I have been a Joseph Conrad fan for a very long time but I had to travel all the way to Ubud in Bali to find copies of his two short stories "A Smile of Fortune" and "The Return".
"A Smile of Fortune" features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him.
He arrives at an island in the Indian Ocean to take on a cargo of sugar, but is also given an open invitation by his ship’s owners to do trade with a local merchant.
The trader turns out to have a brother, and the two of them have diametrically opposed characters: one is socially well respected, but is a brute; the other is a social outcast who wishes to ingratiate himself with the unnamed narrator.
For reasons he himself cannot fully understand, the captain opts for the outcast and allows himself to be drawn into his domestic life whilst waiting for his ship to be made ready. The principal attraction for this delay is a mysterious young woman, who might be the trader’s daughter, with whom the young captain becomes romantically obsessed.
The trader meanwhile is encouraging the captain’s attentions, whilst trying to lure him into a speculative commercial venture. It’s as if the young man is being lured and tempted on two fronts – the erotic and the pecuniary.
In typically modernist fashion, this conflict reaches an unexpected and ambiguous resolution which despite the captain’s commercial profit leads to his resigning his commission and heading back home.
"The Return" is Conrad in his most exotic territory: a house in London, not a boat in sight, utterly free of the Orient. It is set in "the impenetrable and polished discretions of closed doors and curtained windows". Mirrors and a carpet replace sky and sea. For Conrad, the slightest glance, the smallest passing moment, and words themselves, all came weighted with unfathomable implications, signals to us that time is merely the mercy of eternity.
Writing for him was a way to make this both clear and mysterious, bring it home to us and move it beyond us, just as his wife's return and her pale words make Hervey conscious of matters which perhaps only an exile from English mores and manners could see: "the revealing night... the darkness that tries the hearts, in the night useless for the work of men, but in which their gaze, undazzled by the sunshine of covetous days, wanders sometimes as far as the stars".
And there is more to find: I am still looking for a copy of "The Planter of Malata" - Malata? Malaita? a thinly-veiled reference to the Solomon Islands? - , Because of the Dollars, The Partner and The Inn of the Two Witches.
