nothing but the continued drip of his sense of unfairness. When Ismay next writes it is mid-December, he has turned fifty and the shooting season, which has taken ‘my thoughts from other things’, is nearly over. Apart from his daughter Margaret, ‘who has left her husband to keep me company’, he is alone in the house. Florence and the children are currently in London, but will be returning to Liverpool for Christmas when they are expecting a ‘large party — all family, sisters, brothers, son-in-law’. Ismay is dreading it. ‘I am not fond of the so-called festive season, full of pleasure for the young and full of sorrow and unhappy memories for the old like myself.’ Forgetting that he has already, in a previous letter, confided in her about his retirement plans, he now confides again, ‘in the strictest confidence’, that he is ‘going out of business on 30 June’ and that this decision has nothing to do with ‘that terrible calamity’. He will be sorry to no longer be involved with the White Star Line as he ‘loves the business and all connected with it’ but he has ‘neglected other matters’. The reason for his early retirement, he reveals, is to ‘see more of my family and to try and make them happy’, adding that ‘it will be a very great wrench. I will leave Liverpool and settle somewhere in the country.’ But can this really be the reason? Ismay’s children, aged twenty- three, seventeen, fifteen and ten, are now drifting in their own directions and his marriage has been over for years. Ismay, whose motivations always have a secret side, has been divesting himself of his chattels since the day his father died.
He is more anxious about the future than he is about the past; as usual he is looking straight ahead. He is moving into a life of being rather than doing and his anxieties about retirement are nothing new; before he boarded the Titanic he had expressed to Harold Sanderson his ‘very mixed and doubtful feelings’ about the coming years. He delayed the date of his retirement from the presidency of the IMM and the chairmanship of the White Star Line from January to June 1913 because he thought it would be easier in the summer months to deal with the ‘little or nothing’ he now had ‘to fill up my time’. He now has cold feet again about giving up the White Star Line, a company for whom he feels a ‘sentimental attachment’, and announces that he has changed his mind about retirement, that while he is willing to let the IMM presidency go to Sanderson, he still wants to be at the helm of his father’s firm. J. P. Morgan replies this will not be possible; that Ismay has, ‘by your ability and your strong personality overshadowed the other managers’ and that it would be ‘easier for these men, as also for the incoming president, to assert their independence if their former chief is not on the boards with them’. Ismay does not understand what Morgan is saying to him; that he is considered a liability, that he represents the errors of the past, that he is seen as an autocrat around whom no one can breathe.11 He does not mention in his letters to Mrs Thayer that he has been excised from his own company.
Marian Thayer’s most recent letter to Ismay had contained a selection of photographs of herself and Jack, and Ismay has chosen to keep two of the mother and one of the son — ‘I hope you will not consider that I am too grasping.’ ‘Do you know,’ he continues, looking at her picture as he writes, ‘not a single day goes by without my thinking of you. I cannot understand it.’ He wonders how she is and wishes he could talk to her: ‘How I should love it.’ He then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, says something extraordinary: ‘I often think of where our friendship would have taken us if that awful disaster had not taken place, how well I remember our conversations when everything looked so bright. You had a very peculiar attraction to me and I loved talking to you and hearing you talk, you interested me so much… How I ramble on. I must stop.’ Had the Titanic not gone and hit the iceberg, he and Mrs Thayer could have been happy together: this is what occupies Ismay’s mind. ‘My God,’ as Jim says to Marlow when he jumps from the Patna, ‘what a chance missed, what a chance missed.’
In a newspaper article written on the twentieth anniversary of the wreck, Jack Thayer recalled that when he was standing on the deck with his parents, Ismay approached them and told them that the ship had one hour to live. Ismay, who did not even warn his own valet, of course wanted Marian Thayer to live and of course wanted to live himself, especially now that there was someone worth living for.
In October, six months after the disaster, a collection of three sea stories by Joseph Conrad appeared in the shops. Titled Twixt Land and Sea, his new book marked a turning point in Conrad’s career. No longer under the shadow of Henry James, Conrad was once more the master of ‘adventure and psychology’, he was flying his ‘old colours of mystery, romance and the strangeness of life’.12 It was the second story in the volume, called ‘The Secret Sharer’, but variously titled in draft ‘The Secret Self’, ‘The Second Self’, ‘The Other Self’ and ‘The Secret-Sharer’, which was his favourite. It appeared, perfect and complete, in two weeks; Conrad experienced none of the usual agonies and interruptions in the writing process. Some part of him had been released by the tale; it made him feel curiously elated. ‘“The Secret Sharer”, between you and me, is it. Eh?’ he wrote to Edward Garnett. ‘No damn tricks with girls, there, eh? Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck, my boy. Pure luck!’
‘The Secret Sharer’ is told by a fledgling captain who remains unnamed. He has been in command of his ship — also unnamed — for under two weeks and is still waiting to see whether he ‘should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly’. He is soon to find out: keeping watch in his sleep suit one night, rejoicing ‘in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land’, he finds in ‘the sleeping water’ a naked man hanging onto the rope ladder.
The Captain pulls the man, whose name is Leggatt, on board. Like Jim, Leggatt is the son of an English country parson. He has swum several miles from his own ship, the Sephora, where, during a storm, he landed a blow on the head of a mutinous seaman. The seaman is killed, and Leggatt kept prisoner in his cabin. After nine weeks of incarceration, he is overcome by ‘a sudden temptation’ and jumps: ‘I was in the water before I had made up my mind fairly’, and he swims until he sees the lights of this present ship, when he decides to chance his luck. Leggatt feels blameless: in killing the man he saved his ship, and he has nothing but disdain for the law by which he will be judged should he ever again see land. ‘But you don’t see me coming back to explain such things to an old fellow in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen, do you? What can they know whether I am guilty or not — or of what I am guilty, either?’ The Captain feels sympathy for the fugitive, who is older than him by five years and trained, as he did (and as Captain Rostron did too), on the HMS Conway in Liverpool (a training ship which was also a concern of Thomas and Bruce Ismay). He gives Leggatt a sleeping suit of the ‘same grey-striped pattern as the one I was wearing’ and, at the risk of losing his own authority with the crew, keeps him hidden in his cabin. ‘He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes… I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping suit…’ Leggatt is the Captain’s ‘double’, his ‘reflection in a dark and sombre mirror’. Conrad forces on the reader the fact of the Captain’s identification, using the word ‘double’ on nineteen occasions. ‘I knew well enough… that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more.’ If anyone were to see the pair of them, ‘he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own grey ghost’. Not that the two men looked in any way similar. ‘He was not a bit like me, really; yet, as we stood leaning over my bed place, whispering side by side, with our dark heads together and our backs to the door, anybody bold enough to open it stealthily would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.’ Leggatt too has found his sharer: ‘As long as I know that you understand,’ he whispers. ‘But of course you do. It’s a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose… It’s very wonderful.’
The Captain’s description of himself with his looking-glass reflection recalls the picture Conrad painted of himself and Marlow, ‘when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony’. But the company of Leggatt does not offer comfort and harmony: the Captain is ‘creeping quietly as near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border’. In the story’s thrilling final scene the Captain takes a risk with his ship and ‘shaves the land as close as possible’ to allow Leggatt to leg it and swim to the island of Koh-ring. ‘The secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for his new destiny.’
‘The Secret Sharer’ belongs to the same world as Lord Jim: there is a crime at sea, a jump, a story to unburden, an understanding captain, and a second chance. Both Jim and Leggatt commit a ‘breach of faith with the community of mankind’, and both men make sense to themselves only in relation to another. ‘We exist,’ as Conrad puts in, ‘only in so far as we hang together.’ And like Lord Jim, ‘The Secret Sharer’ is based on a real event. In September 1880, during an argument on board the Cutty Sark, the chief mate, Sydney Smith, brought a capstan bar down on the head of a black seaman, who died from injuries three days later. Sydney Smith persuaded the Captain to let him jump
