Brother of the Coast— Joseph Conrad Creates Another World
The Story. Master Gunner Peyrol, old Brother of the Coast, white-haired rover of the outer seas, returned to Toulon some years, before Trafalgar with a hoard of gold mohurs, ducats, guineas stowed away in a canvas jacket next his skin and a case of razors looted from an English prize, intending to spend his last days near the village where he was born, the village he had not seen for 50 years. He found lodging at the Escampobar farm—lodging and the strangest adventure of his life.
At Escampobar lived Citizen Scevola Bron, hysterical, jealous, ex-sansculotte, who mourned for the bloody days of the bygone Terror. The rightful mistress of the farm was lovely Arlette, whom the village thought half-demented —Scevola had saved her body from the massacre that exterminated her Royalist parents, but the memory of the shrieks and the blood of that massacre still walked like a ghost through her mind. Her aunt, the upright, deliberate, tireless Catherine, asserted her a doomed object of God's particular wrath, a fatal woman, not for any man's arms.
How Real, the Naval Lieutenant, sternly devoted to duty, came to the farm and fell in love with its mistress, in spite of himself—how he told Peyrol his plot to delude the English blockading fleet by allowing them to capture certain forged despatches—how Scevola, mad with jealousy, planned to murder Real, and Real, mad with duty, thought the only way out of the pitiful tangle was to let himself be captured with the forged despatches and so leave Arlette forever—and how Peyrol calmly outwitted the lot of them, saved Real for Arlette, removed Scevola from the scene and delivered the forged despatches at the price of his own life— is the theme of the story. He could not save the French fleet, for the gods were against him, but he saved the Escampobars and fooled the English. Arlette was happy with her man—and as, for the old rover, the Brother of the .Coast, the man of dark deeds but of large heart, when the English bullets found him, he found sleep after toil, port after stormy seas.
The Significance. Mr. Conrad's first novel after a three years' silence belongs with Victory, Rescue, Nostromo and the other major masterpieces of his work. The style is a little simpler, a little less gorgeous, than in some of his novels. But it is no less masterly, and the men and women described are so wholly alive that they haunt the mind. Peyrol himself deserves a place beside Lingard and Heyst and the other great wanderers, and throughout the pages of The Rover, Mr. Conrad gives us anew that impression of space and completion that is stamped upon all his best work—the impression that he has not merely written a novel, but created a world.
The Critics. The New York World: "One feels that Conrad has either revamped an old and discarded idea of his beginnings or written a novel because, as his publishers say, 'three years' have closed since he wrote The Rescue."
The New York Times: "Taking some pains to please a popular audience .... has not been 'able to put out the shining light of Mr. Conrad's genius.