Several years ago I became involved in a controversy over the nature of a character in Joseph Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer." The question was this: Is Leggatt, the escaping murderer, a good man or a bad man? Symbolically, as everyone agrees, Leggatt stands for the captain's other self, but is that other self good or evil, his higher or his lower nature? I felt then—and I feel now—that Leggatt represents the higher nature of the captain, his ideal self in fact, and that everything in the story points in that direction. In working out my case, I used as part of my evidence certain changes Conrad made in adapting the actual historic events on which the story was based. At the same time, I noted in the story other uses of historical and autobiographical materials which were then irrelevant to my purpose but which might some day be worth investigating to see exactly how it is that a writer uses the raw material he has at his disposal.

There are really three sets of data which we must keep in mind during this discussion: the story itself, the autobiographical materials relating to Conrad's first voyage as a sea captain, and the historical materials relating to the disastrous voyage of the ship Cutty Sark

Although "The Secret Sharer" is very well known, it is long and complicated; so I shall make brief narrative summaries where they seem necessary to focus attention. For the moment, at least, the relevant facts are simply these. A young officer has just taken command of his first ship, and the story opens as the ship lies at the head of the Gulf of Siam waiting for a breeze. The action of the story continues through several days as the ship makes its passage down the Gulf.

The bare circumstances of a young man's first command and the geographical location are easy to pin down as autobiographical. Conrad passed his master's examination at the end of 1886, but he was unable for some time to get a command. In January of 1888 he determined to return to Europe where his luck might be better, and he was in Singapore waiting for a ship to give him passage when he was offered exactly the opportunity he wanted. The captain of the barque Otago had died at sea, and the Otago was in Bangkok expecting a new captain. Although the dead captain does not come into "The Secret Sharer" in any way, he is noteworthy as an example of the sort of thing the writer must contend with in his raw material. There is a vivid sketch of him in G. Jean-Aubry's Life and Letters:

[The late captain of the Otago] had been a man of somewhat singular character. From the second officer [Conrad] learnt that he had been sixty-five years old, and that he had spent the last weeks of his life playing the fiddle day and night in his cabin, without paying the smallest heed to the ship's course,—except to prevent her touching at a port; that he had seemed not so much indifferent to the welfare of his officers and crew, as desirous of seeing them all perish some day of hunger and boredom. One day, feeling himself to be ill, he had thrown his fiddle overboard and allowed himself to die; to the last completely indifferent to his crew.

This sketch clearly suggests the kind of self-control a writer must exercise in selecting his material. It would have been easy to start the story a little earlier in order to include this beguiling interlude. The temptation is certainly great. But Conrad was not distracted. He recognized exactly what his story was about and where it began. The story is not about the difficulties of taking over a ship from a mad captain, who wrote dirty poems in the ship's account book and never deigned to let the owners know where he was or what he was doing. That is a story—in fact it is two stories, and the name of one is The Shadow Line and the name of the other is "Falk." In "The Secret Sharer," however, Conrad dismisses all this with a line: "In consequence of certain events of no particular significance, except to myself, I had been appointed to the command only a fortnight before."

The story that is of significance now is the classic life-voyage story, and Conrad quite rightly starts it at the beginning of the voyage. The second paragraph of "The Secret Sharer" makes this clear: "She floated at the starting-point of a long journey, very still in an immense stillness, the shadows of her spars flung far to the eastward by the setting sun. At that moment I was alone on her decks. There was not a sound in her—and around us nothing moved, nothing lived, not a canoe on the water, not a bird in the air, not a cloud in the sky. In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges."

There is no place in this beginning for a mad captain. Conrad knows he will keep and be usable another time. As already indicated, this is not a story of the difficulties of taking over command, a story of one's relationship with others. It is, rather, a story of a private test of worthiness to command, a story of a man's relationship with himself: "… I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly."

So far we have located the source of several important elements in the story. First, is the general circumstance of the first command, begun suddenly when the ship has been long at sea. This follows the pattern of events in Conrad's own first command. Second, the setting of the story is also taken from that same autobiographical incident. The opening description of the area around the mouth of the Meinam River and the later description of the island Kohring are both from Conrad's direct perception at that time. And, third, the very idea of a sea captain leads to the moral center of the story, the problem of responsibility.

Although we now have situation, setting, and moral center, we still have no story whatever. Something has got to happen. A test has got to be devised to determine the young man's worthiness of his new position, not only as captain of his ship but also as captain of his soul.

Of course, Conrad could have devised some kind of storm or shipwreck to test the mettle of the young captain. He knew all that sort of thing. He has the captain say when he narrates the story: "[I pictured] to myself the coming passage through the Malay Archipelago, down the Indian Ocean, and up the Atlantic. All its phases were familiar enough to me, every characteristic, all the alternatives which were likely to face me on the high seas—everything! … except the novel responsibility of command. But I took heart from the reasonable thought that the ship was like other ships, the men like other men, and that the sea was not likely to keep any special surprises expressly for my discomfiture."

The captain quite rightly calculates that ship and crew and sea are as they have always been and have no special surprises for him, but he does not properly weigh the most important thing of all: that he himself is something he has never been before and that he holds in store the very special surprise each person has for himself as he takes his position as a morally responsible individual. And it is because of his desire to focus on the moral nature of the story that Conrad declines the suggestion that he test his new captain with some maritime spectacular.

There is no end to the material he might have used, for he was, of course, familiar with the lore of his trade. He must have lived in a world very much like that of his characters, who constantly give the impressions that they know about each other and enjoy a constant flow of rumor and gossip; and we can be sure from this alone that he would be familiar with the story of the Cutty Sark, an unlucky ship much in the news about eight years before he himself took over the command of the Otago. But if we have any doubt at all, we need only look at the beginning of "Falk," the story dealing with the period of his life immediately preceding the events on which "The Secret Sharer" is based—in fact, "Falk" is the story of the captain of that very tug we catch just a glimpse of at the beginning of "The Secret Sharer": "steaming right into the land … hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor."

At the beginning of "Falk," as often happens in Conrad's stories, we have a group of men sitting around. We know that one will shortly begin a story, but for the moment the talk is rather scattered. "We talked of the sea and all its works. The sea never changes, and its works for all the talk of men are wrapped in mystery. But we agreed that the times were changed. And we talked of old ships, of sea-accidents, of break-downs, dismastings; and of a man who brought his ship safe to Liverpool all the way from the River Platte under a jury rudder. We talked of wrecks, of short rations and of heroism—or at least of what the newspapers would have called heroism at sea—a manifestation of virtues quite different from the heroism of primitive times."

This fanciful speculation merely outlines what must have been at Conrad's disposal for the writing of his story. When it comes to the facts of the case there is simply this: in the Author's Note to 'Twixt Land and Sea, Conrad says that he was familiar with the story of the Cutty Sark and used it in "The Secret Sharer." We cannot be sure what version of the story Conrad heard on his travels, but we do know that he was in England during the summer of 1882 when the mate of the Cutty Sark was tried for murder, and we do know that in the same Author's Note he speaks of the affair's having "got into the newspapers about the middle eighties." It seems reasonable to suppose that he read the accounts in the papers, perhaps this in the London Times, August 4, 1882:

John Anderson, 31, seaman [alias Sidney Smith], was indicted for the wilful murder of John Francis.…

The accused, it appeared, was chief mate on board a tea clipper called the Cutty Sark, which sailed from the port of London in May, 1880. The deceased, who was a coloured man, shipped as an able seaman, and it was stated that he soon afterwards incurred the displeasure of the prisoner in consequence of his incompetency. About the 9th or 10th of August, 1880, the vessel had just rounded the Cape, and at a quarter to 9 o'clock the prisoner was in command of the watch. The night was dark and dirty, and the watch was occupied in hauling the sail round. The deceased not being competent to perform seaman's duty, had been placed on the forecastle on the look out. The watch on hauling the ropes found that the "fore lazy tack" was fastened, and the prisoner called out to the deceased to let the tack go. The deceased replied "Very well" or, according to the prisoner's version, "Go to the devil." Immediately afterwards the deceased let go the lazy tack, but instead of doing so as an able seaman would, he let the end go overboard. The prisoner said, "That—has done that out of spite." The deceased retorted, "Well, you told me to let it go," and the prisoner exclaimed "I will come on the forecastle and heave you overboard, you nigger." The deceased replied, "If you come up here I have got the capstan bar waiting for you." The prisoner then went on the forecastle and was seen to raise the capstan bar, with which he struck the deceased on the head. The blow knocked the man over the forecastle on to the deck, and he never spoke again.… The account given by the prisoner was that he did it in self-defence.… Before the arrival of the ship at Anjer the accused, with the connivance of the captain, made his escape. The vessel proceeded thence to Singapore, and during the passage the captain committed suicide by jumping overboard, having previously dropped into the sea the capstan bar used by the prisoner. At Singapore the matter was reported to a magistrate, who, in due course, instituted an inquiry. The prisoner was arrested in London.

The learned counsel addressed the Court in mitigation of punishment, pointing out that the vessel had been under-manned, and that at the time in question the accused had had an important manoeuvre to perform with respect to the sail. The deceased behaved in an insolent and "lubberly" manner, and it was absolutely necessary that the prisoner should assert his authority.

Numerous witnesses were then called on the part of the defence to show that the prisoner bore an excellent character and was a man whose disposition was humane and kindly.

The jury, by his Lordship's direction, then returned a verdict of manslaughter against the accused.

MR. JUSTICE STEPHEN, in passing sentence, told the prisoner he had considered the case with anxious attention and with very great pain, because the evidence which had been given showed that he was a man of good character generally speaking and of humane disposition. He was happy to be able to give full weight to the evidence given in his favour. The deceased had certainly acted in a manner which was calculated to make the prisoner very angry, but it must be clearly understood that the taking of human life by brutal violence, whether on sea or on land, whether the life be that of a black or a white man, was a dreadful crime, and deserving of exemplary punishment. He sentenced the prisoner to seven years' penal servitude.

In his book The Log of the Cutty Sark, Basil Lubbock, however, gives quite a different picture of the mate. According to Lubbock, Smith, although Scotch, was a bucko mate in the best Yankee tradition. He drove the men so hard as they coasted down to Wales that the crew deserted en masse, and the Cutty Sark had to put to sea with a pickup crew. Even so, they had a remarkably fast run, only sixty-nine days from Wales to Java. We learn, for example, in "The Secret Sharer" that the Sephora took 123 days.

The actual murder was not the only instance of violence between Smith and Francis. Things actually came to such a pass at one time that the captain felt obliged to force a show-down fight between them. They battered each other inconclusively for a quarter of an hour while the captain stood by brandishing a revolver to discourage any sailor who might be tempted to take advantage of the occasion and slip a knife into Smith.

Having established the facts in the historical voyage of the Cutty Sark, it is now time to return to the new captain, sitting on his first ship waiting for the wind and waiting also for a labor which will test his manhood, a rite which will initiate him into the great world of adult moral responsibility.

One thought which might have occurred to Conrad is simply to place the events of the Cutty Sark on board the new captain's ship. He was, after all, totally unfamiliar with his officers. One of them could easily have turned out to be Mr. Bucko Smith. Events then take their course. A man is killed, and the captain must act in a morally responsible manner. What, however, is the captain's responsibility?

Taking into consideration Conrad's rigid conception of sea morality, I think there can be little doubt that he would have felt the captain to be faced with the same kind of obligation as Captain Vere in Billy Budd to honor the laws under which he held command of his ship and to turn the mate over to the shore authorities. That this solution is unsatisfactory can be seen by a glance at "The Secret Sharer" where the captain of the Sephora, the ship on which the "murder" actually took place, is depicted as being anxious to follow exactly this course of action. The young captain of the unnamed ship holds the captain of the Sephora in contempt because, in refusing to allow the mate to escape, he has yielded to public pressure and has refused to accept his role as a morally responsible individual, preferring instead to cower behind the forms of legality. On the other hand, the historical captain of the Cutty Sark behaved exactly as the young captain wanted the captain of the Sephora to behave: he released the mate, but when he had done that he was unable to face the consequences of his action and committed suicide.

We can see from the cases of the captain of the Sephora and the captain of the Cutty Sark that, if Conrad had placed his young captain in command of the ship on which the murder took place, the situation would have been virtually impossible to resolve in any satisfactory way. Conrad would have been unable to guide his young man safely to a new destiny, for he could only make him refuse responsibility like the captain of the Sephora and live on "densely distressed," or he could make him accept responsibility like the captain of the Cutty Sark and forfeit his career and his very life. The problem is actually insoluble. The captain must make up his mind whether he is going to slight his legal responsibility to the ship or his moral responsibility to his subordinate. This may be a decision an established man—Captain Vere—can make, but it is not the kind of decision to demand of a young man in an initiation ritual story.

Clearly, therefore, it would not do to give the young captain command of a ship like the Cutty Sark; but the story of the Cutty Sark itself suggests another possibility, and that is to have the murderer escape to the young captain's ship. In this way, the captain is freed from any legal responsibility for the death and can apply himself solely to the moral aspects of the case.

Even as the story is finally constituted, the young captain's problem is not an easy one. It takes its most obvious form in regard to his handling the ship during the final escape of Leggatt, the fugitive mate of the Sephora He must bring the ship close enough to shore to allow Leggatt to escape safely, and he must stay far enough away from shore to keep from wrecking the ship. He could stay so far from shore that the ship was absolutely safe and leave Leggatt to drown—an obvious betrayal of Leggatt and of himself because Leggatt is, of course, himself—or he could give Leggatt absolute safety and wreck the ship—a betrayal of the crew, the owners, and himself, because, as he himself says, "… all my future, the only future for which I was fit, would perhaps go irretrievably to pieces in any mishap to my first command." But in the end he proves. himself able to judge nicely in balancing against each other the dual risks of responsibility to self and responsibility to society, and he has good luck. Leggatt was as good a judge, but his luck was bad.

Having come this far and established the broad lines along which Cutty Sark material is to be used, we must next turn our attention to the character of Leggatt alias Smith alias Anderson. Concerning the mate of the Cutty Sark we know little, and even that little is contradictory. The evidence at Smith's trial lays stress on his good character and humane disposition, whereas Lubbock's account, drawn from the log of the Cutty Sark itself, presents him as a regular hellion mate. Human nature and the courts being what they are, perhaps we should give less weight to the character testimony of defense witnesses than to the account of a journalist, who might at worst tend to heighten the dramatic elements of his material.

In neither account, however, is there any suggestion that Smith is a gentleman or in the least educated above the requirements of his position. He is certainly a violent and hardbitten man in both versions, and very far from being recognizable as related in any way to Leggatt, of whom even the captain of the Sephora says, "'He looked very smart, very gentlemanly, and all that.'" Leggatt is, as a matter of fact, the son of a parson and a graduate of the training ship Conway, both of which facts grant him a definite class position. He is a gentleman, son of a gentleman, educated and trained to the best tradition of the sea. He is as far as possible from being a murderous ruffian, although he is involved in a violent death.

In spite of Conrad's care in adapting his material to his own purposes, many critics have interpreted Leggatt as being much closer to Smith than Conrad obviously intended. Conrad himself made two direct references to "The Secret Sharer." Both are maddeningly inconclusive, but they are all we have. The first is in a letter to John Galsworthy:

Dearest Jack,.. I can't tell you what pleasure you have given me by what you say of the "Secret Sharer,"—and especially of the swimmer. I haven't seen many notices,—three or four in all: but in one of them he is called a murderous ruffian,—or something of the sort. Who are those fellows who write in the Press? Where do they come from? I was simply knocked over,—for indeed I meant him to be what you have seen at once he was. And as you have seen, I feel altogether comforted and rewarded for the trouble he has given me in the doing of him, for it wasn't an easy task. It was extremely difficult to keep him true to type, first as modified to some extent by the sea life and further as affected by the situation.

In order to understand this completely, we need to have the Galsworthy letter Conrad is responding to, but we can see at once that Conrad intended above all that Leggatt should not be a murderous ruffian and that he should be true to the type he belonged to before going to sea: he was the son of a parson with all that implies.

The second reference occurs in the Preface to The Shorter Tales, some ten years later. This time he says, "The second story deals with what may be called the 'esprit de corps,' the deep fellowship of two young seamen meeting for the first time." Here again the author, although not indicating the exact nature of the fellowship, seems specifically to exclude the possibility that it is a fellowship of violence or evil.

It might be objected that in making these changes Conrad was simply re-arranging things to make a better story. He was, of course, doing this; however, it can be demonstrated that in shaping his material he made changes of a consistent pattern intended to produce not just any better story but a specific better story—a story, furthermore, which can be properly understood only in terms of the answer to a very specific question: Why does the hellion mate of the Cutty Sark become the gentleman of the Sephora, a man who is by birth, education, and his own acts to be known as "one of us"?

The changes in the mate's character show that Conrad was trying to increase the identification between him and the captain and to establish unmistakably the nature of that "deep fellowship" and that "'esprit de corps'" referred to in the Preface already quoted. It cannot be too strongly insisted on that no such changes would have been necessary if Conrad had intended the fellowship to be based on a secret bond of criminal impulsiveness. The bucko mate of the Cutty Sark, just as he was, would have served admirably for that purpose; but instead of using the mate as he was, Conrad carefully removed from his character all the elements which could have supported the interpretation commonly forced on the story, that Leggatt represents the evil potentiality of the captain. The result of these changes is that it is not the mate of the Cutty Sark but Leggatt whom the captain recognizes as an extension of himself, and it is not merely a possible extension but an actual extension. The very closeness of the identification indicates that Conrad was after something other than a recognition of possibility, because he proceeds quite differently when he is presenting a character who is being led to penetrate the darkness of his own heart. A case in point is that of Captain Brierly in Lord Jim, who apparently has nothing whatever in common with the disastrous Jim but who, because of an insight into possibility, is driven to commit suicide in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the suicide of the captain of the Cutty Sark.

Before going further it is necessary to take another look at the autobiographical material in order to see what was available on that side for Conrad's use in testing the young captain's mettle. Conrad's own voyage down the Gulf of Siam in the Otago was surely adventurous enough to try the nerve of any captain, young or old. The ship was becalmed. The crew were all down with fever, dysentery, and cholera. Becalmed in the middle of the Gulf, Conrad discovered that the late captain had, among his other eccentricities, sold the quinine out of the medicine chest, the one thing Conrad had counted on to keep at least some of the crew on their feet.

This is all very trying indeed, but it is lacking in one element which makes "The Secret Sharer" a successful story of a young man's passage into maturity. The thing which is missing is the element of choice. The young Conrad had every reason to be proud of his endurance and his ability, and the whole episode can very well take its place, as Conrad says of the voyage, among "… such events of one's life as one has no reason to be ashamed of." Still, on the Otago there was no alternative. Conrad was stuck with the ship and had to get it into port somehow. There was no point at which he could accept or reject responsibility and no point at which he had to face anything other than staggering material odds. He thought of not going on, to be sure, but that was only in passing, and no great moral courage was required for him to do his simple and obvious duty. The only moral pressures which were on him urged him to behave correctly and honorably. His course was automatically imposed by his situation and his tradition.

But in the case of the young captain, faced with the problem of the escaped Leggatt, Conrad has taken care to eliminate the possibility of an automatically imposed correct solution. The captain must create out of the tradition of his life and his profession an individual moral choice to meet the totally unexpected situation, and he must do it in the face of the counter moral pressures of his own crew and of the captain of the Sephora. It would be easy for him to act in a way which would win him social approbation, to make a choice which would be universally acknowledged moral, but it requires a fully developed moral being to make a choice which he alone knows to be moral and which appears to everyone to be criminal or mad.

These observations apply equally to Leggatt. His steadiness throughout the story is the result of the moral strength he has already won by the choice he has already made, and the circumstances of Leggatt's choice involve the second major change in the Cutty Sark material, the change which has made the original form of death impossible to his new character. The story demands, however, that there still be something which looks like a murder; that Leggatt be made to appear to do something which his character will not allow.

It must not be supposed that the choice Leggatt makes is the choice of violence; for his choice, like the captain's, is a choice of responsibility. Further, it is a choice made under trying circumstances when the natural source of authority, in the captain of the Sephora, has totally failed. Leggatt is, in effect, in command of the ship, thereby underlining Conrad's parallel of two morally responsible individuals. The death is merely the by-product of the choice and affects neither its correctness nor its effectiveness: "It was all very simple," the captain thinks when he has heard Leggatt's story. "The same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence." Within the story itself Leggatt twice rejects violence as a way out. He refuses to break out of his cabin on the Sephora, for, he says, "… I did not mean to get into a confounded scrimmage. Somebody else might have got killed—for I would not have broken out only to get chucked back, and I did not want any more of that work." Later he says, "Do you see me being hauled back, stark naked, off one of these little islands by the scruff of the neck and fighting like a wild beast? Somebody would have got killed for certain, and I did not want any of that."

If there is anybody in the story who recognizes violence as a possibility in himself, it is Leggatt, not the captain; but Leggatt specifically renounces violence when only his personal freedom or his life is at stake. He labels it "fighting like a wild beast," and in the second instance quoted above, he does not say, "I didn't want any more of that," but "I didn't want any of that." The omission of more seems to indicate that he makes a clear distinction between what happened when he saved the ship and what might happen in a struggle to save himself. It is quite clear that Leggatt's resolutions are not those of a "criminally impulsive man," nor do they fit with the one action which is charged against him.

It is now desirable to look again at the Cutty Sark material to see the original action out of which Conrad created Leggatt's action. In both the version in the Times and the version in Lubbock, the sailor is brained with a capstan bar, a device rather more potent than a baseball bat. In the Times version, the episode is reported as follows: "The deceased replied, 'If you come up here I have got the capstan bar waiting for you.' The prisoner then went on to the forecastle and was seen to raise the capstan bar, with which he struck the deceased on the head. The blow knocked the man over the forecastle on to the deck, and he never spoke again. The prisoner said to the watch, 'Did you see that nigger lift the capstan bar to me,' but the men replied that they did not."

The only difference in Lubbock's account is a rather cautious "apparently the darkey met him not only with an insolent tongue but a raised capstan bar." It really makes little difference whether the sailor got first cracks or not; Smith's blow was not the act of a humane and gentle man, and Smith did not have the excuse of being under undue strain, for the maneuver was a simple change of tack in a "nice wholesail breeze," a scene of very low dramatic value.

In "The Secret Sharer" the death takes place in a towering storm. The emotional intensity of the scene is reflected in the storm, but Conrad generates a further tension by making Leggatt tell the story in a whisper in a dead calm at night. His version goes like this, and we can see that it is a great improvement over the original.

"It happened while we were setting a reefed foresail, at dusk. Reefed foresail! You understand the sort of weather. The only sail we had left to keep the ship running; so you may guess what it had been like for days. Anxious sort of job, that. He gave me some of his cursed insolence at the sheet. I tell you I was overdone with this terrific weather that seemed to have no end to it. Terrific, I tell you—and a deep ship. I believe the fellow himself was half crazed with funk. It was no time for gentlemanly reproof, so I turned round and felled him like on ox. He up and at me. We closed just as an awful sea made for the ship. All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, 'Look out! Look out!' Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head. They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be seen of the ship—just the three masts and a bit of the forecastle head and of the poop all awash driving along in a smother of foam. It was a miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebits. It's clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face. It was too much for them. It seems they rushed us aft together, gripped as we were, screaming 'Murder!' like a lot of lunatics, and broke into the cuddy. And the ship running for her life, touch and go all the time, any minute her last in a sea fit to turn your hair grey only a-looking at it."

The total effect of this scene is to commit Leggatt to an action which he cannot control and which the reader cannot easily evaluate. Some of the difficulties are suggested by the conduct of the judge who tried the much more clear-cut case of the mate of the Cutty Sark. In the first place, the judge allowed the reduction of the charge from murder to manslaughter. He also gave full weight to testimony of good character and to the fact that the mate had an important maneuver to perform and needed to assert his authority. He accepted all these points in arriving at a sentence, for indeed there can be no standard by which they are not relevant.

If we consider the infinitely greater complexity of Leggatt's case and the fact that Leggatt's skill and courage had just succeeded in setting the sail which saved the ship, the question of his guilt becomes almost impossible to settle. In fact, to the young captain there is no question, because he concludes "it was all very simple." In a sense, however, Conrad has made it simple for the reader too—at least simpler than it is often made out to be—because Leggatt in asserting his authority had no intention of harming the man. He just wanted him out of the way, so he felled him like an ox. Certainly under the circumstances the action was not only not wrong but actually the standard thing to do and of no more importance than throwing a glass of water in the face of a screaming child. But when the sailor came at him again, Leggatt was forced to adopt stronger measures and began to throttle him into submission—on Captain Vere's ship the sailor would have been liable to execution. When the wave broke over the ship, Leggatt's reflex led him to hold fast to anything. Unfortunately he happened to have hold of a man's throat, and what we now have is something which is a murder in form but not a murder in fact. Leggatt's own remark, "'It's clear that I meant business,'" is not at all an expression of guilt, because the business which he meant was far from the business which resulted.

The total pattern of changes Conrad made in adapting the Cutty Sark material effectively removes the episode of the death from the area of ordinary legality. The meaning of this removal can perhaps be made more clear by further reference to Billy Budd, in which there is a similar conflict of legality and morality, but in which, in contrast to "The Secret Sharer," the decision has to be made in purely legal terms and in complete disregard, as far as the action goes, of the obvious moral implications of the case. Captain Vere, on whose ship the death occurs, is sure that Billy is morally innocent; but there is no doubt that he struck and killed his superior officer, and no circumstances can be effectively offered in mitigation of punishment of that crime. The manifest evil of the victim, the colossal provocation are irrelevant to the level on which the case must be tried. Captain Vere, like the captain in "The Secret Sharer," recognizes the superiority of the moral law over the civil or military law, recognizes Billy as innocent under one law and guilty under another. Unfortunately the law under which he is guilty leaves Captain Vere no choice but to hang him, and the young captain in "The Secret Sharer" would likewise have had no choice but to turn Leggatt over to the shore authorities if the death had occurred on his own ship.

I suggested earlier that Conrad might have made more use than he did of the actual events of his own voyage on the Otago. In truth, he did at another time make very complete use of them. In the novel The Shadow Line he started the action in Singapore, where he himself had once waited for a ship to take him to England and where he unexpectedly received his first command. The story takes the new captain to Bangkok and goes into all the difficulties of getting the ship ready for sea and then through all the voyage down the Gulf of Siam and back to Singapore. "The Secret Sharer," in contrast, utilizes only a few days at the beginning of the voyage down the Gulf. These two uses of the same material can give further insight into the possibilities among which the writer must choose in telling his story, and in no story element is this more clear than in Conrad's handling of the two points of view.

"The Secret Sharer" is an unusual story for Conrad. It lacks the retrospective element commonly found in his work, and for that reason is uncommonly immediate and youthful. It is the story of a moment as a short story must be, but it is the story of a young man's moment unqualified by the wisdom of age and experience. Conrad's moments are usually those of men who are looking back over a considerable period of time and have the advantage of being able to see themselves as they once were. Perspective is the meaning of that older man's moment, not immediacy. For example, when Marlow, one of Conrad's favorite mouthpieces, speaks of his own youth, he is able, while in the very act of glorifying it, to see it as made up of ignorance, folly, and hope.

In "The Secret Sharer" there is no such perspective. There is no suggestion that the captain has meditated on what he is talking about. He might be telling the story the next day, and what comes through, raw and immediate, is the special arrogant ruthlessness of youth. We hear Leggatt saying in so many words, "'He [the victim] was one of those creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness. Miserable devils that have no business to live at all.'" In a narrative commentary on Leggatt's remark, the young captain expresses his agreement: "He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes. And I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a character where there are no means of legal repression." The captain's own earlier remark will stand for both of them: "I should have gathered from this that he was young; indeed, it is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues."

In The Shadow Line there is a similar conversation, but with the different pace and the different perspective of the novel Conrad is able to include the voice of an older man, the voice we expect of Conrad himself. The young captain has just allowed himself the luxury of righteously throwing a mortal scare into a minor official who illegally tried to keep him from getting that coveted first command. The older man, Captain Giles, hearing of it, humanely goes to put the official's mind at ease. When he returns, the young man says,

I looked up with surprise. But in reality I was indifferent. He explained that he had found the Steward lying face downwards on the horsehair sofa. He was all right now.

"He would not have died of fright," I said contemptuously.

"No. But he might have taken an overdose out of one of them little bottles he keeps in his room," Captain Giles argued seriously. "The confounded fool has tried to poison himself once—a couple of years ago."

"Really," I said without emotion. "He doesn't seem very fit to live, anyhow."

"As to that, it may be said of a good many."

"Don't exaggerate like this!" I protested, laughing irritably.

We are here in a very different world, the world of the novel, a world in the process of becoming, not the world of the story, a world of the moment of truth or the epiphany.

Both "The Secret Sharer" and The Shadow Line are stories of a young man's passage into maturity. In both cases he learns important things about himself. In "The Secret Sharer" he learns splendid youthful things. He measures up in every way to that ideal conception everyone sets up for himself secretly. But, as I have already pointed out, Conrad is well aware that life is not a series of Boy Scout tests. It is a far more complicated and tragic business than that. This total knowledge is what makes Conrad reduce the consciousness of the narrator to a young man's consciousness in order to allow him to reproduce the splendor of a young man's moment, and to allow him to end his story with a good ringing phrase applicable both to Leggatt and to himself: "a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny."

In The Shadow Line, however, the consciousness is not reduced, and the effect of the passage into maturity is, logically, to make the young captain stop being young. Observe the new captain's relationship with Captain Giles after he has brought his ship back to Singapore. Captain Giles is speaking:

" …a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience, and all that sort of thing. Why—what else would you have to fight against?"

I kept silent. I don't know what he saw in my face, but he asked abruptly:

"Why—you aren't faint-hearted?"

"God only knows, Captain Giles," was my sincere answer.

"That's all right," he said calmly. "You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything—and that's what so many of them youngsters don't understand."

"Well I am no longer a youngster."

"No," he conceded. "Are you leaving soon?"

"I am going on board directly," I said. "I shall pick up one of my anchors and heave in to half-cable on the other as soon as my new crew comes on board and I shall be off at daylight tomorrow."

"You will?" grunted Captain Giles approvingly. "That's the way. You'll do."

"What did you expect? That I should want to take a week ashore for a rest?"

I said, irritated by his tone. "There's no rest for me till she's out in the Indian Ocean and not much of it even then."

He puffed at the cigar moodily, as if transformed.

"Yes, that's what it amounts to," he said in a musing tone. It was as if a ponderous curtain had rolled up disclosing an unexpected Captain Giles.

This sudden insight into Captain Giles is the real mark of this young man's growing up; but, like the young man in "The Secret Sharer," he is a free man striking out for a new destiny. However, his conception of the destiny is entirely different, for he senses that the freedom is the terrible freedom of responsibility. The immediate point of view of "The Secret Sharer" would not do here at all, and Conrad in the opening sentence of The Shadow Line establishes his perspective when he says, "Only the young have such moments." We know at once that it is no young man speaking, and we have a different world of possibilities from that dictated by the point of view of "The Secret Sharer."

It has been impossible to talk about Conrad's use of his material without giving a reading of the story, although adding yet another reading to the literature on "The Secret Sharer" was by no means my intention. Neither was it my intention to discuss his sources, for they are already well known. What I hope I have been able to do is to cast some light on the way in which a writer goes about his work, where his material comes from, how he uses it, and what choices he must make in using it.