at the local hotel and hurriedly caught a train out of town. It doesn’t take long to realise that he had a motive (he had come to see his uncle to beg him to help support his mother; plus he [James] was a beneficiary of Trevelyan’s will; plus a few enquiries reveal that he had been embezzling his employer’s money to fund speculations and had recently lost money) and the opportunity (he had gone to see Trevelyan at or very close to the time of the murder).

So the police arrest, charge and imprison James. But they hadn’t counted on James’s fiancée, Emily, who immediately devotes herself to proving her beloved’s innocence. When she arrives in Sittaford she quickly discovers a journalist from a national newspaper is in the town to hand over the prize for winning a national quiz competition to Major Burnaby. This young man, Charles Enderby, is overjoyed to be on the spot of a true-life murder mystery and sets about boosting his profile by cabling his editor back in London that he will get all kinds of exclusives.

This enthusiasm, plus the fact that she is very attractive, allows Emily to quickly size him up and realise that the can manipulate and use Charles for her own ends, something he half-consciously collaborates in as he starts to fall in love with her – or so he thinks. Here she is buttering him up something rotten.

‘One can’t do anything without a man. Men know so much, and are able to get information in so many ways that are simply impossible to women.’
‘Well – I – yes, I suppose that is true,’ said Mr Enderby complacently. (Chapter 11)

Cast

Here’s the vast cast list. Following the twists and turns of the backstories of a dozen or more of them become a full-time and quite demanding activity.

  • Captain Joseph Trevelyan – confirmed old bachelor, owner of Sittaford House which he has rented to Mrs Willett and her daughter, while he moves into a cottage (named Hazelmoor) in the nearest town, Exhampton, ‘known as a woman hater’, doesn’t like his habits upset
  • Hazelmoor’s owner Miss Larpent. Middle-aged woman, she’s gone to a boarding house at Cheltenham for the winter
  • Evans – long-term cook and handyman for Captain Trevelyan, ‘retired naval chap. Ugly customer in a scrap’, ‘a short thick-set man. He had very long arms and a habit of standing with his hands half clenched. He was clean shaven with small, rather pig-like eyes, yet he had a look of cheerfulness and efficiency that redeemed his bulldog appearance’. Evans has recently married…
  • Rebecca Belling, now Mrs Evans, daughter of the local pub landlady
  • Major Burnaby – Captain Trevelyan’s old friend and sports partner, nowadays more into crosswords and acrostics, lives at Number 1 the cottages, gruff, bluff, ‘naturally a silent man’, sceptical about the séance which he thinks is stuff and nonsense
  • Mrs Willett – ‘a tall woman with a rather silly manner – but her physiognomy was shrewd rather than foolish. She was inclined to overdress, had a distinct Colonial accent…’ ‘a fashionable sort of woman. Dressed up to the nines’
  • Miss Violet – her daughter, very nervous. In Burnaby’s view ‘Pretty girl – scraggy, of course – they all were nowadays. What was the good of a woman if she didn’t look like a woman? Papers said curves were coming back. About time too’
  • Mr Ryecroft – ‘a little, elderly, dried-up man’, ‘an enthusiast on birds’. Member of the Psychical Research Society, lives in Number 3 the Cottages – ‘You must forgive me, Miss Trefusis, I am deeply interested in the study of crime. A fascinating study. Ornithology and criminology are my two subjects’
  • Mr Ronald Garfield – ‘a fresh-coloured, boyish young man’, according to his bed-ridden Aunt, Mrs Percehouse, ‘a good lad in his way, but pitifully weak’
  • Mr Duke – a recent arrival, just bought the last of the six bungalows, Number 6, in September. He is ‘a big man, very quiet and devoted to gardening’
  • Elmer – ‘the proprietor of the sole car in the place, an aged Ford, hired at a handsome price by those who wished to go into Exhampton’
  • Constable Graves – local policeman
  • Dr Warren – lives almost next door to the police station, first to examine the body and declare time of death
  • Inspector Narracott – ‘a very efficient officer. He had a quiet persistence, a logical mind and a keen attention to detail which brought him success where many another man might have failed’
  • Sergeant Pollock of the Exhampton police
  • Superintendent Maxwell – Narracott’s superior
  • Mrs Belling – proprietor of the Three Crowns. ‘Mrs Belling was fat and excitable, and so voluble that there was nothing to be done but to listen patiently until such time as the stream of conversation should dry up’ (note Christie’s mockery of several gabby old women in this novel, as in its predecessor, The Murder at the Vicarage)
  • James Pearson – down from London on a flying visit, soon to be questioned and arrested
  • Young male estate agent at Messrs. Williamson, ‘You learn never to be surprised at anything in the house business’
  • Mr Kirkwood – partner in Messrs. Walters & Kirkwood, Trevelyan’s solicitors, co-executor of his will, ‘an elderly man with a benign expression’
  • Charles Enderby – reporter for the Daily Wire come down to Exhampton to award Major Burnaby a cheque for £5,000
  • Mrs Jennifer Gardner – Captain Trevelyan’s sister, lives in Exeter at The Laurels – ‘A tall, rather commanding woman came into the room. She had an unusual looking face, broad about the brows, and black hair with a touch of grey at the temples, which she wore combed straight back from her forehead.’.. ‘Character – that was what it was. Aunt Jennifer had about enough character for two and three quarter people instead of one’
  • Captain Robert Gardner – Aunt Jennifer’s husband, was invalided out of the army after the war with shell shock which has paralysed all his limbs (allegedly)
    • Beatrice – her ‘slipshod’ maid
    • Nurse Davis – nurse for bed-ridden Captain Gardner
  • Mary Pearson, Trevelyan’s other sister, mother of three adult children i.e. Trevelyan’s nephews and niece
  • James, 28 – ‘good-looking, indeed handsome, if you took no account of the rather weak mouth and the irresolute slant of the eyes. He had a haggard, worried look and an air of not having had much sleep of late.’ In the opinion of Emily his fiancée: ‘Dear Jim, dear, sweet, boyish, helpless, impractical Jim. So utterly to be depended on to do the wrong thing at the wrong moment.’
  • Emily Trefusis – ‘a very exceptional kind of young woman. She was not strikingly beautiful, but she had a face which was arresting and unusual, a face that having once seen you could not forget. There was about her an atmosphere of common sense, savoir-faire, invincible determination and a most tantalizing fascination’… ‘This business-like and attractive girl.’
  • Sylvia, 25 – ‘small and fair and anaemic looking, with a worried and harassed expression. Her voice had that faintly complaining note in it which is about the most annoying sound a human voice can contain.’ Sylvia is married to:
  • Martin Dering – ‘You may have read his books. He’s a moderately successful author’
  • Brian – out in Australia, in Inspector Narracott’s view ‘a hot-tempered, high-handed young man’
  • Mrs Curtis – occupies Number 5 the Cottages; rents out rooms. ‘A small, thin, grey haired woman, energetic and shrewish in disposition.’
  • Curtis – former gardener at Sittaford House, ‘a rather gruff looking grey-haired old man’
  • Miss Caroline Percehouse – lives at Number 4 The Cottages, ‘a spinster of uncertain years and temper who had come down here to die, according to Mrs Curtis, six years ago’. ‘An elderly lady with a thin wrinkled face and with one of the sharpest and most interrogative noses that Emily had ever seen.’ Despite or because of this, Emily comes to respect her insight and judgement.
    • Ronald Garfield is her useless nincompoop nephew; she is his Aunt Caroline
  • Captain Wyatt – occupant of Number 2 the Cottages with an Indian servant – ‘The Captain’s habit of letting off a revolver at real or imaginary cats was a sore trial to his neighbours.’ ‘The young men of the present day make me sick,’ said Captain Wyatt. ‘What’s the good of them?’ [sounding remarkably like D.H. Lawrence]
  • Amos Parker – greengrocer at Exhampton, supplies Sittaford
  • Mrs Hibbert at the post office
  • Mr Pound, the blacksmith
  • Mr Dacres – Emily’s solicitor, who is undertaking Jim’s defence

Long list isn’t it, and there’s barely a person in it who doesn’t turn out to have their own secrets and backstories which, when either Inspector Narracott or Charles Enderby or Emily Trefusis stumble upon, deduce or discover them doesn’t, for a portion of the narrative, make them seem like a possible suspect.

It’s like a child’s kaleidoscope where the steady arrival of new facts and discoveries continually changes the investigators’ hypotheses, and overturn or modify any the reader might have been devising. In this sense the stories are very dynamic, presenting a constantly shifting landscape of theories and interpretations.

Emily Trefusis

In the Chief Constable’s opinion, ‘a managing young woman’, and ‘a young woman who prided herself on being sharper than other people’, Emily quite quickly emerges as the heroine of the book. She is absolutely determined to clear her fiancé’s name and so throws her impressive intellect and redoubtable willpower into solving the mystery of the murder.

‘We shall find something,’ said Emily. ‘I always find something.’
Mr Enderby could well believe that. Emily had the kind of personality that soars triumphantly over all obstacles. (Chapter 11)

‘We’ll assume that it is true,’ said Emily firmly. ‘I am sure that in detection of crime you mustn’t be afraid to assume things.’ (Chapter 15)

Bonding with Miss Percehouse.

‘Here is someone,’ thought Emily, ‘who goes straight to the point and means to have her own way and bosses everybody she can. Just like me only I happen to be rather good-looking and she has to do it all by force of character.’ (Chapter 17)

Mrs Curtis’s view:

‘A deep one – and one that can twist all the men round her little finger.’ (Chapter 21)

And, as I’ve mentioned, Emily does twist poor Charles Enderby entirely round her little finger in order to get him onto her team and working to free her fiancé.

Emily’s theory of ‘angle of attack’

I didn’t entirely understand this but the phrase is repeated and Emily herself uses it to describe her approach.

She wished with all her heart that she had met the dead man even if only once. It was so hard to get an idea of people you had never seen. You had to rely on other people’s judgment, and Emily had never yet acknowledged that any other person’s judgment was superior to her own. Other people’s impressions were no good to you. They might be just as true as yours but you couldn’t act on them. You couldn’t, as it were, use another person’s angle of attack. (Chapter 16)

She had no intention of allowing any angle of attack to remain unexplored. (Chapter 16)

As she investigates more i.e. sets out to meet and interview everyone in the village, everyone who knew the captain, and his extended family, Emily develops a ‘system’ not a million miles from Hercule Poirot’s similar systematicness (except Poirot keeps everything in his head):

At the moment she felt disinclined for anything but solitude. She wanted to sort out and arrange her own ideas. She went up to her own room, and taking pencil and notepaper she set to work on a system of her own. (Chapter 17)

And:

And then deliberately she set herself to think out things from the beginning, going over every detail that she knew herself or had learned by hearsay from other people. She considered every actor in the drama and outside the drama. (Chapter 26)

Elsewhere she justifies her freelance approach to Charles.

‘All public things are much better done by the police. It’s private and personal things like listening to Mrs Curtis and picking up a hint from Miss Percehouse and watching the Willetts – that’s where we score.’ (Chapter 25)

The ‘relying on’ stunt

‘Stunt’ occurs a lot in the 1920s, indicating a scam or schtick or technique or method. A little way into the novel Emily stumbles on a clever way to manipulate the men around her. This is to tell them that she is only a helpless lickle ickle girly and she is so grateful that she’s found a big strong man like them to rely on – at which point no self-respecting man can fail to ruffle up his chest feathers, feeling flattered that he is coming to the rescue of this damsel in distress. Works every time. And gets funnier with every repetition.

To Charles Enderby:

‘That’s just what I mean to do,’ said Emily with a complete lack of truth, ‘It’s so wonderful to have someone you can really rely on.’ (Chapter 11)

To Mr Ryecroft:

‘It’s so wonderful,’ she said, using the phrase that in the course of her short life she had found so effectual, ‘to feel that there’s someone on whom one can really rely.’ (Chapter 16)

To Inspector Narracott:

‘How men do stick together,’ went on Emily looking over the telegrams. ‘Poor Sylvia. In some ways I really think that men are beasts. That’s why,’ she added, ‘it’s so nice when one finds a man on whom one can really rely.’ (Chapter 27)

And not just on men. here she is buttering up bed-ridden Captain Gardner’s nurse:

‘How splendid,’ said Emily. ‘It must be wonderful for Aunt Jennifer to feel she has somebody upon whom she can rely.’
‘Oh, really,’ said the Nurse simpering, ‘you are too kind.’
(Chapter 20)

Ronnie Garfield’s theory

Ronnie is an impecunious Bertie Wooster type of upper-class twit. At one point he is given his own dim-witted ‘theory’, regarding the third cousin, Brian Pearson, who everyone thinks disappeared off to Australia years earlier.

‘Fellows that go off to the Colonies are usually bad hats. Their relations don’t like them and push them out there for that reason. Very well then – there you are. The bad hat comes back, short of money, visits wealthy uncle in the neighbourhood of Christmas time, wealthy relative won’t cough up to impecunious nephew – and impecunious nephew bats him one. That’s what I call a theory. (Chapter 23)

Bookish

Here, as in all her novels, I’m getting used to Christie regularly having her characters describe how they feel as if they’re living in a detective novel, or how things resemble (or don’t) similar scenes you read about in books.

‘What a scoop it would be,’ said Mr Enderby, ‘if you and I discovered the real murderer. The crime expert of the Daily Wire – that’s the way I should be described. But it’s too good to be true,’ he added despondently. ‘That sort of thing only happens in books.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Emily, ‘it happens with me.’
(Chapter 11)

‘Just like a sixpenny [crime novel] I got at Woolworth’s the other day, ‘The Syringa Murders’ it was called. And do you know what led them to find the real murderer, Miss? Just a bit of common sealing wax.’
(The chambermaid at the Three Crowns, Chapter 12)

‘I know what you’re thinking. Like in books there ought to be some little incident that I should remember that would be a clue. Well, I’m sorry, but there isn’t any such thing.’
(Chapter 15)

They went up the small path and entered the cottage. The interior was charming. Bookcases lined the walls. Emily went from one to the other glancing curiously at the titles of the books. One section dealt with occult phenomena, another with modern detective fiction, but by far the greater part of the bookcases was given up to criminology and to the world’s famous trials.
(Chapter 16)

‘Yes, Miss Trefusis, I see exactly what you mean. You’ll understand that contrary to the popular belief in novels it is extremely difficult to fix the time of death accurately.’
(Dr Warren, Chapter 18)

‘But then you know what the police are – always butting in on the wrong tack. At least that’s what it says in detective novels.’
(Ronnie again, Chapter 21)

‘Of course,’ said Emily, ‘the person it ought to be is Abdul. It would be in a book. He’d be a Lascar really, and Captain Trevelyan would have thrown his favourite brother overboard in a mutiny – something like that.’
(Chapter 25)

‘It’s generally understood in books, he said, ‘that the police are intent on having a victim and don’t in the least care if that victim is innocent or not as long as they have enough evidence to convict him. That’s not the truth, Miss Trefusis, it’s only the guilty man we want.’
(Inspector Narracott, Chapter 26)

She took each drawer out and felt behind it. In detective stories there was always an obliging scrap of paper. But evidently in real life one could not expect such fortunate accidents…
(Chapter 28)

Plus what I’ve come to realise is the obligatory reference to Sherlock Holmes which crops up in pretty much every Agatha Christie novel.

‘I say, are you doing any sleuthing? If so, can I help? Be the Watson to your Sherlock, or anything of that kind?’
(Upper-class twit Ronnie Garfield, Chapter 21)

Stereotypes

As discussed in earlier reviews, there’s not a lot of point picking out stereotypical and (nowadays insulting) generalisations about gender and ethnicity because detective stories like these are made out of stereotypes. Every character is a type as broad and recognisable as the types in Pilgrim’s Progress or Restoration comedy or Sheridan – the crusty old Royal Navy bachelor, the keen-as-mustard newspaper reporter, the worried mother and nervous daughter, the solid dependable doctor, and so on and so on.

It’s the familiarity of these types which is such a large part of the enjoyment. It’s like the types you meet in pantomime or sitcoms, utterly predictable and therefore reassuring and amusing. It’s so relaxing not having to cope with the complexities and unreadability of real life, and instead slip into a smooth and totally understandable world of reassuringly familiar caricatures. Obviously lots of them harbour secrets and one of them is a murderer but it really doesn’t matter, because everything will be revealed and explained and competently put to rest.

Gabby old women

The book before this, ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ and in this one, Christie makes a big deal out of several older female characters who can’t stop talking, namely Mrs Curtis:

Left to his own devices Charles Enderby did not relax his efforts. To familiarize himself with life as lived in Sittaford village he had only to turn on Mrs Curtis much as you would turn on the tap of a hydrant. Listening slightly dazed to a stream of anecdote, reminiscence, rumours, surmise and meticulous detail he endeavoured valiantly to sift the grain from the chaff. He then mentioned another name and immediately the force of the water was directed in that direction. (Chapter 21)

‘It’s almost a disease the way that woman talks,’ said [Mrs Willett]. (Chapter 21)

‘That chattering magpie of a woman, Mrs Curtis. She’s clean and she’s honest, but her tongue never stops, and she pays no attention to whether you listen or whether you don’t.’ (Chapter 28)

All complemented by Mrs Curtis’s pantomime lack of self awareness:

‘Curtis will be wanting his tea and that’s a fact,’ said Mrs Curtis without moving. ‘I was never one to stand about gossiping.’ (Chapter 21)

Pushing back

But sometimes Christie enjoys pushing back against expectations. Thus in ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ Miss Marple is a rebuttal of all the tired clichés the pompous male policemen spout against a) women and b) old women, in particular.

And so Emily Trefusis feels similarly unexpected. To me she feels like she’s kicking back against clichés about ‘young women today’ etc. In this she is linked to and Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent in the wonderfully entertaining The Secret of Chimneys and its sequel, The Seven Dials Mystery. This is why Mrs Percehouse’s opinion seems more than usually important:

‘I hate a slobbering female,’ said Miss Percehouse. ‘I like one who gets up and does things.’ (Chapter 17)

In their different ways, Bundle, Marple and Emily are just such women.

He-man

Crops up in various texts from the period. Was obviously a newish slogan or catchphrase in the 1920s.

‘I think path digging will be your only sport.’
‘I’ve been at it all the morning.’
‘Oh! you he-man!’
‘Don’t laugh at me. I’ve got blisters all over my hands.’
(Miss Violet teasing Ronnie Garfield, Chapter 1)

Woman hater

Trevelyan is described by several characters as a ‘woman hater’. Mrs Willett has no time for this description.

‘I’ve known dozens of men like it. They are called women haters and all sorts of silly things, and really all the time it’s only shyness. If I could have got at him,’ said Mrs Willett with determination, ‘I’d soon have got over all that nonsense. That sort of man only wants bringing out.’ (Chapter 14)

I’d like to see her have a go at Andrew Tate.

The press

In a deceptively comic way Christie shows how mendacious and distorting the English press are. All the complexity of human life has to be cramped and chopped up to fit newspaper stereotypes. Thus young Charles Enderby is comically open with Emily about how he’s rewritten their conversations to suit the medium’s requirements.

‘Er – I hope you don’t mind, I have just posted off an interview with you?’
‘Oh! that’s all right,’ said Emily mechanically. ‘What have you made me say?’
‘Oh, the usual sort of things people like to hear,’ said Mr Enderby. ‘Our special representative records his interview with Miss Emily Trefusis, the fiancée of Mr James Pearson who has been arrested by the police and charged with the murder of Captain Trevelyan – Then my impression of you as a high-spirited, beautiful girl.’
‘Thank you,’ said Emily.
‘Shingled,’ went on Charles.
‘What do you mean by shingled?’
‘You are,’ said Charles.
‘Well, of course I am,’ said Emily. ‘But why mention it?’
‘Women readers always like to know,’ said Charles Enderby. ‘It was a splendid interview. You’ve no idea what fine womanly touching things you said about standing by your man, no matter if the whole world was against him… I put in a very good bit about Captain Trevelyan’s sea career and just a hint at foreign idols looted and a possibility of a strange priest’s revenge – only a hint you know.’
(Chapter 17)

Christie had had personal experience of the Press’s commitment to lying and distorting people’s actions and words in order to produce copy that sells newspapers during the famous incident of her disappearance in 1928. All things considered, it’s striking how mild her satire on the Press is. Later she has her cops give a more considered view:

‘What was he doing there? Enderby, I mean?’
‘You know what journalists are,’ said Narracott, ‘always nosing round. They’re uncanny.’
‘They are a darned nuisance very often,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Though they have their uses too.’ (Chapter 24)

Height

Christie doesn’t like gabbing women but she has a penchant for tall characters. Tall is good.

Mrs Willett covertly, that she did not look a fool. She was a tall woman with a rather silly manner – but her physiognomy was shrewd rather than foolish… (Chapter 1)

Inspector Narracott was a very efficient officer. He had a quiet persistence, a logical mind and a keen attention to detail which brought him success where many another man might have failed.
He was a tall man with a quiet manner, rather far away grey eyes, and a slow soft Devonshire voice. (Chapter 4)

‘Violet.’ He had hardly noticed the girl who had followed her in, and yet, she was a very pretty girl, tall and fair with big blue eyes. (Chapter 14)

This was a young man not more than twenty-four or five years of age. Tall, good-looking and determined, with none of the hunted criminal about him. (Chapter 22)

Premise

I’ll sign off with another version of that cliché quoted at the top.

‘But one never knows. He’s no fool, that fellow, whatever else he is.’
‘No, he’s an intelligent sort of chap.’
‘His story seems straightforward enough,’ went on the Inspector.
‘Perfectly clear and above board. Still, as I say, one never knows…’ (Chapter 5)

You never know, you never know… until the final chapters of the novel where all is revealed and then… we all know, light is shed in all the dark corners, the culprit is arrested, all the other anomalies and mysteries are cleared up, and we all achieve complete closure, all in time for bed.

Credit

‘The Sittaford Mystery’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in 1931.

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‘Always dropping in – dropping in – too much dropping in. If I don’t choose to see anyone for a week, or a month, or a year, that’s my business.’ (Captain Wyatt)

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Posted by Simon on July 21, 2025

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The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad (1902)

‘Ha! My dear boy. The men we have known – the ships we’ve sailed – ay! and the things we’ve done…’
(Captain Ned Elliot in sentimental mood, page 76)

‘The End of the Tether’ is a novella by Joseph Conrad, written and published in 1902. It is 52,564 words long.

Cast

Captain Whalley, otherwise known as Dare-devil Harry or Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. Whalley has been fifty years at sea, forty of them out East but now he is old and fallen on hard times.

Mrs Whalley, his soul mate, who painted his cabin on the Condor with roses. But tragically she passed away 23 years ago, leaving Whalley only…

Ivy, his daughter, living in Melbourne, married to…

His son-in-law, consistently unlucky in business. When Whalley loses his life’s savings the son in law takes to a bath chair and doctors say he will never walk again.

Old Swinburne, his mate on the Condor who wept when they buried Mrs Whalley at sea.

Mrs Gardner, the wife of the senior partner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co, the owners of the Condor,  who was kind to him after his wife died.

Captain ‘Ned’ Elliott, Singapore Master-Attendant, a fat jovial blusterer, same age as Whalley, much exercised by worry about the future of his three layabout daughters, and with such a dearth of decent men. (As so often in Conrad, a secondary character provides a contrast to the central protagonist, in this case Elliott’s daughters versus Whalley’s daughter.)

Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley), the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, witness on the night Massy wins the lottery.

The lawyer who draws up the contract between Whalley and Massy, ‘a young man fresh from Europe and not overburdened with business’ (p.121).

Historic figures

Mr Denham, the early, jacket off, hands-on governor of Singapore who encouraged young Whalley to captain the Dido on a voyage to

Evans, ‘with his red face, his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes, who had set up the first patent slip for repairing small ships, on the edge of the forest, in a lonely bay three miles up the coast’.

On the Sofala

Captain Whalley

George Massy the resentful engineer and owner: ‘His black hair lay plastered in long lanky wisps across the bald summit of his head; he had a furrowed brow, a yellow complexion, and a thick shapeless nose. A scanty growth of whisker did not conceal the contour of his jaw. His aspect was of brooding care.’

Mr Stern, first mate, ‘tall, young, lean, with a mustache like a trooper, and something malicious in the eye.’

Second engineer, Jack, who never talks to the rest of the crew but only grunts or hoots, and goes on periodic benders when he locks himself in his cabin and rants and raves.

The Serang, ‘an elderly, alert, little Malay, with a very dark skin’, like a wizened pygmy next to Whalley’s bulk. ‘Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old gray felt hat rammed down on his head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy of fourteen.’

The Malay leadsman, ‘the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, cut off close to the shoulder, bared his brown arm of full rounded form and with a satiny skin like a woman’s’ (p.83)

The quartermaster, ‘a middle-aged, pock-marked, Sumatra Malay, almost as dark as a negro’.

The carpenter, ‘a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose blue drawers for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and fled below, with streaming tail and shaking all over’ before the fury of the generally furious Massy (p.118).

On land

Mr Van Wyk, ‘a short, dapper figure’, ‘the white man of Batu Beru, an ex-naval officer who, for reasons best known to himself, had thrown away the promise of a brilliant career to become the pioneer of tobacco-planting on that remote part of the coast’ (p.125).

The Sultan, ‘a restless and melancholy old ruler who had done with love and war, for whom life no longer held any savour (except of evil forebodings) and time never had any value’ (p.125).

1. Background and setup

The story is set in the mid-1880s and centres on old Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise known as Dare-devil Harry or Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. Whalley has been fifty years at sea, forty of them out East. The text is dotted with his memories of the good old days, way before steam, when places like Singapore were just a muddy creek.

For years he was captain of the Condor, famous in her day. Somewhere between Australia and China lie a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef, named after him and his ship.

But his wife, his best friend and soul mate, who had elaborately painted the state room of the Condor with flowers, passed away, 26 years ago. He buried her at sea, keeping his voice steady as he read the service while his chief mate, old Swinburne, cried like a baby.

They had a daughter named Ivy and Whalley imagined her twined around his heart forever. When she was of age she settled in Melbourne and married a weakling, a man not worthy of her, a man continually unlucky in business.

He was looking forward to a comfortable retirement when he was caught up in the crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, ‘whose downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake’ and lost his life savings.

He retained enough, however, to run a pretty little barque, the Fair Maid. In this he undertook small cargo trips but times have changed. Commercial sailing has become professionalised and dominated by large companies running shipping routes like trams. Not much room for a freelancer and an elderly one at that.

But then, as he turned 65, his daughter’s husband has some kind of collapse and takes to a bath chair; the doctors say he will never walk again. It’s then that Ivy sends him a letter saying she’s decided to open a boarding house and needs £200 seed money.

All that day and night he walks the maindeck thinking, to the astonishment of his officers who are used to his methodical, regular routine. By the morning he’s decided the only way to raise the money the apple of his eye has asked for is to sell his beloved barque, the Fair Maid.

And so the narrative finds him coming out of an office in the main strip at Singapore, having just sold his beloved barque to a Japanese speculator. He got £500 for it, £200 of which he is sending to his daughter in Melbourne. But as he walks through the half-built streets of Singapore he feels bereft. For the first time in 50 years he isn’t attached to a ship and for the first time feels like a back number. His mood is reinforced by the realisation that when he first set foot her, some 40 years earlier, back when ‘individuals were of some account’, the place was just a fishing village on a muddy creek. It is then that he bumps into Captain ‘Ned’ Elliott, a Master-Attendant friend of his.

A master-attendant is a superior sort of harbour-master; a person, out in the East, of some consequence in his sphere; a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of the port, and possessed of vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.

They get talking, Whalley tells him about selling the Fair Maid and Elliott tells him he’s heard about a vacancy on a ship called the Sofala. The catch is that the owner, George Massy, is also the engineer. He’s a prickly character who came into port on a ship which couldn’t wait to get rid of him, and gained a reputation for surly resentment. But then he went and won (second prize) in the Manilla lottery. At which point he bought the Sofala, a ship generally considered too small and not quite modern enough for the sort of  coastal trade she was in. And with one swoop Massy adopted the swaggering mannerisms of the worst kind of ship owner, larded with a vast chip on his shoulder and an urge to get revenge on everyone who’d ever wronged him.

Which is why Massy keeps sticking his oar in and arguing with his captains, which is why they all keep quitting (he’s run through 11 captains in three years). The deuce of it is that, after buying the ship Massy ran through the remainder of his winnings trying to win a second time and now has almost no capital. What he needs is not just a captain but a business partner.

So in, his slow quiet way, Whalley realises this is just the opening which suits him, with his £500 from the sale of the Fair Maid to invest. And so, despite his misgivings, and his strong sense of going down in the world, Whalley negotiates a deal with Massy. It is a three-year contract. In return for his investment of £500, he will brook no interference in his actions as captain and will take a sixth part of the profits from the ship’s voyages (p.90).

2. Captain of the Sofala

And so the main narrative commences. In this timeline (with which the text actually opened) it is three years later and Whalley has skippered the Sofara through the same outward voyage along the coast, stopping at trading stations, and back, no fewer than 36 times, once a month for three years, so that he knows the route off by heart.

The long central passages describe the tensions between the four white crew of the Sofala, being sturdy, taciturn old Whalley with his vast white beard; the angry resentful engineer-owner, Mr Massy; Jack the monosyllabic second engineer; and the malicious and ambitious, competent but widely disliked Mr Stern.

There’s a great deal about their inter-relationships, with a lot of backstory about Massy’s conviction that the whole world is against him. One factor in this is that he has run through all his lottery winnings, partly in futile efforts to win a second time, and the ship desperately needs repairs. Specifically, the boilers are reaching their end of their life, are harder to maintain. The alcoholic second engineer complains about the effort required endlessly, but this only infuriates Massy because any talk of repairing them throws him into a panic; almost certainly he’ll have to borrow the money and it will mean the ship being laid up for some time and losing custom, maybe permanently, probably to the bloody German coast steamers which are spreading everywhere. Anyway, this explains why Massy and Jack are almost continuously shouting abuse at each other.

All this squalid human business is juxtaposed with stunning descriptions of the jungle foliage as the steamer slowly makes its way upriver to its terminus at Batu Beru.

But towards the end of this section, the dominant thing becomes the fact that Mr Stern is convinced he has made a massive discovery which changes everything. Right at the very start of the text, before it cut back in time to give Whalley’s backstory, and again, now, during this passage describing the ship’s 36th journey up the river, much has been made of the way Whalley relies on ‘the Serang’, a wizened old Malayan to do the majority of the navigating. Their close, professional relationship is nicely described, alongside the physical disparity between the massive Whalley and tiny native figure.

But observing them as, for the 36th time, they position the ship to pass through a break in the mud bar at the entrance to the river, Stern has a brainwave. He realises that it’s the Serang steering the ship. Conrad spends several pages describing Stern’s excitement at his discovery but it’s not for some time that we get the central gist, of this discovery and, indeed, of the entire story: Whalley is going blind. Stern is excited because he instantly thinks that he will be able to step into the captain’s shoes, once he is forced out – blithely ignoring the fact that Massy absolutely detests him.

3. Mr van Wyk

The Sofala travels slowly up the river before docking at a tobacco plantation. This is owned by Mr Van Wyk, a Dutchman, a dapper, civilised figure who, after a devastating heartbreak in love, has chosen to isolate himself in the back of beyond. A flashback describes their first meeting three years earlier, on the Sofala’s first trip skippered by Whalley, and how the rather fierce Wyk came to respect and like the optimistic, ancient old seaman with his sturdy faith in his Creator. Noticeably, he is the only member of the crew he routinely invites up to his house for dinner, regarding the others as trash.

Having painted the origins of their friendship, Conrad comes back to the present and this particular trip. As he walks down from his house to the quay where the Sofala has just docked, Van Wyk is intercepted by Stern who, in his sneaky unlikeable way, quickly tells him Whalley’s secret.

Disturbed and upset, Van Wyk hurries to invite Whalley for dinner, as usual. He notices Whalley’s clumsiness and then that he knocks over a tumbler at dinner, and then Whalley admits it: he is going blind but he has told no one. And this makes the ship technically unseaworthy. It is illegal and greatly against the simple principles of a man who’s devoted his life to the sea. He is ashamed.

He had nothing of his own – even his past of honour, of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his spotless life had fallen into the abyss. He had said his last goodbye to it. (p.157)

But, as he explains, by the terms of his contract with Massy, at the end of the three years, he is paid back the £500 he invested in the business. But, if he is dismissed for negligence, illness and so forth, Massy can withold this payment for a year. In which case he, Whalley would have no money to live on and nowhere to live for a year. There are only 6 weeks of the contract left. So, Whalley explains, he plans to complete this trip, and one more, and then will leave at the expiry date of his contract with all his money.

I haven’t properly conveyed how Whalley considers himself as doing all this for his daughter. His daughter is the one thing he has left in his life, the spitting image of his beloved wife. For the three years of his service on the Sofala he has sent her all his salary. In the last few pages it is fidelity to her which Conrad positions as the key motive for Whalley lying to everyone and desperately hoping to make it through the last few weeks of his contract. For then he will collect his £500 investment and take it to her, the daughter, in Melbourne, and place himself in her care.

4. The climax

During this last trip, while anchored off Van Wyk’s plantation, the second engineer goes on another bender, locking himself into his cabin, ranting and raving. Massy, as usual, kicks and bangs on the door yelling at him to shut up. But in among his ravings, the engineer rants about letting the whole bloody ship go to the bottom, and this triggers an idea in Massy’s head.

It’s a simple idea and a common one (in fiction, at least) for someone at their wits’ end for how to get money. He’ll deliberately contrive the shipwreck of his own ship, then claim the insurance. the ship is worth more to him dead than alive.

So Massy fills the pockets of his jacket with old nuts and bolts and iron filings from the filthy cargo hold then strolls casually onto the bridge when Whalley is on watch, depending, as usual, on the Serang to actually steer the ship. He loiters by the compass, blocking the steersman’s view, claiming to be studying it, in reality hanging his jacket on the hook. Everyone’s used to the owner hanging his jacket at random place round the ship so nobody notices this. When he strolls away the steersman is surprised to see that, according to the compass, the ship is way off course and so swings the helm round to come back to its proper course heading north.

Massy goes below and sits with his knees shaking going over and over his plan. He intends the ship to strike a reef east of Pangu, sit on them till the can release the boats, have the ship declared a write-off, collect the insurance cash.

They have sailed this route 36 times and so know it backwards. When they fail to sight land after three hours the Serang becomes increasingly anxious and begs Whalley to look around for sights and to check the compass for himself, both of which he can, of course, not do, for he cannot see.

In bending down to see the compass Whally slips and his hand catches Massy’s jacket which tears its little hanging cord and falls to the deck with a loud clang as all the nuts and bolts fall out the pockets. On his hands and knees Whalley feels them, realises what they are and realises in a flash what Massy has done, deliberately set the ship off course, but at that very second the ship runs into a huge reef just below the surface, like a car hitting a wall. There is a tremendous shock, all kinds of cables snap, the lights go out, the engines stutter.

When the ship rebounds and strikes the reef again the huge funnel amidships topples over onto the bridge which a great smashing. Whalley staggers to his feet, cut and shaken.

Stern comes running out of his cabin and Whalley quickly explains and orders him to lower the lifeboats. Massy and Whalley have a great confrontation on the deck in which Massy points out that, if Whalley tells the truth and reports him to the authorities the ship’s insurance won’t be paid, Massy won’t be able to pay Whalley his £500 back, and Ivy will never get the money. Massy has him by the short and curlies. Whalley is stricken. And for the first time Conrad deploys the book’s signature phrase:

Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s money! Gone in this wreck. Again he had a flash of insight. He was indeed at the end of his tether. (p.167)

And we reach the climax of the other great symbol, the association of Whalley’s gathering blindness with the darkness of  his fate. Ever since Conrad revealed his protagonist was going blind he’s rung changes on the idea that the light has slowly leeched out of his life, overcome by darkness.

For Ivy he had carried his point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a crime. God had not listened to his prayers. The light had finished ebbing out of the world; not a glimmer. It was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley who had gone so far to carry a point should continue to live. He must pay the price. (p.167)

And in that passage you can see how, suddenly, Conrad has his protagonist realise two or three related things: he cannot live because if he does he will have to lie about Massy’s shipwrecking to enable Massy to claim the insurance which will allow him to pay Whalley back so he can pass the money onto his daughter. But he, couldn’t live with himself if he lied. And he can’t live if Ivy is to thrive. And so the decision to go down with the ship.

Once the crew are in the lifeboat he unties the rope holding it to the ship and returns to the bridge. They shout for him to jump but instead he puts on Massy’s jacket with its pockets full of iron. If he’s going to go down, it ought to be as quick and definitive as possible.

Coda

Rather like the move at the end of ‘Typhoon’ which suddenly cuts away altogether from the scene of the dramatic storm, to describe the letters the crew write to their loved ones back home i.e. shows the effect (or lack of effect) on people far removed from the central drama, same here.

The sinking of the Sofala is described with uncharacteristic brevity and then the last three pages of the text cut to its impact on two others. First, Mr Van Wyk. When the Sofala doesn’t return a month later he immediately intuits that he’ll never see it again. A few weeks later he travels to the Sofala‘s port of registration and hears about the board of enquiry and official decision that she was carried onto the reefs by freak currents.

He bumps into Stern by accident, who tells him that Massy got his insurance money, all the time babbling about a new ship, but as soon as he had the cash in hand, caught a ship to Manilla where, the reader knows, he will squander it all playing the lottery. Stern also tells him that Whalley made a conscious decision to go down with the ship, he could have easily jumped and they would have pulled him aboard the lifeboat. He wanted to die though Stern has no idea why. Only the reader knows the full story.

Second, the famous daughter, Ivy, whose wellbeing Whalley has obsessed about all through the story. She receives a letter from Whalley’s lawyer informing her of her father’s death, and including a letter from him. In this he says that, if she’s reading it he must be dead. He always did his best for her. He reveals he is going blind. God seems to have forgotten him. He did so want to see her one last time but his death is probably best for everyone.

And then the story ends very beautifully by dwelling on this daughter. She is thin-faced, pinched and worn with cares. Her husband is upstairs in his wheelchair. The kids are at school. She doesn’t cry. She leans her head against the window. On one level Conrad, by letting us see the dry narrow worn life she now leads, begs the obvious question: was Whalley’s devotion to her really worth it? Did he make very much difference to her tough life?

And then Conrad writes a phrase which, as the father of a grown-up daughter, made me cry:

Even the image of her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the gray twilight; it was her father’s face alone that she saw, as though he had come to see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but with something more august and tender in his aspect.

Big, reassuring, august and tender, God I hope I’ve been half as steadfast for my daughter as Captain Whalley.

1. Incommunication

All the characters struggle to communicate effectively, sometimes to talk at all. Whalley is, to put it mildly, not very talkative.

Good fellow – Harry Whalley – never very talkative. You never knew what he was up to – a bit too off-hand with people of consequence, and apt to take a wrong view of a fellow’s actions.

In the Sofala passages he makes a point of almost completely ignoring Massy’s whining. When he does reply it is in a ‘strange deep-toned voice’.

Massy only speaks in resentful murmurs and mutters but us characterised by repeated use of the word ‘whine’. He is a whiny little so-and-so.

Jack, the second engineer on the Safola, never talks to anyone; at best he hoots like an owl.

He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive manner, and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn concern for his engines that he seemed to have lost the use of speech. When addressed directly his only answer would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance. For all the years he had been in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as much as a frank good morning with any of his shipmates.

Except when he gets drunk, when he goes to the opposite extreme, from taciturn to overflowing with a multitude of voices:

Twice or perhaps three times in the course of the year he would take too much to drink. On these occasions he returned on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran across the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like a tight-rope walker; and locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and argue with himself the livelong night in an amazing variety of tones; storm, sneer, and whine with an inexhaustible persistence.

Mr Van Wyk: ‘When absolutely forced to speak he gave evasive vaguely soothing answers out of pure compassion.’ ‘The gleam of low patent shoes peeping under the wide bottom of trowsers cut straight from the same stuff as the gossamer coat, completed a figure recalling, with its sash, a pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the elegance of a slightly bald dandy indulging, in seclusion, a taste for unorthodox costume.’

Ivy By contrast with all these surly men, Whalley has a special relationship with his daughter, in which much doesn’t need to be said, proving that the deepest bonds often go too deep for words, words aren’t necessary, in fact words expressed in writing or speech often get in the way of the deeper understanding.

The ‘natives’

Much the largest gap in communication is, of course, between the white men and the different types of ‘native’, mostly either Malay or Chinese. And by further contrast, the Serang, the old Malay who steers the ship, finds white people inexplicable – which raises the larger issue of the enormous communication gulf between white or Western men, and all types of ‘natives’.

Incomprehension

A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues… Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending.

An incomprehensible growl answered him… (p.155)

And the upshot of everyone’s inability to talk or communication, is mutual incomprehension. Talk a lot or a little, shout or murmur, whine or command, in the end it barely matters because nothing anyone says can reduce the iron walls of incomprehension everyone is trapped behind.

A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues… Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending.

He [Whalley] remained incomprehensible in his simplicity, fearlessness, and rectitude.

I’ve mentioned the habit of Jack the second engineer of getting drunk and then overflowing with voices. But Conrad uses the passage to highlight, yet again, the way these drunken rants make hardly any difference to the Malays who find everything about the white man incomprehensible.

Outside the solitary lascar told off for night duty in harbour, perhaps a youth fresh from a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck listening to the endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes – beings with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by inscrutable motives.

Everyone is trapped in their silo, unable to understand or even hear each other’s wishes.

The rather opaque ending with the daughter in faraway Melbourne opening the letter from her dead father subtly begs, raises, juggles this issue because, in the end, did father and daughter understand each other? Conrad’s phrasing is ambiguous to allow of both a yes and a no to that question.

Vivid turns of phrase

It’s one of the ironies of Conrad’s writing that a man so obsessed with people’s failures to communicate was himself prone to unstoppable eloquence and loquacity. Some contemporaries criticised him for being long-winded, windy and verbose. This may or may not be true, depending on whether you enjoy his repetitive, incantatory style. Certainly all of Conrad’s (early) stories are full of descriptions which are as lush and beautiful as the English language allows:

The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut, denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid wall of leaves, with here and there the shape of an enormous dark pillar soaring, or a ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannonball, disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the secular inviolable shade of the virgin forest. The thump of the engines reverberated regularly like the strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast silence, the shadow of the western wall had fallen across the river, and the smoke pouring backwards from the funnel eddied down behind the ship, spread a thin dusky veil over the sombre water, which, checked by the flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the reaches.

It’s long, langorous, sensual descriptions like this which led Conrad to be described as an ‘impressionist’, along with comments in his various prefaces where he explicitly says his aim is to make the reader see and feel and smell the scenery.

But also, alongside the lush landscapes, and the passages of trouble dialogue, Conrad regularly slips in a really vivid metaphor or simile, something out of left-field which makes your jaw drop:

The sun had set. And when, after drilling a deep hole with his stick, [Captain Whalley] moved from that spot the night had massed its army of shadows under the trees. They filled the eastern ends of the avenues as if only waiting the signal for a general advance upon the open spaces of the world… (p.76)

‘Sofala,’ articulated Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman, a new emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention as if waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man’s lips. (p.77)

Conrad’s cosmic vision

All these stories contain moments when Conrad’s vision leaves the dull earth and wheels off into space, invoking cosmic visions, invoking the planet or the universe on a scale which, to me, have a slight science fiction tinge.

The perspiration poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust. (p.87)

Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the very bosom of the earth.

It was as if nobody could talk like this now, and the overshadowed eyes, the flowing white beard, the big frame, the serenity, the whole temper of the man, were an amazing survival from the prehistoric times of the world coming up to him out of the sea. (p.132)

In the steadily darkening universe a sinister clearness fell upon his ideas. In the illuminating moments of suffering he saw life, men, all things, the whole earth with all her burden of created nature, as he had never seen them before. (p.160)

It’s a consistent aspect of his work. Compare this, from Heart of Darkness:

We were wanderers on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.

History

Changing patterns of sea trade

The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.

These were the halcyon days of steam coasting trade, before some of the home shipping firms had thought of establishing local fleets to feed their main lines. These, when once organized, took the biggest slices out of that cake, of course; and by-and-by a squad of confounded German tramps turned up east of Suez Canal and swept up all the crumbs. They prowled on the cheap to and fro along the coast and between the islands, like a lot of sharks in the water ready to snap up anything you let drop. And then the high old times were over for good…’ (p.72)

‘If he misses a couple more trips he need never trouble himself to start again. He won’t find any cargo in his old trade. There’s too much competition nowadays for people to keep their stuff lying about for a ship that does not turn up when she’s expected.’ (p.73)

‘The earth is big,’ he said vaguely…
‘Doesn’t seem to be so much room on it,’ growled the Master-Attendant, ‘since these Germans came along shouldering us at every turn. It was not so in our time…’ (p.75)

Remembering the early days of Singapore

Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness without any docks or waterworks.

He remembered muddy shores, a harbour without quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught fire mysteriously and smouldered for days, so that amazed ships came into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red at midday. He remembered the things, the faces, and something more besides – like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of to-day.

Credit

The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the 1975 penguin Modern Classics paperback edition which also contains ‘Youth and The End of the Tether’.

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by Simon on December 4, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2024

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