



Produced by Tracy Camp and David Widger





VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE

By Joseph Conrad



Contents


NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

AUTHOR'S NOTE


PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN


PART TWO

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT












PART THREE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN


PART FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN





NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that last
word was the single word of the title.

Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication
approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
title-page. The word "Victory" the shining and tragic goal of noble
effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere
novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of
commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book
had something to do with war.

Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my
decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of
awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.
"Victory" was the last word I had written in peace-time. It was the last
literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of the Temple
of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the
consciences of men all over the world. Such coincidence could not be
treated lightly. And I made up my mind to let the word stand, in the
same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of Old Rome would have
"accepted the Omen."

The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence (in
the novel) of a person named Schomberg.

That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to
offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old
member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far
back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story
of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true
to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his
deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is
completed at last.

I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology; but
it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in mentioning
him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation
of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated, and, as
it were, impartial conviction.

J. C.



AUTHOR'S NOTE

On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness
to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to
the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained
when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the
war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an
Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already
full of doubts and fears.

The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in this
edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented
to the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been
published in the United States early in the year made it difficult
to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the
thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful
incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter
of reality, tragic enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than
tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to
think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which
in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing
the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp
knife at its throat.

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to
be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement
to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on
with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his
stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the
leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be
disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too
awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly
by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book
pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.

It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting
himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness
of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead
the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the
matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.
The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.

But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I
have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands
behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a
mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so
certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment
was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I
will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a
wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his
surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We became very
friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant
suspicions though, personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent
to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of
life. He was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and
moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.
That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by
the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot help
thinking he had carried to excess. He went away from his rooms without
leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone to--but now I know.
He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure that,
unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking
upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often in the
course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a phrase
heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have fastened on
to him many words heard on other men's lips and belonging to other men's
less perfect, less pathetic moods.

The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is
built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name
was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out
of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in
the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon
extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to
which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome
significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off
the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird
impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the
fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said:
"A professional sharper?" and got for an answer: "He's a terror; but I
must say that up to a certain point he will play fair...." I wonder
what the point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went
straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
ports of call in the direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones's characteristic
insolence belongs to another man of a quite different type. I will say
nothing as to the origins of his mentality because I don't intend to
make any damaging admissions.

It so happened that the very same year Ricardo--the physical
Ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and
extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage between two
places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter. For the most part
he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time
to time on his elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not
exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his
eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with
his familiar devil. Now and then he would give me a glance and make the
hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green
and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his
face. What he was travelling for or what was his business in life he
never confided to me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that
schooner who could have talked openly about his activities and purposes
was a very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior
of a convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly
ferocious countenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate in the dark
and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner
of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very ill indeed. Ricardo
seemed to be either a servant or the confidant of that aged and
distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the passage held a long
murmured conversation with the friar, and after that did nothing but
groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and then call for Martin in a
voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book would go
below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously,
and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read,
would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his
moral attitude towards life illustrated by striking particular instances
of the most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to frighten me? Or seduce
me?