Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 203
told me we should be partners before the year was out—well, I
would have—
(127–8)
After a string of oaths, Ricardo then sits ‘dumb with a stony gaze as if
still marvelling inwardly’ (128). Thus an intimate gaze, so intimate that
it seems like an internal touching, initiates Ricardo’s devoted loyalty
and retrospectively provokes in him an internal gaze of wonder.
Ricardo’s comments on Jones are an odd mixture of servility, admiration
and coy innuendo: ‘It was the first time he called me Martin ... I
let him know very soon that I was game for anything ... in his
company’ (130); ‘A gentleman’s just like any other man—and something
more’ (130); ‘That’s where a gentleman has the pull of you. He
don’t get excited’ (141); ‘That’s another thing you can tell a gentleman
by—his freakishness’ (150). Ideas of sameness and difference occur in
relation to Jones and Ricardo and to Jones and Heyst. During Ricardo’s
narration it ‘flashed through Schomberg’s mind that these two were
indeed well matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in
different disguises’ (130). R.B. Lewis has noted the link between Heyst
and Jones set up by the idea that they are both ‘gentlemen’. 22
Questions of same-sex desire appear with greater subtlety in the
relationship of Heyst and Morrison, which attracts a sense of uncertainty:
‘Heyst became associated with Morrison on terms about which
people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner, others said he was
a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the matter was more
complex’ (10). The narrator of this part of the novel, who appears to
be an unnamed member of the European community in that area, is
close enough to omniscience to reveal the real origin of their partnership,
but nevertheless implies limits to his understanding of Heyst:
‘One day Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in Timor, of all places in the
world, no one knows. Well, he was mooning about Delli ... possibly in
search of some undiscovered facts’ (10). We learn that the relationship
between Heyst and Morrison originated in the former’s financial
rescue of Morrison and continued because of Heyst’s delicacy of
feeling but we may suspect that this delicacy masked a certain unacknowledged
need for company on the part of the isolated Heyst. This
pattern is repeated by Heyst in respect of Lena and this parallel creates
a certain sexual ambiguity. Heyst’s concern for Morrison draws him
into a potentially enriching though finally disastrous financial project
– the coal mining. Heyst’s concern for Lena draws him into a sexual
relationship which greatly enriches his life but is similarly short-lived,