"Conrad, Joseph - Typhoon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

TYPHOON

BY
JOSEPH CONRAD



Far as the mariner on highest mast
Can see all around upon the calmed vast,
So wide was Neptune's hall . . .
-- KEATS



AUTHOR'S NOTE

THE main characteristic of this volume consists in
this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the
same period but have been written one after another in the order
in which they appear in the book.

The period is that which follows on my connection with
Blackwood's Magazine. I had just finished writing "The End of
the Tether" and was casting about for some subject which could be
developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume of
"Youth" when the instance of a steamship full of returning
coolies from Singapore to some port in northern China occurred to
my recollection. Years before I had heard it being talked about
in the East as a recent occurrence. It was for us merely one
subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. Men
earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk
shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their
lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other
subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with
them. Life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting
taskmaster.

I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the
interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but
the extraordinary complication brought into the ship's life at a
moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck.
Neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In
that company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing
was like. The financial difficulty of it, presenting also a
human problem, was solved by a mind much too simple to be
perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle talk for
which it was not adapted.

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say,
that such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a