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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Reminiscences
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #1316]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME REMINISCENCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME REMINISCENCES
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+
+A Familiar Preface.
+
+As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
+ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion,
+and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some
+spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted:
+“You know, you really must.”
+
+It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must! . . .
+
+You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
+his trust, not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power
+of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't
+say this by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be
+impressionable than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean,
+as affecting a whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the
+other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words
+as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not
+far to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction,
+these two by their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and
+upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric.
+There's “virtue” for you if you like! . . . Of course the accent must
+be attended to. The right accent. That's very important. The capacious
+lung, the thundering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me
+of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a
+mathematical imagination. Mathematics command all my respect, but I have
+no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I
+will move the world.
+
+What a dream--for a writer! Because written words have their accent too.
+Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
+amongst the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured
+out aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on
+earth. It may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand.
+But it's no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle
+in a pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such
+luck.
+
+And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
+tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted,
+and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes downwind leaving the world
+unmoved. Once upon a time there lived an Emperor who was a sage and
+something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
+maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
+posterity. Amongst other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
+this solemn admonition: “Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
+truth.” The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
+that it is an easy matter for an austere Emperor to jot down grandiose
+advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic:
+and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
+heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
+
+Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
+of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
+humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
+Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
+for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
+sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
+delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
+embroil one with one's friends.
+
+“Embroil” is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine either
+amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
+as to quarrel with me. “To disappoint one's friends” would be nearer
+the mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
+have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives
+in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world,
+amongst imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them,
+he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He
+remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather
+than a seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of
+fiction. In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot
+help thinking of a passage in the “Imitation of Christ” where the
+ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that “there are
+persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy
+the opinion one had of them.” This is the danger incurred by an author
+of fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
+
+While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
+with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
+wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
+sufficiently literary. Indeed a man who never wrote a line for print
+till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
+and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations and
+emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession
+of his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
+three years ago, when I published “The Mirror of the Sea,” a volume of
+impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
+remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
+they recommended. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and
+its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
+what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
+their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
+It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I
+am incorrigible.
+
+Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
+sea-life, I have a special piety towards that form of my past; for its
+impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
+responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
+call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
+broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
+which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
+great distances from such natural affections as were still left to
+me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
+unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
+mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
+force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
+service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder then that
+in my two exclusively sea books, “The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'” and
+“The Mirror of the Sea” (and in the few short sea stories like “Youth”
+ and “Typhoon”), I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
+vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
+simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
+something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
+hands and the objects of their care.
+
+One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
+seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made up one's mind to
+write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
+what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
+quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
+things; and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
+which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
+But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
+standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
+onwards so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
+much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
+
+It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
+I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts;
+of what the French would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of
+unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
+respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
+garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
+man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
+which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that
+I feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
+all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
+
+My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
+autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only
+express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom an
+open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
+virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
+always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
+humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either
+of laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason
+that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail
+to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No
+artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run
+to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a task which
+mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a
+regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for
+one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's
+work.
+
+And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
+earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
+pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
+for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
+source in weaknesses which must be recognised with smiling compassion as
+the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass into
+each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
+of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
+brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
+distant edge of the horizon.
+
+Yes! I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
+laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
+imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
+oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
+one's own breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their
+souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary
+intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the
+sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular
+wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may
+be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
+on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive
+horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of
+myself which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried
+my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I,
+who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of
+the Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks
+of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act,
+I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
+ineffable company of pure esthetes.
+
+As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
+mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
+of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not
+lovable or hate what was not hateful, out of deference for some general
+principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
+not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
+with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
+always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
+emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
+deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
+the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough perhaps and of
+necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
+pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
+this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
+victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
+and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
+blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
+emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
+giggles.
+
+These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
+condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
+duty. And least of all you can condemn an artist pursuing, however
+humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where
+his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
+adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
+or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
+Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
+
+And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
+open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those
+which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All
+intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even
+beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are
+mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said
+to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
+presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try
+for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
+appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. An
+historian of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet he penetrates
+further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very
+fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves
+admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect too. And he is not
+insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is
+not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic,
+not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by love,
+is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a
+sham.
+
+Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
+creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
+will what the gods will without perhaps being certain what their will
+is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
+and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
+How. As the Frenchman said, “Il y a toujours la maniere.” Very true.
+Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
+indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
+in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
+truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
+
+Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world,
+rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as
+the hills. It rests notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At
+a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can
+expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my
+writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that
+it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute
+optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
+intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things;
+but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to
+special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a
+philosophical mind should be free. . .
+
+I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly
+discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of
+conversation--that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now.
+My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have
+been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them
+were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet
+this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
+follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
+disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with
+unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely
+that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of
+my recollections. “Alas!” I protested mildly. “Could I begin with the
+sacramental words, 'I was born on such a date in such a place'? The
+remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement of all
+interest. I haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be related
+seriatim. I haven't known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous
+remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs. This
+is but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't written
+it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own.”
+
+But my objector was not placated. These were good reasons for not
+writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already, he said.
+
+I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a
+good reason for not writing at all. But since I have written them, all I
+want to say in their defence is that these memories put down without
+any regard for established conventions have not been thrown off without
+system and purpose. They have their hope and their aim. The hope that
+from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of
+a personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar
+as, for instance, “Almayer's Folly” and “The Secret Agent”--and yet a
+coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its action.
+This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely associated with the hope,
+is to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the
+feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and
+with my first contact with the sea.
+
+In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here
+and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.
+
+J.C.K.
+
+
+Chapter I.
+
+Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
+enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in
+the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly
+on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade
+of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (amongst other things) a
+descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
+the decks of a 2000-ton steamer called the “Adowa,” on board of which,
+gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
+chapter of “Almayer's Folly” was begun. With interest, I say, for was
+not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering
+voice the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
+ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
+
+“'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
+behind which the sun had sunk. . . .” These words of Almayer's romantic
+daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on
+the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
+and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
+and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town
+of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
+words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,
+coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation: “You've made it
+jolly warm in here.”
+
+It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tin under
+the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak
+where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
+been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
+vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
+mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and
+being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling,
+by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have
+been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
+play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this
+sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the strings
+under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
+
+“What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?”
+
+It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
+turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
+have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
+opening speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
+wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.
+I could not have told him that Nina had said: “It has set at last.”
+ He would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
+precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
+sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing the
+impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not know this
+myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an
+excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our
+relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.
+
+He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking through the
+porthole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
+quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tailend
+of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen nightcap
+leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom-house guard, belted
+over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
+weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
+houses found a place in the picture framed by my porthole, across a
+wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring
+was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with
+curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding
+with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had
+been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the
+Opera House, where that same porthole gave me a view of quite another
+sort of cafe--the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where
+the worthy Bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere
+Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an
+opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of
+light music.
+
+I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern Archipelago
+which I certainly hoped to see again. The story of “Almayer's Folly”
+ got put away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any
+occupation to keep me away from it; the truth of the matter is that on
+board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life. I
+will not say anything of my privileged position. I was there “just to
+oblige,” as an actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit
+performance of a friend.
+
+As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that
+steamer at that time and in those circumstances. And perhaps I was not
+even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship “wants” an
+officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea life when I served
+shipowners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I
+do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which
+had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral
+Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but
+there was never anything tangible left from the F.C.T.C. It flourished
+no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead
+of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure and died
+before spring set in. But indubitably it was a company, it had even a
+house-flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C. artfully tangled up in
+a complicated monogram. We flew it at our main-mast head, and now I
+have come to the conclusion that it was the only flag of its kind in
+existence. All the same we on board, for many days, had the impression
+of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly departures for
+Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which
+came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we
+started for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life of the F.C.T.C. lies
+the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a remote
+sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina Almayer's story.
+
+The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its modest
+rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the
+greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last
+association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called
+a seagoing experience. Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to
+pay him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of
+years--had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and
+status for the whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He
+organised for us courses of professional lectures, St. John ambulance
+classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies and members of
+Parliament on subjects touching the interests of the service; and as to
+the oncoming of some inquiry or commission relating to matters of the
+sea and to the work of seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his need of
+exerting himself on our corporate behalf. Together with this high sense
+of his official duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a
+strong disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
+that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent master. And
+what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to put him in the way
+of employment? Captain Froud did not see why the Shipmasters' Society,
+besides its general guardianship of our interests, should not be
+unofficially an employment agency of the very highest class.
+
+“I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to
+us for their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about our
+society, and I really don't see why they should not,” he said once to
+me. “I am always telling the captains, too, that all things being equal
+they ought to give preference to the members of the society. In my
+position I can generally find for them what they want amongst our
+members or our associate members.”
+
+In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I was
+very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort
+of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel
+itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice--nearer
+there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting-place used
+to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco
+smoke, but Captain Froud had the smaller room to himself and there
+he granted private interviews, whose principal motive was to render
+service. Thus, one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a
+crooked finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
+perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.
+
+“I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning,” he said, getting back
+to his desk and motioning me to a chair, “who is in want of an officer.
+It's for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be
+asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my way. . .”
+
+As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at the
+closed door but he shook his head.
+
+“Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them.
+But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship wants an officer
+who can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do
+not know anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth and, of
+course, you would not care . . . would you now? I know that it isn't what
+you are looking for.”
+
+It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who
+looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit
+that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second
+officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign
+of being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical
+forests; and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak
+character) had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years
+he and the world of his story had been the companions of my imagination
+without, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of
+sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my
+return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day of which
+I speak.
+
+It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
+square that they first began to live again with a vividness and
+poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been
+treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of
+occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the
+rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined
+him round my table and then the rest of that Pantai band came full
+of words and gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my
+practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions
+of Malays, Arabs and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my
+attention. They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the
+appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems
+now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these
+beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express
+itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious
+fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the
+dwellers on this earth?
+
+I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers
+of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book
+before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
+Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
+blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety
+which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care
+the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.
+
+But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
+disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
+should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few hours' notice the
+unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
+the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a
+regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French
+emigrants to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest
+me very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping
+up the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it. But
+the consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed
+the Captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other.
+He explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect
+and that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the
+higher position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I
+would be given certain special advantages--and so on.
+
+I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
+
+“I am sure,” he insisted, “you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor.”
+
+I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in
+those circumstances that what was to be my last connection with a ship
+began. And after all there was not even one single trip. It may be
+that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written word on
+my forehead which apparently forbade me, through all my sea wanderings,
+ever to achieve the crossing of the Western Ocean--using the words in
+that special sense in which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade,
+of Western Ocean packets, of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life
+attended closely upon the old and the nine chapters of “Almayer's Folly”
+ went with me to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we started for
+Rouen. I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man fated
+never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of the
+Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a single
+passage. It might have been that of course; but the obvious, gross
+obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four hundred and sixty bunks
+for emigrants were put together in the 'tween decks by industrious
+carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant
+turned up in Rouen--of which, being a humane person, I confess I was
+glad. Some gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and
+one was said to be the Chairman--turned up indeed and went from end
+to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the
+deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it that the
+interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though, obviously,
+they had never seen anything of the sort before. Their faces as they
+went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression. Notwithstanding
+that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to
+immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I
+received the inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
+charter-party would ever take place.
+
+It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When we
+first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony well towards the
+centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with
+the tricolour posters announcing the birth of our company, the petit
+bourgeois with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the
+inspection of the ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to
+give information as though I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter,
+while our quarter-masters reaped a harvest of small change from
+personally conducted parties. But when the move was made--that move
+which carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
+an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the desolation of
+solitude became our lot. It was a complete and soundless stagnation;
+for, as we had the ship ready for sea to the smallest detail, as the
+frost was hard and the days short, we were absolutely idle--idle to the
+point of blushing with shame when the thought struck us that all the
+time our salaries went on. Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said,
+we could not enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like
+this all day: even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to
+prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The good
+Paramor--he was really a most excellent fellow--became unhappy as far as
+was possible to his cheery nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out
+of sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the
+crew in hauling both cables up on deck and turning them end for end.
+
+For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. “Excellent idea!” but directly his
+face fell. “Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that job last more than three
+days,” he muttered discontentedly. I don't know how long he expected
+us to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that
+the cables got hauled up and turned end for end according to my satanic
+suggestion, put down again, and their very existence utterly forgotten,
+I believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship
+down, empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think that
+this state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of
+Almayer and his daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort of
+evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as related above, had
+arrested them short at the point of that fateful sunset for many weeks
+together. It was always thus with this book, begun in '89 and finished
+in '94--with that shortest of all the novels which it was to be my lot
+to write. Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner
+in his wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the
+God of Islam--“The Merciful, the Compassionate”--which closes the
+book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the
+elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of
+them) of my childhood and the realisation of childhood's vain words,
+expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim.
+
+It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking
+at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space
+then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to
+myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no
+longer in my character now:
+
+“When I grow up I shall go there.”
+
+And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a
+century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin of
+childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go
+there: there being the region of Stanley Falls which in '68 was the
+blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS.
+of “Almayer's Folly,” carried about me as if it were a talisman or a
+treasure, went there too. That it ever came out of there seems a special
+dispensation of Providence; because a good many of my other properties,
+infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind through
+unfortunate accidents of transportation. I call to mind, for instance,
+a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinchassa and
+Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to take it at night in
+a big canoe with only half the proper number of paddlers. I failed in
+being the second white man on record drowned at that interesting spot
+through the upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer,
+but the accident happened some months before my time, and he, too, I
+believe, was going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still
+he was going home. I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
+was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with “Almayer's
+Folly” amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at that delectable
+capital Boma, where before the departure of the steamer which was to
+take me home I had the time to wish myself dead over and over again
+with perfect sincerity. At that date there were in existence only seven
+chapters of “Almayer's Folly,” but the chapter in my history which
+followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal convalescence.
+Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is
+rendered for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in
+the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth are
+inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management of a
+waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not
+matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the
+activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had
+nothing to hold me with for very long. And then that memorable story,
+like a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro
+upon the sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of
+course I would not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it
+certainly did nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look
+and an ancient, yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable
+to suppose that anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and
+Nina. And yet something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to
+wake them up from their state of suspended animation.
+
+What is it that Novalis says? “It is certain my conviction gains
+infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.” And what is a
+novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
+take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose
+accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride
+of documentary history? Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo
+rapids brought it to the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open
+sea. It would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
+sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young Cambridge
+man (he was a “passenger for his health” on board the good ship Torrens
+outward bound to Australia) who was the first reader of “Almayer's
+Folly”--the very first reader I ever had. “Would it bore you very much
+reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?” I asked him one evening on
+a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was
+Gibbon's History. Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin
+one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his
+own travelling store.
+
+“Not at all,” he answered with his courteous intonation and a faint
+smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him
+a watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe.
+All that's beyond guessing now. He was not a cold but a calm man, still
+more subdued by disease--a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty
+in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
+person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty
+passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look. In his
+attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic voice he asked:
+
+“What is this?” “It is a sort of tale,” I answered with an effort. “It
+is not even finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to know what you
+think of it.” He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I
+remember perfectly his thin brown fingers folding it lengthwise. “I
+will read it tomorrow,” he remarked, seizing the door-handle, and then,
+watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the
+door and was gone. In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained
+booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens,
+and the subdued, as if distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the
+growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
+professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in another
+half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails would have to
+come off the ship.
+
+Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my
+cabin. He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and the MS. was
+in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look but without a word.
+I took it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said nothing.
+I opened and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate
+lay wide open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the
+sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I
+turned my back squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques never
+offered a word. “Well, what do you say?” I asked at last. “Is it worth
+finishing?” This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
+
+“Distinctly,” he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then coughed a
+little.
+
+“Were you interested?” I inquired further almost in a whisper.
+
+“Very much!”
+
+In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the
+ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my
+bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp
+circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly
+in the gusts of wind. It was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the
+longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites
+of Almayer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged
+silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
+writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its
+action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were being
+born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the
+officer of the watch and remained on the alert to catch the order that
+was to follow this call to attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce
+shout to “Square the yards.” “Aha!” I thought to myself, “a westerly
+blow coming on.” Then I turned to my very first reader who, alas! was
+not to live long enough to know the end of the tale.
+
+“Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as
+it stands?”
+
+He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
+
+“Yes! Perfectly.”
+
+This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
+“Almayer's Folly.” We never spoke together of the book again. A long
+period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my
+duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in
+his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose
+went at once up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in
+Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez
+Canal. I am not sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard
+precisely; though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
+passengers who, wandering about to “see the country” during the ship's
+stay in port, had come upon him here and there. At last we sailed,
+homeward bound, and still not one line was added to the careless scrawl
+of the many pages which poor Jacques had had the patience to read with
+the very shadows of Eternity gathering already in the hollows of his
+kind, steadfast eyes.
+
+The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final “Distinctly”
+ remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I am
+compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as
+in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves
+must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days
+gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is
+One--one for all men and for all occupations.
+
+I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and
+more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to
+wait my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those
+wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the
+fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just
+the same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway
+carriages, and could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a
+clothes-line; but I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not
+consent to write without something at least resembling a chair. Line by
+line, rather than page by page, was the growth of “Almayer's Folly.”
+
+And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to
+the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse railway
+station (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to Poland, or more
+precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in
+a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and
+intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not
+thinking of the MS. but of all the other things that were packed in the
+bag.
+
+In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never
+exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while the bag lay
+open on a chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A
+friend of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but had
+turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each
+other for over twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to
+carry me off there.
+
+“You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing,” he
+suggested kindly.
+
+I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or later.
+The talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was
+extremely animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from
+big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem published in a very
+modernist review, edited by the very young and patronised by the highest
+society. But it never touched upon “Almayer's Folly,” and next morning,
+in uninterrupted obscurity, this inseparable companion went on rolling
+with me in the south-east direction towards the Government of Kiev.
+
+At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from the
+railway station to the country house which was my destination.
+
+“Dear boy” (these words were always written in English), so ran the last
+letter from that house received in London,--“Get yourself driven to the
+only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the
+evening my own confidential servant, factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S.
+(I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you,
+reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on
+the next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
+overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the
+road.”
+
+Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous
+barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened and, in
+a travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin cap and a short coat
+girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of noble extraction), a man of
+about thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open and
+moustachioed countenance. I got up from the table and greeted him in
+Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his
+noble blood and his confidential position. His face cleared up in a
+wonderful way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
+assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our understanding
+each other. He imagined I would talk to him in some foreign language. I
+was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come to meet
+me shaped an anxious exclamation:
+
+“Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself
+understood to our master's nephew.”
+
+We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of
+me as if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling
+of coming home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an
+enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and took his seat protectively by
+my side. The sledge was a very small one and it looked utterly
+insignificant, almost like a toy behind the four big bays harnessed two
+and two. We three, counting the coachman, filled it completely. He was
+a young fellow with clear blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur
+coat framed his cheery countenance and stood all round level with the
+top of his head.
+
+“Now, Joseph,” my companion addressed him, “do you think we shall manage
+to get home before six?” His answer was that we would surely, with
+God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch
+between certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar
+sound to my ears. He turned out an excellent coachman with an instinct
+for keeping the road amongst the snow-covered fields and a natural gift
+of getting the best out of his horses.
+
+“He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain remembers.
+He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother of holy memory,”
+ remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my feet.
+
+I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
+grandmother. Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the first
+time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-in-hand whip
+outside the doors of the coach-house.
+
+“What became of him?” I asked. “He is no longer serving, I suppose.”
+
+“He served our master,” was the reply. “But he died of cholera ten
+years ago now--that great epidemic we had. And his wife died at the
+same time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that was
+left.”
+
+The MS. of “Almayer's Folly” was reposing in the bag under our feet.
+
+I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of
+my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view
+as if it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had
+seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which
+fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a
+white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps
+of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
+by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking through a
+screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
+
+That very evening the wandering MS. of “Almayer's Folly” was unpacked
+and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the
+guest-room which had been, I was informed in an affectedly careless
+tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no
+attention from the affectionate presence hovering round the son of the
+favourite sister.
+
+“You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me,
+brother,” he said--this form of address borrowed from the speech of
+our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in
+a moment of affectionate elation. “I shall be always coming in for a
+chat.”
+
+As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
+everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of
+his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand
+presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his
+wards then living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning
+families from the three southern provinces--ever since the year 1860.
+Some of them had been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of
+them, girls or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two
+were older than myself--considerably older, too. One of them, a visitor
+I remember in my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback,
+and his four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and
+general skill in manly exercises was one of my earliest admirations. I
+seem to remember my mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the
+dining-room windows as I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know,
+by the very Joseph--the groom attached specially to my grandmother's
+service--who died of cholera. It was certainly a young man in a dark
+blue, tailless coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery of
+the men about the stables. It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by
+another mode of calculating time, it was certainly in the year in which
+my mother obtained permission to travel south and visit her family, from
+the exile into which she had followed my father. For that, too, she had
+had to ask permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that
+favour was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile
+herself. Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest brother
+who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts of friends and
+a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg, some influential
+personages procured for her this permission--it was officially called
+the “Highest Grace”--of a three months' leave from exile.
+
+This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
+more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
+presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
+remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
+the grey heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect
+and love in the house of her favourite brother who, a few years later,
+was to take the place for me of both my parents.
+
+I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
+though indeed I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of
+invalidism about her--but I think that already they had pronounced her
+doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could re-establish
+her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest period of my
+existence. There was my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl,
+some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as
+if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
+There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a
+few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive
+shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow lowering with the
+darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of
+journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.
+
+This is a far cry back from the MS. of “Almayer's Folly,” but the public
+record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
+egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal.
+It is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's
+children than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That
+which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the
+most enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain for ever
+obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the
+still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and
+their personalities are remotely derived.
+
+Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
+undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master
+of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic
+memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things
+human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the
+emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.
+
+
+
+Chapter II.
+
+As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London
+into Ukraine. The MS. of “Almayer's Folly”--my companion already for
+some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age--was
+deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two
+windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table
+was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same
+drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted
+up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering
+nephew. The blinds were down.
+
+Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
+peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
+the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
+beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
+lay the great unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly
+bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
+patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come
+ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the
+short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snowtrack; a quick tinkle
+of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful
+whisper.
+
+My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help
+me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary
+at the door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not
+like to tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than
+ten years younger than myself; I had not been--I won't say in that place
+but within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless
+physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was
+quite possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a
+grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar to me
+in my early childhood. As a matter of fact he had no such claim on my
+consideration. He was the product of some village near by and was there
+on his promotion, having learned the service in one or two houses as
+pantry-boy. I know this because I asked the worthy V-- next day. I might
+well have spared the question. I discovered before long that all the
+faces about the house and all the faces in the village: the grave faces
+with long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
+young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the handsome,
+tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts
+were as familiar to me as though I had known them all from childhood,
+and my childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday.
+
+The tinkle of the traveller's bels, after growing louder, had faded away
+quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed down
+at last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a small couch, smoked his
+long Turkish chibouk in silence.
+
+“This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my room,” I
+remarked.
+
+“It is really your property,” he said, keeping his eyes on me, with
+an interested and wistful expression as he had done ever since I had
+entered the house. “Forty years ago your mother used to write at this
+very table. In our house in Oratow it stood in the little sitting-room
+which, by a tacit arrangement, was given up to the girls--I mean to
+your mother and her sister who died so young. It was a present to them
+jointly from our uncle Nicholas B. when your mother was seventeen and
+your aunt two years younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that
+aunt of yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.
+She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind, in
+which your mother was far superior. It was her good sense, the admirable
+sweetness of her nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily
+relations that endeared her to everybody. Her death was a terrible
+grief and a serious moral loss for us all. Had she lived she would have
+brought the greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot
+to enter, as wife, mother and mistress of a household. She would have
+created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content which only
+those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke. Your mother--of
+far greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished in person, manner and
+intellect--had a less easy disposition. Being more brilliantly gifted
+she also expected more from life. At that trying time especially, we
+were greatly concerned about her state. Suffering in her health from the
+shock of her father's death (she was alone in the house with him when he
+died suddenly), she was torn by the inward struggle between her love for
+the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of her dead
+father's declared objection to that match. Unable to bring herself
+to disregard that cherished memory and that judgment she had always
+respected and trusted, and, on the other hand, feeling the impossibility
+to resist a sentiment so deep and so true, she could not have been
+expected to preserve her mental and moral balance. At war with herself,
+she could not give to others that feeling of peace which was not her
+own. It was only later, when united at last with the man of her
+choice that she developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which
+compelled the respect and admiration even of our foes. Meeting with calm
+fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national
+and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest
+conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing the exile
+of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our
+Uncle Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection.
+Apart from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really,
+I believe, only three people in the world: his mother--your
+great-grandmother, whom you have seen but cannot possibly remember; his
+brother, our father, in whose house he lived for so many years; and of
+all of us, his nephews and nieces grown up round him, your mother alone.
+The modest, lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem
+able to see. It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected stroke
+of death falling upon the family less than a year after I had become its
+head. It was terribly unexpected. Driving home one wintry afternoon to
+keep me company in our empty house, where I had to remain permanently
+administering the estate and attending to the complicated affairs--(the
+girls took it in turn week and week about)--driving, as I said, from
+the house of the Countess Tekla Potochka, where our invalid mother was
+staying then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a
+snowdrift. She was alone with the coachman and old Valery, the personal
+servant of our late father. Impatient of delay while they were trying
+to dig themselves out, she jumped out of the sledge and went to look for
+the road herself. All this happened in '51, not ten miles from the house
+in which we are sitting now. The road was soon found, but snow had begun
+to fall thickly again, and they were four more hours getting home. Both
+the men took off their sheepskin-lined great-coats and used all their
+own rugs to wrap her up against the cold, notwithstanding her protests,
+positive orders and even struggles, as Valery afterwards related to me.
+'How could I,' he remonstrated with her, 'go to meet the blessed soul
+of my late master if I let any harm come to you while there's a spark of
+life left in my body?' When they reached home at last the poor old man
+was stiff and speechless from exposure, and the coachman was in not much
+better plight, though he had the strength to drive round to the stables
+himself. To my reproaches for venturing out at all in such weather,
+she answered characteristically that she could not bear the thought of
+abandoning me to my cheerless solitude. It is incomprehensible how it
+was that she was allowed to start. I suppose it had to be! She made
+light of the cough which came on next day, but shortly afterwards
+inflammation of the lungs set in, and in three weeks she was no more!
+She was the first to be taken away of the young generation under my
+care. Behold the vanity of all hopes and fears! I was the most frail
+at birth of all the children. For years I remained so delicate that my
+parents had but little hope of bringing me up; and yet I have survived
+five brothers and two sisters, and many of my contemporaries; I have
+outlived my wife and daughter too--and from all those who have had some
+knowledge at least of these old times you alone are left. It has been
+my lot to lay in an early grave many honest hearts, many brilliant
+promises, many hopes full of life.”
+
+He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me, saying: “We will dine in half
+an hour.” Without moving I listened to his quick steps resounding on
+the waxed floor of the next room, traversing the anteroom lined with
+bookshelves, where he paused to put his chibouk in the pipe-stand before
+passing into the drawing-room (these were all en suite), where he became
+inaudible on the thick carpet. But I heard the door of his study-bedroom
+close. He was then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of
+a century the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
+extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I
+seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.
+
+As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in
+the French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of Marshal
+Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of Mounted Rifles in
+the Polish Army--such as it existed up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom
+established by the Congress of Vienna--I must say that from all that
+more distant past, known to me traditionally and a little de visu, and
+called out by the words of the man just gone away, he remains the most
+incomplete figure. It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for
+it is certain that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my
+mother for what he must have known would be the last time. From my early
+boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of mist rises
+before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed
+head of white hair (which is exceptional in the case of the B. family,
+where it is the rule for men to go bald in a becoming manner, before
+thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified nose, a feature in strict
+accordance with the physical tradition of the B. family. But it is not
+by these fragmentary remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my
+memory. I knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was
+a Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish Cross
+for valour Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these glorious facts
+inspired in me an admiring veneration; yet it is not that sentiment,
+strong as it was, which resumes for me the force and the significance
+of his personality. It is overborne by another and complex impression
+of awe, compassion and horror. Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the
+unfortunate and miserable (but heroic) being who once upon a time had
+eaten a dog.
+
+It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect has not
+worn off yet. I believe this is the very first, say, realistic, story I
+heard in my life; but all the same I don't know why I should have been
+so frightfully impressed. Of course I know what our village dogs look
+like--but still . . . No! At this very day, recalling the horror
+and compassion of my childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in
+disclosing to a cold and fastidious world that awful episode in the
+family history. I ask myself--is it right?--especially as the B. family
+had always been honourably known in a wide countryside for the delicacy
+of their tastes in the matter of eating and drinking. But upon the
+whole, and considering that this gastronomical degradation overtaking a
+gallant young officer lies really at the door of the Great Napoleon,
+I think that to cover it up by silence would be an exaggeration of
+literary restraint. Let the truth stand here. The responsibility rests
+with the Man of St. Helena in view of his deplorable levity in the
+conduct of the Russian campaign. It was during the memorable retreat
+from Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of two brother officers--as
+to whose morality and natural refinement I know nothing--bagged a dog
+on the outskirts of a village and subsequently devoured him. As far as
+I can remember the weapon used was a cavalry sabre, and the issue of the
+sporting episode was rather more of a matter of life and death than if
+it had been an encounter with a tiger. A picket of Cossacks was sleeping
+in that village lost in the depths of the great Lithuanian forest. The
+three sportsmen had observed them from a hiding-place making themselves
+very much at home amongst the huts just before the early winter darkness
+set in at four o'clock. They had observed them with disgust and perhaps
+with despair. Late in the night the rash counsels of hunger overcame
+the dictates of prudence. Crawling through the snow they crept up to the
+fence of dry branches which generally encloses a village in that part
+of Lithuania. What they expected to get and in what manner, and whether
+this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only knows. However, these
+Cossack parties, in most cases wandering without an officer, were known
+to guard themselves badly and often not at all. In addition, the village
+lying at a great distance from the line of French retreat, they could
+not suspect the presence of stragglers from the Grand Army. The three
+officers had strayed away in a blizzard from the main column and
+had been lost for days in the woods, which explains sufficiently the
+terrible straits to which they were reduced. Their plan was to try and
+attract the attention of the peasants in that one of the huts which was
+nearest to the enclosure; but as they were preparing to venture into
+the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is mighty strange
+that there was but one), a creature quite as formidable under the
+circumstances as a lion, began to bark on the other side of the
+fence. . . .
+
+At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by request)
+from the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my grandmother, I
+used to tremble with excitement.
+
+The dog barked. And if he had done no more than bark three officers of
+the Great Napoleon's army would have perished honourably on the points
+of Cossack's lances, or perchance escaping the chase would have died
+decently of starvation. But before they had time to think of running
+away, that fatal and revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of
+his zeal, dashed out through a gap in the fence. He dashed out and
+died. His head, I understand, was severed at one blow from his body.
+I understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
+snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit by
+the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to be distinctly
+unsatisfactory. It was not thin--on the contrary, it seemed unhealthily
+obese; its skin showed bare patches of an unpleasant character. However,
+they had not killed that dog for the sake of the pelt. He was
+large . . . He was eaten . . . The rest is silence . . .
+
+A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
+
+“I could not have eaten that dog.”
+
+And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
+
+“Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry.”
+
+I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to
+eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language
+of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on
+ancient salt junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake,
+of nondescript dishes containing things without a name--but of the
+Lithuanian village dog--never! I wish it to be distinctly understood
+that it is not I but my grand-uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed
+gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, &c. &c., who, in his young
+days, had eaten the Lithuanian dog.
+
+I wish he had not. The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly to
+the grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still if he really
+had to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on active
+service, while bearing up bravely against the greatest military disaster
+of modern history, and, in a manner, for the sake of his country. He had
+eaten him to appease his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of an
+unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith that
+lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled like a false
+beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a brave nation.
+
+Pro patria!
+
+Looked at in that light it appears a sweet and decorous meal.
+
+And looked at in the same light my own diet of la vache enragee appears
+a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for why should I,
+the son of a land which such men as these have turned up with their
+ploughshares and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of
+fantastic meals of salt junk and hard tack upon the wide seas? On
+the kindest view it seems an unanswerable question. Alas! I have the
+conviction that there are men of unstained rectitude who are ready
+to murmur scornfully the word desertion. Thus the taste of innocent
+adventure may be made bitter to the palate. The part of the inexplicable
+should be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where
+no explanation is final. No charge of faithlessness ought to be lightly
+uttered. The appearances of this perishable life are deceptive like
+everything that falls under the judgment of our imperfect senses. The
+inner voice may remain true enough in its secret counsel. The fidelity
+to a special tradition may last through the events of an unrelated
+existence, following faithfully too the traced way of an inexplicable
+impulse.
+
+It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of
+contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times
+the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible
+explanation. Indulgence--as somebody said--is the most intelligent of
+all the virtues. I venture to think that it is one of the least common,
+if not the most uncommon of all. I would not imply by this that men
+are foolish--or even most men. Far from it. The barber and the priest,
+backed by the whole opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct
+of the ingenious hidalgo who, sallying forth from his native place,
+broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffensive
+sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable.
+God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by
+hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a
+very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise
+the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the
+charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties.
+After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his
+very body from the intolerable reality of things. He wished to meet eye
+to eye the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose armour
+is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his
+arm, is the gate of a fortified city. O amiable and natural weakness!
+O blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! Who would not
+succumb to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless it was a form of
+self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a
+good citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their
+strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who
+used to say in his exile, “The people are never in fault”--one may admit
+that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole village.
+Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by
+the well of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by
+the fat, sly rogue of a landlord, has come very near perfection. He
+rides forth, his head encircled by a halo--the patron saint of all lives
+spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was
+not a good citizen.
+
+Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered
+exclamation of my tutor.
+
+It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have had a
+jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterwards, jolly enough in
+a way and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which I
+speak was the year of my last schoolboy holiday. There are other reasons
+why I should remember that year, but they are too long to state formally
+in this place. Moreover they have nothing to do with that holiday. What
+has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark
+was made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls of
+the Rhine, the Lake of Constance--in fact it was a memorable holiday of
+travel. Of late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of the Reuss.
+It was a delightful time. It was much more like a stroll than a tramp.
+Landing from a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves
+at the end of the second day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely
+footsteps, a little way beyond Hospenthal. This is not the day on which
+the remark was made: in the shadows of the deep valley and with the
+habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not upon the
+ethics of conduct but upon the simpler human problem of shelter and
+food. There did not seem anything of the kind in sight, and we were
+thinking of turning back when suddenly at a bend of the road we came
+upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.
+
+At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and that
+magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the
+unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the
+mountains. It was long though not big at all; it was low; it was built
+of boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with the white
+window-frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front. And
+yet it was an hotel; it had even a name which I have forgotten. But
+there was no gold-laced door-keeper at its humble door. A plain but
+vigorous servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who
+owned the place appeared. It was clear that no travellers were expected,
+or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostelry, which in its severe
+style resembled the house which surmounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls
+of the toy Noah's Arks, the universal possession of European childhood.
+However, its roof was not hinged and it was not full to the brim of
+slab-sided and painted animals of wood. Even the live tourist animal was
+nowhere in evidence. We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at
+one end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to my
+sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw plank, since
+there was no one at the other end to balance it against our two dusty
+and travel-stained figures. Then we hastened upstairs to bed in a room
+smelling of pine planks, and I was fast asleep before my head touched
+the pillow.
+
+In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow University) woke
+me up early, and as we were dressing remarked: “There seems to be a lot
+of people staying in this hotel. I have heard a noise of talking up till
+11 o'clock?” This statement surprised me; I had heard no noise whatever,
+having slept like a top.
+
+We went downstairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its long
+and narrow table. There were two rows of plates on it. At one of the
+many uncurtained windows stood a tall bony man with a bald head set off
+by a bunch of black hair above each ear and with a long black beard. He
+glanced up from the paper he was reading and seemed genuinely astonished
+at our intrusion. By-and-by more men came in. Not one of them looked
+like a tourist. Not a single woman appeared. These men seemed to
+know each other with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very
+talkative lot. The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the
+table. It all had the air of a family party. By-and-by, from one of the
+vigorous servant-girls in national costume, we discovered that the place
+was really a boarding-house for some English engineers engaged at the
+works of the St. Gothard Tunnel; and I could listen my fill to
+the sounds of the English language, as far as it is used at a
+breakfast-table by men who do not believe in wasting many words on the
+mere amenities of life.
+
+This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the tourist
+kind seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne--the kind which has no
+real existence in a workaday world. I know now that the bald-headed man
+spoke with a strong Scotch accent. I have met many of his kind since,
+both ashore and afloat. The second engineer of the steamer “Mavis”, for
+instance, ought to have been his twin brother. I cannot help thinking
+that he really was, though for some reasons of his own he assured me
+that he never had a twin brother. Anyway the deliberate bald-headed Scot
+with the coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic and
+mysterious person.
+
+We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped-out route led over the Furca Pass
+towards the Rhone Glacier, with the further intention of following down
+the trend of the Hasli Valley. The sun was already declining when we
+found ourselves on the top of the pass, and the remark alluded to was
+presently uttered.
+
+We sat down by the side of the road to continue the argument begun half
+a mile or so before. I am certain it was an argument because I remember
+perfectly how my tutor argued and how without the power of reply I
+listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on the ground. A stir on the
+road made me look up--and then I saw my unforgettable Englishman. There
+are acquaintances of later years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember
+less clearly. He marched rapidly towards the east (attended by a
+hang-dog Swiss guide) with the mien of an ardent and fearless traveller.
+He was clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore
+short socks under his laced boots, for reasons which whether hygienic or
+conscientious were surely imaginative, his calves exposed to the public
+gaze and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the
+splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young
+ivory. He was the leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong,
+exalted satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains
+illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white
+whiskers, his innocently eager and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast
+a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny
+teeth towards the man and the boy sitting like dusty tramps by the
+roadside, with a modest knapsack lying at their feet. His white calves
+twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss guide with a surly mouth stalked
+like an unwilling bear at his elbow; a small train of three mules
+followed in single file the lead of this inspiring enthusiast. Two
+ladies rode past one behind the other, but from the way they sat I saw
+only their calm, uniform backs, and the long ends of blue veils hanging
+behind far down over their identical hat-brims. His two daughters
+surely. An industrious luggage-mule, with unstarched ears and guarded by
+a slouching, sallow driver, brought up the rear. My tutor, after pausing
+for a look and a faint smile, resumed his earnest argument.
+
+I tell you it was a memorable year! One does not meet such an Englishman
+twice in a lifetime. Was he in the mystic ordering of common events the
+ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment
+on the top of an Alpine pass, with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for
+mute and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable
+and comic ardour of his striving-forward appearance helped me to
+pull myself together. It must be stated that on that day and in the
+exhilarating atmosphere of that elevated spot I had been feeling utterly
+crushed. It was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my desire
+to go to sea. At first like those sounds that, ranging outside the
+scale to which men's ears are attuned, remain inaudible to our sense of
+hearing, this declaration passed unperceived. It was as if it had not
+been. Later on, by trying various tones I managed to arouse here and
+there a surprised momentary attention--the “What was that funny noise?”
+ sort of inquiry. Later on it was--“Did you hear what that boy said? What
+an extraordinary outbreak!” Presently a wave of scandalised astonishment
+(it could not have been greater if I had announced the intention of
+entering a Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of the educational and
+academical town of Cracow spread itself over several provinces.
+It spread itself shallow but far-reaching. It stirred up a mass of
+remonstrance, indignation, pitying wonder, bitter irony and downright
+chaff. I could hardly breathe under its weight, and certainly had no
+words for an answer. People wondered what Mr. T.B. would do now with his
+worrying nephew and, I dare say, hoped kindly that he would make short
+work of my nonsense.
+
+What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine to have it out
+with me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial and just,
+taking his stand on the ground of wisdom and affection. As far as is
+possible for a boy whose power of expression is still unformed I opened
+the secret of my thoughts to him and he in return allowed me a glimpse
+into his mind and heart; the first glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble
+treasure of clear thought and warm feeling, which through life was to
+be mine to draw upon with a never-deceived love and confidence.
+Practically, after several exhaustive conversations, he concluded that
+he would not have me later on reproach him for having spoiled my life
+by an unconditional opposition. But I must take time for serious
+reflection. And I must not only think of myself but of others; weigh the
+claims of affection and conscience against my own sincerity of purpose.
+“Think well what it all means in the larger issues, my boy,” he exhorted
+me finally with special friendliness. “And meantime try to get the best
+place you can at the yearly examinations.”
+
+The scholastic year came to an end. I took a fairly good place at
+the exams., which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be a more
+difficult task than for other boys. In that respect I could enter with
+a good conscience upon that holiday which was like a long visit pour
+prendre conge of the mainland of old Europe I was to see so little of
+for the next four and twenty years. Such, however, was not the avowed
+purpose of that tour. It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to
+distract and occupy my thoughts in other directions. Nothing had been
+said for months of my going to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor
+and his influence over me were so well known that he must have received
+a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic folly. It was an
+excellently appropriate arrangement, as neither he nor I had ever had a
+single glimpse of the sea in our lives. That was to come by-and-by for
+both of us in Venice, from the outer shore of Lido. Meantime he had
+taken his mission to heart so well that I began to feel crushed before
+we reached Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he
+had argued away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove! Of
+his devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt. He had proved
+it already by two years of unremitting and arduous care. I could not
+hate him. But he had been crushing me slowly, and when he started to
+argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer a success
+than either he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing silence,
+feeling that ghostly, unrealised and desired sea of my dreams escape
+from the unnerved grip of my will.
+
+The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed--and the argument went on.
+What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years,
+either in ambition, honour or conscience? An unanswerable question. But
+I felt no longer crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion was
+visible in his as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked
+up the knapsack suddenly and got on to his feet.
+
+“You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That's what you are.”
+
+I was surprised. I was only fifteen and did not know what he meant
+exactly. But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the immortal knight
+turning up in connection with my own folly, as some people would call it
+to my face. Alas! I don't think there was anything to be proud of. Mine
+was not the stuff the protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of
+this world's wrongs are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that
+best. Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and the
+priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.
+
+I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking back he
+stopped. The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over the Furca
+Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me and in full view of the
+Finster-Aarhorn, with his band of giant brothers rearing their
+monstrous heads against a brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder
+affectionately.
+
+“Well! That's enough. We will have no more of it.”
+
+And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between
+us. There was to be no more question of it at all, nowhere or with any
+one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily. Eleven
+years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of the
+St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant Service. But
+the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was
+no longer living.
+
+That very year of our travels he took his degree of the Philosophical
+Faculty--and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to
+the call he entered at once upon the four-year course of the Medical
+Schools. A day came when, on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I
+opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had
+made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian
+Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of
+the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
+coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.
+
+How short his years and how clear his vision! What greater reward in
+ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to win for himself
+when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the end of
+my opening life.
+
+
+
+Chapter III.
+
+The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by my
+grand-uncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and famished
+scarecrows, symbolised, to my childish imagination, the whole horror of
+the retreat from Moscow and the immorality of a conqueror's ambition. An
+extreme distaste for that objectionable episode has tinged the views I
+hold as to the character and achievements of Napoleon the Great. I need
+not say that these are unfavourable. It was morally reprehensible for
+that great captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog
+by raising in his breast a false hope of national independence. It
+has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards of a
+hundred years on a diet of false hopes and--well--dog. It is, when one
+thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen. Some pride in the national
+constitution which has survived a long course of such dishes is really
+excusable. But enough of generalising. Returning to particulars, Mr.
+Nicholas B. confided to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his
+misanthropically laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been
+nearly “the death of him.” This is not surprising. What surprises me is
+that the story was ever heard of; for grand-uncle Nicholas differed in
+this from the generality of military men of Napoleon's time (and perhaps
+of all time), that he did not like to talk of his campaigns, which began
+at Friedland and ended somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc.
+His admiration of the great Emperor was unreserved in everything but
+expression. Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a
+sentiment to be displayed before a world of little faith. Apart from
+that he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he
+had hardly ever seen a soldier in his life. Proud of his decorations
+earned before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear the ribbons at the
+buttonhole in the manner practised to this day in Europe and even was
+unwilling to display the insignia on festive occasions, as though he
+wished to conceal them in the fear of appearing boastful. “It is enough
+that I have them,” he used to mutter. In the course of thirty years they
+were seen on his breast only twice--at an auspicious marriage in the
+family and at the funeral of an old friend. That the wedding which was
+thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only late in
+life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas B., who made amends
+at my birth by a long letter of congratulation containing the following
+prophecy: “He will see better times.” Even in his embittered heart there
+lived a hope. But he was not a true prophet.
+
+He was a man of strange contradictions. Living for many years in his
+brother's house, the home of many children, a house full of life, of
+animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of many guests, he
+kept his habits of solitude and silence. Considered as obstinately
+secretive in all his purposes, he was in reality the victim of a most
+painful irresolution in all matters of civil life. Under his taciturn,
+phlegmatic behaviour was hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate
+anger. I suspect he had no talent for narrative; but it seemed to afford
+him sombre satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride over
+the bridge of the river Elster after the battle of Leipsic. Lest some
+construction favourable to his valour should be put on the fact he
+condescended to explain how it came to pass. It seems that shortly after
+the retreat began he was sent back to the town where some divisions
+of the French Army (and amongst them the Polish corps of Prince Joseph
+Poniatowski), jammed hopelessly in the streets, were being simply
+exterminated by the troops of the Allied Powers. When asked what it was
+like in there Mr. Nicholas B. muttered the only word “Shambles.” Having
+delivered his message to the Prince he hastened away at once to render
+an account of his mission to the superior who had sent him. By that time
+the advance of the enemy had enveloped the town, and he was shot at from
+houses and chased all the way to the river bank by a disorderly mob of
+Austrian Dragoons and Prussian Hussars. The bridge had been mined
+early in the morning and his opinion was that the sight of the horsemen
+converging from many sides in the pursuit of his person alarmed the
+officer in command of the sappers and caused the premature firing of the
+charges. He had not gone more than 200 yards on the other side when he
+heard the sound of the fatal explosions. Mr. Nicholas B. concluded
+his bald narrative with the word “Imbecile” uttered with the utmost
+deliberation. It testified to his indignation at the loss of so many
+thousands of lives. But his phlegmatic physiognomy lighted up when he
+spoke of his only wound, with something resembling satisfaction. You
+will see that there was some reason for it when you learn that he was
+wounded in the heel. “Like his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon himself,”
+ he reminded his hearers with assumed indifference. There can be no doubt
+that the indifference was assumed, if one thinks what very distinguished
+sort of wound it was. In all the history of warfare there are, I
+believe, only three warriors publicly known to have been wounded in
+the heel--Achilles and Napoleon--demi-gods indeed--to whom the familial
+piety of an unworthy descendant adds the name of the simple mortal,
+Nicholas B.
+
+The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B. staying with a distant relative
+of ours, owner of a small estate in Galicia. How he got there across the
+breadth of an armed Europe and after what adventures I am afraid will
+never be known now. All his papers were destroyed shortly before his
+death; but if there was amongst them, as he affirmed, a concise record
+of his life, then I am pretty sure it did not take up more than a
+half-sheet of foolscap or so. This relative of ours happened to be
+an Austrian officer, who had left the service after the battle of
+Austerlitz. Unlike Mr. Nicholas B., who concealed his decorations, he
+liked to display his honourable discharge in which he was mentioned as
+unschreckbar (fearless) before the enemy. No conjunction could seem more
+unpromising, yet it stands in the family tradition that these two got on
+very well together in their rural solitude.
+
+When asked whether he had not been sorely tempted during the Hundred
+Days to make his way again to France and join the service of his beloved
+Emperor, Mr. Nicholas B. used to mutter: “No money. No horse. Too far to
+walk.”
+
+The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of national hopes affected adversely
+the character of Mr. Nicholas B. He shrank from returning to his
+province. But for that there was also another reason. Mr. Nicholas B.
+and his brother--my maternal grandfather--had lost their father early,
+while they were quite children. Their mother, young still and left
+very well off, married again a man of great charm and of an amiable
+disposition but without a penny. He turned out an affectionate and
+careful stepfather; it was unfortunate though that while directing the
+boys' education and forming their character by wise counsel he did his
+best to get hold of the fortune by buying and selling land in his own
+name and investing capital in such a manner as to cover up the traces
+of the real ownership. It seems that such practices can be successful
+if one is charming enough to dazzle one's own wife permanently and brave
+enough to defy the vain terrors of public opinion. The critical time
+came when the elder of the boys on attaining his majority in the year
+1811 asked for the accounts and some part at least of the inheritance
+to begin life upon. It was then that the stepfather declared with
+calm finality that there were no accounts to render and no property to
+inherit. The whole fortune was his very own. He was very good-natured
+about the young man's misapprehension of the true state of affairs, but
+of course felt obliged to maintain his position firmly. Old friends
+came and went busily, voluntary mediators appeared travelling on most
+horrible roads from the most distant corners of the three provinces;
+and the Marshal of the Nobility (ex-officio guardian of all well-born
+orphans) called a meeting of landowners to “ascertain in a friendly
+way how the misunderstanding between X and his stepsons had arisen and
+devise proper measures to remove the same.” A deputation to that effect
+visited X, who treated them to excellent wines, but absolutely refused
+his ear to their remonstrances. As to the proposals for arbitration he
+simply laughed at them; yet the whole province must have been aware
+that fourteen years before, when he married the widow, all his
+visible fortune consisted (apart from his social qualities) in a smart
+four-horse turn-out with two servants, with whom he went about visiting
+from house to house; and as to any funds he might have possessed at that
+time their existence could only be inferred from the fact that he was
+very punctual in settling his modest losses at cards. But by the magic
+power of stubborn and constant assertion, there were found presently,
+here and there, people who mumbled that surely “there must be something
+in it.” However, on his next name-day (which he used to celebrate by
+a great three-days' shooting-party), of all the invited crowd only two
+guests turned up, distant neighbours of no importance; one notoriously a
+fool, and the other a very pious and honest person but such a passionate
+lover of the gun that on his own confession he could not have refused
+an invitation to a shooting-party from the devil himself. X met this
+manifestation of public opinion with the serenity of an unstained
+conscience. He refused to be crushed. Yet he must have been a man
+of deep feeling, because, when his wife took openly the part of her
+children, he lost his beautiful tranquillity, proclaimed himself
+heart-broken and drove her out of the house, neglecting in his grief to
+give her enough time to pack her trunks.
+
+This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an abominable marvel of chicane,
+which by the use of every legal subterfuge was made to last for many
+years. It was also the occasion for a display of much kindness and
+sympathy. All the neighbouring houses flew open for the reception of the
+homeless. Neither legal aid nor material assistance in the prosecution
+of the suit was ever wanting. X, on his side, went about shedding
+tears publicly over his stepchildren's ingratitude and his wife's blind
+infatuation; but as at the same time he displayed great cleverness
+in the art of concealing material documents (he was even suspected of
+having burnt a lot of historically interesting family papers), this
+scandalous litigation had to be ended by a compromise lest worse should
+befall. It was settled finally by a surrender, out of the disputed
+estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, of two villages with the
+names of which I do not intend to trouble my readers. After this lame
+and impotent conclusion neither the wife nor the stepsons had anything
+to say to the man who had presented the world with such a successful
+example of self-help based on character, determination and industry; and
+my great-grandmother, her health completely broken down, died a
+couple of years later in Carlsbad. Legally secured by a decree in the
+possession of his plunder, X regained his wonted serenity and went on
+living in the neighbourhood in a comfortable style and in apparent peace
+of mind. His big shoots were fairly well attended again. He was never
+tired of assuring people that he bore no grudge for what was past;
+he protested loudly of his constant affection for his wife and
+stepchildren. It was true he said that they had tried their best to
+strip him as naked as a Turkish saint in the decline of his days; and
+because he had defended himself from spoliation, as anybody else in his
+place would have done, they had abandoned him now to the horrors of a
+solitary old age. Nevertheless, his love for them survived these cruel
+blows. And there might have been some truth in his protestations. Very
+soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his eldest stepson, my
+maternal grandfather; and when these were peremptorily rejected he went
+on renewing them again and again with characteristic obstinacy. For
+years he persisted in his efforts at reconciliation, promising my
+grandfather to execute a will in his favour if he only would be friends
+again to the extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close
+neighbourhood for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in
+an appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My grandfather was an
+ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as free from
+hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the liberal-minded
+Benedictines who directed the only public school of some standing then
+in the south, he had also read deeply the authors of the eighteenth
+century. In him Christian charity was joined to a philosophical
+indulgence for the failings of human nature. But the memory of these
+miserably anxious early years, his young man's years robbed of all
+generous illusions by the cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the
+way of forgiveness. He never succumbed to the fascination of the great
+shoot; and X, his heart set to the last on reconciliation with the draft
+of the will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died intestate.
+The fortune thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful management
+passed to some distant relatives whom he had never seen and who even did
+not bear his name.
+
+Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe. Mr.
+Nicholas B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the “fearless”
+ Austrian officer, departed from Galicia, and without going near his
+native place, where the odious lawsuit was still going on, proceeded
+straight to Warsaw and entered the army of the newly constituted Polish
+kingdom under the sceptre of Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.
+
+This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgment to a
+nation of its former independent existence, included only the central
+provinces of the old Polish patrimony. A brother of the Emperor, the
+Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief,
+married morganatically to a Polish lady to whom he was fiercely
+attached, extended this affection to what he called “My Poles” in
+a capricious and savage manner. Sallow in complexion, with a Tartar
+physiognomy and fierce little eyes, he walked with his fists clenched,
+his body bent forward, darting suspicious glances from under an enormous
+cocked hat. His intelligence was limited and his sanity itself was
+doubtful. The hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by
+mystic leanings as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in their
+various ways, for one was mystically liberal and the other mystically
+autocratic), but by the fury of an uncontrollable temper which generally
+broke out in disgusting abuse on the parade ground. He was a passionate
+militarist and an amazing drill-master. He treated his Polish Army as a
+spoiled child treats a favourite toy, except that he did not take it to
+bed with him at night. It was not small enough for that. But he played
+with it all day and every day, delighting in the variety of pretty
+uniforms and in the fun of incessant drilling. This childish passion,
+not for war but for mere militarism, achieved a desirable result. The
+Polish Army, in its equipment, in its armament and in its battlefield
+efficiency, as then understood, became, by the end of the year 1830, a
+first-rate tactical instrument. Polish peasantry (not serfs) served in
+the ranks by enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly to the smaller
+nobility. Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had no difficulty
+in obtaining a lieutenancy, but the promotion in the Polish Army was
+slow, because, being a separate organisation, it took no part in the
+wars of the Russian Empire against Persia or Turkey. Its first campaign,
+against Russia itself, was to be its last. In 1831, on the outbreak of
+the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas B. was the senior captain of his regiment.
+Some time before he had been made head of the remount establishment
+quartered outside the kingdom in our southern provinces, whence almost
+all the horses for the Polish cavalry were drawn. For the first time
+since he went away from home at the age of eighteen to begin his
+military life by the battle of Friedland, Mr. Nicholas B. breathed the
+air of the “Border,” his native air. Unkind fate was lying in wait for
+him amongst the scenes of his youth. At the first news of the rising
+in Warsaw all the remount establishment, officers, vets., and the very
+troopers, were put promptly under arrest and hurried off in a body
+beyond the Dnieper to the nearest town in Russia proper. From there they
+were dispersed to the distant parts of the Empire. On this occasion poor
+Mr. Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much farther than he ever did in
+the times of Napoleonic invasion, if much less willingly. Astrakhan was
+his destination. He remained there three years, allowed to live at
+large in the town but having to report himself every day at noon to the
+military commandant, who used to detain him frequently for a pipe and
+a chat. It is difficult to form a just idea of what a chat with Mr.
+Nicholas B. could have been like. There must have been much compressed
+rage under his taciturnity, for the commandant communicated to him the
+news from the theatre of war and this news was such as it could be,
+that is, very bad for the Poles. Mr. Nicholas B. received these
+communications with outward phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm
+sympathy for his prisoner. “As a soldier myself I understand your
+feelings. You, of course, would like to be in the thick of it. By
+heavens! I am fond of you. If it were not for the terms of the military
+oath I would let you go on my own responsibility. What difference could
+it make to us, one more or less of you?”
+
+At other times he wondered with simplicity.
+
+“Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch”--(my great-grandfather's name
+was Stephen and the commandant used the Russian form of polite
+address)--“tell me why is it that you Poles are always looking for
+trouble? What else could you expect from running up against Russia?”
+
+He was capable, too, of philosophical reflections.
+
+“Look at your Napoleon now. A great man. There is no denying it that he
+was a great man as long as he was content to thrash those Germans and
+Austrians and all those nations. But no! He must go to Russia looking
+for trouble, and what's the consequence? Such as you see me, I have
+rattled this sabre of mine on the pavements of Paris.”
+
+After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B. described him as a “worthy
+man but stupid,” whenever he could be induced to speak of the conditions
+of his exile. Declining the option offered him to enter the Russian Army
+he was retired with only half the pension of his rank. His nephew (my
+uncle and guardian) told me that the first lasting impression on his
+memory as a child of four was the glad excitement reigning in his
+parents' house on the day when Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home from his
+detention in Russia.
+
+Every generation has its memories. The first memories of Mr. Nicholas
+B. might have been shaped by the events of the last partition of Poland,
+and he lived long enough to suffer from the last armed rising in 1863,
+an event which affected the future of all my generation and has coloured
+my earliest impressions. His brother, in whose house he had sheltered
+for some seventeen years his misanthropical timidity before the
+commonest problems of life, having died in the early fifties, Mr.
+Nicholas B. had to screw his courage up to the sticking-point and come
+to some decision as to the future. After a long and agonising hesitation
+he was persuaded at last to become the tenant of some fifteen hundred
+acres out of the estate of a friend in the neighbourhood. The terms
+of the lease were very advantageous, but the retired situation of the
+village and a plain comfortable house in good repair were, I fancy, the
+greatest inducements. He lived there quietly for about ten years, seeing
+very few people and taking no part in the public life of the province,
+such as it could be under an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny. His
+character and his patriotism were above suspicion; but the organisers
+of the rising in their frequent journeys up and down the province
+scrupulously avoided coming near his house. It was generally felt that
+the repose of the old man's last years ought not to be disturbed. Even
+such intimates as my paternal grandfather, a comrade-in-arms during
+Napoleon's Moscow campaign and later on a fellow-officer in the Polish
+Army, refrained from visiting his crony as the date of the outbreak
+approached. My paternal grandfather's two sons and his only daughter
+were all deeply involved in the revolutionary work; he himself was of
+that type of Polish squire whose only ideal of patriotic action was to
+“get into the saddle and drive them out.” But even he agreed that “dear
+Nicholas must not be worried.” All this considerate caution on the part
+of friends, both conspirators and others, did not prevent Mr. Nicholas
+B. being made to feel the misfortunes of that ill-omened year.
+
+Less than forty-eight hours after the beginning of the rebellion in that
+part of the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks passed through the
+village and invaded the homestead. Most of them remained formed between
+the house and the stables, while several, dismounting, ransacked the
+various outbuildings. The officer in command, accompanied by two men,
+walked up to the front door. All the blinds on that side were down.
+The officer told the servant who received him that he wanted to see his
+master. He was answered that the master was away from home, which was
+perfectly true.
+
+I follow here the tale as told afterwards by the servant to my
+grand-uncle's friends and relatives, and as I have heard it repeated.
+
+On receiving this answer the Cossack officer, who had been standing in
+the porch, stepped into the house.
+
+“Where is the master gone, then?”
+
+“Our master went to J--” (the government town some fifty miles off),
+“the day before yesterday.”
+
+“There are only two horses in the stables. Where are the others?”
+
+“Our master always travels with his own horses” (meaning: not by post).
+“He will be away a week or more. He was pleased to mention to me that he
+had to attend to some business in the Civil Court.”
+
+While the servant was speaking the officer looked about the hall. There
+was a door facing him, a door to the right and a door to the left. The
+officer chose to enter the room on the left and ordered the blinds to
+be pulled up. It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s study with a couple of tall
+bookcases, some pictures on the walls, and so on. Besides the big centre
+table, with books and papers, there was a quite small writing-table
+with several drawers, standing between the door and the window in a good
+light; and at this table my grand-uncle usually sat either to read or
+write.
+
+On pulling up the blind the servant was startled by the discovery that
+the whole male population of the village was massed in front, trampling
+down the flower-beds. There were also a few women amongst them. He was
+glad to observe the village priest (of the Orthodox Church) coming up
+the drive. The good man in his haste had tucked up his cassock as high
+as the top of his boots.
+
+The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the bookcases.
+Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre-table and remarked
+easily:
+
+“Your master did not take you to town with him, then.”
+
+“I am the head servant and he leaves me in charge of the house. It's a
+strong, young chap that travels with our master. If--God forbid--there
+was some accident on the road he would be of much more use than I.”
+
+Glancing through the window he saw the priest arguing vehemently in the
+thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his interference. Three or
+four men, however, were talking with the Cossacks at the door.
+
+“And you don't think your master has gone to join the rebels maybe--eh?”
+ asked the officer.
+
+“Our master would be too old for that surely. He's well over seventy
+and he's getting feeble too. It's some years now since he's been on
+horseback and he can't walk much either now.”
+
+The officer sat there swinging his leg, very quiet and indifferent. By
+that time the peasants who had been talking with the Cossack troopers at
+the door had been permitted to get into the hall. One or two more left
+the crowd and followed them in. They were seven in all and amongst them
+the blacksmith, an ex-soldier. The servant appealed deferentially to the
+officer.
+
+“Won't your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to their
+homes? What do they want to push themselves into the house like this
+for? It's not proper for them to behave like this while our master's
+away and I am responsible for everything here.”
+
+The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired:
+
+“Have you any arms in the house?”
+
+“Yes. We have. Some old things.”
+
+“Bring them all, here, on to this table.”
+
+The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.
+
+“Won't your honour tell these chaps? . . .”
+
+But the officer looked at him in silence in such a way that he gave it
+up at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help him collect
+the arms. Meantime the officer walked slowly through all the rooms in
+the house, examining them attentively but touching nothing. The peasants
+in the hall fell back and took off their caps when he passed through.
+He said nothing whatever to them. When he came back to the study all the
+arms to be found in the house were lying on the table. There was a pair
+of big flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry
+swords, one of the French the other of the Polish Army pattern, with a
+fowling-piece or two.
+
+The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords and guns, one
+after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up. The peasants in the
+hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen after him into the study. He
+gave not the slightest sign of being conscious of their existence and,
+his business being apparently concluded, strode out of the house without
+a word. Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps
+and began to smile at each other.
+
+The Cossacks rode away, passing through the yards of the home farm
+straight into the fields. The priest, still arguing with the peasants,
+moved gradually down the drive and his earnest eloquence was drawing the
+silent mob after him, away from the house. This justice must be rendered
+to the parish priests of the Greek Church that, strangers to the country
+as they were (being all drawn from the interior of Russia), the majority
+of them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the cause
+of peace and humanity. True to the spirit of their calling, they tried
+to soothe the passions of the excited peasantry and opposed rapine and
+violence whenever they could, with all their might. And this conduct
+they pursued against the express wishes of the authorities. Later on
+some of them were made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed
+abruptly to the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.
+
+The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had got into
+the house. What sort of conduct was that, he asked them, towards a man
+who was only a tenant, had been invariably good and considerate to the
+villagers for years; and only the other day had agreed to give up two
+meadows for the use of the village herd? He reminded them, too, of Mr.
+Nicholas B.'s devotion to the sick in the time of cholera. Every word
+of this was true and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch
+their heads and look irresolute. The speaker then pointed at the window,
+exclaiming: “Look! there's all your crowd going away quietly and you
+silly chaps had better go after them and pray God to forgive you your
+evil thoughts.”
+
+This appeal was an unlucky inspiration. In crowding clumsily to the
+window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows overturned
+the little writing-table. As it fell over a chink of loose coin was
+heard. “There's money in that thing,” cried the blacksmith. In a moment
+the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay
+exposed in a drawer eighty half-imperials. Gold coin was a rare sight in
+Russia even at that time; it put the peasants beside themselves. “There
+must be more of that in the house and we shall have it,” yelled the
+ex-soldier blacksmith. “This is war time.” The others were already
+shouting out of the window urging the crowd to come back and help. The
+priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms up and hurried
+away so as not to see what was going to happen.
+
+In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in the
+house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that, as the
+servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in
+the whole house. They broke some very fine mirrors, all the windows and
+every piece of glass and china. They threw the books and papers out
+on the lawn and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing
+apparently. Absolutely the only one solitary thing which they left whole
+was a small ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in
+the wrecked bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany and
+splintered boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead. Detecting
+the servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned tin box, they
+tore it from him, and because he resisted they threw him out of the
+dining-room window. The house was on one floor but raised well above the
+ground, and the fall was so serious that the man remained lying stunned
+till the cook and a stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their
+hiding-places and picked him up. By that time the mob had departed
+carrying off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money.
+Some distance from the house in the middle of a field they broke it
+open. They found inside documents engrossed on parchment and the two
+crosses of the Legion of Honour and For Valour. At the sight of these
+objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour given
+only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what they had
+done. They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.
+
+On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down
+completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him
+much. While he was still in bed from the shock the two crosses were
+found and returned to him. It helped somewhat his slow convalescence,
+but the tin box and the parchments, though searched for in all the
+ditches around, never turned up again. He could not get over the loss of
+his Legion of Honour Patent, whose preamble, setting forth his services,
+he knew by heart to the very letter, and after this blow volunteered
+sometimes to recite, tears standing in his eyes the while. Its terms
+haunted him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an
+extent that he used to repeat them to himself. This is confirmed by
+the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more intimate
+friends. “What makes my heart heavy is to hear our master in his room at
+night walking up and down and praying aloud in the French language.”
+
+It must have been somewhat over a year afterwards that I saw Mr.
+Nicholas B., or, more correctly, that he saw me, for the last time.
+It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother had a three
+months' leave from exile, which she was spending in the house of her
+brother, and friends and relations were coming from far and near to do
+her honour. It is inconceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not have
+been of the number. The little child a few months old he had taken up in
+his arms on the day of his home-coming after years of war and exile was
+confessing her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her
+turn. I do not know whether he was present on the very day of our
+departure. I have already admitted that for me he is more especially
+the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a
+gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any
+remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated
+evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily
+buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr.
+Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his
+grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those he
+had seen in the course of his taciturn life.
+
+But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The
+elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-horses,
+standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns,
+four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups
+of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest
+neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on all the faces an air of sober
+concentration; my grandmother all in black gazing stoically, my uncle
+giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been
+placed already; at the top of the flight my little cousin in a short
+skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a
+small princess attended by the women of her own household: the head
+gourvernante, our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty
+years in the service of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor
+attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression,
+and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
+meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown paper.
+Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes only
+were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the
+silence with an appeal to me: “N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri.” In
+three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only
+to speak French but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent
+playmate. In the distance, half way down to the great gates, a light,
+open trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn
+up on one side with the police-captain of the district sitting in it,
+the vizor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over his eyes.
+
+It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our going so
+carefully. Without wishing to treat with levity the just timidities of
+Imperialists all the world over, I may allow myself the reflection that
+a woman, practically condemned by the doctors, and a small boy not quite
+six years old could not be regarded as seriously dangerous even for
+the largest of conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of
+responsibilities. And this good man, I believe, did not think so either.
+
+I learned afterwards why he was present on that day. I don't remember
+any outward signs, but it seems that, about a month before, my mother
+became so unwell that there was a doubt whether she could be made fit to
+travel in the time. In this uncertainty the Governor-General in Kiev was
+petitioned to grant her a fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's
+house. No answer whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at
+dusk the police-captain of the district drove up to the house and told
+my uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak with
+the master in private, at once. Very much impressed (he thought it was
+going to be an arrest) the servant, “more dead than alive with fright,”
+ as he related afterwards, smuggled him through the big drawing-room,
+which was dark (that room was not lighted every evening), on tiptoe, so
+as not to attract the attention of the ladies in the house, and led him
+by way of the orangery to my uncle's private apartments.
+
+The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my uncle's
+hands.
+
+“There. Pray read this. I have no business to show this paper to you. It
+is wrong of me. But I can't either eat or sleep with such a job hanging
+over me.”
+
+That police-captain, a native of Great Russia, had been for many years
+serving in the district.
+
+My uncle unfolded and read the document. It was a service order issued
+from the Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with the matter of the
+petition and directing the police-captain to disregard all remonstrances
+and explanations in regard to that illness either from medical men or
+others, “and if she has not left her brother's house”--it went on to
+say--“on the morning of the day specified on her permit, you are
+to despatch her at once under escort, direct” (underlined) “to the
+prison-hospital in Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands.”
+
+“For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your sister goes away punctually on
+that day. Don't give me this work to do with a woman--and with one of
+your family too. I simply cannot bear to think of it.”
+
+He was absolutely wringing his hands. My uncle looked at him in silence.
+
+“Thank you for this warning. I assure you that even if she were dying
+she would be carried out to the carriage.”
+
+“Yes--indeed--and what difference would it make--travel to Kiev or back
+to her husband. For she would have to go--death or no death. And mind,
+Mr. B., I will be here on the day, not that I doubt your promise, but
+because I must. I have got to. Duty. All the same my trade is not fit
+for a dog since some of you Poles will persist in rebelling, and all of
+you have got to suffer for it.”
+
+This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap pulled
+up between the house and the great gates. I regret not being able
+to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in the rights of
+conquest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial greatness.
+On the other hand, I am in a position to state the name of the
+Governor-General who signed the order with the marginal note “to be
+carried out to the letter” in his own handwriting. The gentleman's name
+was Bezak. A high dignitary, an energetic official, the idol for a time
+of the Russian Patriotic Press.
+
+Each generation has its memories.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV.
+
+It must not be supposed that in setting forth the memories of this
+half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we met again at
+dinner, I am losing sight of “Almayer's Folly.” Having confessed that my
+first novel was begun in idleness--a holiday task--I think I have also
+given the impression that it was a much-delayed book. It was never
+dismissed from my mind, even when the hope of ever finishing it was very
+faint. Many things came in its way: daily duties, new impressions,
+old memories. It was not the outcome of a need--the famous need of
+self-expression which artists find in their search for motives.
+The necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity, a
+completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon. Or perhaps some idle and
+frivolous magician (there must be magicians in London) had cast a spell
+over me through his parlour window as I explored the maze of streets
+east and west in solitary leisurely walks without chart and compass.
+Till I began to write that novel I had written nothing but letters and
+not very many these. I never made a note of a fact, of an impression or
+of an anecdote in my life. The conception of a planned book was entirely
+outside my mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of
+being an author had never turned up amongst these gracious imaginary
+existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and
+immobility of a day-dream: yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday
+that from the moment I had done blackening over the first manuscript
+page of “Almayer's Folly” (it contained about two hundred words and this
+proportion of words to a page has remained with me through the fifteen
+years of my writing life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of
+my heart and the amazing ignorance of my mind, written that page the die
+was cast. Never had Rubicon been more blindly forded, without invocation
+to the gods, without fear of men.
+
+That morning I got up from my breakfast, pushing the chair back, and
+rang the bell violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely, or perhaps
+I should say eagerly, I do not know. But manifestly it must have been
+a special ring of the bell, a common sound made impressive, like the
+ringing of a bell for the raising of the curtain upon a new scene.
+It was an unusual thing for me to do. Generally, I dawdled over my
+breakfast and I solemn took the trouble to ring the bell for the table
+to be cleared away; but on that morning for some reason hidden in the
+general mysteriousness of the event I did not dawdle. And yet I was
+not in a hurry. I pulled the cord casually and while the faint tinkling
+somewhere down in the basement went on, I charged my pipe in the usual
+way and I looked for the matchbox with glances distraught indeed but
+exhibiting, I am ready to swear, no signs of a fine frenzy. I was
+composed enough to perceive after some considerable time the matchbox
+lying there on the mantelpiece right under my nose. And all this was
+beautifully and safely usual. Before I had thrown down the match my
+landlady's daughter appeared with her calm, pale face and an inquisitive
+look, in the doorway. Of late it was the landlady's daughter who
+answered my bell. I mention this little fact with pride, because it
+proves that during the thirty or forty days of my tenancy I had produced
+a favourable impression. For a fortnight past I had been spared the
+unattractive sight of the domestic slave. The girls in that Bessborough
+Gardens house were often changed, but whether short or long, fair or
+dark, they were always untidy and particularly bedraggled as if in a
+sordid version of the fairy tale the ashbin cat had been changed into a
+maid. I was infinitely sensible of the privilege of being waited on by
+my landlady's daughter. She was neat if anaemic.
+
+“Will you please clear away all this at once?” I addressed her in
+convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting my pipe
+to draw. This, I admit, was an unusual request. Generally on getting up
+from breakfast I would sit down in the window with a book and let them
+clear the table when they liked; but if you think that on that morning
+I was in the least impatient, you are mistaken. I remember that I was
+perfectly calm. As a matter of fact I was not at all certain that I
+wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to
+write about. No, I was not impatient. I lounged between the mantelpiece
+and the window, not even consciously waiting for the table to be
+cleared. It was ten to one that before my landlady's daughter was done I
+would pick up a book and sit down with it all the morning in a spirit of
+enjoyable indolence. I affirm it with assurance, and I don't even know
+now what were the books then lying about the room. Whatever they were
+they were not the works of great masters, where the secret of clear
+thought and exact expression can be found. Since the age of five I have
+been a great reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was
+never aware of learning to read. At ten years of age I had read much
+of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in Polish and in French,
+history, voyages, novels; I knew “Gil Blas” and “Don Quixote” in
+abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some
+French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before I began
+to write myself. I believe it was a novel and it is quite possible
+that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My
+acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English
+novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of
+European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was
+otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was
+“Nicholas Nickleby.” It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could
+chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that
+language. As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned
+Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their native speech. It was, I
+have no doubt, an excellent translation. This must have been in the year
+'70. But I really believe that I am wrong. That book was not my first
+introduction to English literature. My first acquaintance was (or were)
+the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and that in the very MS. of my father's
+translation. It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been
+less than a year after my mother's death, because I remember myself
+in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning. We were
+living together, quite alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the
+town of T--. That afternoon, instead of going out to play in the large
+yard which we shared with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in
+which my father generally wrote. What emboldened me to clamber into
+his chair I am sure I don't know, but a couple of hours afterwards he
+discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my head
+held in both hands over the MS. of loose pages. I was greatly confused,
+expecting to get into trouble. He stood in the doorway looking at me
+with some surprise, but the only thing he said after a moment of silence
+was:
+
+“Read the page aloud.”
+
+Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with erasures
+and corrections, and my father's handwriting was otherwise extremely
+legible. When I got to the end he nodded and I flew out of doors
+thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof for that piece of
+impulsive audacity. I have tried to discover since the reason of this
+mildness, and I imagine that all unknown to myself I had earned, in
+my father's mind, the right to some latitude in my relations with his
+writing-table. It was only a month before, or perhaps it was only a week
+before, that I had read to him aloud from beginning to end, and to his
+perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very well at the
+time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's “Toilers of the
+Sea.” Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and also my first
+introduction to the sea in literature. If I do not remember where, how
+and when I learned to read, I am not likely to forget the process of
+being trained in the art of reading aloud. My poor father, an admirable
+reader himself, was the most exacting of masters. I reflect proudly that
+I must have read that page of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” tolerably well
+at the age of eight. The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume
+edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in Falmouth,
+at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment of caulkers'
+mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship in dry dock. We had
+run in, in a sinking condition and with the crew refusing duty after a
+month of weary battling with the gales of the North Atlantic. Books are
+an integral part of one's life and my Shakespearean associations are
+with that first year of our bereavement, the last I spent with my father
+in exile (he sent me away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he
+could brace himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard
+gales, the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water
+and then by fire.
+
+Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my
+writing life began I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion that it
+might have been one of Trollope's political novels. And I remember,
+too, the character of the day. It was an autumn day with an opaline
+atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and
+flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the
+trees of the square with all their leaves gone were like tracings of
+indian ink on a sheet of tissue paper. It was one of those London days
+that have the charm of mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.
+The effect of opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on
+account of the nearness to the river.
+
+There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that day
+than on any other day, except that I stood for a long time looking out
+of the window after the landlady's daughter was gone with her spoil
+of cups and saucers. I heard her put the tray down in the passage and
+finally shut the door; and still I remained smoking with my back to the
+room. It is very clear that I was in no haste to take the plunge into my
+writing life, if as plunge this first attempt may be described. My whole
+being was steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the
+sea, the scene of never-ending labour and of unceasing duty. For utter
+surrender to indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that mood
+is on him, the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to the full.
+It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an
+impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years.
+What I am certain of is, that I was very far from thinking of writing a
+story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the
+man Almayer.
+
+I had seen him for the first time some four years before from the bridge
+of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or
+less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning and a slight mist, an
+opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only without the fiery flicks on
+roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun, promised to
+turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small dug-out canoe on the
+river there was nothing moving within sight. I had just come up yawning
+from my cabin. The serang and the Malay crew were overhauling the cargo
+chains and trying the winches; their voices sounded subdued on the
+deck below and their movements were languid. That tropical daybreak was
+chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something from the
+lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests above and below and
+on the opposite bank looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging
+upon the tightly stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a
+shuddering yawn that I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a
+patch of burnt grass, a blurred shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of
+a house behind him, a low house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves with a
+high-pitched roof of grass.
+
+He stepped upon the jetty. He was clad simply in flapping pyjamas of
+cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals on a disagreeable
+blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with short sleeves. His arms,
+bare to the elbow, were crossed on his chest. His black hair looked
+as if it had not been cut for a very long time and a curly wisp of it
+strayed across his forehead. I had heard of him at Singapore; I had
+heard of him on board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late
+at night; I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of
+him in a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who
+described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded civilised
+and progressive till you heard that the mine could not be worked at
+present because it was haunted by some particularly atrocious ghosts. I
+had heard of him in a place called Dongola, in the Island of Celebes,
+when the Rajah of that little-known seaport (you can get no anchorage
+there in less than fifteen fathom, which is extremely inconvenient) came
+on board in a friendly way with only two attendants, and drank bottle
+after bottle of soda-water on the after-skylight with my good friend and
+commander, Captain C--. At least I heard his name distinctly pronounced
+several times in a lot of talk in Malay language. Oh yes, I heard it
+quite distinctly--Almayer, Almayer--and saw Captain C-- smile while the
+fat dingy Rajah laughed audibly. To hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright
+is a rare experience I can assure you. And I overhead more of Almayer's
+name amongst our deck passengers (mostly wandering traders of good
+repute) as they sat all over the ship--each man fenced round with
+bundles and boxes--on mats, on pillows, on quilts, on billets of wood,
+conversing of Island affairs. Upon my word, I heard the mutter of
+Almayer's name faintly at midnight, while making my way aft from the
+bridge to look at the patent taffrail-log tinkling its quarter-miles in
+the great silence of the sea. I don't mean to say that our passengers
+dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is indubitable that two of them at
+least, who could not sleep apparently and were trying to charm away the
+trouble of insomnia by a little whispered talk at that ghostly hour,
+were referring in some way or other to Almayer. It was really impossible
+on board that ship to get away definitely from Almayer; and a very small
+pony tied up forward and whisking its tail inside the galley, to the
+great embarrassment of our Chinaman cook, was destined for Almayer. What
+he wanted with a pony goodness only knows, since I am perfectly certain
+he could not ride it; but here you have the man, ambitious, aiming at
+the grandiose, importing a pony, whereas in the whole settlement at
+which he used to shake daily his impotent fist, there was only one path
+that was practicable for a pony: a quarter of a mile at most, hedged
+in by hundreds of square leagues of virgin forest. But who knows? The
+importation of that Bali Pony might have been part of some deep scheme,
+of some diplomatic plan, of some hopeful intrigue. With Almayer one
+could never tell. He governed his conduct by considerations removed
+from the obvious, by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic
+impenetrable to any reasonable person. I learned all this later. That
+morning seeing the figure in pyjamas moving in the mist I said to
+myself: “That's the man.”
+
+He came quite close to the ship's side and raised a harassed
+countenance, round and flat, with that curl of black hair over the
+forehead and a heavy, pained glance.
+
+“Good morning.”
+
+“Good morning.”
+
+He looked hard at me: I was a new face, having just replaced the chief
+mate he was accustomed to see; and I think that this novelty inspired
+him, as things generally did, with deep-seated mistrust.
+
+“Didn't expect you in till this evening,” he remarked suspiciously.
+
+I don't know why he should have been aggrieved, but he seemed to be.
+I took pains to explain to him that having picked up the beacon at the
+mouth of the river just before dark and the tide serving, Captain C--
+was enabled to cross the bar and there was nothing to prevent him going
+up river at night.
+
+“Captain C-- knows this river like his own pocket,” I concluded
+discursively, trying to get on terms.
+
+“Better,” said Almayer.
+
+Leaning over the rail of the bridge I looked at Almayer, who looked down
+at the wharf in aggrieved thought. He shuffled his feet a little; he
+wore straw slippers with thick soles. The morning fog had thickened
+considerably. Everything round us dripped: the derricks, the rails,
+every single rope in the ship--as if a fit of crying had come upon the
+universe.
+
+Almayer again raised his head and in the accents of a man accustomed to
+the buffets of evil fortune asked hardly audibly:
+
+“I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a pony on board?”
+
+I told him almost in a whisper, for he attuned my communications to his
+minor key, that we had such a thing as a pony, and I hinted, as gently
+as I could, that he was confoundedly in the way too. I was very anxious
+to have him landed before I began to handle the cargo. Almayer remained
+looking up at me for a long while with incredulous and melancholy
+eyes as though it were not a safe thing to believe my statement. This
+pathetic mistrust in the favourable issue of any sort of affair touched
+me deeply, and I added:
+
+“He doesn't seem a bit the worse for the passage. He's a nice pony too.”
+
+Almayer was not to be cheered up; for all answer he cleared his throat
+and looked down again at his feet. I tried to close with him on another
+tack.
+
+“By Jove!” I said. “Aren't you afraid of catching pneumonia or
+bronchitis or something, walking about in a singlet in such a wet fog?”
+
+He was not to be propitiated by a show of interest in his health. His
+answer was a sinister “No fear,” as much as to say that even that way of
+escape from inclement fortune was closed to him.
+
+“I just came down . . .” he mumbled after a while.
+
+“Well then, now you're here I will land that pony for you at once and
+you can lead him home. I really don't want him on deck. He's in the
+way.”
+
+Almayer seemed doubtful. I insisted:
+
+“Why, I will just swing him out and land him on the wharf right in front
+of you. I'd much rather do it before the hatches are off. The little
+devil may jump down the hold or do some other deadly thing.”
+
+“There's a halter?” postulated Almayer.
+
+“Yes, of course there's a halter.” And without waiting any more I leaned
+over the bridge rail.
+
+“Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony.”
+
+The cook hastened to shut the door of the galley and a moment later a
+great scuffle began on deck. The pony kicked with extreme energy, the
+kalashes skipped out of the way, the serang issued many orders in a
+cracked voice. Suddenly the pony leaped upon the fore-hatch. His little
+hoofs thundered tremendously; he plunged and reared. He had tossed his
+mane and his forelock into a state of amazing wildness, he dilated his
+nostrils, bits of foam flecked his broad little chest, his eyes blazed.
+He was something under eleven hands; he was fierce, terrible, angry,
+warlike, he said ha! ha! distinctly, he raged and thumped--and sixteen
+able-bodied kalashes stood round him like disconcerted nurses round a
+spoilt and passionate child. He whisked his tail incessantly; he arched
+his pretty neck; he was perfectly delightful; he was charmingly naughty.
+There was not an atom of vice in that performance; no savage baring of
+teeth and lying back of ears. On the contrary, he pricked them forward
+in a comically aggressive manner. He was totally unmoral and lovable; I
+would have liked to give him bread, sugar, carrots. But life is a stern
+thing and the sense of duty the only safe guide. So I steeled my heart
+and from my elevated position on the bridge I ordered the men to fling
+themselves upon him in a body.
+
+The elderly serang, emitting a strange inarticulate cry, gave the
+example. He was an excellent petty officer--very competent indeed, and a
+moderate opium smoker. The rest of them in one great rush smothered that
+pony. They hung on to his ears, to his mane, to his tail; they lay in
+piles across his back, seventeen in all. The carpenter, seizing the hook
+of the cargo-chain, flung himself on top of them. A very satisfactory
+petty officer too, but he stuttered. Have you ever heard a light-yellow,
+lean, sad, earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English? It's very weird
+indeed. He made the eighteenth. I could not see the pony at all; but
+from the swaying and heaving of that heap of men I knew that there was
+something alive inside.
+
+From the wharf Almayer hailed in quavering tones:
+
+“Oh, I say!”
+
+Where he stood he could not see what was going on on deck unless perhaps
+the tops of the men's heads; he could only hear the scuffle, the mighty
+thuds, as if the ship were being knocked to pieces. I looked over: “What
+is it?”
+
+“Don't let them break his legs,” he entreated me plaintively.
+
+“Oh, nonsense! He's all right now. He can't move.”
+
+By that time the cargo-chain had been hooked to the broad canvas belt
+round the pony's body, the kalashes sprang off simultaneously in all
+directions, rolling over each other, and the worthy serang, making a
+dash behind the winch, turned the steam on.
+
+“Steady!” I yelled, in great apprehension of seeing the animal snatched
+up to the very head of the derrick.
+
+On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw slippers uneasily. The rattle of
+the winch stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence that pony began to
+swing across the deck.
+
+How limp he was! Directly he felt himself in the air he relaxed every
+muscle in a most wonderful manner. His four hoofs knocked together in a
+bunch, his head hung down, and his tail remained pendent in a nerveless
+and absolute immobility. He reminded me vividly of the pathetic little
+sheep which hangs on the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece. I had
+no idea that anything in the shape of a horse could be so limp as that,
+either living or dead. His wild mane hung down lumpily, a mere mass of
+inanimate horsehair; his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went
+swaying slowly across the front of the bridge I noticed an astute gleam
+in his dreamy, half-closed eye. A trustworthy quartermaster, his glance
+anxious and his mouth on the broad grin, was easing over the derrick
+watchfully. I superintended, greatly interested.
+
+“So! That will do.”
+
+The derrick-head stopped. The kalashes lined the rail. The rope of the
+halter hung perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull in front of
+Almayer. Everything was very still. I suggested amicably that he
+should catch hold of the rope and mind what he was about. He extended a
+provokingly casual and superior hand.
+
+“Look out then! Lower away!”
+
+Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently enough, but when the pony's
+hoofs touched the wharf he gave way all at once to a most foolish
+optimism. Without pausing, without thinking, almost without looking, he
+disengaged the hook suddenly from the sling, and the cargo-chain, after
+hitting the pony's quarters, swung back against the ship's side with
+a noisy, rattling slap. I suppose I must have blinked. I know I missed
+something, because the next thing I saw was Almayer lying flat on his
+back on the jetty. He was alone.
+
+Astonishment deprived me of speech long enough to give Almayer time to
+pick himself up in a leisurely and painful manner. The kalashes lining
+the rail had all their mouths open. The mist flew in the light breeze,
+and it had come over quite thick enough to hide the shore completely.
+
+“How on earth did you manage to let him get away?” I asked scandalised.
+
+Almayer looked into the smarting palm of his right hand, but did not
+answer my inquiry.
+
+“Where do you think he will get to?” I cried. “Are there any fences
+anywhere in this fog? Can he bolt into the forest? What's to be done
+now?”
+
+Almayer shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Some of my men are sure to be about. They will get hold of him sooner
+or later.”
+
+“Sooner or later! That's all very fine, but what about my canvas
+sling--he's carried it off. I want it now, at once, to land two Celebes
+cows.”
+
+Since Dongola we had on board a pair of the pretty little island cattle
+in addition to the pony. Tied up on the other side of the fore deck they
+had been whisking their tails into the other door of the galley. These
+cows were not for Almayer, however; they were invoiced to Abdullah bin
+Selim, his enemy. Almayer's disregard of my requisites was complete.
+
+“If I were you I would try to find out where he's gone,” I insisted.
+“Hadn't you better call your men together or something? He will throw
+himself down and cut his knees. He may even break a leg, you know.”
+
+But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, did not seem to want that
+pony any more. Amazed at this sudden indifference I turned all hands out
+on shore to hunt for him on my own account, or, at any rate, to hunt
+for the canvas sling which he had round his body. The whole crew of
+the steamer, with the exception of firemen and engineers, rushed up the
+jetty past the thoughtful Almayer and vanished from my sight. The white
+fog swallowed them up; and again there was a deep silence that seemed to
+extend for miles up and down the stream. Still taciturn, Almayer started
+to climb on board, and I went down from the bridge to meet him on the
+after deck.
+
+“Would you mind telling the captain that I want to see him very
+particularly?” he asked me in a low tone, letting his eyes stray all
+over the place.
+
+“Very well. I will go and see.”
+
+With the door of his cabin wide open Captain C--, just back from the
+bathroom, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick, damp, iron-grey
+hair with two large brushes.
+
+“Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see you very particularly, sir.”
+
+Saying these words I smiled. I don't know why I smiled except that it
+seemed absolutely impossible to mention Almayer's name without a smile
+of a sort. It had not to be necessarily a mirthful smile. Turning his
+head towards me Captain C-- smiled too, rather joylessly.
+
+“The pony got away from him--eh?”
+
+“Yes sir. He did.”
+
+“Where is he?”
+
+“Goodness only knows.”
+
+“No. I mean Almayer. Let him come along.”
+
+The captain's stateroom opening straight on deck under the bridge, I had
+only to beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who had remained aft, with
+downcast eyes, on the very spot where I had left him. He strolled up
+moodily, shook hands and at once asked permission to shut the cabin
+door.
+
+“I have a pretty story to tell you,” were the last words I heard. The
+bitterness of tone was remarkable.
+
+I went away from the door, of course. For the moment I had no crew on
+board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag hung round his
+neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the empty decks knocking
+out the wedges of the hatches and dropping them into the bag
+conscientiously. Having nothing to do I joined our two engineers at the
+door of the engine-room. It was near breakfast time.
+
+“He's turned up early, hasn't he?” commented the second engineer, and
+smiled indifferently. He was an abstemious man with a good digestion and
+a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.
+
+“Yes,” I said. “Shut up with the old man. Some very particular
+business.”
+
+“He will spin him a damned endless yarn,” observed the chief engineer.
+
+He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic and suffered from gnawing
+hunger in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two
+vertical folds on his shaven cheeks. And I smiled too, but I was not
+exactly amused. In that man, whose name apparently could not be uttered
+anywhere in the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing
+amusing whatever. That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking
+mostly into his cup. I informed him that my men came upon his pony
+capering in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in
+which he kept his store of guttah. The cover was off with no one near
+by, and the whole of my crew just missed going heels over head into
+that beastly hole. Jurumudi Itam, our best quartermaster, deft at fine
+needlework, he who mended the ship's flags and sewed buttons on our
+coats, was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.
+
+Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer's character. He
+mumbled:
+
+“Do you mean that pirate fellow?”
+
+“What pirate fellow? The man has been in the ship eleven years,” I said
+indignantly.
+
+“It's his looks,” Almayer muttered for all apology.
+
+The sun had eaten up the fog. From where we sat under the after awning
+we could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of Almayer's
+house, to a post of the verandah. We were silent for a long time. All at
+once Almayer, alluding evidently to the subject of his conversation in
+the captain's cabin, exclaimed anxiously across the table:
+
+“I really don't know what I can do now!”
+
+Captain C-- only raised his eyebrows at him, and got up from his chair.
+We dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half dressed as he was in
+his cretonne pyjamas and the thin cotton singlet, remained on board,
+lingering near the gangway as though he could not make up his mind
+whether to go home or stay with us for good. Our Chinamen boys gave
+him side glances as they went to and fro; and Ah Sing, our young chief
+steward, the handsomest and most sympathetic of Chinamen, catching my
+eye, nodded knowingly at his burly back. In the course of the morning I
+approached him for a moment.
+
+“Well, Mr. Almayer,” I addressed him easily, “you haven't started on
+your letters yet.”
+
+We had brought him his mail and he had held the bundle in his hand ever
+since we got up from breakfast. He glanced at it when I spoke and, for a
+moment, it looked as if he were on the point of opening his fingers and
+letting the whole lot fall overboard. I believe he was tempted to do so.
+I shall never forget that man afraid of his letters.
+
+“Have you been long out from Europe?” he asked me.
+
+“Not very. Not quite eight months,” I told him. “I left a ship in
+Samarang with a hurt back and have been in the hospital in Singapore
+some weeks.”
+
+He sighed.
+
+“Trade is very bad here.”
+
+“Indeed!”
+
+“Hopeless! . . . See these geese?”
+
+With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what resembled
+a patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant part of his
+compound. It disappeared behind some bushes.
+
+“The only geese on the East Coast,” Almayer informed me in a perfunctory
+mutter without a spark of faith, hope or pride. Thereupon, with the same
+absence of any sort of sustaining spirit he declared his intention to
+silence a fat bird and send him on board for us not later than next day.
+
+I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as if it
+were a sort of Court decoration given only to the tried friends of the
+house. I had expected more pomp in the ceremony. The gift had surely
+its special quality, multiple and rare. From the only flock on the East
+Coast! He did not make half enough of it. That man did not understand
+his opportunities. However, I thanked him at some length.
+
+“You see,” he interrupted abruptly in a very peculiar tone, “the worst
+of this country is that one is not able to realise . . . it's impossible
+to realise . . .” His voice sank into a languid mutter. “And when one
+has very large interests . . . very important interests . . .” he finished
+faintly . . . “up the river.”
+
+We looked at each other. He astonished me by giving a start and making a
+very queer grimace.
+
+“Well, I must be off,” he burst out hurriedly. “So long!”
+
+At the moment of stepping over the gangway he checked himself though, to
+give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that evening with my
+captain, an invitation which I accepted. I don't think it could have
+been possible for me to refuse.
+
+I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of free
+will “at any rate for practical purposes.” Free, is it? For practical
+purposes! Bosh! How could I have refused to dine with that man? I did
+not refuse simply because I could not refuse. Curiosity, a healthy
+desire for a change of cooking, common civility, the talk and the smiles
+of the previous twenty days, every condition of my existence at that
+moment and place made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all
+that, there was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want
+of foreknowledge to counter-balance these imperative conditions of
+the problem. A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane. Nobody
+unless a surly lunatic would have refused. But if I had not got to know
+Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a
+line of mine in print.
+
+I accepted then--and I am paying yet the price of my sanity. The
+possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is responsible
+for the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far. The number of
+geese he had called into being under adverse climatic conditions was
+considerably more than fourteen. The tale of volumes will never overtake
+the counting of heads, I am safe to say; but my ambitions point not
+exactly that way, and whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me
+I have always thought kindly of Almayer.
+
+I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would have
+been? This is something not to be discovered in this world. But if we
+ever meet in the Elysian Fields--where I cannot depict him to myself
+otherwise than attended in the distance by his flock of geese (birds
+sacred to Jupiter)--and he addresses me in the stillness of that
+passionless region, neither light nor darkness, neither sound nor
+silence, and heaving endlessly with billowy mists from the impalpable
+multitudes of the swarming dead, I think I know what answer to make.
+
+I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone of his
+measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of course, the solemn
+eternity of stillness in the least--I would say something like this:
+
+“It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted your name
+to my own uses. But that is a very small larceny. What's in a name, O
+Shade? If so much of your old mortal weakness clings to you yet as
+to make you feel aggrieved (it was the note of your earthly voice,
+Almayer), then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our
+sublime fellow-Shade--with him who, in his transient existence as a
+poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You
+came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the
+disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name
+was the common property of the winds: it, as it were, floated naked over
+the waters about the Equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the
+royal mantle of the tropics and have essayed to put into the hollow
+sound the very anguish of paternity--feats which you did not demand from
+me--but remember that all the toil and all the pain were mine. In your
+earthly life you haunted me, Almayer. Consider that this was taking a
+great liberty. Since you were always complaining of being lost to the
+world, you should remember that if I had not believed enough in your
+existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens, you would
+have been much more lost. You affirm that had I been capable of looking
+at you with a more perfect detachment and a greater simplicity, I might
+have perceived better the inward marvellousness which, you insist,
+attended your career upon that tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible
+far, far below us, where both our graves lie. No doubt! But reflect, O
+complaining Shade! that this was not so much my fault as your crowning
+misfortune. I believed in you in the only way it was possible for me to
+believe. It was not worthy of your merits? So be it. But you were always
+an unlucky man, Almayer. Nothing was ever quite worthy of you. What made
+you so real to me was that you held this lofty theory with some force of
+conviction and with an admirable consistency.”
+
+It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy
+expressions that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian Abode
+of Shades, since it has come to pass that having parted many years ago,
+we are never to meet again in this world.
+
+
+
+Chapter V.
+
+In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that
+literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the
+coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event.
+In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological
+cause which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts
+being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to
+boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen at any rate
+was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps a
+pen (the cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of
+penny stamps and halfpenny postcards. In fact, this was the epoch when
+by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made the reputation of
+a novel or two. And I too had a pen rolling about somewhere--the
+seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen
+rugged with the dried ink of abandoned attempts, of answers delayed
+longer than decency permitted, of letters begun with infinite reluctance
+and put off suddenly till next day--tell next week as likely as not! The
+neglected, uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and
+under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm, in a
+perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the “Where the devil is the beastly thing
+gone to?” ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It might have been reposing
+behind the sofa for a day or so. My landlady's anaemic daughter (as
+Ollendorff would have expressed it), though commendably neat, had a
+lordly, careless manner of approaching her domestic duties. Or it
+might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side of
+the table-leg, and when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which
+would have discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me! “Never
+mind. This will do.”
+
+O days without guile! If anybody had told me then that a devoted
+household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
+importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss
+I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my
+sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never deigned as much as the
+contemptuous smile of unbelief. There are imaginings too unlikely for
+any kind of notice, too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a
+smile. Perhaps, had that seer of the future been a friend, I should have
+been secretly saddened. “Alas!” I would have thought, looking at him
+with an unmoved face, “the poor fellow is going mad.”
+
+I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world where the
+journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of heaven itself,
+blowing where it listeth, does so under the prophetical management of
+the Meteorological Office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot
+be captured either by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely
+that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness
+than that I should turn into a writer of tales.
+
+To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating
+pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied,
+the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of
+unseen forces, that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking
+here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded
+conceit--who really never rest in this world, and when out of it go
+on fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last
+habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I
+thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some
+aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a detached, impersonal
+glance upon themselves.
+
+And that's a pity. They are unlucky. These two kinds, together with
+the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate
+beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has
+put it) “the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness,” miss,
+perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the
+abode of conflicting opinions. The ethical view of the universe involves
+us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last
+vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready
+to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot
+be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely
+spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you
+like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for despair! Those
+visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest
+is our affair--the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation,
+the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of
+a subtle mind--that's our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful
+attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our
+consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth. A task in which
+fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted
+with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the
+haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable serenity; to
+the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.
+
+Chi lo sa? It may be true. In this view there is room for every religion
+except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and cloak of arid
+despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every fair dream, for every
+charitable hope. The great aim is to remain true to the emotions called
+out of the deep encircled by the firmament of stars, whose infinite
+numbers and awful distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the
+Walrus or the Carpenter, in the poem, who “wept to see such quantities
+of sand”?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter nothing
+at all.
+
+The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem full of
+merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a purely spectacular
+universe, where inspiration of every sort has a rational existence, the
+artist of every kind finds a natural place; and amongst them the poet as
+the seer par excellence. Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble
+and more toilsome task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy
+of a place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps laughter
+out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry. Yes! Even he, the prose
+artist of fiction, which after all is but truth often dragged out of a
+well and clothed in the painted robe of imaged phrases--even he has his
+place amongst kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes,
+Cabinet Ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
+Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and
+constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
+itself.
+
+Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a subtle
+expression, as if the cat were out of the bag. I take the novelist's
+freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the exclamation,
+“That's it! The fellow talks pro domo.”
+
+Indeed it was not the intention! When I shouldered the bag I was not
+aware of the cat inside. But, after all, why not? The fair courtyards of
+the House of Art are thronged by many humble retainers. And there is
+no retainer so devoted as he who is allowed to sit on the doorstep. The
+fellows who have got inside are apt to think too much of themselves.
+This last remark, I beg to state, is not malicious within the definition
+of the law of libel. It's fair comment on a matter of public interest.
+But never mind. Pro domo. So be it. For his house tant que vous voudrez.
+And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify my existence.
+The attempt would have been not only needless and absurd, but almost
+inconceivable, in a purely spectacular universe, where no such
+disagreeable necessity can possibly arise. It is sufficient for me to
+say (and I am saying it at some length in these pages): “J'ai vecu.” I
+have existed, obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the
+Abbe Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to
+exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of the
+French Revolution. “J'ai vecu”, as I apprehend most of us manage
+to exist, missing all along the varied forms of destruction by a
+hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear, and perhaps my soul
+also, but not without some damage here and there to the fine edge of my
+conscience, that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the group, of the
+family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks,
+the acts, and even by the silences and abstentions surrounding one's
+childhood; tinged in a complete scheme of delicate shades
+and crude colours by the inherited traditions, beliefs, or
+prejudices--unaccountable, despotic, persuasive, and often, in its
+texture, romantic.
+
+And often romantic! . . . The matter in hand, however, is to keep these
+reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary
+activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme
+thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence;
+for that such was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, visible to
+an unprejudiced eye. But then, you see, the man was not a writer of
+fiction. He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his
+anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of
+the French Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but
+a great outburst of morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual
+perusal of “Emile” will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is
+the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time
+to the play of his invention. Inspiration comes from the earth, which
+has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven.
+A writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist)
+stands confessed in his works. His conscience, his deeper sense of
+things, lawful and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world.
+Indeed, every one who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers
+(unless a moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except
+the one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of
+nothing else. It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of
+French prose writers, who says that we must recognise at last that,
+“failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only talk of
+ourselves.”
+
+This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring
+match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules
+of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the
+memorable saying, “The good critic is he who relates the adventures of
+his soul amongst masterpieces,” M. Anatole France maintained that there
+were no rules and no principles. And that may be very true. Rules,
+principles and standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all
+dead and vanished by this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free days
+of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the
+forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up
+presently in the old places. But what is interesting to a writer is the
+possession of an inward certitude that literary criticism will never
+die, for man (so variously defined) is, before everything else, a
+critical animal. And, as long as distinguished minds are ready to treat
+it in the spirit of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal
+to us with all the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal
+experience.
+
+For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task, any
+task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
+But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an adventurous spirit.
+They take risks, of course--one can hardly live without that. The daily
+bread is served out to us (however sparingly) with a pinch of salt.
+Otherwise one would get sick of the diet one prays for, and that would
+be not only improper, but impious. From impiety of that or any other
+kind--save us! An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense
+of proprieties, from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from
+weariness, induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
+adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes a mere
+“notice,” as it were the relation of a journey where nothing but the
+distances and the geology of a new country should be set down; the
+glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the
+hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings too! I
+have no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept
+out; no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so
+that the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the
+part of a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most
+deplorable adventure. “Life,” in the words of an immortal thinker of,
+I should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the
+worship of posterity--“life is not all beer and skittles.” Neither
+is the writing of novels. It isn't really. Je vous donne ma parole
+d'honneur that it--is--not. Not all. I am thus emphatic because some
+years ago, I remember, the daughter of a general. . .
+
+Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then
+to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle Ages, to
+lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations of the world's
+superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their
+own bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of
+temperance, let us say, or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes
+or playing the flute. And thus this general's daughter came to me--or I
+should say one of the general's daughters did. There were three of
+these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
+farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The eldest
+warred against the decay of manners in the village children, and
+executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of
+curtseys. It sounds futile, but it was really a war for an idea. The
+second skirmished and scouted all over the country; and it was that one
+who pushed a reconnaissance right to my very table--I mean the one who
+wore stand-up collars. She was really calling upon my wife in the
+soft spirit of afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial
+determination. She marched into my room swinging her stick . . . but
+no--I mustn't exaggerate. It is not my speciality. I am not a humoristic
+writer. In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she had a
+stick to swing.
+
+No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the door too
+stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm, still sunshine of
+the wide fields. They lay around me infinitely helpful, but truth to
+say I had not known for weeks whether the sun shone upon the earth and
+whether the stars above still moved on their appointed courses. I was
+just then giving up some days of my allotted span to the last chapters
+of the novel “Nostromo,” a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard,
+which is still mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
+connection with the word “failure” and sometimes in conjunction with the
+word “astonishing.” I have no opinion on this discrepancy. It's the sort
+of difference that can never be settled. All I know is that, for twenty
+months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the
+humblest on this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, “wrestled with
+the Lord” for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the
+darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the
+sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes
+of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are,
+perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the
+intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and
+conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day,
+away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really
+lovable and gentle--something for which a material parallel can only be
+found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage
+round Cape Horn. For that too is the wrestling of men with the might
+of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without the
+amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a sense of
+over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be adequate, but for
+the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain longitude, once won,
+cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars and the shape of your earth
+are the witnesses of your gain; whereas a handful of pages, no matter
+how much you have made them your own, are at best but an obscure and
+questionable spoil. Here they are. “Failure”--“Astonishing”: take your
+choice; or perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces
+of paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
+snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the sunshine.
+
+“How do you do?”
+
+It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard nothing--no
+rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of
+premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence--just
+that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and
+the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height--a fall, let us say,
+from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the
+fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself
+up quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair stunned
+and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of
+one world and flung down into another--perfectly civil.
+
+“Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?”
+
+That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true
+reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la
+Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start
+upsetting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow
+myself to hint in any other way at the appalling magnitude of the
+disaster. The whole world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember,
+of my seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town,
+campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its
+soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
+geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine,
+and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name,
+cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over his head--in
+Linda Viola's voice), dominated even after death the dark gulf
+containing his conquests of treasure and love--all that had come down
+crashing about my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in
+that very moment I was saying, “Won't you sit down?”
+
+The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck training even
+in a merchant ship will do! This episode should give you a new view of
+the English and Scots seamen (a much-caricatured folk) who had the last
+say in the formation of my character. One is nothing if not modest,
+but in this disaster I think I have done some honour to their simple
+teaching. “Won't you sit down?” Very fair; very fair indeed. She sat
+down. Her amused glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of
+MS. on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a chair,
+single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners; there were there
+living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead pages that would be burnt
+at the end of the day--the litter of a cruel battlefield, of a long,
+long and desperate fray. Long! I suppose I went to bed sometimes, and
+got up the same number of times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the
+food put before me, and talked connectedly to my household on suitable
+occasions. But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily
+life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
+affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at that table
+surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days and nights on
+end. It seemed so, because of the intense weariness of which that
+interruption had made me aware--the awful disenchantment of a mind
+realising suddenly the futility of an enormous task, joined to a bodily
+fatigue such as no ordinary amount of fairly heavy physical labour could
+ever account for. I have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost
+double under a ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in
+the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know.
+
+And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concerned for the
+dignity and comeliness of their service. I was, most likely, the only
+writer that neat lady had ever caught in the exercise of his craft, and
+it distressed me not to be able to remember when it was that I dressed
+myself last, and how. No doubt that would be all right in essentials.
+The fortune of the house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes that
+would see to that. But I felt somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
+after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and dishevelled
+down to my very heels. And I am afraid I blinked stupidly. All this was
+bad for the honour of letters and the dignity of their service. Seen
+indistinctly through the dust of my collapsed universe, the good lady
+glanced about the room with a slightly amused serenity. And she was
+smiling. What on earth was she smiling at? She remarked casually:
+
+“I am afraid I interrupted you.”
+
+“Not at all.”
+
+She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was strictly true.
+Interrupted--indeed! She had robbed me of at least twenty lives, each
+infinitely more poignant and real than her own, because informed with
+passion, possessed of convictions, involved in great affairs created out
+of my own substance for an anxiously meditated end.
+
+She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all round
+at the litter of the fray:
+
+“And you sit like this here writing your--your . . .”
+
+“I--what? Oh, yes, I sit here all day.”
+
+“It must be perfectly delightful.”
+
+I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on the
+verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the porch, and my
+boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had espied him from afar.
+He came on straight and swift like a cannon-ball, and the noise of the
+fight, which burst suddenly upon our ears, was more than enough to scare
+away a fit of apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated the gallant
+animals. Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife--just
+round the corner, under the trees. She nodded and went off with her dog,
+leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she had lightly
+made--and with the awfully instructive sound of the word “delightful”
+ lingering in my ears.
+
+Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate. I wanted
+to be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere novel that one
+should be rude to a lady on their account?), but mainly, to adopt the
+good sound Ollendorffian style, because I did not want the dog of the
+general's daughter to fight again (encore) with the faithful dog of
+my infant son (mon petit garcon).--Was I afraid that the dog of the
+general's daughter would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my
+child?--No, I was not afraid. . . . But away with the Ollendorff method.
+However appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything
+appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin, character
+and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the child from a
+man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian value, a man almost
+childlike in the impulsive movements of his untutored genius, the
+most single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of
+straight feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong
+if, perhaps, not fully conscious conviction. His art did not obtain,
+I fear, all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am
+alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of “The Red Badge
+of Courage,” a work of imagination which found its short moment of
+celebrity in the last decade of the departed century. Other books
+followed. Not many. He had not the time. It was an individual and
+complete talent, which obtained but a grudging, somewhat supercilious
+recognition from the world at large. For himself one hesitates to regret
+his early death. Like one of the men in his “Open Boat,” one felt that
+he was of those whom fate seldom allows to make a safe landing after
+much toil and bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding affection
+for that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient
+figure. He liked me even before we met on the strength of a page or
+two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he liked me
+still. He used to point out to me with great earnestness, and even with
+some severity, that “a boy ought to have a dog.” I suspect that he
+was shocked at my neglect of parental duties. Ultimately it was he who
+provided the dog. Shortly afterwards, one day, after playing with the
+child on the rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he
+raised his head and declared firmly: “I shall teach your boy to ride.”
+ That was not to be. He was not given the time.
+
+But here is the dog--an old dog now. Broad and low on his bandy paws,
+with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black spot at
+the other end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad, smiles
+not altogether unkind. Grotesque and engaging in the whole of his
+appearance, his usual attitudes are meek, but his temperament discloses
+itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the presence of his kind. As he lies
+in the firelight, his head well up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed
+at the shadows of the room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in
+the calm consciousness of an unstained life. He has brought up one baby,
+and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is bringing up
+another with the same conscientious devotion, but with a more deliberate
+gravity of manner, the sign of greater wisdom and riper experience,
+but also of rheumatism, I fear. From the morning bath to the evening
+ceremonies of the cot you attend, old friend, the little two-legged
+creature of your adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of
+your duties with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by
+every person in the house--even as I myself am treated; only you
+deserve it more. The general's daughter would tell you that it must be
+“perfectly delightful.”
+
+Aha! old dog. She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it's that poor
+left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you preserve a rigid
+immobility for fear of overturning the little two-legged creature. She
+has never seen your resigned smile when the little two-legged creature,
+interrogated sternly, “What are you doing to the good dog?” answers with
+a wide, innocent stare: “Nothing. Only loving him, mamma dear!”
+
+The general's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-imposed
+tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very rewards of rigid
+self-command. But we have lived together many years. We have grown
+older, too; and though our work is not quite done yet we may indulge now
+and then in a little introspection before the fire--meditate on the art
+of bringing up babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where
+so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly
+away.
+
+
+Chapter VI.
+
+In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary stage
+of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments, and even two
+distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its successive scenes,
+a certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable. I am conscious of it in
+these pages. This remark is put forward in no apologetic spirit. As
+years go by and the number of pages grows steadily, the feeling grows
+upon one too that one can write only for friends. Then why should one
+put them to the necessity of protesting (as a friend would do) that no
+apology is necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of
+one's discretion? So much as to the care due to those friends whom a
+word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the right
+place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety, has drawn
+from the great multitude of fellow-beings even as a fish is drawn from
+the depths of the sea. Fishing is notoriously (I am talking now of the
+deep sea) a matter of luck. As to one's enemies, those will take care of
+themselves.
+
+There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking, jumps
+upon me with both feet. This image has no grace, but it is exceedingly
+apt to the occasion--to the several occasions. I don't know precisely
+how long he had been indulging in that intermittent exercise, whose
+seasons are ruled by the custom of the publishing trade. Somebody
+pointed him out (in printed shape, of course) to my attention some time
+ago, and straightway I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for
+that robust man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for
+the writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain
+shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the
+sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has
+a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more estimable origin than the
+caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is, indeed, lawful, in so much
+that it is given (reluctantly) for a consideration, for several
+considerations. There is that robustness, for instance, so often the
+sign of good moral balance. That's a consideration. It is not, indeed,
+pleasant to be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation,
+implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into work
+whose qualities and defects, whatever they may be, are not so much on
+the surface, is something to be thankful for in view of the fact that it
+may happen to one's work to be condemned without being read at all. This
+is the most fatuous adventure that can well happen to a writer venturing
+his soul amongst criticisms. It can do one no harm, of course, but it
+is disagreeable. It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering
+a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot of folk in a third-class
+compartment. The open impudence of the whole transaction, appealing
+insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the brazen, shameless
+patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while insisting on the fairness of
+the game, give one a feeling of sickening disgust. The honest violence
+of a plain man playing a fair game fairly--even if he means to knock you
+over--may appear shocking, but it remains within the pale of decency.
+Damaging as it may be, it is in no sense offensive. One may well feel
+some regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's own vile body.
+But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not be stayed
+by explanations or placated by apologies. Were I to advance the plea of
+youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found in these pages, he would
+be likely to say “Bosh!” in a column and a half of fierce print. Yet a
+writer is no older than his first published book, and, notwithstanding
+the vain appearances of decay which attend us in this transitory life, I
+stand here with the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.
+
+With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of feeling
+and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that, upon the whole,
+my previous state of existence was not a good equipment for a literary
+life. Perhaps I should not have used the word literary. That word
+presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance with letters, a turn of mind and
+a manner of feeling to which I dare lay no claim. I only love letters;
+but the love of letters does not make a literary man, any more than the
+love of the sea makes a seaman. And it is very possible, too, that I
+love the letters in the same way a literary man may love the sea
+he looks at from the shore--a scene of great endeavour and of great
+achievements changing the face of the world, the great open way to all
+sorts of undiscovered countries. No, perhaps I had better say that the
+life at sea--and I don't mean a mere taste of it, but a good broad span
+of years, something that really counts as real service--is not, upon the
+whole, a good equipment for a writing life. God forbid, though, that I
+should be thought of as denying my masters of the quarter-deck. I am not
+capable of that sort of apostasy. I have confessed my attitude of piety
+towards their shades in three or four tales, and if any man on earth
+more than another needs to be true to himself as he hopes to be saved,
+it is certainly the writer of fiction.
+
+What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training does not
+prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary criticism. Only
+that, and no more. But this defect is not without gravity. If it be
+permissible to twist, invert, adapt (and spoil) M. Anatole France's
+definition of a good critic, then let us say that the good author is he
+who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures
+of his soul amongst criticisms. Far be from me the intention to mislead
+an attentive public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea.
+That would be dishonest, and even impolite. Everything can be found
+at sea, according to the spirit of your quest--strife, peace, romance,
+naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom, disgust,
+inspiration--and every conceivable opportunity, including the
+opportunity to make a fool of yourself--exactly as in the pursuit of
+literature. But the quarter-deck criticism is somewhat different from
+literary criticism. This much they have in common, that before the one
+and the other the answering back, as a general rule, does not pay.
+
+Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation--I tell you
+everything is to be found on salt water--criticism generally impromptu,
+and always viva voce, which is the outward, obvious difference from the
+literary operation of that kind, with consequent freshness and vigour
+which may be lacking in the printed word. With appreciation, which comes
+at the end, when the critic and the criticised are about to part, it
+is otherwise. The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the
+permanency of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal
+in its phrasing. There the literary master has the superiority, though
+he, too, can in effect but say--and often says it in the very phrase--“I
+can highly recommend.” Only usually he uses the word “We,” there being
+some occult virtue in the first person plural, which makes it specially
+fit for critical and royal declarations. I have a small handful of these
+sea appreciations, signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my
+writing-table's left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like
+a handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree of
+knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits of paper,
+headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the names of a
+few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced the astonished
+indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of a sort hard to
+bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been charged with the want of
+patriotism, the want of sense, and the want of heart too; that I went
+through agonies of self-conflict and shed secret tears not a few, and
+had the beauties of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called
+an “incorrigible Don Quixote,” in allusion to the book-born madness of
+the knight. For that spoil! They rustle, those bits of paper--some dozen
+of them in all. In that faint, ghostly sound there live the memories of
+twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more, the strong voice of
+the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur
+of the great sea, which must have somehow reached my inland cradle and
+entered my unconscious ear, like that formula of Mohammedan faith the
+Mussulman father whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making
+him one of the faithful almost with his first breath. I do not know
+whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very
+faithful one. And after all there is that handful of “characters” from
+various ships to prove that all these years have not been altogether a
+dream. There they are, brief, and monotonous in tone, but as suggestive
+bits of writing to me as any inspired page to be found in literature.
+But then, you see, I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be
+helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist
+also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up
+to it, at whatever cost, for a change. With this end in view, I will
+confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to see my
+blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these suggestive bits
+of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain the words “strictly
+sober.”
+
+Did I overhear a civil murmur, “That's very gratifying, to be sure”?
+Well, yes, it is gratifying--thank you. It is at least as gratifying to
+be certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates
+would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association
+or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic
+institution such as the London County Council, for instance. The above
+prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general
+sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because
+a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published in
+a French translation, a Parisian critic--I am almost certain it was M.
+Gustave Kahn in the “Gil-Blas”--giving me a short notice, summed up
+his rapid impression of the writer's quality in the words un puissant
+reveur. So be it! Who would cavil at the words of a friendly reader? Yet
+perhaps not such an unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold
+to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of
+responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before
+the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of
+interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked
+form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be
+rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that
+comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried to be a sober
+worker all my life--all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt,
+having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession,
+but also from artistic conviction. Yet there are so many pitfalls on
+each side of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a
+little battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the
+mere daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept
+always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power, and
+truth, and peace.
+
+As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
+sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing in their
+time. I seem to hear your polite murmur that “Surely this might have
+been taken for granted.” Well, no. It might not have been. That august
+academical body the Marine Department of the Board of Trade takes
+nothing for granted in the granting of its learned degrees. By its
+regulations issued under the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very word
+_sober_ must be written, or a whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the
+most enthusiastic appreciation will avail you nothing. The door of the
+examination rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.
+The most fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly
+fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board of
+Trade. As I have been face to face at various times with all the
+examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can be no doubt
+as to the force and the continuity of my abstemiousness. Three of them
+were examiners in seamanship, and it was my fate to be delivered into
+the hands of each of them at proper intervals of sea service. The first
+of all, tall, spare, with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet,
+kindly manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced
+to conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my
+appearance. His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his crossed
+legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice, and went on,
+went on. . . . It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange
+microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I
+could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly
+reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in
+my answers. But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept
+upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of
+untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got
+frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did
+not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious,
+and weird. “This ancient person,” I said to myself, terrified, “is so
+near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is
+considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is all very well
+for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room
+into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
+landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the
+way to my hired home.” This statement is not so much of a verbal
+exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through
+my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing
+to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this
+earth. I verily believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of
+languid way. At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last
+for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
+pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper
+to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting
+bow. . . .
+
+When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon,
+and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and
+tip him a shilling, said:
+
+“Well! I thought you were never coming out.”
+
+“How long have I been in there?” I asked faintly.
+
+He pulled out his watch.
+
+“He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this ever
+happened with any of the gentlemen before.”
+
+It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk on
+air. And the human animal being averse from change and timid before the
+unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really being examined
+by the same man on a future occasion. But when the time of ordeal
+came round again the doorkeeper let me into another room, with the
+now familiar paraphernalia of models of ships and tackle, a board for
+signals on the wall, a big long table covered with official forms,
+and having an unrigged mast fixed to the edge. The solitary tenant
+was unknown to me by sight, though not by reputation, which was simply
+execrable. Short and sturdy as far as I could judge, clad in an old,
+brown, morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his
+eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the other side
+of the table. He was motionless, mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with
+something mournful too in the pose, like that statue of Giuliano (I
+think) de' Medici shading his face on the tomb by Michael Angelo,
+though, of course, he was far, far from being beautiful. He began by
+trying to make me talk nonsense. But I had been warned of that fiendish
+trait, and contradicted him with great assurance. After a while he left
+off. So far good. But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the
+abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and more
+impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and then, placing
+me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under certain conditions of
+weather, season, locality, &c. &c.--all very clear and precise--ordered
+me to execute a certain manoeuvre. Before I was half through with it he
+did some material damage to the ship. Directly I had grappled with the
+difficulty he caused another to present itself, and when that too
+was met he stuck another ship before me, creating a very dangerous
+situation. I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity in piling up
+trouble upon a man.
+
+“I wouldn't have got into that mess,” I suggested mildly. “I could have
+seen that ship before.”
+
+He never stirred the least bit.
+
+“No, you couldn't. The weather's thick.”
+
+“Oh! I didn't know,” I apologised blankly.
+
+I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with
+sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on.
+You must understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me
+was, I gathered, a homeward passage--the sort of passage I would not
+wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ship seemed to labour under
+a most comprehensive curse. It's no use enlarging on these never-ending
+misfortunes; suffice it to say that long before the end I would have
+welcomed with gratitude an opportunity to exchange into the “Flying
+Dutchman.” Finally he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and
+provided me with a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks--the Dutch coast
+presumably. Distance, eight miles. The evidence of such implacable
+animosity deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.
+
+“Well,” he said--for our pace had been very smart indeed till then.
+
+“I will have to think a little, sir.”
+
+“Doesn't look as if there were much time to think,” he muttered
+sardonically from under his hand.
+
+“No, sir,” I said with some warmth. “Not on board a ship I could see.
+But so many accidents have happened that I really can't remember what
+there's left for me to work with.”
+
+Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made unexpectedly a
+grunting remark.
+
+“You've done very well.”
+
+“Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?” I asked.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them both
+go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of testing
+resourcefulness came into play again.
+
+“But there's only one cable. You've lost the other.”
+
+It was exasperating.
+
+“Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser on
+board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from
+that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have to
+go.”
+
+“Nothing more to do, eh?”
+
+“No, sir. I could do no more.”
+
+He gave a bitter half-laugh.
+
+“You could always say your prayers.”
+
+He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly. It was a sallow,
+strong, unamiable face. He put me in a surly, bored fashion through the
+usual questions as to lights and signals, and I escaped from the room
+thankfully--passed! Forty minutes! And again I walked on air along Tower
+Hill, where so many good men had lost their heads, because, I suppose,
+they were not resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of hearts
+I had no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third and
+last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I should.
+I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an unreasonable
+time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .
+
+But not a bit of it. When I presented myself to be examined for Master
+the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face
+in grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.
+
+He commenced operations with an easy-going “Let's see. H'm. Suppose you
+tell me all you know of charter-parties.” He kept it up in that style
+all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his
+own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in
+hand. It was very interesting. “What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?”
+ he queried suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon
+a point of stowage.
+
+I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave
+him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange
+he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before,
+when in command of a 3000-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest
+contrivance imaginable. “May be of use to you some day,” he concluded.
+“You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam.”
+
+There he was wrong. I never went into steam--not really. If I only live
+long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort
+of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the dark ages who had never
+gone into steam--not really.
+
+Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few interesting
+details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.
+
+“The use of wire rigging became general about that time too,” he
+observed. “I was a very young master then. That was before you were
+born.”
+
+“Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857.”
+
+“The Mutiny year,” he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder
+tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed
+under a Government charter.
+
+Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who
+so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in
+me the sense of the continuity of that sea-life into which I had stepped
+from outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of
+official relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as
+though he had been an ancestor.
+
+Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care on the
+slip of blue paper, he remarked:
+
+“You are of Polish extraction.”
+
+“Born there, sir.”
+
+He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for the
+first time.
+
+“Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I never
+remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea. Don't
+remember ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren't you?”
+
+I said yes--very much so. We were remote from the sea not only by
+situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect association, not
+being a commercial nation at all, but purely agricultural. He made then
+the quaint reflection that it was “a long way for me to come out to
+begin a sea-life”; as if sea-life were not precisely a life in which one
+goes a long way from home.
+
+I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much nearer
+my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was to be a
+seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other. It was a matter of
+deliberate choice.
+
+He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
+interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent a
+little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I
+did not want to present myself to the British Merchant Service in an
+altogether green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious
+vocation was so strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea.
+It was the exact truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat
+exceptional psychology of my sea-going, I fear.
+
+“I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at sea. Have
+you now?”
+
+I admitted I never had. The examiner had given himself up to the spirit
+of gossiping idleness. For myself, I was in no haste to leave that room.
+Not in the least. The era of examinations was over. I would never
+again see that friendly man who was a professional ancestor, a sort of
+grandfather in the craft. Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me,
+and of that there was no sign. As he remained silent, looking at me, I
+added:
+
+“But I have heard of one, some years ago. He seems to have been a boy
+serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not mistaken.”
+
+“What was his name?”
+
+I told him.
+
+“How did you say that?” he asked, puckering up his eyes at the uncouth
+sound.
+
+I repeated the name very distinctly.
+
+“How do you spell it?”
+
+I told him. He moved his head at the impracticable nature of that name,
+and observed:
+
+“It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?”
+
+There was no hurry. I had passed for Master, and I had all the rest of
+my life before me to make the best of it. That seemed a long time. I
+went leisurely through a small mental calculation, and said:
+
+“Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir.”
+
+“Is it?” The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the table to
+me, and rose from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very abrupt ending of
+our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part from that excellent man,
+who was master of a ship before the whisper of the sea had reached my
+cradle. He offered me his hand and wished me well. He even made a few
+steps towards the door with me, and ended with good-natured advice.
+
+“I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into steam.
+When a man has got his master's certificate it's the proper time. If I
+were you I would go into steam.”
+
+I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era of
+examinations. But that time I did not walk on air, as on the first two
+occasions. I walked across the Hill of many beheadings with measured
+steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now a British master
+mariner beyond a doubt. It was not that I had an exaggerated sense of
+that very modest achievement, with which, however, luck, opportunity,
+or any extraneous influence could have had nothing to do. That
+fact, satisfactory and obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal
+significance. It was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even
+to some not very kind aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had
+been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I don't
+mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go
+to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough,
+in all conscience, the commotion of his little world had seemed a very
+considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the
+echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and
+retrospect meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
+voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed
+boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his
+impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called
+upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine
+was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking
+a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and
+associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort
+of “career” in my call. Of Russia or Germany there could be no question.
+The nationality, the antecedents, made it impossible. The feeling
+against the Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there
+would have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School at
+Pola. It would have meant six months' extra grinding at German, perhaps,
+but I was not past the age of admission, and in other respects I was
+well qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly was thought of--but
+not by me. I must admit that in that respect my negative was accepted
+at once. That order of feeling was comprehensible enough to the most
+inimical of my critics. I was not called upon to offer explanations; the
+truth is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but the sea.
+There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the language
+at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is with France that
+Poland has most connection. There were some facilities for having me a
+little looked after, at first. Letters were being written, answers
+were being received, arrangements were being made for my departure
+for Marseilles, where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in
+a roundabout fashion through various French channels, had promised
+good-naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent ship
+for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier de chien.
+
+I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own counsel.
+But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already
+the determined resolve, that “if a seaman, then an English seaman,” was
+formulated in my head though, of course, in the Polish language. I did
+not know six words of English, and I was astute enough to understand
+that it was much better to say nothing of my purpose. As it was I was
+already looked upon as partly insane, at least by the more distant
+acquaintances. The principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in
+the good-natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
+shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.
+
+This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out a
+quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black, short beard,
+a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He was as jovial and
+good-natured as any boy could desire. I was still asleep in my room in
+a modest hotel near the quays of the old port, after the fatigues of
+the journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyons, when he burst in flinging the
+shutters open to the sun of Provence and chiding me boisterously for
+lying abed. How pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to
+be up and off instantly for a “three years' campaign in the South Seas.”
+ O magic words! “Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud”--that is
+the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.
+
+He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was unwearied;
+but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me in a very
+solemn spirit. He had been at sea himself, but had left off at the age
+of twenty-five, finding he could earn his living on shore in a much more
+agreeable manner. He was related to an incredible number of Marseilles
+well-to-do families of a certain class. One of his uncles was a
+ship-broker of good standing, with a large connection amongst English
+ships; other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts,
+sold chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers, shipwrights.
+His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
+Pilots. I made acquaintances amongst these people, but mainly amongst
+the pilots. The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by
+invitation, in a big half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs
+on the look-out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and
+the smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall Planier
+lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon with a white
+perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provencal
+seamen. Under the general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin I
+was made the guest of the Corporation of Pilots, and had the freedom
+of their boats night or day. And many a day and a night too did I spend
+cruising with these rough, kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy
+with the sea began. Many a time “the little friend of Baptistin” had the
+hooded cloak of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest
+hands while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch
+for the lights of ships. Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or shaved,
+lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the pilot-breed, and
+here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over my
+sea-infancy. The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of
+observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states
+of the weather. They gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited
+to sit in more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
+hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate
+by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
+daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses of black
+hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly white
+teeth.
+
+I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them,
+Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style,
+would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the
+Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old
+aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to
+make me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens's “Bleak House,” a work of the
+master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense
+and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
+its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other
+men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and
+in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by a not very
+surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly
+of the belle Madame Delestang.
+
+Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose, and a
+perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as it were
+by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock's
+“grand air” and courtly solemnity. He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie
+only, and was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my
+needs. He was such an ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist
+that he used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary,
+I should say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money
+matters reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of
+post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
+of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were still
+promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur
+de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs. You must admit
+that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.
+Luckily in the counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of
+the Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts
+were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in
+making my wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist
+(I suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
+windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with
+heavily moulded cornices. I always felt on going out as though I had
+been in the temple of some very dignified but completely temporal
+religion. And it was generally on these occasions that under the great
+carriage gateway Lady Ded-- I mean Madame Delestang, catching sight of
+my raised hat, would beckon me with an amiable imperiousness to the side
+of the carriage, and suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, “Venez
+donc faire un tour avec nous,” to which the husband would add an
+encouraging “C'est ca. Allons, montez, jeune homme.” He questioned me
+sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as to the
+way I employed my time, and never failed to express the hope that I
+wrote regularly to my “honoured uncle.” I made no secret of the way I
+employed my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots
+and so on entertained Madame Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman
+could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of his new
+experience amongst strange men and strange sensations. She expressed no
+opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in the
+gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and fleeting
+episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street, she
+offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight pressure, for a moment.
+While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she
+leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of warning in
+her leisurely tone: “Il faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater
+sa vie.” I had never seen her face so close to mine before. She made
+my heart beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
+Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life. But
+she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed
+to me.
+
+
+Chapter VII.
+
+Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold
+suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on Political
+Economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible? Would it be right?
+With my feet on the very shores of the sea and about to embrace my
+blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's
+life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the
+last too of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
+bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress,
+like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so
+callous or so stupid as not to recognise there also the voice of
+kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning--because what can be the
+meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?--arrested one's attention
+by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before,
+the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole
+evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion
+of life as an enterprise that could be mismanaged. But I left off being
+thoughtful shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts
+of the past and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of
+the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of my friends. I knew where she
+would be waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a canal behind the
+Fort at the entrance of the harbour. The deserted quays looked very
+white and dry in the moonlight and as if frost-bound in the sharp air
+of that December night. A prowler or two slunk by noiselessly; a
+custom-house guard, soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced close under
+the bowsprits of the long row of ships moored bows on opposite the long,
+slightly curved, continuous flat wall of the tall houses that seemed
+to be one immense abandoned building with innumerable windows shuttered
+closely. Only here and there a small dingy cafe for sailors cast a
+yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones. Passing by, one
+heard a deep murmur of voices inside--nothing more. How quiet everything
+was at the end of the quays on the last night on which I went out for
+a service cruise as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! Not a footstep,
+except my own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo of the usual revelry
+going on in the narrow unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my
+ear--and suddenly, with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass,
+the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey swung round the corner
+of the dead wall which faces across the paved road the characteristic
+angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. Three horses trotted abreast with
+the clatter of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow, uproarious
+machine jolted violently behind them, fantastic, lighted up, perfectly
+empty and with the driver apparently asleep on his swaying perch above
+that amazing racket. I flattened myself against the wall and gasped. It
+was a stunning experience. Then after staggering on a few paces in
+the shadow of the Fort casting a darkness more intense than that of a
+clouded night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern standing
+on the quay, and became aware of muffled figures making towards it from
+various directions. Pilots of the Third Company hastening to embark.
+Too sleepy to be talkative they step on board in silence. But a few low
+grunts and an enormous yawn are heard. Somebody even ejaculates: “Ah!
+Coquin de sort!” and sighs wearily at his hard fate.
+
+The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of pilots
+at that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my friend Solary
+(Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep-chested man of forty, with a
+keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes. He greets me by a low,
+hearty, “He, l'ami. Comment va?” With his clipped moustache and massive
+open face, energetic and at the same time placid in expression, he is
+a fine specimen of the southerner of the calm type. For there is such
+a type in which the volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid
+force. He is fair, but no one could mistake him for a man of the north
+even by the dim gleam of the lantern standing on the quay. He is worth
+a dozen of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but then, in the whole
+immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, you could not find half a
+dozen men of his stamp.
+
+Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick jacket
+and bends his head over it in the light cast into the boat. Time's up.
+His pleasant voice commands in a quiet undertone “Larguez.” A suddenly
+projected arm snatches the lantern off the quay--and, warped along by
+a line at first, then with the regular tug of four heavy sweeps in
+the bow, the big half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black
+breathless shadow of the Fort. The open water of the avant-port glitters
+under the moon as if sown over with millions of sequins, and the long
+white breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid silver. With a quick
+rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the sail is filled by a
+little breeze keen enough to have come straight down from the frozen
+moon, and the boat, after the clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems
+to stand at rest, surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and
+unearthly that it may be the rustling of the brilliant, over-powering
+moonrays breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless
+sea.
+
+I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the Third
+Company. I have known the spell of moonlight since, on various seas
+and coasts--coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand dunes--but no magic so
+perfect in its revelation of unsuspected character, as though one were
+allowed to look upon the mystic nature of material things. For hours I
+suppose no word was spoken in that boat. The pilots seated in two rows
+facing each other dozed with their arms folded and their chins resting
+upon their breasts. They displayed a great variety of caps: cloth, wool,
+leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque round beret or
+two pulled down over the brows; and one grandfather, with a shaved, bony
+face and a great beak of a nose, had a cloak with a hood which made him
+look in our midst like a cowled monk being carried off goodness knows
+where by that silent company of seamen--quiet enough to be dead.
+
+My fingers itched for the tiller and in due course my friend, the
+patron, surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the family
+coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road. There was a
+great solitude around us; the islets ahead, Monte Cristo and the
+Chateau d'If in full light, seemed to float towards us--so steady, so
+imperceptible was the progress of our boat. “Keep her in the furrow
+of the moon,” the patron directed me in a quiet murmur, sitting down
+ponderously in the stern-sheets and reaching for his pipe.
+
+The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to the
+westward of the islets; and presently, as we approached the spot, the
+boat we were going to relieve swam into our view suddenly, on her way
+home, cutting black and sinister into the wake of the moon under a
+sable wing, while to them our sail must have been a vision of white
+and dazzling radiance. Without altering the course a hair's-breadth we
+slipped by each other within an oar's-length. A drawling sardonic hail
+came out of her. Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on
+their feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst out,
+a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter, which lasted till the boats were
+stern to stern, theirs all bright now and with a shining sail to our
+eyes, we turned all black to their vision, and drawing away from them
+under a sable wing. That extraordinary uproar died away almost as
+suddenly as it had begun; first one had enough of it and sat down, then
+another, then three or four together, and when all had left off with
+mutters and growling half-laughs the sound of hearty chuckling became
+audible, persistent, unnoticed. The cowled grandfather was very much
+entertained somewhere within his hood.
+
+He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved the
+least bit. He had remained quietly in his place against the foot of the
+mast. I had been given to understand long before that he had the rating
+of a second-class able seaman (matelot leger) in the fleet which sailed
+from Toulon for the conquest of Algeria in the year of grace 1830. And,
+indeed, I had seen and examined one of the buttons of his old brown
+patched coat, the only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and
+thin, with the words Equipages de ligne engraved on it. That sort of
+button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons. “I
+preserved it from the time of my Navy Service,” he explained, nodding
+rapidly his frail, vulture-like head. It was not very likely that he had
+picked up that relic in the street. He looked certainly old enough to
+have fought at Trafalgar--or at any rate to have played his little part
+there as a powder-monkey. Shortly after we had been introduced he had
+informed me in a Franco-Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his
+toothless jaws, that when he was a “shaver no higher than that” he
+had seen the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba. It was at night,
+he narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and
+Antibes in the open country. A big fire had been lit at the side of the
+cross-roads. The population from several villages had collected there,
+old and young--down to the very children in arms, because the women had
+refused to stay at home. Tall soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood
+in a circle facing the people silently, and their stern eyes and big
+moustaches were enough to make everybody keep at a distance. He, “being
+an impudent little shaver,” wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on his
+hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs, and peeping
+through discovered standing perfectly still in the light of the fire
+“a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat, buttoned up in a long
+straight coat, with a big pale face, inclined on one shoulder, looking
+something like a priest. His hands were clasped behind his back. . . .
+It appears that this was the Emperor,” the Ancient commented with a
+faint sigh. He was staring from the ground with all his might, when “my
+poor father,” who had been searching for his boy frantically everywhere,
+pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.
+
+The tale seems an authentic recollection. He related it to me many
+times, using the very same words. The grandfather honoured me by a
+special and somewhat embarrassing predilection. Extremes touch. He was
+the oldest member by a long way in that Company, and I was, if I may say
+so, its temporarily adopted baby. He had been a pilot longer than any
+man in the boat could remember; thirty--forty years. He did not seem
+certain himself, but it could be found out, he suggested, in the
+archives of the Pilot-office. He had been pensioned off years before,
+but he went out from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the
+Company once confided to me in a whisper, “the old chap did no harm.
+He was not in the way.” They treated him with rough deference. One and
+another would address some insignificant remark to him now and again,
+but nobody really took any notice of what he had to say. He had survived
+his strength, his usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long, green,
+worsted stockings, pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of
+woollen nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet.
+Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen hands
+would be extended to help him on board, but afterwards he was left
+pretty much to his own thoughts. Of course he never did any work,
+except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed: “He, l'Ancien! let
+go the halyards there, at your hand”--or some such request of an easy
+kind.
+
+No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow of the
+hood. He kept it up for a long time with intense enjoyment. Obviously he
+had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused. But
+when his hilarity had exhausted itself, he made a professional remark in
+a self-assertive but quavering voice:
+
+“Can't expect much work on a night like this.”
+
+No one took it up. It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas could be
+expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy splendour and
+spiritual stillness. We would have to glide idly to and fro, keeping our
+station within the appointed bearings, and, unless a fresh breeze sprang
+up with the dawn, we would land before sunrise on a small islet that,
+within two miles of us, shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to “break
+a crust and take a pull at the wine bottle.” I was familiar with the
+procedure. The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
+capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth amenity
+of the classic sea when in a gentle mood. The crust broken, and the
+mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no more than that with this
+abstemious race--the pilots would pass the time stamping their feet on
+the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped fingers. One
+or two misanthropists would sit apart perched on boulders like man-like
+sea-fowl of solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip
+scandalously in little gesticulating knots; and there would be
+perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon
+with the long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
+piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
+brandishing and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a short
+turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boatful
+of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer for the old Phoenician
+port, dominated, watched over from the ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by
+the red-and-white-striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
+
+All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very
+recent experience. But also something not foreseen by me did happen,
+something which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots. It
+was on this occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side
+of an English ship.
+
+No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught
+got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy
+with a clean, colourless light. It was while we were all ashore on the
+islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like
+an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to
+her water-line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of
+smoke slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and
+headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an
+hour.
+
+She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met
+on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super structures,
+powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two
+hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear was not a matter of
+course in these days--and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in
+thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peaked caps--I suppose
+all her officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known
+well by sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship
+seen once so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I
+have not forgotten. How could I--the first English ship on whose side I
+ever laid my hand! The name--I read it letter by letter on the bow--was
+“James Westoll.” Not very romantic you will say. The name of a very
+considerable, well-known and universally respected North-country
+shipowner, I believe. James Westoll! What better name could an
+honourable hard-working ship have? To me the very grouping of the
+letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw
+her floating motionless, and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere
+purity of the light.
+
+We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to
+pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on
+board while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us
+all through the night, went on gliding gently past the black glistening
+length of the ship. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then
+that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed
+in English--the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long
+friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of
+ease, and of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued,
+of remembered emotions--of my very dreams! And if (after being thus
+fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not claim
+it aloud as my own, then, at any rate the speech of my children. Thus
+small events grow memorable by the passage of time. As to the quality
+of the address itself I cannot say it was very striking. Too short for
+eloquence and devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the
+three words “Look out there,” growled out huskily above my head.
+
+It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy double
+chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up very high,
+even to the level of his breast-bone, by a pair of braces quite exposed
+to public view. As where he stood there was no bulwark but only a
+rail and stanchions I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his
+voluminous person from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat,
+which sat like an absurd flanged cone on his big head. The grotesque and
+massive space of that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the
+lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much. My course of reading, of dreaming
+and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea-brother of that
+sort. I never met again a figure in the least like his except in the
+illustrations to Mr. W.W. Jacobs' most entertaining tales of barges and
+coasters; but the inspired talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun
+at poor, innocent sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its
+felicitous invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth,
+was not yet. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet. I fancy that, at
+most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had achieved at
+that early date.
+
+Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have been
+prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise. The object of
+his concise address was to call my attention to a rope which he
+incontinently flung down for me to catch. I caught it, though it was
+not really necessary, the ship having no way on her by that time. Then
+everything went on very swiftly. The dinghy came with a slight bump
+against the steamer's side, the pilot, grabbing the rope ladder, had
+scrambled halfway up before I knew that our task of boarding was done;
+the harsh, muffled clanging of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear
+through the iron plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to
+“shove off--push hard”; and when I bore against the smooth flank of
+the first English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already
+throbbing under my open palm.
+
+Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the miniature
+lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there, hardly
+distinguishable against the land. The dinghy danced a squashy, splashy
+jig in the wash of the wake and turning in my seat I followed the “James
+Westoll” with my eyes. Before she had gone in a quarter of a mile she
+hoisted her flag as the harbour regulations prescribe for arriving
+and departing ships. I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the
+flagstaff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere
+bathing the drab and grey masses of that southern land, the livid
+islets, the sea of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that
+cold sunrise, it was as far as the eye could reach the only spot of
+ardent colour--flame-like, intense, and presently as minute as the tiny
+red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire kindles in
+the clear heart of a globe of crystal. The Red Ensign--the symbolic,
+protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined
+for so many years to be the only roof over my head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Reminiscences
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #1316]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME REMINISCENCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      SOME REMINISCENCES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Joseph Conrad
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> A Familiar Preface. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter III. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter IV. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter V. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter VI. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter VII. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      A Familiar Preface.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
+      ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion,
+      and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some
+      spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted:
+      &ldquo;You know, you really must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must! . . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his
+      trust, not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of
+      sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't say this by
+      way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be impressionable than
+      reflective. Nothing humanely great&mdash;great, I mean, as affecting a
+      whole mass of lives&mdash;has come from reflection. On the other hand, you
+      cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
+      instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far to seek.
+      Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction, these two by
+      their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry,
+      hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There's &ldquo;virtue&rdquo; for
+      you if you like! . . . Of course the accent must be attended to. The right
+      accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the thundering or the
+      tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an
+      absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics command
+      all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and
+      the right accent and I will move the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a dream&mdash;for a writer! Because written words have their accent
+      too. Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying
+      somewhere amongst the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations
+      poured out aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on
+      earth. It may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand.
+      But it's no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in
+      a pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such luck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
+      tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and
+      fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes downwind leaving the world unmoved.
+      Once upon a time there lived an Emperor who was a sage and something of a
+      literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims,
+      reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of posterity.
+      Amongst other sayings&mdash;I am quoting from memory&mdash;I remember this
+      solemn admonition: &ldquo;Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth.&rdquo;
+       The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking that it
+      is an easy matter for an austere Emperor to jot down grandiose advice.
+      Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic: and there
+      have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth
+      have moved it to nothing but derision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words of
+      extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
+      humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus
+      Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than for an
+      artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That
+      complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the
+      hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's
+      friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Embroil&rdquo; is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine either
+      amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do as
+      to quarrel with me. &ldquo;To disappoint one's friends&rdquo; would be nearer the
+      mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life have
+      come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work.
+      He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, amongst imaginary
+      things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only writing
+      about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains to a certain
+      extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a seen presence&mdash;a
+      movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. In these personal
+      notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help thinking of a passage in
+      the &ldquo;Imitation of Christ&rdquo; where the ascetic author, who knew life so
+      profoundly, says that &ldquo;there are persons esteemed on their reputation who
+      by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them.&rdquo; This is the
+      danger incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk about himself
+      without disguise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
+      with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
+      wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
+      sufficiently literary. Indeed a man who never wrote a line for print till
+      he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence and his
+      experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations and emotions, upon
+      his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as
+      only so much material for his hands. Once before, some three years ago,
+      when I published &ldquo;The Mirror of the Sea,&rdquo; a volume of impressions and
+      memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical remarks. But, truth
+      to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift they recommended. I
+      wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom I
+      remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am. That
+      seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to their shades.
+      There could not be a question in my mind of anything else. It is quite
+      possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am
+      incorrigible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
+      sea-life, I have a special piety towards that form of my past; for its
+      impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
+      responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
+      call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
+      broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
+      which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by great
+      distances from such natural affections as were still left to me, and even
+      estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally unintelligible character
+      of the life which had seduced me so mysteriously from my allegiance, I may
+      safely say that through the blind force of circumstances the sea was to be
+      all my world and the merchant service my only home for a long succession
+      of years. No wonder then that in my two exclusively sea books, &ldquo;The Nigger
+      of the 'Narcissus'&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Mirror of the Sea&rdquo; (and in the few short sea
+      stories like &ldquo;Youth&rdquo; and &ldquo;Typhoon&rdquo;), I have tried with an almost filial
+      regard to render the vibration of life in the great world of waters, in
+      the hearts of the simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes,
+      and also that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships&mdash;the
+      creatures of their hands and the objects of their care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
+      seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made up one's mind to write
+      only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for what it
+      is not, or&mdash;generally&mdash;to teach it how to behave. Being neither
+      quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
+      things; and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance which
+      attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other. But
+      resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left standing as a
+      mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying onwards so many
+      lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so much insight as can
+      be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism I
+      am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts; of what
+      the French would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of unbroken
+      silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my respect for
+      criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of
+      letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the man behind
+      the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume which is a
+      personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I feel hurt in
+      the least. The charge&mdash;if it amounted to a charge at all&mdash;was
+      made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
+      autobiography&mdash;and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can
+      only express himself in his creation&mdash;then there are some of us to
+      whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise
+      the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
+      always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
+      humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either of
+      laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that
+      should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to
+      move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No artist
+      can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet
+      and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a task which mainly
+      consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for
+      decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own
+      dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then&mdash;it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on
+      this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
+      pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
+      for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their source
+      in weaknesses which must be recognised with smiling compassion as the
+      common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each
+      other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as
+      mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of
+      supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of
+      the horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes! I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
+      laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
+      imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
+      oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within one's
+      own breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for love
+      or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence can
+      perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be
+      a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because of my
+      dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea-training
+      acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one thing
+      really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of losing even
+      for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first
+      condition of good service. And I have carried my notion of good service
+      from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never sought in the
+      written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful, I have carried
+      over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more
+      circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act, I suppose, I have become
+      permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of pure
+      esthetes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
+      mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
+      of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not lovable or
+      hate what was not hateful, out of deference for some general principle.
+      Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know not. After
+      the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil
+      mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always suspected in the
+      effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch
+      of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow
+      ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility&mdash;innocently
+      enough perhaps and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the
+      stage above the pitch of natural conversation&mdash;but still we have to
+      do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the
+      writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact
+      notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as
+      something too cold, too blunt for his purpose&mdash;as, in fact, not good
+      enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is
+      easy to snivelling and giggles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
+      condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
+      And least of all you can condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and
+      imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and
+      his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there
+      are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion
+      to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations
+      if not his conscience?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And besides&mdash;this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
+      open talk&mdash;I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which
+      climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual
+      and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of
+      prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the
+      worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions are
+      their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to believe in the
+      sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways of
+      affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work? To try to go
+      deeper is not to be insensible. An historian of hearts is not an historian
+      of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be, since his
+      aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human
+      affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect too. And
+      he is not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh
+      which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not
+      mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by
+      love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become
+      a sham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
+      creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
+      will what the gods will without perhaps being certain what their will is&mdash;or
+      even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life and art
+      it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the How. As the
+      Frenchman said, &ldquo;Il y a toujours la maniere.&rdquo; Very true. Yes. There is the
+      manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and
+      enthusiasms, in judgments&mdash;and even in love. The manner in which, as
+      in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is
+      foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world,
+      rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as
+      the hills. It rests notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a
+      time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can
+      expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my
+      writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it
+      frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism
+      is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it
+      contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect
+      Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness
+      awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should
+      be free. . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly
+      discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of
+      conversation&mdash;that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost
+      now. My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed,
+      have been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into
+      them were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet
+      this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
+      follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with disregard
+      of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with
+      unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely
+      that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of my
+      recollections. &ldquo;Alas!&rdquo; I protested mildly. &ldquo;Could I begin with the
+      sacramental words, 'I was born on such a date in such a place'? The
+      remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement of all
+      interest. I haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be related
+      seriatim. I haven't known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous
+      remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs. This is
+      but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't written it
+      with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But my objector was not placated. These were good reasons for not writing
+      at all&mdash;not a defence of what stood written already, he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a good
+      reason for not writing at all. But since I have written them, all I want
+      to say in their defence is that these memories put down without any regard
+      for established conventions have not been thrown off without system and
+      purpose. They have their hope and their aim. The hope that from the
+      reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of a
+      personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar as, for
+      instance, &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Secret Agent&rdquo;&mdash;and yet a
+      coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its action.
+      This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely associated with the hope, is
+      to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the
+      feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and
+      with my first contact with the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here and
+      there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      J.C.K. <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter
+      the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the
+      middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly on
+      humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade of old
+      Flaubert&mdash;who imagined himself to be (amongst other things) a
+      descendant of Vikings&mdash;might have hovered with amused interest over
+      the decks of a 2000-ton steamer called the &ldquo;Adowa,&rdquo; on board of which,
+      gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
+      chapter of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; was begun. With interest, I say, for was not
+      the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering voice the
+      last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic,
+      devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
+      behind which the sun had sunk. . . .&rdquo; These words of Almayer's romantic
+      daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on the
+      blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles and
+      shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests and
+      rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of
+      the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and words
+      was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth, coming in
+      with a bang of the door and the exclamation: &ldquo;You've made it jolly warm in
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tin under
+      the leaky water-cock&mdash;for perhaps you do not know that water will
+      leak where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had been
+      doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
+      vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their mere
+      aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being
+      also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a
+      strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
+      written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not play the
+      banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this sentimental
+      inspection and after meditating a while over the strings under my silent
+      scrutiny inquired airily:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply turned
+      the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not have told
+      him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening
+      speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which
+      were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night. I could not
+      have told him that Nina had said: &ldquo;It has set at last.&rdquo; He would have been
+      extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his precious banjo. Neither
+      could I have told him that the sun of my sea-going was setting too, even
+      as I wrote the words expressing the impatience of passionate youth bent on
+      its desire. I did not know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not
+      have cared, though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with
+      more deference than, in our relative positions, I was strictly entitled
+      to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking through the
+      porthole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
+      quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tailend of
+      a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned
+      against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom-house guard, belted over his
+      blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and
+      the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy houses found a
+      place in the picture framed by my porthole, across a wide stretch of paved
+      quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring was sombre, and the most
+      conspicuous feature was a little cafe with curtained windows and a shabby
+      front of white woodwork, corresponding with the squalor of these poorer
+      quarters bordering the river. We had been shifted down there from another
+      berth in the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same porthole
+      gave me a view of quite another sort of cafe&mdash;the best in the town, I
+      believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his wife, the
+      romantic daughter of old Pere Renault, had some refreshment after the
+      memorable performance of an opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di
+      Lammermoor in a setting of light music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern Archipelago which
+      I certainly hoped to see again. The story of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; got put
+      away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any
+      occupation to keep me away from it; the truth of the matter is that on
+      board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life. I will not
+      say anything of my privileged position. I was there &ldquo;just to oblige,&rdquo; as
+      an actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit performance of a
+      friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that steamer
+      at that time and in those circumstances. And perhaps I was not even wanted
+      there in the usual sense in which a ship &ldquo;wants&rdquo; an officer. It was the
+      first and last instance in my sea life when I served shipowners who have
+      remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the
+      well-known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to
+      the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian Transport
+      Company. A death leaves something behind, but there was never anything
+      tangible left from the F.C.T.C. It flourished no longer than roses live,
+      and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead of winter, emitted a sort of
+      faint perfume of adventure and died before spring set in. But indubitably
+      it was a company, it had even a house-flag, all white with the letters
+      F.C.T.C. artfully tangled up in a complicated monogram. We flew it at our
+      main-mast head, and now I have come to the conclusion that it was the only
+      flag of its kind in existence. All the same we on board, for many days,
+      had the impression of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly
+      departures for Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and
+      prospectuses which came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock,
+      London, just before we started for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life
+      of the F.C.T.C. lies the secret of that, my last employment in my calling,
+      which in a remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina
+      Almayer's story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its modest
+      rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the
+      greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last
+      association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called a
+      seagoing experience. Dear Captain Froud&mdash;it is impossible not to pay
+      him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of years&mdash;had
+      very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the
+      whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He organised for us
+      courses of professional lectures, St. John ambulance classes, corresponded
+      industriously with public bodies and members of Parliament on subjects
+      touching the interests of the service; and as to the oncoming of some
+      inquiry or commission relating to matters of the sea and to the work of
+      seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his need of exerting himself on our
+      corporate behalf. Together with this high sense of his official duties he
+      had in him a vein of personal kindness, a strong disposition to do what
+      good he could to the individual members of that craft of which in his time
+      he had been a very excellent master. And what greater kindness can one do
+      to a seaman than to put him in the way of employment? Captain Froud did
+      not see why the Shipmasters' Society, besides its general guardianship of
+      our interests, should not be unofficially an employment agency of the very
+      highest class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to us for
+      their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about our society, and
+      I really don't see why they should not,&rdquo; he said once to me. &ldquo;I am always
+      telling the captains, too, that all things being equal they ought to give
+      preference to the members of the society. In my position I can generally
+      find for them what they want amongst our members or our associate
+      members.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I was very
+      idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort of
+      resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel itself
+      nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice&mdash;nearer
+      there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting-place used
+      to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco
+      smoke, but Captain Froud had the smaller room to himself and there he
+      granted private interviews, whose principal motive was to render service.
+      Thus, one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a crooked finger
+      and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is perhaps my
+      strongest physical recollection of the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning,&rdquo; he said, getting back to
+      his desk and motioning me to a chair, &ldquo;who is in want of an officer. It's
+      for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be asked, but
+      unfortunately I do not quite see my way. . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at the closed
+      door but he shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them. But
+      the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship wants an officer who
+      can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do not know
+      anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth and, of course, you
+      would not care . . . would you now? I know that it isn't what you are
+      looking for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who
+      looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit
+      that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second
+      officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign of
+      being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical forests;
+      and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak character)
+      had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years he and the
+      world of his story had been the companions of my imagination without, I
+      hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of sea life. I had
+      had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my return from the
+      eastern waters, some four years before the day of which I speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
+      square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy
+      quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been treating myself
+      to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings,
+      Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue. Before long, as
+      was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table and then
+      the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and gestures. Unknown to
+      my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly after my breakfast to
+      hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs and half-castes. They did not
+      clamour aloud for my attention. They came with a silent and irresistible
+      appeal&mdash;and the appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my
+      vanity. It seems now to have had a moral character, for why should the
+      memory of these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand
+      to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that
+      mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all
+      the dwellers on this earth?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers of
+      any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book before
+      me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
+      Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
+      blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety
+      which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care the
+      memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
+      disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
+      should fail him in his ambition&mdash;to satisfy at a few hours' notice
+      the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
+      the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a
+      regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French
+      emigrants to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me
+      very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up
+      the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it. But the
+      consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed the
+      Captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other. He
+      explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect and
+      that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the higher
+      position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I would be
+      given certain special advantages&mdash;and so on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure,&rdquo; he insisted, &ldquo;you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in those
+      circumstances that what was to be my last connection with a ship began.
+      And after all there was not even one single trip. It may be that it was
+      simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written word on my forehead which
+      apparently forbade me, through all my sea wanderings, ever to achieve the
+      crossing of the Western Ocean&mdash;using the words in that special sense
+      in which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade, of Western Ocean packets,
+      of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life attended closely upon the old
+      and the nine chapters of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; went with me to the Victoria
+      Dock, whence in a few days we started for Rouen. I won't go so far as
+      saying that the engaging of a man fated never to cross the Western Ocean
+      was the absolute cause of the Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure
+      to achieve even a single passage. It might have been that of course; but
+      the obvious, gross obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four hundred
+      and sixty bunks for emigrants were put together in the 'tween decks by
+      industrious carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an
+      emigrant turned up in Rouen&mdash;of which, being a humane person, I
+      confess I was glad. Some gentlemen from Paris&mdash;I think there were
+      three of them, and one was said to be the Chairman&mdash;turned up indeed
+      and went from end to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly
+      against the deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it
+      that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though,
+      obviously, they had never seen anything of the sort before. Their faces as
+      they went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression.
+      Notwithstanding that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a
+      preliminary to immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our
+      gangway, that I received the inward monition that no sailing within the
+      meaning of our charter-party would ever take place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When we
+      first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony well towards the
+      centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with the
+      tricolour posters announcing the birth of our company, the petit bourgeois
+      with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the inspection of the
+      ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to give information as
+      though I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter, while our
+      quarter-masters reaped a harvest of small change from personally conducted
+      parties. But when the move was made&mdash;that move which carried us some
+      mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to an altogether muddier and
+      shabbier quay&mdash;then indeed the desolation of solitude became our lot.
+      It was a complete and soundless stagnation; for, as we had the ship ready
+      for sea to the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the days short,
+      we were absolutely idle&mdash;idle to the point of blushing with shame
+      when the thought struck us that all the time our salaries went on. Young
+      Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, we could not enjoy any sort of fun
+      in the evening after loafing like this all day: even the banjo lost its
+      charm since there was nothing to prevent his strumming on it all the time
+      between the meals. The good Paramor&mdash;he was really a most excellent
+      fellow&mdash;became unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature,
+      till one dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should
+      employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up on deck
+      and turning them end for end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. &ldquo;Excellent idea!&rdquo; but directly his
+      face fell. &ldquo;Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that job last more than three
+      days,&rdquo; he muttered discontentedly. I don't know how long he expected us to
+      be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables
+      got hauled up and turned end for end according to my satanic suggestion,
+      put down again, and their very existence utterly forgotten, I believe,
+      before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down, empty as
+      she came, into the Havre roads. You may think that this state of forced
+      idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of Almayer and his
+      daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort of evil spell, my
+      banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as related above, had arrested them
+      short at the point of that fateful sunset for many weeks together. It was
+      always thus with this book, begun in '89 and finished in '94&mdash;with
+      that shortest of all the novels which it was to be my lot to write.
+      Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner in his
+      wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the God of
+      Islam&mdash;&ldquo;The Merciful, the Compassionate&rdquo;&mdash;which closes the book,
+      there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the elevated
+      phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of them) of my
+      childhood and the realisation of childhood's vain words, expressing a
+      light-hearted and romantic whim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at
+      a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then
+      representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with
+      absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my
+      character now:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I grow up I shall go there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a century
+      or so an opportunity offered to go there&mdash;as if the sin of childish
+      audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go there: there
+      being the region of Stanley Falls which in '68 was the blankest of blank
+      spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS. of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly,&rdquo;
+       carried about me as if it were a talisman or a treasure, went there too.
+      That it ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of Providence;
+      because a good many of my other properties, infinitely more valuable and
+      useful to me, remained behind through unfortunate accidents of
+      transportation. I call to mind, for instance, a specially awkward turn of
+      the Congo between Kinchassa and Leopoldsville&mdash;more particularly when
+      one had to take it at night in a big canoe with only half the proper
+      number of paddlers. I failed in being the second white man on record
+      drowned at that interesting spot through the upsetting of a canoe. The
+      first was a young Belgian officer, but the accident happened some months
+      before my time, and he, too, I believe, was going home; not perhaps quite
+      so ill as myself&mdash;but still he was going home. I got round the turn
+      more or less alive, though I was too sick to care whether I did or not,
+      and, always with &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; amongst my diminishing baggage, I
+      arrived at that delectable capital Boma, where before the departure of the
+      steamer which was to take me home I had the time to wish myself dead over
+      and over again with perfect sincerity. At that date there were in
+      existence only seven chapters of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly,&rdquo; but the chapter in my
+      history which followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal
+      convalescence. Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of
+      Champel, is rendered for ever famous by the termination of the eighth
+      chapter in the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the
+      ninth are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management
+      of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not
+      matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the
+      activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had
+      nothing to hold me with for very long. And then that memorable story, like
+      a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the
+      sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of course I would
+      not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it certainly did
+      nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look and an ancient,
+      yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable to suppose that
+      anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and Nina. And yet
+      something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to wake them up
+      from their state of suspended animation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is it that Novalis says? &ldquo;It is certain my conviction gains
+      infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.&rdquo; And what is a
+      novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
+      take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose
+      accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of
+      documentary history? Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo rapids
+      brought it to the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open sea. It
+      would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the sallow,
+      sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young Cambridge man (he was
+      a &ldquo;passenger for his health&rdquo; on board the good ship Torrens outward bound
+      to Australia) who was the first reader of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo;&mdash;the very
+      first reader I ever had. &ldquo;Would it bore you very much reading a MS. in a
+      handwriting like mine?&rdquo; I asked him one evening on a sudden impulse at the
+      end of a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History. Jacques
+      (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy dog-watch below,
+      after bringing me a book to read from his own travelling store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he answered with his courteous intonation and a faint smile.
+      As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him a
+      watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe. All
+      that's beyond guessing now. He was not a cold but a calm man, still more
+      subdued by disease&mdash;a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty
+      in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
+      person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty
+      passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look. In his
+      attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic voice he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is this?&rdquo; &ldquo;It is a sort of tale,&rdquo; I answered with an effort. &ldquo;It is
+      not even finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to know what you think of
+      it.&rdquo; He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I remember
+      perfectly his thin brown fingers folding it lengthwise. &ldquo;I will read it
+      tomorrow,&rdquo; he remarked, seizing the door-handle, and then, watching the
+      roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone.
+      In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the
+      swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens, and the subdued, as if
+      distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the growing disquiet in the great
+      restlessness of the ocean, and responded professionally to it with the
+      thought that at eight o'clock, in another half-hour or so at the furthest,
+      the top-gallant sails would have to come off the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my cabin.
+      He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and the MS. was in his
+      hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look but without a word. I took
+      it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said nothing. I opened
+      and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide
+      open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book
+      I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I turned my back
+      squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques never offered a word. &ldquo;Well,
+      what do you say?&rdquo; I asked at last. &ldquo;Is it worth finishing?&rdquo; This question
+      expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Distinctly,&rdquo; he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then coughed a
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you interested?&rdquo; I inquired further almost in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the ship,
+      and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my bed-place swung
+      to and fro as it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals,
+      and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly in the gusts of wind. It
+      was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the longitude of Greenwich, as far
+      as I can remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's and Nina's
+      resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged silence it occurred to me
+      that there was a good deal of retrospective writing in the story as far as
+      it went. Was it intelligible in its action, I asked myself, as if already
+      the story-teller were being born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on
+      deck the whistle of the officer of the watch and remained on the alert to
+      catch the order that was to follow this call to attention. It reached me
+      as a faint, fierce shout to &ldquo;Square the yards.&rdquo; &ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; I thought to
+      myself, &ldquo;a westerly blow coming on.&rdquo; Then I turned to my very first reader
+      who, alas! was not to live long enough to know the end of the tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as it
+      stands?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! Perfectly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
+      &ldquo;Almayer's Folly.&rdquo; We never spoke together of the book again. A long
+      period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my duties,
+      whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in his
+      cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose went at
+      once up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in Australia
+      or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez Canal. I am
+      not sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard precisely;
+      though I made inquiries about him from some of our return passengers who,
+      wandering about to &ldquo;see the country&rdquo; during the ship's stay in port, had
+      come upon him here and there. At last we sailed, homeward bound, and still
+      not one line was added to the careless scrawl of the many pages which poor
+      Jacques had had the patience to read with the very shadows of Eternity
+      gathering already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final &ldquo;Distinctly&rdquo;
+       remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I am
+      compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as
+      in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves
+      must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by,
+      on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One&mdash;one
+      for all men and for all occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and
+      more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to wait
+      my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those
+      wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the
+      fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the
+      same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages,
+      and could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line; but I
+      must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not consent to write
+      without something at least resembling a chair. Line by line, rather than
+      page by page, was the growth of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to the
+      first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse railway station
+      (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to Poland, or more precisely to
+      Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in a hurry I left my
+      Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager
+      rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the MS. but of all the
+      other things that were packed in the bag.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never
+      exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while the bag lay open
+      on a chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A friend
+      of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but had turned to
+      growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each other for over
+      twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing,&rdquo; he
+      suggested kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or later. The
+      talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was extremely
+      animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from big-game shooting
+      in Africa to the last poem published in a very modernist review, edited by
+      the very young and patronised by the highest society. But it never touched
+      upon &ldquo;Almayer's Folly,&rdquo; and next morning, in uninterrupted obscurity, this
+      inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the south-east direction
+      towards the Government of Kiev.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from the
+      railway station to the country house which was my destination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear boy&rdquo; (these words were always written in English), so ran the last
+      letter from that house received in London,&mdash;&ldquo;Get yourself driven to
+      the only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the
+      evening my own confidential servant, factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S.
+      (I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you,
+      reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the
+      next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
+      overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the
+      road.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous
+      barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened and, in a
+      travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin cap and a short coat girt
+      with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of noble extraction), a man of about
+      thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open and
+      moustachioed countenance. I got up from the table and greeted him in
+      Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his
+      noble blood and his confidential position. His face cleared up in a
+      wonderful way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
+      assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our understanding
+      each other. He imagined I would talk to him in some foreign language. I
+      was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come to meet me
+      shaped an anxious exclamation:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself
+      understood to our master's nephew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of me as
+      if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling of coming
+      home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an enormous
+      bear-skin travelling-coat and took his seat protectively by my side. The
+      sledge was a very small one and it looked utterly insignificant, almost
+      like a toy behind the four big bays harnessed two and two. We three,
+      counting the coachman, filled it completely. He was a young fellow with
+      clear blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur coat framed his cheery
+      countenance and stood all round level with the top of his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, Joseph,&rdquo; my companion addressed him, &ldquo;do you think we shall manage
+      to get home before six?&rdquo; His answer was that we would surely, with God's
+      help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch between
+      certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar sound to my
+      ears. He turned out an excellent coachman with an instinct for keeping the
+      road amongst the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of getting the
+      best out of his horses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain remembers. He who
+      used to drive the Captain's late grandmother of holy memory,&rdquo; remarked
+      V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my grandmother.
+      Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the first time in my life and
+      allowed me to play with the great four-in-hand whip outside the doors of
+      the coach-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What became of him?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;He is no longer serving, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He served our master,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;But he died of cholera ten years
+      ago now&mdash;that great epidemic we had. And his wife died at the same
+      time&mdash;the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that was
+      left.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The MS. of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; was reposing in the bag under our feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of my
+      childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view as if
+      it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had seen the
+      sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly
+      upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth
+      joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees about
+      a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided by, a low
+      interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking through a screen of
+      fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That very evening the wandering MS. of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo; was unpacked and
+      unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the guest-room
+      which had been, I was informed in an affectedly careless tone, awaiting me
+      for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no attention from the
+      affectionate presence hovering round the son of the favourite sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me,
+      brother,&rdquo; he said&mdash;this form of address borrowed from the speech of
+      our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in a
+      moment of affectionate elation. &ldquo;I shall be always coming in for a chat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
+      everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of his
+      study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand presented
+      to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his wards then
+      living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from
+      the three southern provinces&mdash;ever since the year 1860. Some of them
+      had been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls or
+      boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two were older than
+      myself&mdash;considerably older, too. One of them, a visitor I remember in
+      my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback, and his
+      four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and general skill in
+      manly exercises was one of my earliest admirations. I seem to remember my
+      mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as
+      I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know, by the very Joseph&mdash;the
+      groom attached specially to my grandmother's service&mdash;who died of
+      cholera. It was certainly a young man in a dark blue, tailless coat and
+      huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery of the men about the stables.
+      It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by another mode of calculating
+      time, it was certainly in the year in which my mother obtained permission
+      to travel south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had
+      followed my father. For that, too, she had had to ask permission, and I
+      know that one of the conditions of that favour was that she should be
+      treated exactly as a condemned exile herself. Yet a couple of years later,
+      in memory of her eldest brother who had served in the Guards and dying
+      early left hosts of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St.
+      Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this permission&mdash;it
+      was officially called the &ldquo;Highest Grace&rdquo;&mdash;of a three months' leave
+      from exile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
+      more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
+      presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
+      remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
+      the grey heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect and
+      love in the house of her favourite brother who, a few years later, was to
+      take the place for me of both my parents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time, though
+      indeed I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of
+      invalidism about her&mdash;but I think that already they had pronounced
+      her doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could
+      re-establish her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest
+      period of my existence. There was my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered
+      little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched
+      over, as if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth
+      year. There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a
+      few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive
+      shadow of the great Russian Empire&mdash;the shadow lowering with the
+      darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of
+      journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a far cry back from the MS. of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly,&rdquo; but the public
+      record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
+      egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal. It
+      is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's children
+      than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That which in
+      their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the most
+      enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain for ever obscure
+      even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
+      of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
+      personalities are remotely derived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
+      undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of
+      art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories
+      may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things human which
+      sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions of the
+      man reviewing his own experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London
+      into Ukraine. The MS. of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo;&mdash;my companion already for
+      some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age&mdash;was
+      deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two
+      windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table was
+      fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same
+      drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up
+      festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew.
+      The blinds were down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
+      peasant hut of the village&mdash;part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
+      the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
+      beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
+      lay the great unfenced fields&mdash;not a flat and severe plain, but a
+      kindly bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the
+      black patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had
+      come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing
+      the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snowtrack; a quick tinkle
+      of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful
+      whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help me,
+      and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary at the
+      door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not like to
+      tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than ten years
+      younger than myself; I had not been&mdash;I won't say in that place but
+      within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless
+      physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was
+      quite possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a
+      grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar to me in
+      my early childhood. As a matter of fact he had no such claim on my
+      consideration. He was the product of some village near by and was there on
+      his promotion, having learned the service in one or two houses as
+      pantry-boy. I know this because I asked the worthy V&mdash; next day. I
+      might well have spared the question. I discovered before long that all the
+      faces about the house and all the faces in the village: the grave faces
+      with long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
+      young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the handsome,
+      tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts
+      were as familiar to me as though I had known them all from childhood, and
+      my childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tinkle of the traveller's bels, after growing louder, had faded away
+      quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed down at
+      last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a small couch, smoked his long
+      Turkish chibouk in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my room,&rdquo; I
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is really your property,&rdquo; he said, keeping his eyes on me, with an
+      interested and wistful expression as he had done ever since I had entered
+      the house. &ldquo;Forty years ago your mother used to write at this very table.
+      In our house in Oratow it stood in the little sitting-room which, by a
+      tacit arrangement, was given up to the girls&mdash;I mean to your mother
+      and her sister who died so young. It was a present to them jointly from
+      our uncle Nicholas B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two
+      years younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of yours,
+      of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name. She did not shine
+      so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind, in which your mother was
+      far superior. It was her good sense, the admirable sweetness of her
+      nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily relations that endeared
+      her to everybody. Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral loss
+      for us all. Had she lived she would have brought the greatest blessings to
+      the house it would have been her lot to enter, as wife, mother and
+      mistress of a household. She would have created round herself an
+      atmosphere of peace and content which only those who can love unselfishly
+      are able to evoke. Your mother&mdash;of far greater beauty, exceptionally
+      distinguished in person, manner and intellect&mdash;had a less easy
+      disposition. Being more brilliantly gifted she also expected more from
+      life. At that trying time especially, we were greatly concerned about her
+      state. Suffering in her health from the shock of her father's death (she
+      was alone in the house with him when he died suddenly), she was torn by
+      the inward struggle between her love for the man whom she was to marry in
+      the end and her knowledge of her dead father's declared objection to that
+      match. Unable to bring herself to disregard that cherished memory and that
+      judgment she had always respected and trusted, and, on the other hand,
+      feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and so true, she
+      could not have been expected to preserve her mental and moral balance. At
+      war with herself, she could not give to others that feeling of peace which
+      was not her own. It was only later, when united at last with the man of
+      her choice that she developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which
+      compelled the respect and admiration even of our foes. Meeting with calm
+      fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national and
+      social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest conceptions
+      of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing the exile of her
+      husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our Uncle
+      Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection. Apart
+      from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only
+      three people in the world: his mother&mdash;your great-grandmother, whom
+      you have seen but cannot possibly remember; his brother, our father, in
+      whose house he lived for so many years; and of all of us, his nephews and
+      nieces grown up round him, your mother alone. The modest, lovable
+      qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem able to see. It was I who
+      felt most profoundly this unexpected stroke of death falling upon the
+      family less than a year after I had become its head. It was terribly
+      unexpected. Driving home one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our
+      empty house, where I had to remain permanently administering the estate
+      and attending to the complicated affairs&mdash;(the girls took it in turn
+      week and week about)&mdash;driving, as I said, from the house of the
+      Countess Tekla Potochka, where our invalid mother was staying then to be
+      near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a snowdrift. She was
+      alone with the coachman and old Valery, the personal servant of our late
+      father. Impatient of delay while they were trying to dig themselves out,
+      she jumped out of the sledge and went to look for the road herself. All
+      this happened in '51, not ten miles from the house in which we are sitting
+      now. The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly again,
+      and they were four more hours getting home. Both the men took off their
+      sheepskin-lined great-coats and used all their own rugs to wrap her up
+      against the cold, notwithstanding her protests, positive orders and even
+      struggles, as Valery afterwards related to me. 'How could I,' he
+      remonstrated with her, 'go to meet the blessed soul of my late master if I
+      let any harm come to you while there's a spark of life left in my body?'
+      When they reached home at last the poor old man was stiff and speechless
+      from exposure, and the coachman was in not much better plight, though he
+      had the strength to drive round to the stables himself. To my reproaches
+      for venturing out at all in such weather, she answered characteristically
+      that she could not bear the thought of abandoning me to my cheerless
+      solitude. It is incomprehensible how it was that she was allowed to start.
+      I suppose it had to be! She made light of the cough which came on next
+      day, but shortly afterwards inflammation of the lungs set in, and in three
+      weeks she was no more! She was the first to be taken away of the young
+      generation under my care. Behold the vanity of all hopes and fears! I was
+      the most frail at birth of all the children. For years I remained so
+      delicate that my parents had but little hope of bringing me up; and yet I
+      have survived five brothers and two sisters, and many of my
+      contemporaries; I have outlived my wife and daughter too&mdash;and from
+      all those who have had some knowledge at least of these old times you
+      alone are left. It has been my lot to lay in an early grave many honest
+      hearts, many brilliant promises, many hopes full of life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me, saying: &ldquo;We will dine in half an
+      hour.&rdquo; Without moving I listened to his quick steps resounding on the
+      waxed floor of the next room, traversing the anteroom lined with
+      bookshelves, where he paused to put his chibouk in the pipe-stand before
+      passing into the drawing-room (these were all en suite), where he became
+      inaudible on the thick carpet. But I heard the door of his study-bedroom
+      close. He was then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of a
+      century the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
+      extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I
+      seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in the
+      French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of Marshal
+      Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of Mounted Rifles in the
+      Polish Army&mdash;such as it existed up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom
+      established by the Congress of Vienna&mdash;I must say that from all that
+      more distant past, known to me traditionally and a little de visu, and
+      called out by the words of the man just gone away, he remains the most
+      incomplete figure. It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for it
+      is certain that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my
+      mother for what he must have known would be the last time. From my early
+      boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of mist rises
+      before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed
+      head of white hair (which is exceptional in the case of the B. family,
+      where it is the rule for men to go bald in a becoming manner, before
+      thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified nose, a feature in strict accordance
+      with the physical tradition of the B. family. But it is not by these
+      fragmentary remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my memory. I
+      knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was a Knight of
+      the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish Cross for valour
+      Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these glorious facts inspired in me an
+      admiring veneration; yet it is not that sentiment, strong as it was, which
+      resumes for me the force and the significance of his personality. It is
+      overborne by another and complex impression of awe, compassion and horror.
+      Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the unfortunate and miserable (but heroic)
+      being who once upon a time had eaten a dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect has not
+      worn off yet. I believe this is the very first, say, realistic, story I
+      heard in my life; but all the same I don't know why I should have been so
+      frightfully impressed. Of course I know what our village dogs look like&mdash;but
+      still . . . No! At this very day, recalling the horror and compassion of
+      my childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in disclosing to a cold and
+      fastidious world that awful episode in the family history. I ask myself&mdash;is
+      it right?&mdash;especially as the B. family had always been honourably
+      known in a wide countryside for the delicacy of their tastes in the matter
+      of eating and drinking. But upon the whole, and considering that this
+      gastronomical degradation overtaking a gallant young officer lies really
+      at the door of the Great Napoleon, I think that to cover it up by silence
+      would be an exaggeration of literary restraint. Let the truth stand here.
+      The responsibility rests with the Man of St. Helena in view of his
+      deplorable levity in the conduct of the Russian campaign. It was during
+      the memorable retreat from Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of two
+      brother officers&mdash;as to whose morality and natural refinement I know
+      nothing&mdash;bagged a dog on the outskirts of a village and subsequently
+      devoured him. As far as I can remember the weapon used was a cavalry
+      sabre, and the issue of the sporting episode was rather more of a matter
+      of life and death than if it had been an encounter with a tiger. A picket
+      of Cossacks was sleeping in that village lost in the depths of the great
+      Lithuanian forest. The three sportsmen had observed them from a
+      hiding-place making themselves very much at home amongst the huts just
+      before the early winter darkness set in at four o'clock. They had observed
+      them with disgust and perhaps with despair. Late in the night the rash
+      counsels of hunger overcame the dictates of prudence. Crawling through the
+      snow they crept up to the fence of dry branches which generally encloses a
+      village in that part of Lithuania. What they expected to get and in what
+      manner, and whether this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only
+      knows. However, these Cossack parties, in most cases wandering without an
+      officer, were known to guard themselves badly and often not at all. In
+      addition, the village lying at a great distance from the line of French
+      retreat, they could not suspect the presence of stragglers from the Grand
+      Army. The three officers had strayed away in a blizzard from the main
+      column and had been lost for days in the woods, which explains
+      sufficiently the terrible straits to which they were reduced. Their plan
+      was to try and attract the attention of the peasants in that one of the
+      huts which was nearest to the enclosure; but as they were preparing to
+      venture into the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is mighty
+      strange that there was but one), a creature quite as formidable under the
+      circumstances as a lion, began to bark on the other side of the fence. . .
+      .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by request) from
+      the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my grandmother, I used to
+      tremble with excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dog barked. And if he had done no more than bark three officers of the
+      Great Napoleon's army would have perished honourably on the points of
+      Cossack's lances, or perchance escaping the chase would have died decently
+      of starvation. But before they had time to think of running away, that
+      fatal and revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of his zeal,
+      dashed out through a gap in the fence. He dashed out and died. His head, I
+      understand, was severed at one blow from his body. I understand also that
+      later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the snow-laden woods, when, in a
+      sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit by the party, the condition of the
+      quarry was discovered to be distinctly unsatisfactory. It was not thin&mdash;on
+      the contrary, it seemed unhealthily obese; its skin showed bare patches of
+      an unpleasant character. However, they had not killed that dog for the
+      sake of the pelt. He was large . . . He was eaten . . . The rest is
+      silence . . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not have eaten that dog.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to eat
+      dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language of the
+      volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on ancient salt
+      junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript
+      dishes containing things without a name&mdash;but of the Lithuanian
+      village dog&mdash;never! I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is
+      not I but my grand-uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier
+      de la Legion d'Honneur, &amp;c. &amp;c., who, in his young days, had eaten
+      the Lithuanian dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish he had not. The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly to the
+      grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still if he really had
+      to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on active service,
+      while bearing up bravely against the greatest military disaster of modern
+      history, and, in a manner, for the sake of his country. He had eaten him
+      to appease his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of an unappeasable
+      and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith that lives still, and
+      in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled like a false beacon by a great
+      man to lead astray the effort of a brave nation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pro patria!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looked at in that light it appears a sweet and decorous meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And looked at in the same light my own diet of la vache enragee appears a
+      fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for why should I, the son
+      of a land which such men as these have turned up with their ploughshares
+      and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of
+      salt junk and hard tack upon the wide seas? On the kindest view it seems
+      an unanswerable question. Alas! I have the conviction that there are men
+      of unstained rectitude who are ready to murmur scornfully the word
+      desertion. Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be made bitter to the
+      palate. The part of the inexplicable should be allowed for in appraising
+      the conduct of men in a world where no explanation is final. No charge of
+      faithlessness ought to be lightly uttered. The appearances of this
+      perishable life are deceptive like everything that falls under the
+      judgment of our imperfect senses. The inner voice may remain true enough
+      in its secret counsel. The fidelity to a special tradition may last
+      through the events of an unrelated existence, following faithfully too the
+      traced way of an inexplicable impulse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions
+      in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape
+      of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation. Indulgence&mdash;as
+      somebody said&mdash;is the most intelligent of all the virtues. I venture
+      to think that it is one of the least common, if not the most uncommon of
+      all. I would not imply by this that men are foolish&mdash;or even most
+      men. Far from it. The barber and the priest, backed by the whole opinion
+      of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the ingenious hidalgo who,
+      sallying forth from his native place, broke the head of the muleteer, put
+      to death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful
+      experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should
+      escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime
+      caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing
+      except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one
+      aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his
+      frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape
+      with his very body from the intolerable reality of things. He wished to
+      meet eye to eye the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose
+      armour is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his
+      arm, is the gate of a fortified city. O amiable and natural weakness! O
+      blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! Who would not succumb
+      to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless it was a form of
+      self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a good
+      citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their
+      strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who used
+      to say in his exile, &ldquo;The people are never in fault&rdquo;&mdash;one may admit
+      that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole village.
+      Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by the
+      well of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by the fat,
+      sly rogue of a landlord, has come very near perfection. He rides forth,
+      his head encircled by a halo&mdash;the patron saint of all lives spoiled
+      or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was not a good
+      citizen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered exclamation
+      of my tutor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have had a
+      jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterwards, jolly enough in a
+      way and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which I
+      speak was the year of my last schoolboy holiday. There are other reasons
+      why I should remember that year, but they are too long to state formally
+      in this place. Moreover they have nothing to do with that holiday. What
+      has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark was
+      made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls of the Rhine,
+      the Lake of Constance&mdash;in fact it was a memorable holiday of travel.
+      Of late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of the Reuss. It was a
+      delightful time. It was much more like a stroll than a tramp. Landing from
+      a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves at the end of
+      the second day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little
+      way beyond Hospenthal. This is not the day on which the remark was made:
+      in the shadows of the deep valley and with the habitations of men left
+      some way behind, our thoughts ran not upon the ethics of conduct but upon
+      the simpler human problem of shelter and food. There did not seem anything
+      of the kind in sight, and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly
+      at a bend of the road we came upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and that
+      magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the
+      unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the
+      mountains. It was long though not big at all; it was low; it was built of
+      boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with the white
+      window-frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front. And yet
+      it was an hotel; it had even a name which I have forgotten. But there was
+      no gold-laced door-keeper at its humble door. A plain but vigorous
+      servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who owned the
+      place appeared. It was clear that no travellers were expected, or perhaps
+      even desired, in this strange hostelry, which in its severe style
+      resembled the house which surmounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the
+      toy Noah's Arks, the universal possession of European childhood. However,
+      its roof was not hinged and it was not full to the brim of slab-sided and
+      painted animals of wood. Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in
+      evidence. We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one end of a
+      long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to my sleepy eyes,
+      seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw plank, since there was no one
+      at the other end to balance it against our two dusty and travel-stained
+      figures. Then we hastened upstairs to bed in a room smelling of pine
+      planks, and I was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow University) woke
+      me up early, and as we were dressing remarked: &ldquo;There seems to be a lot of
+      people staying in this hotel. I have heard a noise of talking up till 11
+      o'clock?&rdquo; This statement surprised me; I had heard no noise whatever,
+      having slept like a top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went downstairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its long and
+      narrow table. There were two rows of plates on it. At one of the many
+      uncurtained windows stood a tall bony man with a bald head set off by a
+      bunch of black hair above each ear and with a long black beard. He glanced
+      up from the paper he was reading and seemed genuinely astonished at our
+      intrusion. By-and-by more men came in. Not one of them looked like a
+      tourist. Not a single woman appeared. These men seemed to know each other
+      with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very talkative lot. The
+      bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the table. It all had the
+      air of a family party. By-and-by, from one of the vigorous servant-girls
+      in national costume, we discovered that the place was really a
+      boarding-house for some English engineers engaged at the works of the St.
+      Gothard Tunnel; and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English
+      language, as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not
+      believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the tourist kind
+      seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne&mdash;the kind which has no real
+      existence in a workaday world. I know now that the bald-headed man spoke
+      with a strong Scotch accent. I have met many of his kind since, both
+      ashore and afloat. The second engineer of the steamer &ldquo;Mavis&rdquo;, for
+      instance, ought to have been his twin brother. I cannot help thinking that
+      he really was, though for some reasons of his own he assured me that he
+      never had a twin brother. Anyway the deliberate bald-headed Scot with the
+      coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic and mysterious
+      person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped-out route led over the Furca Pass
+      towards the Rhone Glacier, with the further intention of following down
+      the trend of the Hasli Valley. The sun was already declining when we found
+      ourselves on the top of the pass, and the remark alluded to was presently
+      uttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat down by the side of the road to continue the argument begun half a
+      mile or so before. I am certain it was an argument because I remember
+      perfectly how my tutor argued and how without the power of reply I
+      listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on the ground. A stir on the road
+      made me look up&mdash;and then I saw my unforgettable Englishman. There
+      are acquaintances of later years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember
+      less clearly. He marched rapidly towards the east (attended by a hang-dog
+      Swiss guide) with the mien of an ardent and fearless traveller. He was
+      clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore short socks
+      under his laced boots, for reasons which whether hygienic or conscientious
+      were surely imaginative, his calves exposed to the public gaze and to the
+      tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of
+      their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. He was the
+      leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction
+      with the world of men and the scenery of mountains illumined his
+      clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white whiskers, his innocently
+      eager and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity
+      and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth towards the man and the
+      boy sitting like dusty tramps by the roadside, with a modest knapsack
+      lying at their feet. His white calves twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss
+      guide with a surly mouth stalked like an unwilling bear at his elbow; a
+      small train of three mules followed in single file the lead of this
+      inspiring enthusiast. Two ladies rode past one behind the other, but from
+      the way they sat I saw only their calm, uniform backs, and the long ends
+      of blue veils hanging behind far down over their identical hat-brims. His
+      two daughters surely. An industrious luggage-mule, with unstarched ears
+      and guarded by a slouching, sallow driver, brought up the rear. My tutor,
+      after pausing for a look and a faint smile, resumed his earnest argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tell you it was a memorable year! One does not meet such an Englishman
+      twice in a lifetime. Was he in the mystic ordering of common events the
+      ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment
+      on the top of an Alpine pass, with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for
+      mute and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and
+      comic ardour of his striving-forward appearance helped me to pull myself
+      together. It must be stated that on that day and in the exhilarating
+      atmosphere of that elevated spot I had been feeling utterly crushed. It
+      was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my desire to go to sea.
+      At first like those sounds that, ranging outside the scale to which men's
+      ears are attuned, remain inaudible to our sense of hearing, this
+      declaration passed unperceived. It was as if it had not been. Later on, by
+      trying various tones I managed to arouse here and there a surprised
+      momentary attention&mdash;the &ldquo;What was that funny noise?&rdquo; sort of
+      inquiry. Later on it was&mdash;&ldquo;Did you hear what that boy said? What an
+      extraordinary outbreak!&rdquo; Presently a wave of scandalised astonishment (it
+      could not have been greater if I had announced the intention of entering a
+      Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of the educational and academical town of
+      Cracow spread itself over several provinces. It spread itself shallow but
+      far-reaching. It stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying
+      wonder, bitter irony and downright chaff. I could hardly breathe under its
+      weight, and certainly had no words for an answer. People wondered what Mr.
+      T.B. would do now with his worrying nephew and, I dare say, hoped kindly
+      that he would make short work of my nonsense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine to have it out with
+      me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial and just, taking his
+      stand on the ground of wisdom and affection. As far as is possible for a
+      boy whose power of expression is still unformed I opened the secret of my
+      thoughts to him and he in return allowed me a glimpse into his mind and
+      heart; the first glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble treasure of clear
+      thought and warm feeling, which through life was to be mine to draw upon
+      with a never-deceived love and confidence. Practically, after several
+      exhaustive conversations, he concluded that he would not have me later on
+      reproach him for having spoiled my life by an unconditional opposition.
+      But I must take time for serious reflection. And I must not only think of
+      myself but of others; weigh the claims of affection and conscience against
+      my own sincerity of purpose. &ldquo;Think well what it all means in the larger
+      issues, my boy,&rdquo; he exhorted me finally with special friendliness. &ldquo;And
+      meantime try to get the best place you can at the yearly examinations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The scholastic year came to an end. I took a fairly good place at the
+      exams., which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be a more difficult
+      task than for other boys. In that respect I could enter with a good
+      conscience upon that holiday which was like a long visit pour prendre
+      conge of the mainland of old Europe I was to see so little of for the next
+      four and twenty years. Such, however, was not the avowed purpose of that
+      tour. It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to distract and occupy my
+      thoughts in other directions. Nothing had been said for months of my going
+      to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor and his influence over me were
+      so well known that he must have received a confidential mission to talk me
+      out of my romantic folly. It was an excellently appropriate arrangement,
+      as neither he nor I had ever had a single glimpse of the sea in our lives.
+      That was to come by-and-by for both of us in Venice, from the outer shore
+      of Lido. Meantime he had taken his mission to heart so well that I began
+      to feel crushed before we reached Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in
+      lake steamboats, he had argued away for me the obligatory sunrise on the
+      Righi, by Jove! Of his devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no
+      doubt. He had proved it already by two years of unremitting and arduous
+      care. I could not hate him. But he had been crushing me slowly, and when
+      he started to argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer a
+      success than either he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing
+      silence, feeling that ghostly, unrealised and desired sea of my dreams
+      escape from the unnerved grip of my will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed&mdash;and the argument went on.
+      What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years, either
+      in ambition, honour or conscience? An unanswerable question. But I felt no
+      longer crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion was visible in his
+      as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked up the knapsack
+      suddenly and got on to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That's what you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was surprised. I was only fifteen and did not know what he meant
+      exactly. But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the immortal knight
+      turning up in connection with my own folly, as some people would call it
+      to my face. Alas! I don't think there was anything to be proud of. Mine
+      was not the stuff the protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of
+      this world's wrongs are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that
+      best. Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and the
+      priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking back he
+      stopped. The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over the Furca
+      Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me and in full view of the
+      Finster-Aarhorn, with his band of giant brothers rearing their monstrous
+      heads against a brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder affectionately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! That's enough. We will have no more of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between
+      us. There was to be no more question of it at all, nowhere or with any
+      one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily. Eleven
+      years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of the
+      St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant Service. But
+      the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was
+      no longer living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That very year of our travels he took his degree of the Philosophical
+      Faculty&mdash;and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to
+      the call he entered at once upon the four-year course of the Medical
+      Schools. A day came when, on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I
+      opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had
+      made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian
+      Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of
+      the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
+      coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How short his years and how clear his vision! What greater reward in
+      ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to win for himself
+      when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the end of my
+      opening life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by my
+      grand-uncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and famished
+      scarecrows, symbolised, to my childish imagination, the whole horror of
+      the retreat from Moscow and the immorality of a conqueror's ambition. An
+      extreme distaste for that objectionable episode has tinged the views I
+      hold as to the character and achievements of Napoleon the Great. I need
+      not say that these are unfavourable. It was morally reprehensible for that
+      great captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by
+      raising in his breast a false hope of national independence. It has been
+      the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards of a hundred years
+      on a diet of false hopes and&mdash;well&mdash;dog. It is, when one thinks
+      of it, a singularly poisonous regimen. Some pride in the national
+      constitution which has survived a long course of such dishes is really
+      excusable. But enough of generalising. Returning to particulars, Mr.
+      Nicholas B. confided to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his
+      misanthropically laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been
+      nearly &ldquo;the death of him.&rdquo; This is not surprising. What surprises me is
+      that the story was ever heard of; for grand-uncle Nicholas differed in
+      this from the generality of military men of Napoleon's time (and perhaps
+      of all time), that he did not like to talk of his campaigns, which began
+      at Friedland and ended somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc. His
+      admiration of the great Emperor was unreserved in everything but
+      expression. Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a
+      sentiment to be displayed before a world of little faith. Apart from that
+      he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he had
+      hardly ever seen a soldier in his life. Proud of his decorations earned
+      before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear the ribbons at the
+      buttonhole in the manner practised to this day in Europe and even was
+      unwilling to display the insignia on festive occasions, as though he
+      wished to conceal them in the fear of appearing boastful. &ldquo;It is enough
+      that I have them,&rdquo; he used to mutter. In the course of thirty years they
+      were seen on his breast only twice&mdash;at an auspicious marriage in the
+      family and at the funeral of an old friend. That the wedding which was
+      thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only late in
+      life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas B., who made amends
+      at my birth by a long letter of congratulation containing the following
+      prophecy: &ldquo;He will see better times.&rdquo; Even in his embittered heart there
+      lived a hope. But he was not a true prophet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a man of strange contradictions. Living for many years in his
+      brother's house, the home of many children, a house full of life, of
+      animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of many guests, he kept
+      his habits of solitude and silence. Considered as obstinately secretive in
+      all his purposes, he was in reality the victim of a most painful
+      irresolution in all matters of civil life. Under his taciturn, phlegmatic
+      behaviour was hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate anger. I suspect
+      he had no talent for narrative; but it seemed to afford him sombre
+      satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride over the bridge
+      of the river Elster after the battle of Leipsic. Lest some construction
+      favourable to his valour should be put on the fact he condescended to
+      explain how it came to pass. It seems that shortly after the retreat began
+      he was sent back to the town where some divisions of the French Army (and
+      amongst them the Polish corps of Prince Joseph Poniatowski), jammed
+      hopelessly in the streets, were being simply exterminated by the troops of
+      the Allied Powers. When asked what it was like in there Mr. Nicholas B.
+      muttered the only word &ldquo;Shambles.&rdquo; Having delivered his message to the
+      Prince he hastened away at once to render an account of his mission to the
+      superior who had sent him. By that time the advance of the enemy had
+      enveloped the town, and he was shot at from houses and chased all the way
+      to the river bank by a disorderly mob of Austrian Dragoons and Prussian
+      Hussars. The bridge had been mined early in the morning and his opinion
+      was that the sight of the horsemen converging from many sides in the
+      pursuit of his person alarmed the officer in command of the sappers and
+      caused the premature firing of the charges. He had not gone more than 200
+      yards on the other side when he heard the sound of the fatal explosions.
+      Mr. Nicholas B. concluded his bald narrative with the word &ldquo;Imbecile&rdquo;
+       uttered with the utmost deliberation. It testified to his indignation at
+      the loss of so many thousands of lives. But his phlegmatic physiognomy
+      lighted up when he spoke of his only wound, with something resembling
+      satisfaction. You will see that there was some reason for it when you
+      learn that he was wounded in the heel. &ldquo;Like his Majesty the Emperor
+      Napoleon himself,&rdquo; he reminded his hearers with assumed indifference.
+      There can be no doubt that the indifference was assumed, if one thinks
+      what very distinguished sort of wound it was. In all the history of
+      warfare there are, I believe, only three warriors publicly known to have
+      been wounded in the heel&mdash;Achilles and Napoleon&mdash;demi-gods
+      indeed&mdash;to whom the familial piety of an unworthy descendant adds the
+      name of the simple mortal, Nicholas B.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B. staying with a distant relative of
+      ours, owner of a small estate in Galicia. How he got there across the
+      breadth of an armed Europe and after what adventures I am afraid will
+      never be known now. All his papers were destroyed shortly before his
+      death; but if there was amongst them, as he affirmed, a concise record of
+      his life, then I am pretty sure it did not take up more than a half-sheet
+      of foolscap or so. This relative of ours happened to be an Austrian
+      officer, who had left the service after the battle of Austerlitz. Unlike
+      Mr. Nicholas B., who concealed his decorations, he liked to display his
+      honourable discharge in which he was mentioned as unschreckbar (fearless)
+      before the enemy. No conjunction could seem more unpromising, yet it
+      stands in the family tradition that these two got on very well together in
+      their rural solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When asked whether he had not been sorely tempted during the Hundred Days
+      to make his way again to France and join the service of his beloved
+      Emperor, Mr. Nicholas B. used to mutter: &ldquo;No money. No horse. Too far to
+      walk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of national hopes affected adversely the
+      character of Mr. Nicholas B. He shrank from returning to his province. But
+      for that there was also another reason. Mr. Nicholas B. and his brother&mdash;my
+      maternal grandfather&mdash;had lost their father early, while they were
+      quite children. Their mother, young still and left very well off, married
+      again a man of great charm and of an amiable disposition but without a
+      penny. He turned out an affectionate and careful stepfather; it was
+      unfortunate though that while directing the boys' education and forming
+      their character by wise counsel he did his best to get hold of the fortune
+      by buying and selling land in his own name and investing capital in such a
+      manner as to cover up the traces of the real ownership. It seems that such
+      practices can be successful if one is charming enough to dazzle one's own
+      wife permanently and brave enough to defy the vain terrors of public
+      opinion. The critical time came when the elder of the boys on attaining
+      his majority in the year 1811 asked for the accounts and some part at
+      least of the inheritance to begin life upon. It was then that the
+      stepfather declared with calm finality that there were no accounts to
+      render and no property to inherit. The whole fortune was his very own. He
+      was very good-natured about the young man's misapprehension of the true
+      state of affairs, but of course felt obliged to maintain his position
+      firmly. Old friends came and went busily, voluntary mediators appeared
+      travelling on most horrible roads from the most distant corners of the
+      three provinces; and the Marshal of the Nobility (ex-officio guardian of
+      all well-born orphans) called a meeting of landowners to &ldquo;ascertain in a
+      friendly way how the misunderstanding between X and his stepsons had
+      arisen and devise proper measures to remove the same.&rdquo; A deputation to
+      that effect visited X, who treated them to excellent wines, but absolutely
+      refused his ear to their remonstrances. As to the proposals for
+      arbitration he simply laughed at them; yet the whole province must have
+      been aware that fourteen years before, when he married the widow, all his
+      visible fortune consisted (apart from his social qualities) in a smart
+      four-horse turn-out with two servants, with whom he went about visiting
+      from house to house; and as to any funds he might have possessed at that
+      time their existence could only be inferred from the fact that he was very
+      punctual in settling his modest losses at cards. But by the magic power of
+      stubborn and constant assertion, there were found presently, here and
+      there, people who mumbled that surely &ldquo;there must be something in it.&rdquo;
+       However, on his next name-day (which he used to celebrate by a great
+      three-days' shooting-party), of all the invited crowd only two guests
+      turned up, distant neighbours of no importance; one notoriously a fool,
+      and the other a very pious and honest person but such a passionate lover
+      of the gun that on his own confession he could not have refused an
+      invitation to a shooting-party from the devil himself. X met this
+      manifestation of public opinion with the serenity of an unstained
+      conscience. He refused to be crushed. Yet he must have been a man of deep
+      feeling, because, when his wife took openly the part of her children, he
+      lost his beautiful tranquillity, proclaimed himself heart-broken and drove
+      her out of the house, neglecting in his grief to give her enough time to
+      pack her trunks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an abominable marvel of chicane,
+      which by the use of every legal subterfuge was made to last for many
+      years. It was also the occasion for a display of much kindness and
+      sympathy. All the neighbouring houses flew open for the reception of the
+      homeless. Neither legal aid nor material assistance in the prosecution of
+      the suit was ever wanting. X, on his side, went about shedding tears
+      publicly over his stepchildren's ingratitude and his wife's blind
+      infatuation; but as at the same time he displayed great cleverness in the
+      art of concealing material documents (he was even suspected of having
+      burnt a lot of historically interesting family papers), this scandalous
+      litigation had to be ended by a compromise lest worse should befall. It
+      was settled finally by a surrender, out of the disputed estate, in full
+      satisfaction of all claims, of two villages with the names of which I do
+      not intend to trouble my readers. After this lame and impotent conclusion
+      neither the wife nor the stepsons had anything to say to the man who had
+      presented the world with such a successful example of self-help based on
+      character, determination and industry; and my great-grandmother, her
+      health completely broken down, died a couple of years later in Carlsbad.
+      Legally secured by a decree in the possession of his plunder, X regained
+      his wonted serenity and went on living in the neighbourhood in a
+      comfortable style and in apparent peace of mind. His big shoots were
+      fairly well attended again. He was never tired of assuring people that he
+      bore no grudge for what was past; he protested loudly of his constant
+      affection for his wife and stepchildren. It was true he said that they had
+      tried their best to strip him as naked as a Turkish saint in the decline
+      of his days; and because he had defended himself from spoliation, as
+      anybody else in his place would have done, they had abandoned him now to
+      the horrors of a solitary old age. Nevertheless, his love for them
+      survived these cruel blows. And there might have been some truth in his
+      protestations. Very soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his
+      eldest stepson, my maternal grandfather; and when these were peremptorily
+      rejected he went on renewing them again and again with characteristic
+      obstinacy. For years he persisted in his efforts at reconciliation,
+      promising my grandfather to execute a will in his favour if he only would
+      be friends again to the extent of calling now and then (it was fairly
+      close neighbourhood for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of
+      putting in an appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My
+      grandfather was an ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as
+      free from hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the
+      liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the only public school of some
+      standing then in the south, he had also read deeply the authors of the
+      eighteenth century. In him Christian charity was joined to a philosophical
+      indulgence for the failings of human nature. But the memory of these
+      miserably anxious early years, his young man's years robbed of all
+      generous illusions by the cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the way
+      of forgiveness. He never succumbed to the fascination of the great shoot;
+      and X, his heart set to the last on reconciliation with the draft of the
+      will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died intestate. The fortune
+      thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful management passed to
+      some distant relatives whom he had never seen and who even did not bear
+      his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe. Mr. Nicholas
+      B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the &ldquo;fearless&rdquo; Austrian
+      officer, departed from Galicia, and without going near his native place,
+      where the odious lawsuit was still going on, proceeded straight to Warsaw
+      and entered the army of the newly constituted Polish kingdom under the
+      sceptre of Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgment to a
+      nation of its former independent existence, included only the central
+      provinces of the old Polish patrimony. A brother of the Emperor, the Grand
+      Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, married
+      morganatically to a Polish lady to whom he was fiercely attached, extended
+      this affection to what he called &ldquo;My Poles&rdquo; in a capricious and savage
+      manner. Sallow in complexion, with a Tartar physiognomy and fierce little
+      eyes, he walked with his fists clenched, his body bent forward, darting
+      suspicious glances from under an enormous cocked hat. His intelligence was
+      limited and his sanity itself was doubtful. The hereditary taint expressed
+      itself, in his case, not by mystic leanings as in his two brothers,
+      Alexander and Nicholas (in their various ways, for one was mystically
+      liberal and the other mystically autocratic), but by the fury of an
+      uncontrollable temper which generally broke out in disgusting abuse on the
+      parade ground. He was a passionate militarist and an amazing drill-master.
+      He treated his Polish Army as a spoiled child treats a favourite toy,
+      except that he did not take it to bed with him at night. It was not small
+      enough for that. But he played with it all day and every day, delighting
+      in the variety of pretty uniforms and in the fun of incessant drilling.
+      This childish passion, not for war but for mere militarism, achieved a
+      desirable result. The Polish Army, in its equipment, in its armament and
+      in its battlefield efficiency, as then understood, became, by the end of
+      the year 1830, a first-rate tactical instrument. Polish peasantry (not
+      serfs) served in the ranks by enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly
+      to the smaller nobility. Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had
+      no difficulty in obtaining a lieutenancy, but the promotion in the Polish
+      Army was slow, because, being a separate organisation, it took no part in
+      the wars of the Russian Empire against Persia or Turkey. Its first
+      campaign, against Russia itself, was to be its last. In 1831, on the
+      outbreak of the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas B. was the senior captain of his
+      regiment. Some time before he had been made head of the remount
+      establishment quartered outside the kingdom in our southern provinces,
+      whence almost all the horses for the Polish cavalry were drawn. For the
+      first time since he went away from home at the age of eighteen to begin
+      his military life by the battle of Friedland, Mr. Nicholas B. breathed the
+      air of the &ldquo;Border,&rdquo; his native air. Unkind fate was lying in wait for him
+      amongst the scenes of his youth. At the first news of the rising in Warsaw
+      all the remount establishment, officers, vets., and the very troopers,
+      were put promptly under arrest and hurried off in a body beyond the
+      Dnieper to the nearest town in Russia proper. From there they were
+      dispersed to the distant parts of the Empire. On this occasion poor Mr.
+      Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much farther than he ever did in the
+      times of Napoleonic invasion, if much less willingly. Astrakhan was his
+      destination. He remained there three years, allowed to live at large in
+      the town but having to report himself every day at noon to the military
+      commandant, who used to detain him frequently for a pipe and a chat. It is
+      difficult to form a just idea of what a chat with Mr. Nicholas B. could
+      have been like. There must have been much compressed rage under his
+      taciturnity, for the commandant communicated to him the news from the
+      theatre of war and this news was such as it could be, that is, very bad
+      for the Poles. Mr. Nicholas B. received these communications with outward
+      phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm sympathy for his prisoner. &ldquo;As a
+      soldier myself I understand your feelings. You, of course, would like to
+      be in the thick of it. By heavens! I am fond of you. If it were not for
+      the terms of the military oath I would let you go on my own
+      responsibility. What difference could it make to us, one more or less of
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At other times he wondered with simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch&rdquo;&mdash;(my great-grandfather's name was
+      Stephen and the commandant used the Russian form of polite address)&mdash;&ldquo;tell
+      me why is it that you Poles are always looking for trouble? What else
+      could you expect from running up against Russia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was capable, too, of philosophical reflections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at your Napoleon now. A great man. There is no denying it that he
+      was a great man as long as he was content to thrash those Germans and
+      Austrians and all those nations. But no! He must go to Russia looking for
+      trouble, and what's the consequence? Such as you see me, I have rattled
+      this sabre of mine on the pavements of Paris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B. described him as a &ldquo;worthy man
+      but stupid,&rdquo; whenever he could be induced to speak of the conditions of
+      his exile. Declining the option offered him to enter the Russian Army he
+      was retired with only half the pension of his rank. His nephew (my uncle
+      and guardian) told me that the first lasting impression on his memory as a
+      child of four was the glad excitement reigning in his parents' house on
+      the day when Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home from his detention in Russia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every generation has its memories. The first memories of Mr. Nicholas B.
+      might have been shaped by the events of the last partition of Poland, and
+      he lived long enough to suffer from the last armed rising in 1863, an
+      event which affected the future of all my generation and has coloured my
+      earliest impressions. His brother, in whose house he had sheltered for
+      some seventeen years his misanthropical timidity before the commonest
+      problems of life, having died in the early fifties, Mr. Nicholas B. had to
+      screw his courage up to the sticking-point and come to some decision as to
+      the future. After a long and agonising hesitation he was persuaded at last
+      to become the tenant of some fifteen hundred acres out of the estate of a
+      friend in the neighbourhood. The terms of the lease were very
+      advantageous, but the retired situation of the village and a plain
+      comfortable house in good repair were, I fancy, the greatest inducements.
+      He lived there quietly for about ten years, seeing very few people and
+      taking no part in the public life of the province, such as it could be
+      under an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny. His character and his patriotism
+      were above suspicion; but the organisers of the rising in their frequent
+      journeys up and down the province scrupulously avoided coming near his
+      house. It was generally felt that the repose of the old man's last years
+      ought not to be disturbed. Even such intimates as my paternal grandfather,
+      a comrade-in-arms during Napoleon's Moscow campaign and later on a
+      fellow-officer in the Polish Army, refrained from visiting his crony as
+      the date of the outbreak approached. My paternal grandfather's two sons
+      and his only daughter were all deeply involved in the revolutionary work;
+      he himself was of that type of Polish squire whose only ideal of patriotic
+      action was to &ldquo;get into the saddle and drive them out.&rdquo; But even he agreed
+      that &ldquo;dear Nicholas must not be worried.&rdquo; All this considerate caution on
+      the part of friends, both conspirators and others, did not prevent Mr.
+      Nicholas B. being made to feel the misfortunes of that ill-omened year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Less than forty-eight hours after the beginning of the rebellion in that
+      part of the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks passed through the
+      village and invaded the homestead. Most of them remained formed between
+      the house and the stables, while several, dismounting, ransacked the
+      various outbuildings. The officer in command, accompanied by two men,
+      walked up to the front door. All the blinds on that side were down. The
+      officer told the servant who received him that he wanted to see his
+      master. He was answered that the master was away from home, which was
+      perfectly true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I follow here the tale as told afterwards by the servant to my
+      grand-uncle's friends and relatives, and as I have heard it repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On receiving this answer the Cossack officer, who had been standing in the
+      porch, stepped into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the master gone, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our master went to J&mdash;&rdquo; (the government town some fifty miles off),
+      &ldquo;the day before yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are only two horses in the stables. Where are the others?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our master always travels with his own horses&rdquo; (meaning: not by post).
+      &ldquo;He will be away a week or more. He was pleased to mention to me that he
+      had to attend to some business in the Civil Court.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While the servant was speaking the officer looked about the hall. There
+      was a door facing him, a door to the right and a door to the left. The
+      officer chose to enter the room on the left and ordered the blinds to be
+      pulled up. It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s study with a couple of tall bookcases,
+      some pictures on the walls, and so on. Besides the big centre table, with
+      books and papers, there was a quite small writing-table with several
+      drawers, standing between the door and the window in a good light; and at
+      this table my grand-uncle usually sat either to read or write.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On pulling up the blind the servant was startled by the discovery that the
+      whole male population of the village was massed in front, trampling down
+      the flower-beds. There were also a few women amongst them. He was glad to
+      observe the village priest (of the Orthodox Church) coming up the drive.
+      The good man in his haste had tucked up his cassock as high as the top of
+      his boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the bookcases.
+      Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre-table and remarked
+      easily:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your master did not take you to town with him, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the head servant and he leaves me in charge of the house. It's a
+      strong, young chap that travels with our master. If&mdash;God forbid&mdash;there
+      was some accident on the road he would be of much more use than I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glancing through the window he saw the priest arguing vehemently in the
+      thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his interference. Three or
+      four men, however, were talking with the Cossacks at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't think your master has gone to join the rebels maybe&mdash;eh?&rdquo;
+       asked the officer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our master would be too old for that surely. He's well over seventy and
+      he's getting feeble too. It's some years now since he's been on horseback
+      and he can't walk much either now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The officer sat there swinging his leg, very quiet and indifferent. By
+      that time the peasants who had been talking with the Cossack troopers at
+      the door had been permitted to get into the hall. One or two more left the
+      crowd and followed them in. They were seven in all and amongst them the
+      blacksmith, an ex-soldier. The servant appealed deferentially to the
+      officer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to their
+      homes? What do they want to push themselves into the house like this for?
+      It's not proper for them to behave like this while our master's away and I
+      am responsible for everything here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any arms in the house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. We have. Some old things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring them all, here, on to this table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't your honour tell these chaps? . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the officer looked at him in silence in such a way that he gave it up
+      at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help him collect the
+      arms. Meantime the officer walked slowly through all the rooms in the
+      house, examining them attentively but touching nothing. The peasants in
+      the hall fell back and took off their caps when he passed through. He said
+      nothing whatever to them. When he came back to the study all the arms to
+      be found in the house were lying on the table. There was a pair of big
+      flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry swords, one
+      of the French the other of the Polish Army pattern, with a fowling-piece
+      or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords and guns, one
+      after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up. The peasants in the
+      hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen after him into the study. He
+      gave not the slightest sign of being conscious of their existence and, his
+      business being apparently concluded, strode out of the house without a
+      word. Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps and
+      began to smile at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cossacks rode away, passing through the yards of the home farm
+      straight into the fields. The priest, still arguing with the peasants,
+      moved gradually down the drive and his earnest eloquence was drawing the
+      silent mob after him, away from the house. This justice must be rendered
+      to the parish priests of the Greek Church that, strangers to the country
+      as they were (being all drawn from the interior of Russia), the majority
+      of them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the cause of
+      peace and humanity. True to the spirit of their calling, they tried to
+      soothe the passions of the excited peasantry and opposed rapine and
+      violence whenever they could, with all their might. And this conduct they
+      pursued against the express wishes of the authorities. Later on some of
+      them were made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed abruptly
+      to the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had got into
+      the house. What sort of conduct was that, he asked them, towards a man who
+      was only a tenant, had been invariably good and considerate to the
+      villagers for years; and only the other day had agreed to give up two
+      meadows for the use of the village herd? He reminded them, too, of Mr.
+      Nicholas B.'s devotion to the sick in the time of cholera. Every word of
+      this was true and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch their
+      heads and look irresolute. The speaker then pointed at the window,
+      exclaiming: &ldquo;Look! there's all your crowd going away quietly and you silly
+      chaps had better go after them and pray God to forgive you your evil
+      thoughts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This appeal was an unlucky inspiration. In crowding clumsily to the window
+      to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows overturned the
+      little writing-table. As it fell over a chink of loose coin was heard.
+      &ldquo;There's money in that thing,&rdquo; cried the blacksmith. In a moment the top
+      of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in a
+      drawer eighty half-imperials. Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia even at
+      that time; it put the peasants beside themselves. &ldquo;There must be more of
+      that in the house and we shall have it,&rdquo; yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith.
+      &ldquo;This is war time.&rdquo; The others were already shouting out of the window
+      urging the crowd to come back and help. The priest, abandoned suddenly at
+      the gate, flung his arms up and hurried away so as not to see what was
+      going to happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in the
+      house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that, as the
+      servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in
+      the whole house. They broke some very fine mirrors, all the windows and
+      every piece of glass and china. They threw the books and papers out on the
+      lawn and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing apparently.
+      Absolutely the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small
+      ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked bedroom
+      above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany and splintered boards which had
+      been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead. Detecting the servant in the act of
+      stealing away with a japanned tin box, they tore it from him, and because
+      he resisted they threw him out of the dining-room window. The house was on
+      one floor but raised well above the ground, and the fall was so serious
+      that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable-boy
+      ventured forth at dusk from their hiding-places and picked him up. By that
+      time the mob had departed carrying off the tin box, which they supposed to
+      be full of paper money. Some distance from the house in the middle of a
+      field they broke it open. They found inside documents engrossed on
+      parchment and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour and For Valour. At
+      the sight of these objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of
+      honour given only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what
+      they had done. They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed
+      hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down completely.
+      The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him much. While he
+      was still in bed from the shock the two crosses were found and returned to
+      him. It helped somewhat his slow convalescence, but the tin box and the
+      parchments, though searched for in all the ditches around, never turned up
+      again. He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent,
+      whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to the very
+      letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to recite, tears
+      standing in his eyes the while. Its terms haunted him apparently during
+      the last two years of his life to such an extent that he used to repeat
+      them to himself. This is confirmed by the remark made more than once by
+      his old servant to the more intimate friends. &ldquo;What makes my heart heavy
+      is to hear our master in his room at night walking up and down and praying
+      aloud in the French language.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been somewhat over a year afterwards that I saw Mr. Nicholas
+      B., or, more correctly, that he saw me, for the last time. It was, as I
+      have already said, at the time when my mother had a three months' leave
+      from exile, which she was spending in the house of her brother, and
+      friends and relations were coming from far and near to do her honour. It
+      is inconceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not have been of the number.
+      The little child a few months old he had taken up in his arms on the day
+      of his home-coming after years of war and exile was confessing her faith
+      in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn. I do not know
+      whether he was present on the very day of our departure. I have already
+      admitted that for me he is more especially the man who in his youth had
+      eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My
+      memory cannot place him in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek
+      white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid
+      figure militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on
+      earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of
+      his grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those
+      he had seen in the course of his taciturn life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The elongated,
+      bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-horses, standing before
+      the long front of the house with its eight columns, four on each side of
+      the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups of servants, a few
+      relations, one or two friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect
+      silence, on all the faces an air of sober concentration; my grandmother
+      all in black gazing stoically, my uncle giving his arm to my mother down
+      to the carriage in which I had been placed already; at the top of the
+      flight my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal
+      of red in it, and like a small princess attended by the women of her own
+      household: the head gourvernante, our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had
+      been for thirty years in the service of the B. family), the former nurse,
+      now outdoor attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate
+      expression, and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black
+      eyebrows meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown
+      paper. Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes
+      only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke
+      the silence with an appeal to me: &ldquo;N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri.&rdquo;
+       In three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only to
+      speak French but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent playmate.
+      In the distance, half way down to the great gates, a light, open trap,
+      harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn up on one side
+      with the police-captain of the district sitting in it, the vizor of his
+      flat cap with a red band pulled down over his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our going so
+      carefully. Without wishing to treat with levity the just timidities of
+      Imperialists all the world over, I may allow myself the reflection that a
+      woman, practically condemned by the doctors, and a small boy not quite six
+      years old could not be regarded as seriously dangerous even for the
+      largest of conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of
+      responsibilities. And this good man, I believe, did not think so either.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I learned afterwards why he was present on that day. I don't remember any
+      outward signs, but it seems that, about a month before, my mother became
+      so unwell that there was a doubt whether she could be made fit to travel
+      in the time. In this uncertainty the Governor-General in Kiev was
+      petitioned to grant her a fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's
+      house. No answer whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at dusk
+      the police-captain of the district drove up to the house and told my
+      uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak with the
+      master in private, at once. Very much impressed (he thought it was going
+      to be an arrest) the servant, &ldquo;more dead than alive with fright,&rdquo; as he
+      related afterwards, smuggled him through the big drawing-room, which was
+      dark (that room was not lighted every evening), on tiptoe, so as not to
+      attract the attention of the ladies in the house, and led him by way of
+      the orangery to my uncle's private apartments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my uncle's
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There. Pray read this. I have no business to show this paper to you. It
+      is wrong of me. But I can't either eat or sleep with such a job hanging
+      over me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That police-captain, a native of Great Russia, had been for many years
+      serving in the district.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My uncle unfolded and read the document. It was a service order issued
+      from the Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with the matter of the
+      petition and directing the police-captain to disregard all remonstrances
+      and explanations in regard to that illness either from medical men or
+      others, &ldquo;and if she has not left her brother's house&rdquo;&mdash;it went on to
+      say&mdash;&ldquo;on the morning of the day specified on her permit, you are to
+      despatch her at once under escort, direct&rdquo; (underlined) &ldquo;to the
+      prison-hospital in Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your sister goes away punctually on that
+      day. Don't give me this work to do with a woman&mdash;and with one of your
+      family too. I simply cannot bear to think of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was absolutely wringing his hands. My uncle looked at him in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you for this warning. I assure you that even if she were dying she
+      would be carried out to the carriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;indeed&mdash;and what difference would it make&mdash;travel to
+      Kiev or back to her husband. For she would have to go&mdash;death or no
+      death. And mind, Mr. B., I will be here on the day, not that I doubt your
+      promise, but because I must. I have got to. Duty. All the same my trade is
+      not fit for a dog since some of you Poles will persist in rebelling, and
+      all of you have got to suffer for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap pulled up
+      between the house and the great gates. I regret not being able to give up
+      his name to the scorn of all believers in the rights of conquest, as a
+      reprehensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial greatness. On the other hand,
+      I am in a position to state the name of the Governor-General who signed
+      the order with the marginal note &ldquo;to be carried out to the letter&rdquo; in his
+      own handwriting. The gentleman's name was Bezak. A high dignitary, an
+      energetic official, the idol for a time of the Russian Patriotic Press.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each generation has its memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It must not be supposed that in setting forth the memories of this
+      half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we met again at
+      dinner, I am losing sight of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly.&rdquo; Having confessed that my
+      first novel was begun in idleness&mdash;a holiday task&mdash;I think I
+      have also given the impression that it was a much-delayed book. It was
+      never dismissed from my mind, even when the hope of ever finishing it was
+      very faint. Many things came in its way: daily duties, new impressions,
+      old memories. It was not the outcome of a need&mdash;the famous need of
+      self-expression which artists find in their search for motives. The
+      necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity, a completely
+      masked and unaccountable phenomenon. Or perhaps some idle and frivolous
+      magician (there must be magicians in London) had cast a spell over me
+      through his parlour window as I explored the maze of streets east and west
+      in solitary leisurely walks without chart and compass. Till I began to
+      write that novel I had written nothing but letters and not very many
+      these. I never made a note of a fact, of an impression or of an anecdote
+      in my life. The conception of a planned book was entirely outside my
+      mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of being an author had
+      never turned up amongst these gracious imaginary existences one creates
+      fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and immobility of a
+      day-dream: yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday that from the moment
+      I had done blackening over the first manuscript page of &ldquo;Almayer's Folly&rdquo;
+       (it contained about two hundred words and this proportion of words to a
+      page has remained with me through the fifteen years of my writing life),
+      from the moment I had, in the simplicity of my heart and the amazing
+      ignorance of my mind, written that page the die was cast. Never had
+      Rubicon been more blindly forded, without invocation to the gods, without
+      fear of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That morning I got up from my breakfast, pushing the chair back, and rang
+      the bell violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely, or perhaps I
+      should say eagerly, I do not know. But manifestly it must have been a
+      special ring of the bell, a common sound made impressive, like the ringing
+      of a bell for the raising of the curtain upon a new scene. It was an
+      unusual thing for me to do. Generally, I dawdled over my breakfast and I
+      solemn took the trouble to ring the bell for the table to be cleared away;
+      but on that morning for some reason hidden in the general mysteriousness
+      of the event I did not dawdle. And yet I was not in a hurry. I pulled the
+      cord casually and while the faint tinkling somewhere down in the basement
+      went on, I charged my pipe in the usual way and I looked for the matchbox
+      with glances distraught indeed but exhibiting, I am ready to swear, no
+      signs of a fine frenzy. I was composed enough to perceive after some
+      considerable time the matchbox lying there on the mantelpiece right under
+      my nose. And all this was beautifully and safely usual. Before I had
+      thrown down the match my landlady's daughter appeared with her calm, pale
+      face and an inquisitive look, in the doorway. Of late it was the
+      landlady's daughter who answered my bell. I mention this little fact with
+      pride, because it proves that during the thirty or forty days of my
+      tenancy I had produced a favourable impression. For a fortnight past I had
+      been spared the unattractive sight of the domestic slave. The girls in
+      that Bessborough Gardens house were often changed, but whether short or
+      long, fair or dark, they were always untidy and particularly bedraggled as
+      if in a sordid version of the fairy tale the ashbin cat had been changed
+      into a maid. I was infinitely sensible of the privilege of being waited on
+      by my landlady's daughter. She was neat if anaemic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you please clear away all this at once?&rdquo; I addressed her in
+      convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting my pipe to
+      draw. This, I admit, was an unusual request. Generally on getting up from
+      breakfast I would sit down in the window with a book and let them clear
+      the table when they liked; but if you think that on that morning I was in
+      the least impatient, you are mistaken. I remember that I was perfectly
+      calm. As a matter of fact I was not at all certain that I wanted to write,
+      or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to write about. No, I was
+      not impatient. I lounged between the mantelpiece and the window, not even
+      consciously waiting for the table to be cleared. It was ten to one that
+      before my landlady's daughter was done I would pick up a book and sit down
+      with it all the morning in a spirit of enjoyable indolence. I affirm it
+      with assurance, and I don't even know now what were the books then lying
+      about the room. Whatever they were they were not the works of great
+      masters, where the secret of clear thought and exact expression can be
+      found. Since the age of five I have been a great reader, as is not perhaps
+      wonderful in a child who was never aware of learning to read. At ten years
+      of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in
+      Polish and in French, history, voyages, novels; I knew &ldquo;Gil Blas&rdquo; and &ldquo;Don
+      Quixote&rdquo; in abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets
+      and some French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before
+      I began to write myself. I believe it was a novel and it is quite possible
+      that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My
+      acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English
+      novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of
+      European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was
+      otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was
+      &ldquo;Nicholas Nickleby.&rdquo; It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could
+      chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that
+      language. As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned Squeers
+      it seemed as natural to them as their native speech. It was, I have no
+      doubt, an excellent translation. This must have been in the year '70. But
+      I really believe that I am wrong. That book was not my first introduction
+      to English literature. My first acquaintance was (or were) the &ldquo;Two
+      Gentlemen of Verona,&rdquo; and that in the very MS. of my father's translation.
+      It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been less than a year
+      after my mother's death, because I remember myself in the black blouse
+      with a white border of my heavy mourning. We were living together, quite
+      alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the town of T&mdash;. That
+      afternoon, instead of going out to play in the large yard which we shared
+      with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in which my father generally
+      wrote. What emboldened me to clamber into his chair I am sure I don't
+      know, but a couple of hours afterwards he discovered me kneeling in it
+      with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over the MS. of
+      loose pages. I was greatly confused, expecting to get into trouble. He
+      stood in the doorway looking at me with some surprise, but the only thing
+      he said after a moment of silence was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read the page aloud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with erasures and
+      corrections, and my father's handwriting was otherwise extremely legible.
+      When I got to the end he nodded and I flew out of doors thinking myself
+      lucky to have escaped reproof for that piece of impulsive audacity. I have
+      tried to discover since the reason of this mildness, and I imagine that
+      all unknown to myself I had earned, in my father's mind, the right to some
+      latitude in my relations with his writing-table. It was only a month
+      before, or perhaps it was only a week before, that I had read to him aloud
+      from beginning to end, and to his perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his
+      bed, not being very well at the time, the proofs of his translation of
+      Victor Hugo's &ldquo;Toilers of the Sea.&rdquo; Such was my title to consideration, I
+      believe, and also my first introduction to the sea in literature. If I do
+      not remember where, how and when I learned to read, I am not likely to
+      forget the process of being trained in the art of reading aloud. My poor
+      father, an admirable reader himself, was the most exacting of masters. I
+      reflect proudly that I must have read that page of &ldquo;Two Gentlemen of
+      Verona&rdquo; tolerably well at the age of eight. The next time I met them was
+      in a 5s. one-volume edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare,
+      read in Falmouth, at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment of
+      caulkers' mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship in dry dock.
+      We had run in, in a sinking condition and with the crew refusing duty
+      after a month of weary battling with the gales of the North Atlantic.
+      Books are an integral part of one's life and my Shakespearean associations
+      are with that first year of our bereavement, the last I spent with my
+      father in exile (he sent me away to Poland to my mother's brother directly
+      he could brace himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard
+      gales, the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water
+      and then by fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my writing
+      life began I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion that it might have
+      been one of Trollope's political novels. And I remember, too, the
+      character of the day. It was an autumn day with an opaline atmosphere, a
+      veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and flashes of red
+      sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the trees of the square
+      with all their leaves gone were like tracings of indian ink on a sheet of
+      tissue paper. It was one of those London days that have the charm of
+      mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness. The effect of opaline mist
+      was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on account of the nearness to
+      the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that day than
+      on any other day, except that I stood for a long time looking out of the
+      window after the landlady's daughter was gone with her spoil of cups and
+      saucers. I heard her put the tray down in the passage and finally shut the
+      door; and still I remained smoking with my back to the room. It is very
+      clear that I was in no haste to take the plunge into my writing life, if
+      as plunge this first attempt may be described. My whole being was steeped
+      deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the sea, the scene of
+      never-ending labour and of unceasing duty. For utter surrender to
+      indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that mood is on him, the
+      mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to the full. It seems to me that
+      I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an impression which is hardly
+      to be believed at this distance of years. What I am certain of is, that I
+      was very far from thinking of writing a story, though it is possible and
+      even likely that I was thinking of the man Almayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had seen him for the first time some four years before from the bridge
+      of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or
+      less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning and a slight mist, an
+      opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only without the fiery flicks on
+      roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun, promised to turn
+      presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small dug-out canoe on the river
+      there was nothing moving within sight. I had just come up yawning from my
+      cabin. The serang and the Malay crew were overhauling the cargo chains and
+      trying the winches; their voices sounded subdued on the deck below and
+      their movements were languid. That tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay
+      quartermaster, coming up to get something from the lockers on the bridge,
+      shivered visibly. The forests above and below and on the opposite bank
+      looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly
+      stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that
+      I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a patch of burnt grass, a
+      blurred shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of a house behind him, a low
+      house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves with a high-pitched roof of grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped upon the jetty. He was clad simply in flapping pyjamas of
+      cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals on a disagreeable
+      blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with short sleeves. His arms, bare
+      to the elbow, were crossed on his chest. His black hair looked as if it
+      had not been cut for a very long time and a curly wisp of it strayed
+      across his forehead. I had heard of him at Singapore; I had heard of him
+      on board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late at night; I had
+      heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of him in a place called
+      Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who described himself as the
+      manager of a coal-mine; which sounded civilised and progressive till you
+      heard that the mine could not be worked at present because it was haunted
+      by some particularly atrocious ghosts. I had heard of him in a place
+      called Dongola, in the Island of Celebes, when the Rajah of that
+      little-known seaport (you can get no anchorage there in less than fifteen
+      fathom, which is extremely inconvenient) came on board in a friendly way
+      with only two attendants, and drank bottle after bottle of soda-water on
+      the after-skylight with my good friend and commander, Captain C&mdash;. At
+      least I heard his name distinctly pronounced several times in a lot of
+      talk in Malay language. Oh yes, I heard it quite distinctly&mdash;Almayer,
+      Almayer&mdash;and saw Captain C&mdash; smile while the fat dingy Rajah
+      laughed audibly. To hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright is a rare experience
+      I can assure you. And I overhead more of Almayer's name amongst our deck
+      passengers (mostly wandering traders of good repute) as they sat all over
+      the ship&mdash;each man fenced round with bundles and boxes&mdash;on mats,
+      on pillows, on quilts, on billets of wood, conversing of Island affairs.
+      Upon my word, I heard the mutter of Almayer's name faintly at midnight,
+      while making my way aft from the bridge to look at the patent taffrail-log
+      tinkling its quarter-miles in the great silence of the sea. I don't mean
+      to say that our passengers dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is indubitable
+      that two of them at least, who could not sleep apparently and were trying
+      to charm away the trouble of insomnia by a little whispered talk at that
+      ghostly hour, were referring in some way or other to Almayer. It was
+      really impossible on board that ship to get away definitely from Almayer;
+      and a very small pony tied up forward and whisking its tail inside the
+      galley, to the great embarrassment of our Chinaman cook, was destined for
+      Almayer. What he wanted with a pony goodness only knows, since I am
+      perfectly certain he could not ride it; but here you have the man,
+      ambitious, aiming at the grandiose, importing a pony, whereas in the whole
+      settlement at which he used to shake daily his impotent fist, there was
+      only one path that was practicable for a pony: a quarter of a mile at
+      most, hedged in by hundreds of square leagues of virgin forest. But who
+      knows? The importation of that Bali Pony might have been part of some deep
+      scheme, of some diplomatic plan, of some hopeful intrigue. With Almayer
+      one could never tell. He governed his conduct by considerations removed
+      from the obvious, by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic
+      impenetrable to any reasonable person. I learned all this later. That
+      morning seeing the figure in pyjamas moving in the mist I said to myself:
+      &ldquo;That's the man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He came quite close to the ship's side and raised a harassed countenance,
+      round and flat, with that curl of black hair over the forehead and a
+      heavy, pained glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked hard at me: I was a new face, having just replaced the chief
+      mate he was accustomed to see; and I think that this novelty inspired him,
+      as things generally did, with deep-seated mistrust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't expect you in till this evening,&rdquo; he remarked suspiciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know why he should have been aggrieved, but he seemed to be. I
+      took pains to explain to him that having picked up the beacon at the mouth
+      of the river just before dark and the tide serving, Captain C&mdash; was
+      enabled to cross the bar and there was nothing to prevent him going up
+      river at night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Captain C&mdash; knows this river like his own pocket,&rdquo; I concluded
+      discursively, trying to get on terms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better,&rdquo; said Almayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaning over the rail of the bridge I looked at Almayer, who looked down
+      at the wharf in aggrieved thought. He shuffled his feet a little; he wore
+      straw slippers with thick soles. The morning fog had thickened
+      considerably. Everything round us dripped: the derricks, the rails, every
+      single rope in the ship&mdash;as if a fit of crying had come upon the
+      universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer again raised his head and in the accents of a man accustomed to
+      the buffets of evil fortune asked hardly audibly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a pony on board?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him almost in a whisper, for he attuned my communications to his
+      minor key, that we had such a thing as a pony, and I hinted, as gently as
+      I could, that he was confoundedly in the way too. I was very anxious to
+      have him landed before I began to handle the cargo. Almayer remained
+      looking up at me for a long while with incredulous and melancholy eyes as
+      though it were not a safe thing to believe my statement. This pathetic
+      mistrust in the favourable issue of any sort of affair touched me deeply,
+      and I added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't seem a bit the worse for the passage. He's a nice pony too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer was not to be cheered up; for all answer he cleared his throat and
+      looked down again at his feet. I tried to close with him on another tack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jove!&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Aren't you afraid of catching pneumonia or bronchitis
+      or something, walking about in a singlet in such a wet fog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not to be propitiated by a show of interest in his health. His
+      answer was a sinister &ldquo;No fear,&rdquo; as much as to say that even that way of
+      escape from inclement fortune was closed to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I just came down . . .&rdquo; he mumbled after a while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then, now you're here I will land that pony for you at once and you
+      can lead him home. I really don't want him on deck. He's in the way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer seemed doubtful. I insisted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I will just swing him out and land him on the wharf right in front
+      of you. I'd much rather do it before the hatches are off. The little devil
+      may jump down the hold or do some other deadly thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a halter?&rdquo; postulated Almayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, of course there's a halter.&rdquo; And without waiting any more I leaned
+      over the bridge rail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cook hastened to shut the door of the galley and a moment later a
+      great scuffle began on deck. The pony kicked with extreme energy, the
+      kalashes skipped out of the way, the serang issued many orders in a
+      cracked voice. Suddenly the pony leaped upon the fore-hatch. His little
+      hoofs thundered tremendously; he plunged and reared. He had tossed his
+      mane and his forelock into a state of amazing wildness, he dilated his
+      nostrils, bits of foam flecked his broad little chest, his eyes blazed. He
+      was something under eleven hands; he was fierce, terrible, angry, warlike,
+      he said ha! ha! distinctly, he raged and thumped&mdash;and sixteen
+      able-bodied kalashes stood round him like disconcerted nurses round a
+      spoilt and passionate child. He whisked his tail incessantly; he arched
+      his pretty neck; he was perfectly delightful; he was charmingly naughty.
+      There was not an atom of vice in that performance; no savage baring of
+      teeth and lying back of ears. On the contrary, he pricked them forward in
+      a comically aggressive manner. He was totally unmoral and lovable; I would
+      have liked to give him bread, sugar, carrots. But life is a stern thing
+      and the sense of duty the only safe guide. So I steeled my heart and from
+      my elevated position on the bridge I ordered the men to fling themselves
+      upon him in a body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elderly serang, emitting a strange inarticulate cry, gave the example.
+      He was an excellent petty officer&mdash;very competent indeed, and a
+      moderate opium smoker. The rest of them in one great rush smothered that
+      pony. They hung on to his ears, to his mane, to his tail; they lay in
+      piles across his back, seventeen in all. The carpenter, seizing the hook
+      of the cargo-chain, flung himself on top of them. A very satisfactory
+      petty officer too, but he stuttered. Have you ever heard a light-yellow,
+      lean, sad, earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English? It's very weird
+      indeed. He made the eighteenth. I could not see the pony at all; but from
+      the swaying and heaving of that heap of men I knew that there was
+      something alive inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the wharf Almayer hailed in quavering tones:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I say!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Where he stood he could not see what was going on on deck unless perhaps
+      the tops of the men's heads; he could only hear the scuffle, the mighty
+      thuds, as if the ship were being knocked to pieces. I looked over: &ldquo;What
+      is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let them break his legs,&rdquo; he entreated me plaintively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, nonsense! He's all right now. He can't move.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By that time the cargo-chain had been hooked to the broad canvas belt
+      round the pony's body, the kalashes sprang off simultaneously in all
+      directions, rolling over each other, and the worthy serang, making a dash
+      behind the winch, turned the steam on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Steady!&rdquo; I yelled, in great apprehension of seeing the animal snatched up
+      to the very head of the derrick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw slippers uneasily. The rattle of
+      the winch stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence that pony began to
+      swing across the deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How limp he was! Directly he felt himself in the air he relaxed every
+      muscle in a most wonderful manner. His four hoofs knocked together in a
+      bunch, his head hung down, and his tail remained pendent in a nerveless
+      and absolute immobility. He reminded me vividly of the pathetic little
+      sheep which hangs on the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece. I had
+      no idea that anything in the shape of a horse could be so limp as that,
+      either living or dead. His wild mane hung down lumpily, a mere mass of
+      inanimate horsehair; his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went
+      swaying slowly across the front of the bridge I noticed an astute gleam in
+      his dreamy, half-closed eye. A trustworthy quartermaster, his glance
+      anxious and his mouth on the broad grin, was easing over the derrick
+      watchfully. I superintended, greatly interested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So! That will do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The derrick-head stopped. The kalashes lined the rail. The rope of the
+      halter hung perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull in front of
+      Almayer. Everything was very still. I suggested amicably that he should
+      catch hold of the rope and mind what he was about. He extended a
+      provokingly casual and superior hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look out then! Lower away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently enough, but when the pony's
+      hoofs touched the wharf he gave way all at once to a most foolish
+      optimism. Without pausing, without thinking, almost without looking, he
+      disengaged the hook suddenly from the sling, and the cargo-chain, after
+      hitting the pony's quarters, swung back against the ship's side with a
+      noisy, rattling slap. I suppose I must have blinked. I know I missed
+      something, because the next thing I saw was Almayer lying flat on his back
+      on the jetty. He was alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Astonishment deprived me of speech long enough to give Almayer time to
+      pick himself up in a leisurely and painful manner. The kalashes lining the
+      rail had all their mouths open. The mist flew in the light breeze, and it
+      had come over quite thick enough to hide the shore completely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How on earth did you manage to let him get away?&rdquo; I asked scandalised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer looked into the smarting palm of his right hand, but did not
+      answer my inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you think he will get to?&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;Are there any fences
+      anywhere in this fog? Can he bolt into the forest? What's to be done now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of my men are sure to be about. They will get hold of him sooner or
+      later.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sooner or later! That's all very fine, but what about my canvas sling&mdash;he's
+      carried it off. I want it now, at once, to land two Celebes cows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Since Dongola we had on board a pair of the pretty little island cattle in
+      addition to the pony. Tied up on the other side of the fore deck they had
+      been whisking their tails into the other door of the galley. These cows
+      were not for Almayer, however; they were invoiced to Abdullah bin Selim,
+      his enemy. Almayer's disregard of my requisites was complete.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were you I would try to find out where he's gone,&rdquo; I insisted.
+      &ldquo;Hadn't you better call your men together or something? He will throw
+      himself down and cut his knees. He may even break a leg, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, did not seem to want that pony
+      any more. Amazed at this sudden indifference I turned all hands out on
+      shore to hunt for him on my own account, or, at any rate, to hunt for the
+      canvas sling which he had round his body. The whole crew of the steamer,
+      with the exception of firemen and engineers, rushed up the jetty past the
+      thoughtful Almayer and vanished from my sight. The white fog swallowed
+      them up; and again there was a deep silence that seemed to extend for
+      miles up and down the stream. Still taciturn, Almayer started to climb on
+      board, and I went down from the bridge to meet him on the after deck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you mind telling the captain that I want to see him very
+      particularly?&rdquo; he asked me in a low tone, letting his eyes stray all over
+      the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. I will go and see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the door of his cabin wide open Captain C&mdash;, just back from the
+      bathroom, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick, damp, iron-grey
+      hair with two large brushes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see you very particularly, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Saying these words I smiled. I don't know why I smiled except that it
+      seemed absolutely impossible to mention Almayer's name without a smile of
+      a sort. It had not to be necessarily a mirthful smile. Turning his head
+      towards me Captain C&mdash; smiled too, rather joylessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pony got away from him&mdash;eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes sir. He did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Goodness only knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I mean Almayer. Let him come along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain's stateroom opening straight on deck under the bridge, I had
+      only to beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who had remained aft, with
+      downcast eyes, on the very spot where I had left him. He strolled up
+      moodily, shook hands and at once asked permission to shut the cabin door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a pretty story to tell you,&rdquo; were the last words I heard. The
+      bitterness of tone was remarkable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went away from the door, of course. For the moment I had no crew on
+      board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag hung round his neck
+      and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the empty decks knocking out the
+      wedges of the hatches and dropping them into the bag conscientiously.
+      Having nothing to do I joined our two engineers at the door of the
+      engine-room. It was near breakfast time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's turned up early, hasn't he?&rdquo; commented the second engineer, and
+      smiled indifferently. He was an abstemious man with a good digestion and a
+      placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Shut up with the old man. Some very particular business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will spin him a damned endless yarn,&rdquo; observed the chief engineer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic and suffered from gnawing hunger
+      in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two vertical
+      folds on his shaven cheeks. And I smiled too, but I was not exactly
+      amused. In that man, whose name apparently could not be uttered anywhere
+      in the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing amusing
+      whatever. That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking mostly
+      into his cup. I informed him that my men came upon his pony capering in
+      the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which he kept his
+      store of guttah. The cover was off with no one near by, and the whole of
+      my crew just missed going heels over head into that beastly hole. Jurumudi
+      Itam, our best quartermaster, deft at fine needlework, he who mended the
+      ship's flags and sewed buttons on our coats, was disabled by a kick on the
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer's character. He
+      mumbled:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean that pirate fellow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What pirate fellow? The man has been in the ship eleven years,&rdquo; I said
+      indignantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's his looks,&rdquo; Almayer muttered for all apology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun had eaten up the fog. From where we sat under the after awning we
+      could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of Almayer's house, to
+      a post of the verandah. We were silent for a long time. All at once
+      Almayer, alluding evidently to the subject of his conversation in the
+      captain's cabin, exclaimed anxiously across the table:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know what I can do now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain C&mdash; only raised his eyebrows at him, and got up from his
+      chair. We dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half dressed as he was in
+      his cretonne pyjamas and the thin cotton singlet, remained on board,
+      lingering near the gangway as though he could not make up his mind whether
+      to go home or stay with us for good. Our Chinamen boys gave him side
+      glances as they went to and fro; and Ah Sing, our young chief steward, the
+      handsomest and most sympathetic of Chinamen, catching my eye, nodded
+      knowingly at his burly back. In the course of the morning I approached him
+      for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mr. Almayer,&rdquo; I addressed him easily, &ldquo;you haven't started on your
+      letters yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We had brought him his mail and he had held the bundle in his hand ever
+      since we got up from breakfast. He glanced at it when I spoke and, for a
+      moment, it looked as if he were on the point of opening his fingers and
+      letting the whole lot fall overboard. I believe he was tempted to do so. I
+      shall never forget that man afraid of his letters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been long out from Europe?&rdquo; he asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not very. Not quite eight months,&rdquo; I told him. &ldquo;I left a ship in Samarang
+      with a hurt back and have been in the hospital in Singapore some weeks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trade is very bad here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hopeless! . . . See these geese?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what resembled a
+      patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant part of his
+      compound. It disappeared behind some bushes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The only geese on the East Coast,&rdquo; Almayer informed me in a perfunctory
+      mutter without a spark of faith, hope or pride. Thereupon, with the same
+      absence of any sort of sustaining spirit he declared his intention to
+      silence a fat bird and send him on board for us not later than next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as if it were
+      a sort of Court decoration given only to the tried friends of the house. I
+      had expected more pomp in the ceremony. The gift had surely its special
+      quality, multiple and rare. From the only flock on the East Coast! He did
+      not make half enough of it. That man did not understand his opportunities.
+      However, I thanked him at some length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he interrupted abruptly in a very peculiar tone, &ldquo;the worst of
+      this country is that one is not able to realise . . . it's impossible to
+      realise . . .&rdquo; His voice sank into a languid mutter. &ldquo;And when one has
+      very large interests . . . very important interests . . .&rdquo; he finished
+      faintly . . . &ldquo;up the river.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We looked at each other. He astonished me by giving a start and making a
+      very queer grimace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I must be off,&rdquo; he burst out hurriedly. &ldquo;So long!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of stepping over the gangway he checked himself though, to
+      give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that evening with my
+      captain, an invitation which I accepted. I don't think it could have been
+      possible for me to refuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of free will
+      &ldquo;at any rate for practical purposes.&rdquo; Free, is it? For practical purposes!
+      Bosh! How could I have refused to dine with that man? I did not refuse
+      simply because I could not refuse. Curiosity, a healthy desire for a
+      change of cooking, common civility, the talk and the smiles of the
+      previous twenty days, every condition of my existence at that moment and
+      place made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all that, there was
+      the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want of foreknowledge to
+      counter-balance these imperative conditions of the problem. A refusal
+      would have appeared perverse and insane. Nobody unless a surly lunatic
+      would have refused. But if I had not got to know Almayer pretty well it is
+      almost certain there would never have been a line of mine in print.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I accepted then&mdash;and I am paying yet the price of my sanity. The
+      possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is responsible for
+      the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far. The number of geese he had
+      called into being under adverse climatic conditions was considerably more
+      than fourteen. The tale of volumes will never overtake the counting of
+      heads, I am safe to say; but my ambitions point not exactly that way, and
+      whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me I have always thought
+      kindly of Almayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would have been?
+      This is something not to be discovered in this world. But if we ever meet
+      in the Elysian Fields&mdash;where I cannot depict him to myself otherwise
+      than attended in the distance by his flock of geese (birds sacred to
+      Jupiter)&mdash;and he addresses me in the stillness of that passionless
+      region, neither light nor darkness, neither sound nor silence, and heaving
+      endlessly with billowy mists from the impalpable multitudes of the
+      swarming dead, I think I know what answer to make.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone of his
+      measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of course, the solemn
+      eternity of stillness in the least&mdash;I would say something like this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted your name
+      to my own uses. But that is a very small larceny. What's in a name, O
+      Shade? If so much of your old mortal weakness clings to you yet as to make
+      you feel aggrieved (it was the note of your earthly voice, Almayer), then,
+      I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade&mdash;with
+      him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of
+      the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped of all prestige by
+      men's queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader
+      in the Islands. Your name was the common property of the winds: it, as it
+      were, floated naked over the waters about the Equator. I wrapped round its
+      unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics and have essayed to put
+      into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity&mdash;feats which you
+      did not demand from me&mdash;but remember that all the toil and all the
+      pain were mine. In your earthly life you haunted me, Almayer. Consider
+      that this was taking a great liberty. Since you were always complaining of
+      being lost to the world, you should remember that if I had not believed
+      enough in your existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens,
+      you would have been much more lost. You affirm that had I been capable of
+      looking at you with a more perfect detachment and a greater simplicity, I
+      might have perceived better the inward marvellousness which, you insist,
+      attended your career upon that tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible
+      far, far below us, where both our graves lie. No doubt! But reflect, O
+      complaining Shade! that this was not so much my fault as your crowning
+      misfortune. I believed in you in the only way it was possible for me to
+      believe. It was not worthy of your merits? So be it. But you were always
+      an unlucky man, Almayer. Nothing was ever quite worthy of you. What made
+      you so real to me was that you held this lofty theory with some force of
+      conviction and with an admirable consistency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy expressions
+      that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian Abode of Shades,
+      since it has come to pass that having parted many years ago, we are never
+      to meet again in this world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that
+      literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the
+      coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event. In
+      my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological cause
+      which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts being a
+      consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a
+      rational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen at any rate was there, and
+      there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps a pen (the cold steel
+      of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of penny stamps and
+      halfpenny postcards. In fact, this was the epoch when by means of postcard
+      and pen Mr. Gladstone had made the reputation of a novel or two. And I too
+      had a pen rolling about somewhere&mdash;the seldom-used, the
+      reluctantly-taken-up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried
+      ink of abandoned attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency
+      permitted, of letters begun with infinite reluctance and put off suddenly
+      till next day&mdash;tell next week as likely as not! The neglected,
+      uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and under the
+      stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm, in a perfunctory,
+      grumpy worry, in the &ldquo;Where the devil is the beastly thing gone to?&rdquo;
+       ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It might have been reposing behind the
+      sofa for a day or so. My landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would
+      have expressed it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner
+      of approaching her domestic duties. Or it might even be resting delicately
+      poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and when picked up show
+      a gaping, inefficient beak which would have discouraged any man of
+      literary instincts. But not me! &ldquo;Never mind. This will do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      O days without guile! If anybody had told me then that a devoted
+      household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
+      importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss I
+      would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my sacrosanct
+      pen of authorship, I would have never deigned as much as the contemptuous
+      smile of unbelief. There are imaginings too unlikely for any kind of
+      notice, too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile. Perhaps,
+      had that seer of the future been a friend, I should have been secretly
+      saddened. &ldquo;Alas!&rdquo; I would have thought, looking at him with an unmoved
+      face, &ldquo;the poor fellow is going mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world where the
+      journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of heaven itself,
+      blowing where it listeth, does so under the prophetical management of the
+      Meteorological Office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot be
+      captured either by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely that
+      the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than
+      that I should turn into a writer of tales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating
+      pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied, the
+      subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of unseen
+      forces, that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking here of
+      megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit&mdash;who
+      really never rest in this world, and when out of it go on fretting and
+      fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last habitation, where all
+      men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I thinking of those ambitious
+      minds who, always looking forward to some aim of aggrandisement, can spare
+      no time for a detached, impersonal glance upon themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that's a pity. They are unlucky. These two kinds, together with the
+      much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate beings
+      in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has put it)
+      &ldquo;the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness,&rdquo; miss, perhaps, the
+      true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the abode of
+      conflicting opinions. The ethical view of the universe involves us at last
+      in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of
+      faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish,
+      that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at
+      all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a
+      spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view&mdash;and
+      in this view alone&mdash;never for despair! Those visions, delicious or
+      poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair&mdash;the
+      laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high
+      tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind&mdash;that's
+      our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of
+      the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed
+      task on this earth. A task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us
+      except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony
+      to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion and the
+      illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the
+      sublime spectacle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chi lo sa? It may be true. In this view there is room for every religion
+      except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and cloak of arid
+      despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every fair dream, for every
+      charitable hope. The great aim is to remain true to the emotions called
+      out of the deep encircled by the firmament of stars, whose infinite
+      numbers and awful distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the
+      Walrus or the Carpenter, in the poem, who &ldquo;wept to see such quantities of
+      sand&rdquo;?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter nothing at
+      all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem full of
+      merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a purely spectacular
+      universe, where inspiration of every sort has a rational existence, the
+      artist of every kind finds a natural place; and amongst them the poet as
+      the seer par excellence. Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble
+      and more toilsome task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy
+      of a place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps laughter
+      out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry. Yes! Even he, the prose
+      artist of fiction, which after all is but truth often dragged out of a
+      well and clothed in the painted robe of imaged phrases&mdash;even he has
+      his place amongst kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes,
+      Cabinet Ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
+      Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and
+      constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
+      itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a subtle
+      expression, as if the cat were out of the bag. I take the novelist's
+      freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the exclamation, &ldquo;That's
+      it! The fellow talks pro domo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed it was not the intention! When I shouldered the bag I was not aware
+      of the cat inside. But, after all, why not? The fair courtyards of the
+      House of Art are thronged by many humble retainers. And there is no
+      retainer so devoted as he who is allowed to sit on the doorstep. The
+      fellows who have got inside are apt to think too much of themselves. This
+      last remark, I beg to state, is not malicious within the definition of the
+      law of libel. It's fair comment on a matter of public interest. But never
+      mind. Pro domo. So be it. For his house tant que vous voudrez. And yet in
+      truth I was by no means anxious to justify my existence. The attempt would
+      have been not only needless and absurd, but almost inconceivable, in a
+      purely spectacular universe, where no such disagreeable necessity can
+      possibly arise. It is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at some
+      length in these pages): &ldquo;J'ai vecu.&rdquo; I have existed, obscure amongst the
+      wonders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe Sieyes, the original utterer
+      of the quoted words, had managed to exist through the violences, the
+      crimes, and the enthusiasms of the French Revolution. &ldquo;J'ai vecu&rdquo;, as I
+      apprehend most of us manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms
+      of destruction by a hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear, and
+      perhaps my soul also, but not without some damage here and there to the
+      fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the
+      group, of the family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the words, the
+      looks, the acts, and even by the silences and abstentions surrounding
+      one's childhood; tinged in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude
+      colours by the inherited traditions, beliefs, or prejudices&mdash;unaccountable,
+      despotic, persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And often romantic! . . . The matter in hand, however, is to keep these
+      reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary activity
+      discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme
+      thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence; for
+      that such was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, visible to an
+      unprejudiced eye. But then, you see, the man was not a writer of fiction.
+      He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his
+      anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of the
+      French Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but a great
+      outburst of morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of
+      &ldquo;Emile&rdquo; will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is the exact
+      understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time to the play
+      of his invention. Inspiration comes from the earth, which has a past, a
+      history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven. A writer of
+      imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist) stands
+      confessed in his works. His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful
+      and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world. Indeed, every one
+      who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers (unless a moralist,
+      who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the one he is at pains
+      to produce for the use of others) can speak of nothing else. It is M.
+      Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of French prose writers, who
+      says that we must recognise at last that, &ldquo;failing the resolution to hold
+      our peace, we can only talk of ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring
+      match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules of
+      literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the memorable
+      saying, &ldquo;The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul
+      amongst masterpieces,&rdquo; M. Anatole France maintained that there were no
+      rules and no principles. And that may be very true. Rules, principles and
+      standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all dead and vanished
+      by this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free days of destroyed
+      landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the forms of the
+      new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up presently in
+      the old places. But what is interesting to a writer is the possession of
+      an inward certitude that literary criticism will never die, for man (so
+      variously defined) is, before everything else, a critical animal. And, as
+      long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit of high
+      adventure, literary criticism shall appeal to us with all the charm and
+      wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task, any
+      task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
+      But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an adventurous spirit.
+      They take risks, of course&mdash;one can hardly live without that. The
+      daily bread is served out to us (however sparingly) with a pinch of salt.
+      Otherwise one would get sick of the diet one prays for, and that would be
+      not only improper, but impious. From impiety of that or any other kind&mdash;save
+      us! An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense of proprieties,
+      from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness, induces, I
+      suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the adventurous side of
+      their calling, and then the criticism becomes a mere &ldquo;notice,&rdquo; as it were
+      the relation of a journey where nothing but the distances and the geology
+      of a new country should be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the
+      dangers of flood and field, the hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings
+      (oh, the sufferings too! I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the
+      traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful plant being
+      ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance looks like a mere
+      feat of agility on the part of a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel
+      spectacle&mdash;a most deplorable adventure. &ldquo;Life,&rdquo; in the words of an
+      immortal thinker of, I should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable
+      name is lost to the worship of posterity&mdash;&ldquo;life is not all beer and
+      skittles.&rdquo; Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't really. Je vous
+      donne ma parole d'honneur that it&mdash;is&mdash;not. Not all. I am thus
+      emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a general. .
+      .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then to
+      hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle Ages, to lonely
+      sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations of the world's
+      superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their own
+      bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance,
+      let us say, or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the
+      flute. And thus this general's daughter came to me&mdash;or I should say
+      one of the general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor
+      ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring farmhouse in a
+      united and more or less military occupation. The eldest warred against the
+      decay of manners in the village children, and executed frontal attacks
+      upon the village mothers for the conquest of curtseys. It sounds futile,
+      but it was really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all
+      over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance right to
+      my very table&mdash;I mean the one who wore stand-up collars. She was
+      really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of afternoon friendliness,
+      but with her usual martial determination. She marched into my room
+      swinging her stick . . . but no&mdash;I mustn't exaggerate. It is not my
+      speciality. I am not a humoristic writer. In all soberness, then, all I am
+      certain of is that she had a stick to swing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the door too
+      stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm, still sunshine of the
+      wide fields. They lay around me infinitely helpful, but truth to say I had
+      not known for weeks whether the sun shone upon the earth and whether the
+      stars above still moved on their appointed courses. I was just then giving
+      up some days of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel
+      &ldquo;Nostromo,&rdquo; a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still
+      mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in connection with
+      the word &ldquo;failure&rdquo; and sometimes in conjunction with the word
+      &ldquo;astonishing.&rdquo; I have no opinion on this discrepancy. It's the sort of
+      difference that can never be settled. All I know is that, for twenty
+      months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the
+      humblest on this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, &ldquo;wrestled with the
+      Lord&rdquo; for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of
+      the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the sky, and for
+      the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women,
+      of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are, perhaps, strong words,
+      but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain
+      of a creative effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to
+      the full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the
+      exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle&mdash;something
+      for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre
+      stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn. For that too is the
+      wrestling of men with the might of their Creator, in a great isolation
+      from the world, without the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely
+      struggle under a sense of over-matched littleness, for no reward that
+      could be adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain
+      longitude, once won, cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars and the
+      shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain; whereas a handful of
+      pages, no matter how much you have made them your own, are at best but an
+      obscure and questionable spoil. Here they are. &ldquo;Failure&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Astonishing&rdquo;:
+      take your choice; or perhaps both, or neither&mdash;a mere rustle and
+      flutter of pieces of paper settling down in the night, and
+      undistinguishable, like the snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt
+      away in the sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard nothing&mdash;no
+      rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of
+      premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence&mdash;just
+      that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and
+      the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height&mdash;a fall, let us
+      say, from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the
+      fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself
+      up quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair stunned
+      and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of
+      one world and flung down into another&mdash;perfectly civil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true
+      reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la Jean
+      Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start
+      upsetting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow
+      myself to hint in any other way at the appalling magnitude of the
+      disaster. The whole world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of
+      my seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo
+      (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had
+      not placed in position with my own hands); all the history, geography,
+      politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine, and the
+      splendour of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name, cried out
+      in the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over his head&mdash;in Linda
+      Viola's voice), dominated even after death the dark gulf containing his
+      conquests of treasure and love&mdash;all that had come down crashing about
+      my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces&mdash;and in that very
+      moment I was saying, &ldquo;Won't you sit down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck training even in
+      a merchant ship will do! This episode should give you a new view of the
+      English and Scots seamen (a much-caricatured folk) who had the last say in
+      the formation of my character. One is nothing if not modest, but in this
+      disaster I think I have done some honour to their simple teaching. &ldquo;Won't
+      you sit down?&rdquo; Very fair; very fair indeed. She sat down. Her amused
+      glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of MS. on the table and
+      under the table, a batch of typed copy on a chair, single leaves had
+      fluttered away into distant corners; there were there living pages, pages
+      scored and wounded, dead pages that would be burnt at the end of the day&mdash;the
+      litter of a cruel battlefield, of a long, long and desperate fray. Long! I
+      suppose I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of times. Yes,
+      I suppose I slept, and ate the food put before me, and talked connectedly
+      to my household on suitable occasions. But I had never been aware of the
+      even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent,
+      watchful, tireless affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been
+      sitting at that table surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for
+      days and nights on end. It seemed so, because of the intense weariness of
+      which that interruption had made me aware&mdash;the awful disenchantment
+      of a mind realising suddenly the futility of an enormous task, joined to a
+      bodily fatigue such as no ordinary amount of fairly heavy physical labour
+      could ever account for. I have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent
+      almost double under a ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six
+      in the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to
+      know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concerned for the
+      dignity and comeliness of their service. I was, most likely, the only
+      writer that neat lady had ever caught in the exercise of his craft, and it
+      distressed me not to be able to remember when it was that I dressed myself
+      last, and how. No doubt that would be all right in essentials. The fortune
+      of the house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes that would see to
+      that. But I felt somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero after a day's
+      fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and dishevelled down to my very
+      heels. And I am afraid I blinked stupidly. All this was bad for the honour
+      of letters and the dignity of their service. Seen indistinctly through the
+      dust of my collapsed universe, the good lady glanced about the room with a
+      slightly amused serenity. And she was smiling. What on earth was she
+      smiling at? She remarked casually:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid I interrupted you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was strictly true.
+      Interrupted&mdash;indeed! She had robbed me of at least twenty lives, each
+      infinitely more poignant and real than her own, because informed with
+      passion, possessed of convictions, involved in great affairs created out
+      of my own substance for an anxiously meditated end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all round at
+      the litter of the fray:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you sit like this here writing your&mdash;your . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;what? Oh, yes, I sit here all day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must be perfectly delightful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on the verge
+      of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the porch, and my boy's
+      dog, patrolling the field in front, had espied him from afar. He came on
+      straight and swift like a cannon-ball, and the noise of the fight, which
+      burst suddenly upon our ears, was more than enough to scare away a fit of
+      apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated the gallant animals.
+      Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife&mdash;just round
+      the corner, under the trees. She nodded and went off with her dog, leaving
+      me appalled before the death and devastation she had lightly made&mdash;and
+      with the awfully instructive sound of the word &ldquo;delightful&rdquo; lingering in
+      my ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate. I wanted to
+      be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere novel that one should
+      be rude to a lady on their account?), but mainly, to adopt the good sound
+      Ollendorffian style, because I did not want the dog of the general's
+      daughter to fight again (encore) with the faithful dog of my infant son
+      (mon petit garcon).&mdash;Was I afraid that the dog of the general's
+      daughter would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my child?&mdash;No,
+      I was not afraid. . . . But away with the Ollendorff method. However
+      appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything
+      appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin, character
+      and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the child from a man
+      for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian value, a man almost
+      childlike in the impulsive movements of his untutored genius, the most
+      single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of straight
+      feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong if,
+      perhaps, not fully conscious conviction. His art did not obtain, I fear,
+      all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am alluding to
+      the late Stephen Crane, the author of &ldquo;The Red Badge of Courage,&rdquo; a work
+      of imagination which found its short moment of celebrity in the last
+      decade of the departed century. Other books followed. Not many. He had not
+      the time. It was an individual and complete talent, which obtained but a
+      grudging, somewhat supercilious recognition from the world at large. For
+      himself one hesitates to regret his early death. Like one of the men in
+      his &ldquo;Open Boat,&rdquo; one felt that he was of those whom fate seldom allows to
+      make a safe landing after much toil and bitterness at the oar. I confess
+      to an abiding affection for that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely
+      living and transient figure. He liked me even before we met on the
+      strength of a page or two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to
+      think he liked me still. He used to point out to me with great
+      earnestness, and even with some severity, that &ldquo;a boy ought to have a
+      dog.&rdquo; I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect of parental duties.
+      Ultimately it was he who provided the dog. Shortly afterwards, one day,
+      after playing with the child on the rug for an hour or so with the most
+      intense absorption, he raised his head and declared firmly: &ldquo;I shall teach
+      your boy to ride.&rdquo; That was not to be. He was not given the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here is the dog&mdash;an old dog now. Broad and low on his bandy paws,
+      with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black spot at the other
+      end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad, smiles not altogether
+      unkind. Grotesque and engaging in the whole of his appearance, his usual
+      attitudes are meek, but his temperament discloses itself unexpectedly
+      pugnacious in the presence of his kind. As he lies in the firelight, his
+      head well up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed at the shadows of the
+      room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in the calm consciousness of
+      an unstained life. He has brought up one baby, and now, after seeing his
+      first charge off to school, he is bringing up another with the same
+      conscientious devotion, but with a more deliberate gravity of manner, the
+      sign of greater wisdom and riper experience, but also of rheumatism, I
+      fear. From the morning bath to the evening ceremonies of the cot you
+      attend, old friend, the little two-legged creature of your adoption, being
+      yourself treated in the exercise of your duties with every possible
+      regard, with infinite consideration, by every person in the house&mdash;even
+      as I myself am treated; only you deserve it more. The general's daughter
+      would tell you that it must be &ldquo;perfectly delightful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Aha! old dog. She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it's that poor
+      left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you preserve a rigid
+      immobility for fear of overturning the little two-legged creature. She has
+      never seen your resigned smile when the little two-legged creature,
+      interrogated sternly, &ldquo;What are you doing to the good dog?&rdquo; answers with a
+      wide, innocent stare: &ldquo;Nothing. Only loving him, mamma dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The general's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-imposed
+      tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very rewards of rigid
+      self-command. But we have lived together many years. We have grown older,
+      too; and though our work is not quite done yet we may indulge now and then
+      in a little introspection before the fire&mdash;meditate on the art of
+      bringing up babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where so
+      many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary stage of
+      childhood and early youth, two distinct developments, and even two
+      distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its successive scenes, a
+      certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable. I am conscious of it in these
+      pages. This remark is put forward in no apologetic spirit. As years go by
+      and the number of pages grows steadily, the feeling grows upon one too
+      that one can write only for friends. Then why should one put them to the
+      necessity of protesting (as a friend would do) that no apology is
+      necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of one's
+      discretion? So much as to the care due to those friends whom a word here,
+      a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the right place, some
+      happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety, has drawn from the great
+      multitude of fellow-beings even as a fish is drawn from the depths of the
+      sea. Fishing is notoriously (I am talking now of the deep sea) a matter of
+      luck. As to one's enemies, those will take care of themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking, jumps
+      upon me with both feet. This image has no grace, but it is exceedingly apt
+      to the occasion&mdash;to the several occasions. I don't know precisely how
+      long he had been indulging in that intermittent exercise, whose seasons
+      are ruled by the custom of the publishing trade. Somebody pointed him out
+      (in printed shape, of course) to my attention some time ago, and
+      straightway I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust
+      man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for the writer's
+      substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain shadow, cherished
+      or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the sentiment owned to is
+      not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has a deeper, and, I venture
+      to think, a more estimable origin than the caprice of emotional
+      lawlessness. It is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given
+      (reluctantly) for a consideration, for several considerations. There is
+      that robustness, for instance, so often the sign of good moral balance.
+      That's a consideration. It is not, indeed, pleasant to be stamped upon,
+      but the very thoroughness of the operation, implying not only a careful
+      reading, but some real insight into work whose qualities and defects,
+      whatever they may be, are not so much on the surface, is something to be
+      thankful for in view of the fact that it may happen to one's work to be
+      condemned without being read at all. This is the most fatuous adventure
+      that can well happen to a writer venturing his soul amongst criticisms. It
+      can do one no harm, of course, but it is disagreeable. It is disagreeable
+      in the same way as discovering a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot
+      of folk in a third-class compartment. The open impudence of the whole
+      transaction, appealing insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind,
+      the brazen, shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while insisting
+      on the fairness of the game, give one a feeling of sickening disgust. The
+      honest violence of a plain man playing a fair game fairly&mdash;even if he
+      means to knock you over&mdash;may appear shocking, but it remains within
+      the pale of decency. Damaging as it may be, it is in no sense offensive.
+      One may well feel some regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's
+      own vile body. But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not
+      be stayed by explanations or placated by apologies. Were I to advance the
+      plea of youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found in these pages, he
+      would be likely to say &ldquo;Bosh!&rdquo; in a column and a half of fierce print. Yet
+      a writer is no older than his first published book, and, notwithstanding
+      the vain appearances of decay which attend us in this transitory life, I
+      stand here with the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of feeling
+      and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that, upon the whole, my
+      previous state of existence was not a good equipment for a literary life.
+      Perhaps I should not have used the word literary. That word presupposes an
+      intimacy of acquaintance with letters, a turn of mind and a manner of
+      feeling to which I dare lay no claim. I only love letters; but the love of
+      letters does not make a literary man, any more than the love of the sea
+      makes a seaman. And it is very possible, too, that I love the letters in
+      the same way a literary man may love the sea he looks at from the shore&mdash;a
+      scene of great endeavour and of great achievements changing the face of
+      the world, the great open way to all sorts of undiscovered countries. No,
+      perhaps I had better say that the life at sea&mdash;and I don't mean a
+      mere taste of it, but a good broad span of years, something that really
+      counts as real service&mdash;is not, upon the whole, a good equipment for
+      a writing life. God forbid, though, that I should be thought of as denying
+      my masters of the quarter-deck. I am not capable of that sort of apostasy.
+      I have confessed my attitude of piety towards their shades in three or
+      four tales, and if any man on earth more than another needs to be true to
+      himself as he hopes to be saved, it is certainly the writer of fiction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training does not
+      prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary criticism. Only
+      that, and no more. But this defect is not without gravity. If it be
+      permissible to twist, invert, adapt (and spoil) M. Anatole France's
+      definition of a good critic, then let us say that the good author is he
+      who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of
+      his soul amongst criticisms. Far be from me the intention to mislead an
+      attentive public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea. That
+      would be dishonest, and even impolite. Everything can be found at sea,
+      according to the spirit of your quest&mdash;strife, peace, romance,
+      naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom, disgust,
+      inspiration&mdash;and every conceivable opportunity, including the
+      opportunity to make a fool of yourself&mdash;exactly as in the pursuit of
+      literature. But the quarter-deck criticism is somewhat different from
+      literary criticism. This much they have in common, that before the one and
+      the other the answering back, as a general rule, does not pay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation&mdash;I tell you
+      everything is to be found on salt water&mdash;criticism generally
+      impromptu, and always viva voce, which is the outward, obvious difference
+      from the literary operation of that kind, with consequent freshness and
+      vigour which may be lacking in the printed word. With appreciation, which
+      comes at the end, when the critic and the criticised are about to part, it
+      is otherwise. The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the
+      permanency of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal in
+      its phrasing. There the literary master has the superiority, though he,
+      too, can in effect but say&mdash;and often says it in the very phrase&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      can highly recommend.&rdquo; Only usually he uses the word &ldquo;We,&rdquo; there being
+      some occult virtue in the first person plural, which makes it specially
+      fit for critical and royal declarations. I have a small handful of these
+      sea appreciations, signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my
+      writing-table's left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a
+      handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree of
+      knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits of paper,
+      headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the names of a few Scots
+      and English shipmasters, that I have faced the astonished indignations,
+      the mockeries and the reproaches of a sort hard to bear for a boy of
+      fifteen; that I have been charged with the want of patriotism, the want of
+      sense, and the want of heart too; that I went through agonies of
+      self-conflict and shed secret tears not a few, and had the beauties of the
+      Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called an &ldquo;incorrigible Don
+      Quixote,&rdquo; in allusion to the book-born madness of the knight. For that
+      spoil! They rustle, those bits of paper&mdash;some dozen of them in all.
+      In that faint, ghostly sound there live the memories of twenty years, the
+      voices of rough men now no more, the strong voice of the everlasting
+      winds, and the whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea,
+      which must have somehow reached my inland cradle and entered my
+      unconscious ear, like that formula of Mohammedan faith the Mussulman
+      father whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making him one of the
+      faithful almost with his first breath. I do not know whether I have been a
+      good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one. And after all
+      there is that handful of &ldquo;characters&rdquo; from various ships to prove that all
+      these years have not been altogether a dream. There they are, brief, and
+      monotonous in tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me as any
+      inspired page to be found in literature. But then, you see, I have been
+      called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember
+      that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made
+      out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change. With
+      this end in view, I will confide to you coyly, and only because there is
+      no one about to see my blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that
+      these suggestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain the
+      words &ldquo;strictly sober.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Did I overhear a civil murmur, &ldquo;That's very gratifying, to be sure&rdquo;? Well,
+      yes, it is gratifying&mdash;thank you. It is at least as gratifying to be
+      certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates
+      would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association or
+      for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution
+      such as the London County Council, for instance. The above prosaic
+      reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general sobriety of
+      my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because a couple of
+      years ago, a certain short story of mine being published in a French
+      translation, a Parisian critic&mdash;I am almost certain it was M. Gustave
+      Kahn in the &ldquo;Gil-Blas&rdquo;&mdash;giving me a short notice, summed up his rapid
+      impression of the writer's quality in the words un puissant reveur. So be
+      it! Who would cavil at the words of a friendly reader? Yet perhaps not
+      such an unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold to say that
+      neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of responsibility.
+      There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before the most
+      seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of interior
+      life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of
+      truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered
+      without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out
+      through the strength of wine. I have tried to be a sober worker all my
+      life&mdash;all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt, having an
+      instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also
+      from artistic conviction. Yet there are so many pitfalls on each side of
+      the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a little battered
+      and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the mere daily
+      difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept always, always
+      faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power, and truth, and peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
+      sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing in their
+      time. I seem to hear your polite murmur that &ldquo;Surely this might have been
+      taken for granted.&rdquo; Well, no. It might not have been. That august
+      academical body the Marine Department of the Board of Trade takes nothing
+      for granted in the granting of its learned degrees. By its regulations
+      issued under the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very word <i>sober</i>
+      must be written, or a whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the most
+      enthusiastic appreciation will avail you nothing. The door of the
+      examination rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties. The
+      most fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly fierce
+      in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board of Trade. As I
+      have been face to face at various times with all the examiners of the Port
+      of London, in my generation, there can be no doubt as to the force and the
+      continuity of my abstemiousness. Three of them were examiners in
+      seamanship, and it was my fate to be delivered into the hands of each of
+      them at proper intervals of sea service. The first of all, tall, spare,
+      with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet, kindly manner, and an
+      air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced to conclude, have been
+      unfavourably impressed by something in my appearance. His old thin hands
+      loosely clasped resting on his crossed legs, he began by an elementary
+      question in a mild voice, and went on, went on. . . . It lasted for hours,
+      for hours. Had I been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly
+      mischief to the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more
+      microscopic examination. Greatly reassured by his apparent benevolence, I
+      had been at first very alert in my answers. But at length the feeling of
+      my brain getting addled crept upon me. And still the passionless process
+      went on, with a sense of untold ages having been spent already on mere
+      preliminaries. Then I got frightened. I was not frightened of being
+      plucked; that eventuality did not even present itself to my mind. It was
+      something much more serious, and weird. &ldquo;This ancient person,&rdquo; I said to
+      myself, terrified, &ldquo;is so near his grave that he must have lost all notion
+      of time. He is considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is
+      all very well for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out
+      of this room into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my
+      very landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember
+      the way to my hired home.&rdquo; This statement is not so much of a verbal
+      exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through
+      my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing to
+      do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this earth.
+      I verily believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of languid way.
+      At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for ages,
+      while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my pass-slip slowly
+      with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper to me without a word,
+      inclined his white head gravely to my parting bow. . . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon, and
+      the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and tip
+      him a shilling, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! I thought you were never coming out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long have I been in there?&rdquo; I asked faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled out his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this ever
+      happened with any of the gentlemen before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk on air.
+      And the human animal being averse from change and timid before the
+      unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really being examined by
+      the same man on a future occasion. But when the time of ordeal came round
+      again the doorkeeper let me into another room, with the now familiar
+      paraphernalia of models of ships and tackle, a board for signals on the
+      wall, a big long table covered with official forms, and having an unrigged
+      mast fixed to the edge. The solitary tenant was unknown to me by sight,
+      though not by reputation, which was simply execrable. Short and sturdy as
+      far as I could judge, clad in an old, brown, morning-suit, he sat leaning
+      on his elbow, his hand shading his eyes, and half averted from the chair I
+      was to occupy on the other side of the table. He was motionless,
+      mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with something mournful too in the pose,
+      like that statue of Giuliano (I think) de' Medici shading his face on the
+      tomb by Michael Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far from being
+      beautiful. He began by trying to make me talk nonsense. But I had been
+      warned of that fiendish trait, and contradicted him with great assurance.
+      After a while he left off. So far good. But his immobility, the thick
+      elbow on the table, the abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face
+      grew more and more impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment,
+      and then, placing me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under certain
+      conditions of weather, season, locality, &amp;c. &amp;c.&mdash;all very
+      clear and precise&mdash;ordered me to execute a certain manoeuvre. Before
+      I was half through with it he did some material damage to the ship.
+      Directly I had grappled with the difficulty he caused another to present
+      itself, and when that too was met he stuck another ship before me,
+      creating a very dangerous situation. I felt slightly outraged by this
+      ingenuity in piling up trouble upon a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't have got into that mess,&rdquo; I suggested mildly. &ldquo;I could have
+      seen that ship before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He never stirred the least bit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you couldn't. The weather's thick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I didn't know,&rdquo; I apologised blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with sufficient
+      approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on. You must
+      understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me was, I
+      gathered, a homeward passage&mdash;the sort of passage I would not wish to
+      my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ship seemed to labour under a most
+      comprehensive curse. It's no use enlarging on these never-ending
+      misfortunes; suffice it to say that long before the end I would have
+      welcomed with gratitude an opportunity to exchange into the &ldquo;Flying
+      Dutchman.&rdquo; Finally he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and
+      provided me with a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks&mdash;the Dutch coast
+      presumably. Distance, eight miles. The evidence of such implacable
+      animosity deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said&mdash;for our pace had been very smart indeed till then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have to think a little, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doesn't look as if there were much time to think,&rdquo; he muttered
+      sardonically from under his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; I said with some warmth. &ldquo;Not on board a ship I could see. But
+      so many accidents have happened that I really can't remember what there's
+      left for me to work with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made unexpectedly a
+      grunting remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've done very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them both go
+      in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of testing
+      resourcefulness came into play again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there's only one cable. You've lost the other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was exasperating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser on board
+      on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from that,
+      which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing more to do, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir. I could do no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave a bitter half-laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could always say your prayers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly. It was a sallow,
+      strong, unamiable face. He put me in a surly, bored fashion through the
+      usual questions as to lights and signals, and I escaped from the room
+      thankfully&mdash;passed! Forty minutes! And again I walked on air along
+      Tower Hill, where so many good men had lost their heads, because, I
+      suppose, they were not resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of
+      hearts I had no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the
+      third and last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I
+      should. I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an
+      unreasonable time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not a bit of it. When I presented myself to be examined for Master the
+      examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face in
+      grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He commenced operations with an easy-going &ldquo;Let's see. H'm. Suppose you
+      tell me all you know of charter-parties.&rdquo; He kept it up in that style all
+      through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his own
+      life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in hand.
+      It was very interesting. &ldquo;What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?&rdquo; he
+      queried suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a
+      point of stowage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave
+      him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange
+      he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before,
+      when in command of a 3000-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest
+      contrivance imaginable. &ldquo;May be of use to you some day,&rdquo; he concluded.
+      &ldquo;You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There he was wrong. I never went into steam&mdash;not really. If I only
+      live long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a
+      sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the dark ages who had
+      never gone into steam&mdash;not really.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few interesting
+      details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The use of wire rigging became general about that time too,&rdquo; he observed.
+      &ldquo;I was a very young master then. That was before you were born.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Mutiny year,&rdquo; he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder tone
+      that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed under a
+      Government charter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who so
+      unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in me
+      the sense of the continuity of that sea-life into which I had stepped from
+      outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of official
+      relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as though he
+      had been an ancestor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care on the
+      slip of blue paper, he remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are of Polish extraction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Born there, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for the
+      first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I never
+      remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea. Don't remember
+      ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I said yes&mdash;very much so. We were remote from the sea not only by
+      situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect association, not
+      being a commercial nation at all, but purely agricultural. He made then
+      the quaint reflection that it was &ldquo;a long way for me to come out to begin
+      a sea-life&rdquo;; as if sea-life were not precisely a life in which one goes a
+      long way from home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much nearer
+      my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was to be a seaman
+      then I would be a British seaman and no other. It was a matter of
+      deliberate choice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
+      interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent a little
+      time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I did not
+      want to present myself to the British Merchant Service in an altogether
+      green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious vocation was so
+      strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea. It was the exact
+      truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat exceptional
+      psychology of my sea-going, I fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at sea. Have
+      you now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I admitted I never had. The examiner had given himself up to the spirit of
+      gossiping idleness. For myself, I was in no haste to leave that room. Not
+      in the least. The era of examinations was over. I would never again see
+      that friendly man who was a professional ancestor, a sort of grandfather
+      in the craft. Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me, and of that
+      there was no sign. As he remained silent, looking at me, I added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I have heard of one, some years ago. He seems to have been a boy
+      serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not mistaken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was his name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you say that?&rdquo; he asked, puckering up his eyes at the uncouth
+      sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I repeated the name very distinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you spell it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him. He moved his head at the impracticable nature of that name,
+      and observed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite as long as your own&mdash;isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no hurry. I had passed for Master, and I had all the rest of my
+      life before me to make the best of it. That seemed a long time. I went
+      leisurely through a small mental calculation, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it?&rdquo; The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the table to me,
+      and rose from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very abrupt ending of our
+      relations, and I felt almost sorry to part from that excellent man, who
+      was master of a ship before the whisper of the sea had reached my cradle.
+      He offered me his hand and wished me well. He even made a few steps
+      towards the door with me, and ended with good-natured advice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into steam. When
+      a man has got his master's certificate it's the proper time. If I were you
+      I would go into steam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era of
+      examinations. But that time I did not walk on air, as on the first two
+      occasions. I walked across the Hill of many beheadings with measured
+      steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now a British master
+      mariner beyond a doubt. It was not that I had an exaggerated sense of that
+      very modest achievement, with which, however, luck, opportunity, or any
+      extraneous influence could have had nothing to do. That fact, satisfactory
+      and obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal significance. It was an
+      answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even to some not very kind
+      aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had been cried upon as a
+      stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I don't mean to say that a whole
+      country had been convulsed by my desire to go to sea. But for a boy
+      between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough, in all conscience, the
+      commotion of his little world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed.
+      So considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to this
+      day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect meeting arguments
+      and charges made thirty-five years ago by voices now for ever still;
+      finding things to say that an assailed boy could not have found, simply
+      because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself. I understood no
+      more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no
+      precedent. I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my
+      nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of
+      his racial surroundings and associations. For you must understand that
+      there was no idea of any sort of &ldquo;career&rdquo; in my call. Of Russia or Germany
+      there could be no question. The nationality, the antecedents, made it
+      impossible. The feeling against the Austrian service was not so strong,
+      and I dare say there would have been no difficulty in finding my way into
+      the Naval School at Pola. It would have meant six months' extra grinding
+      at German, perhaps, but I was not past the age of admission, and in other
+      respects I was well qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly was
+      thought of&mdash;but not by me. I must admit that in that respect my
+      negative was accepted at once. That order of feeling was comprehensible
+      enough to the most inimical of my critics. I was not called upon to offer
+      explanations; the truth is that what I had in view was not a naval career,
+      but the sea. There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the
+      language at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is with France
+      that Poland has most connection. There were some facilities for having me
+      a little looked after, at first. Letters were being written, answers were
+      being received, arrangements were being made for my departure for
+      Marseilles, where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in a
+      roundabout fashion through various French channels, had promised
+      good-naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent ship
+      for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier de chien.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own counsel. But
+      what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already the
+      determined resolve, that &ldquo;if a seaman, then an English seaman,&rdquo; was
+      formulated in my head though, of course, in the Polish language. I did not
+      know six words of English, and I was astute enough to understand that it
+      was much better to say nothing of my purpose. As it was I was already
+      looked upon as partly insane, at least by the more distant acquaintances.
+      The principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in the good-natured
+      Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was shocked a little by
+      the phrase about the metier de chien.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out a
+      quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black, short beard, a
+      fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He was as jovial and
+      good-natured as any boy could desire. I was still asleep in my room in a
+      modest hotel near the quays of the old port, after the fatigues of the
+      journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyons, when he burst in flinging the shutters
+      open to the sun of Provence and chiding me boisterously for lying abed.
+      How pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to be up and off
+      instantly for a &ldquo;three years' campaign in the South Seas.&rdquo; O magic words!
+      &ldquo;Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud&rdquo;&mdash;that is the French
+      for a three years' deep-water voyage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was unwearied; but I
+      fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me in a very solemn
+      spirit. He had been at sea himself, but had left off at the age of
+      twenty-five, finding he could earn his living on shore in a much more
+      agreeable manner. He was related to an incredible number of Marseilles
+      well-to-do families of a certain class. One of his uncles was a
+      ship-broker of good standing, with a large connection amongst English
+      ships; other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts,
+      sold chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers, shipwrights.
+      His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
+      Pilots. I made acquaintances amongst these people, but mainly amongst the
+      pilots. The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by
+      invitation, in a big half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs on
+      the look-out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and the
+      smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall Planier
+      lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon with a white
+      perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provencal
+      seamen. Under the general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin I was
+      made the guest of the Corporation of Pilots, and had the freedom of their
+      boats night or day. And many a day and a night too did I spend cruising
+      with these rough, kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy with the
+      sea began. Many a time &ldquo;the little friend of Baptistin&rdquo; had the hooded
+      cloak of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest hands
+      while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch for the
+      lights of ships. Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or shaved, lean or
+      full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the pilot-breed, and here and
+      there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over my
+      sea-infancy. The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of
+      observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states of
+      the weather. They gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited to
+      sit in more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their hospitable
+      board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate by their
+      high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their daughters&mdash;thick-set
+      girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses of black hair arranged with
+      complicated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly white teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them,
+      Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style, would
+      carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the Prado,
+      at the hour of fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old
+      aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to
+      make me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens's &ldquo;Bleak House,&rdquo; a work of the
+      master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and
+      unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very
+      weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other men's work.
+      I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and in English; I have
+      read it only the other day, and, by a not very surprising inversion, the
+      Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly of the belle Madame
+      Delestang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose, and a
+      perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as it were by
+      short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock's &ldquo;grand
+      air&rdquo; and courtly solemnity. He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and
+      was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs. He
+      was such an ardent&mdash;no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he
+      used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should say,
+      with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money matters reckoned not
+      in francs, like the common, godless herd of post-Revolutionary Frenchmen,
+      but in obsolete and forgotten ecus&mdash;ecus of all money units in the
+      world!&mdash;as though Louis Quatorze were still promenading in royal
+      splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the
+      direction of maritime affairs. You must admit that in a banker of the
+      nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. Luckily in the
+      counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the Delestang town
+      residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts were kept in modern
+      money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my wants known to the
+      grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist (I suppose) clerks, sitting in the
+      perpetual gloom of heavily barred windows behind the sombre, ancient
+      counters, beneath lofty ceilings with heavily moulded cornices. I always
+      felt on going out as though I had been in the temple of some very
+      dignified but completely temporal religion. And it was generally on these
+      occasions that under the great carriage gateway Lady Ded&mdash; I mean
+      Madame Delestang, catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon me with an
+      amiable imperiousness to the side of the carriage, and suggest with an air
+      of amused nonchalance, &ldquo;Venez donc faire un tour avec nous,&rdquo; to which the
+      husband would add an encouraging &ldquo;C'est ca. Allons, montez, jeune homme.&rdquo;
+       He questioned me sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and
+      delicacy, as to the way I employed my time, and never failed to express
+      the hope that I wrote regularly to my &ldquo;honoured uncle.&rdquo; I made no secret
+      of the way I employed my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of
+      the pilots and so on entertained Madame Delestang, so far as that
+      ineffable woman could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very
+      full of his new experience amongst strange men and strange sensations. She
+      expressed no opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait
+      hangs in the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and
+      fleeting episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a
+      street, she offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight pressure, for
+      a moment. While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before
+      him, she leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of
+      warning in her leisurely tone: &ldquo;Il faut, cependant, faire attention a ne
+      pas gater sa vie.&rdquo; I had never seen her face so close to mine before. She
+      made my heart beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole
+      evening. Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life.
+      But she did not know&mdash;nobody could know&mdash;how impossible that
+      danger seemed to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold
+      suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on Political
+      Economy? I ask&mdash;is it conceivable? Is it possible? Would it be right?
+      With my feet on the very shores of the sea and about to embrace my
+      blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's
+      life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the last
+      too of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very bizarre&mdash;and,
+      uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress, like the voice
+      of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so callous or so stupid as
+      not to recognise there also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness
+      of the warning&mdash;because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to
+      spoil one's life?&mdash;arrested one's attention by its air of wise
+      profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la belle
+      Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole evening. I tried to
+      understand and tried in vain, not having any notion of life as an
+      enterprise that could be mismanaged. But I left off being thoughtful
+      shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts of the past
+      and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of the Vieux Port
+      to join the pilot-boat of my friends. I knew where she would be waiting
+      for her crew, in the little bit of a canal behind the Fort at the entrance
+      of the harbour. The deserted quays looked very white and dry in the
+      moonlight and as if frost-bound in the sharp air of that December night. A
+      prowler or two slunk by noiselessly; a custom-house guard, soldier-like, a
+      sword by his side, paced close under the bowsprits of the long row of
+      ships moored bows on opposite the long, slightly curved, continuous flat
+      wall of the tall houses that seemed to be one immense abandoned building
+      with innumerable windows shuttered closely. Only here and there a small
+      dingy cafe for sailors cast a yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the
+      flagstones. Passing by, one heard a deep murmur of voices inside&mdash;nothing
+      more. How quiet everything was at the end of the quays on the last night
+      on which I went out for a service cruise as a guest of the Marseilles
+      pilots! Not a footstep, except my own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo
+      of the usual revelry going on in the narrow unspeakable lanes of the Old
+      Town reached my ear&mdash;and suddenly, with a terrific jingling rattle of
+      iron and glass, the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey swung
+      round the corner of the dead wall which faces across the paved road the
+      characteristic angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. Three horses trotted
+      abreast with the clatter of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow,
+      uproarious machine jolted violently behind them, fantastic, lighted up,
+      perfectly empty and with the driver apparently asleep on his swaying perch
+      above that amazing racket. I flattened myself against the wall and gasped.
+      It was a stunning experience. Then after staggering on a few paces in the
+      shadow of the Fort casting a darkness more intense than that of a clouded
+      night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern standing on the
+      quay, and became aware of muffled figures making towards it from various
+      directions. Pilots of the Third Company hastening to embark. Too sleepy to
+      be talkative they step on board in silence. But a few low grunts and an
+      enormous yawn are heard. Somebody even ejaculates: &ldquo;Ah! Coquin de sort!&rdquo;
+       and sighs wearily at his hard fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of pilots at
+      that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my friend Solary
+      (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep-chested man of forty, with a keen,
+      frank glance which always seeks your eyes. He greets me by a low, hearty,
+      &ldquo;He, l'ami. Comment va?&rdquo; With his clipped moustache and massive open face,
+      energetic and at the same time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen
+      of the southerner of the calm type. For there is such a type in which the
+      volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid force. He is fair, but
+      no one could mistake him for a man of the north even by the dim gleam of
+      the lantern standing on the quay. He is worth a dozen of your ordinary
+      Normans or Bretons, but then, in the whole immense sweep of the
+      Mediterranean shores, you could not find half a dozen men of his stamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick jacket
+      and bends his head over it in the light cast into the boat. Time's up. His
+      pleasant voice commands in a quiet undertone &ldquo;Larguez.&rdquo; A suddenly
+      projected arm snatches the lantern off the quay&mdash;and, warped along by
+      a line at first, then with the regular tug of four heavy sweeps in the
+      bow, the big half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black
+      breathless shadow of the Fort. The open water of the avant-port glitters
+      under the moon as if sown over with millions of sequins, and the long
+      white breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid silver. With a quick
+      rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the sail is filled by a
+      little breeze keen enough to have come straight down from the frozen moon,
+      and the boat, after the clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at
+      rest, surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and unearthly that it
+      may be the rustling of the brilliant, over-powering moonrays breaking like
+      a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the Third
+      Company. I have known the spell of moonlight since, on various seas and
+      coasts&mdash;coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand dunes&mdash;but no magic
+      so perfect in its revelation of unsuspected character, as though one were
+      allowed to look upon the mystic nature of material things. For hours I
+      suppose no word was spoken in that boat. The pilots seated in two rows
+      facing each other dozed with their arms folded and their chins resting
+      upon their breasts. They displayed a great variety of caps: cloth, wool,
+      leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque round beret or two
+      pulled down over the brows; and one grandfather, with a shaved, bony face
+      and a great beak of a nose, had a cloak with a hood which made him look in
+      our midst like a cowled monk being carried off goodness knows where by
+      that silent company of seamen&mdash;quiet enough to be dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My fingers itched for the tiller and in due course my friend, the patron,
+      surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the family coachman lets
+      a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road. There was a great solitude
+      around us; the islets ahead, Monte Cristo and the Chateau d'If in full
+      light, seemed to float towards us&mdash;so steady, so imperceptible was
+      the progress of our boat. &ldquo;Keep her in the furrow of the moon,&rdquo; the patron
+      directed me in a quiet murmur, sitting down ponderously in the
+      stern-sheets and reaching for his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to the
+      westward of the islets; and presently, as we approached the spot, the boat
+      we were going to relieve swam into our view suddenly, on her way home,
+      cutting black and sinister into the wake of the moon under a sable wing,
+      while to them our sail must have been a vision of white and dazzling
+      radiance. Without altering the course a hair's-breadth we slipped by each
+      other within an oar's-length. A drawling sardonic hail came out of her.
+      Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their feet in a body.
+      An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst out, a jocular, passionate,
+      voluble chatter, which lasted till the boats were stern to stern, theirs
+      all bright now and with a shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black to
+      their vision, and drawing away from them under a sable wing. That
+      extraordinary uproar died away almost as suddenly as it had begun; first
+      one had enough of it and sat down, then another, then three or four
+      together, and when all had left off with mutters and growling half-laughs
+      the sound of hearty chuckling became audible, persistent, unnoticed. The
+      cowled grandfather was very much entertained somewhere within his hood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved the least
+      bit. He had remained quietly in his place against the foot of the mast. I
+      had been given to understand long before that he had the rating of a
+      second-class able seaman (matelot leger) in the fleet which sailed from
+      Toulon for the conquest of Algeria in the year of grace 1830. And, indeed,
+      I had seen and examined one of the buttons of his old brown patched coat,
+      the only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin, with the
+      words Equipages de ligne engraved on it. That sort of button, I believe,
+      went out with the last of the French Bourbons. &ldquo;I preserved it from the
+      time of my Navy Service,&rdquo; he explained, nodding rapidly his frail,
+      vulture-like head. It was not very likely that he had picked up that relic
+      in the street. He looked certainly old enough to have fought at Trafalgar&mdash;or
+      at any rate to have played his little part there as a powder-monkey.
+      Shortly after we had been introduced he had informed me in a
+      Franco-Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless jaws,
+      that when he was a &ldquo;shaver no higher than that&rdquo; he had seen the Emperor
+      Napoleon returning from Elba. It was at night, he narrated vaguely,
+      without animation, at a spot between Frejus and Antibes in the open
+      country. A big fire had been lit at the side of the cross-roads. The
+      population from several villages had collected there, old and young&mdash;down
+      to the very children in arms, because the women had refused to stay at
+      home. Tall soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood in a circle facing the
+      people silently, and their stern eyes and big moustaches were enough to
+      make everybody keep at a distance. He, &ldquo;being an impudent little shaver,&rdquo;
+       wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on his hands and knees as near as he
+      dared to the grenadiers' legs, and peeping through discovered standing
+      perfectly still in the light of the fire &ldquo;a little fat fellow in a
+      three-cornered hat, buttoned up in a long straight coat, with a big pale
+      face, inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest. His hands
+      were clasped behind his back. . . . It appears that this was the Emperor,&rdquo;
+       the Ancient commented with a faint sigh. He was staring from the ground
+      with all his might, when &ldquo;my poor father,&rdquo; who had been searching for his
+      boy frantically everywhere, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the
+      ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tale seems an authentic recollection. He related it to me many times,
+      using the very same words. The grandfather honoured me by a special and
+      somewhat embarrassing predilection. Extremes touch. He was the oldest
+      member by a long way in that Company, and I was, if I may say so, its
+      temporarily adopted baby. He had been a pilot longer than any man in the
+      boat could remember; thirty&mdash;forty years. He did not seem certain
+      himself, but it could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the
+      Pilot-office. He had been pensioned off years before, but he went out from
+      force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the Company once confided
+      to me in a whisper, &ldquo;the old chap did no harm. He was not in the way.&rdquo;
+       They treated him with rough deference. One and another would address some
+      insignificant remark to him now and again, but nobody really took any
+      notice of what he had to say. He had survived his strength, his
+      usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long, green, worsted stockings,
+      pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen nightcap on
+      his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet. Without his hooded
+      cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen hands would be extended to
+      help him on board, but afterwards he was left pretty much to his own
+      thoughts. Of course he never did any work, except, perhaps, to cast off
+      some rope when hailed: &ldquo;He, l'Ancien! let go the halyards there, at your
+      hand&rdquo;&mdash;or some such request of an easy kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow of the
+      hood. He kept it up for a long time with intense enjoyment. Obviously he
+      had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused. But
+      when his hilarity had exhausted itself, he made a professional remark in a
+      self-assertive but quavering voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't expect much work on a night like this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No one took it up. It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas could be
+      expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy splendour and
+      spiritual stillness. We would have to glide idly to and fro, keeping our
+      station within the appointed bearings, and, unless a fresh breeze sprang
+      up with the dawn, we would land before sunrise on a small islet that,
+      within two miles of us, shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to &ldquo;break a
+      crust and take a pull at the wine bottle.&rdquo; I was familiar with the
+      procedure. The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
+      capable side against the very rock&mdash;such is the perfectly smooth
+      amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood. The crust broken, and
+      the mouthful of wine swallowed&mdash;it was literally no more than that
+      with this abstemious race&mdash;the pilots would pass the time stamping
+      their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped
+      fingers. One or two misanthropists would sit apart perched on boulders
+      like man-like sea-fowl of solitary habits; the sociably disposed would
+      gossip scandalously in little gesticulating knots; and there would be
+      perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon
+      with the long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
+      piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
+      brandishing and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a short turn
+      of duty&mdash;the long turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boatful of
+      pilots would relieve us&mdash;and we should steer for the old Phoenician
+      port, dominated, watched over from the ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by
+      the red-and-white-striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very recent
+      experience. But also something not foreseen by me did happen, something
+      which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots. It was on this
+      occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side of an English
+      ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught got
+      a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy with a
+      clean, colourless light. It was while we were all ashore on the islet that
+      a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like an insect
+      posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to her
+      water-line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke
+      slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and headed the
+      boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met on the
+      sea no more, black hull, with low, white super structures, powerfully
+      rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two hands at her
+      enormous wheel&mdash;steam steering-gear was not a matter of course in
+      these days&mdash;and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick
+      blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peaked caps&mdash;I suppose
+      all her officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known well
+      by sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once
+      so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I have not
+      forgotten. How could I&mdash;the first English ship on whose side I ever
+      laid my hand! The name&mdash;I read it letter by letter on the bow&mdash;was
+      &ldquo;James Westoll.&rdquo; Not very romantic you will say. The name of a very
+      considerable, well-known and universally respected North-country
+      shipowner, I believe. James Westoll! What better name could an honourable
+      hard-working ship have? To me the very grouping of the letters is alive
+      with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her floating motionless,
+      and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere purity of the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to pull
+      bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on board while
+      our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us all through the
+      night, went on gliding gently past the black glistening length of the
+      ship. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the
+      very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English&mdash;the
+      speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the
+      deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary
+      hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions&mdash;of
+      my very dreams! And if (after being thus fashioned by it in that part of
+      me which cannot decay) I dare not claim it aloud as my own, then, at any
+      rate the speech of my children. Thus small events grow memorable by the
+      passage of time. As to the quality of the address itself I cannot say it
+      was very striking. Too short for eloquence and devoid of all charm of
+      tone, it consisted precisely of the three words &ldquo;Look out there,&rdquo; growled
+      out huskily above my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy double
+      chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up very high, even
+      to the level of his breast-bone, by a pair of braces quite exposed to
+      public view. As where he stood there was no bulwark but only a rail and
+      stanchions I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his voluminous
+      person from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat
+      like an absurd flanged cone on his big head. The grotesque and massive
+      space of that deck hand (I suppose he was that&mdash;very likely the
+      lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much. My course of reading, of dreaming
+      and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea-brother of that
+      sort. I never met again a figure in the least like his except in the
+      illustrations to Mr. W.W. Jacobs' most entertaining tales of barges and
+      coasters; but the inspired talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun at
+      poor, innocent sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its
+      felicitous invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth,
+      was not yet. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet. I fancy that, at
+      most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had achieved at
+      that early date.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have been
+      prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise. The object of his
+      concise address was to call my attention to a rope which he incontinently
+      flung down for me to catch. I caught it, though it was not really
+      necessary, the ship having no way on her by that time. Then everything
+      went on very swiftly. The dinghy came with a slight bump against the
+      steamer's side, the pilot, grabbing the rope ladder, had scrambled halfway
+      up before I knew that our task of boarding was done; the harsh, muffled
+      clanging of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear through the iron
+      plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to &ldquo;shove off&mdash;push
+      hard&rdquo;; and when I bore against the smooth flank of the first English ship
+      I ever touched in my life, I felt it already throbbing under my open palm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the miniature
+      lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there, hardly
+      distinguishable against the land. The dinghy danced a squashy, splashy jig
+      in the wash of the wake and turning in my seat I followed the &ldquo;James
+      Westoll&rdquo; with my eyes. Before she had gone in a quarter of a mile she
+      hoisted her flag as the harbour regulations prescribe for arriving and
+      departing ships. I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the
+      flagstaff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing
+      the drab and grey masses of that southern land, the livid islets, the sea
+      of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that cold sunrise, it was
+      as far as the eye could reach the only spot of ardent colour&mdash;flame-like,
+      intense, and presently as minute as the tiny red spark the concentrated
+      reflection of a great fire kindles in the clear heart of a globe of
+      crystal. The Red Ensign&mdash;the symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting
+      flung wide upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only
+      roof over my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Reminiscences
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #1316]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME REMINISCENCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME REMINISCENCES
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+
+A Familiar Preface.
+
+As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
+ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion,
+and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some
+spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted:
+"You know, you really must."
+
+It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must! . . .
+
+You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
+his trust, not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power
+of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't
+say this by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be
+impressionable than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean,
+as affecting a whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the
+other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words
+as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not
+far to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction,
+these two by their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and
+upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric.
+There's "virtue" for you if you like! . . . Of course the accent must
+be attended to. The right accent. That's very important. The capacious
+lung, the thundering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me
+of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a
+mathematical imagination. Mathematics command all my respect, but I have
+no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I
+will move the world.
+
+What a dream--for a writer! Because written words have their accent too.
+Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
+amongst the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured
+out aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on
+earth. It may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand.
+But it's no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle
+in a pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such
+luck.
+
+And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
+tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted,
+and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes downwind leaving the world
+unmoved. Once upon a time there lived an Emperor who was a sage and
+something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
+maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
+posterity. Amongst other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
+this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
+truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
+that it is an easy matter for an austere Emperor to jot down grandiose
+advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic:
+and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
+heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
+
+Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
+of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
+humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
+Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
+for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
+sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
+delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
+embroil one with one's friends.
+
+"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine either
+amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
+as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer
+the mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
+have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives
+in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world,
+amongst imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them,
+he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He
+remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather
+than a seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of
+fiction. In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot
+help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the
+ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are
+persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy
+the opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author
+of fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
+
+While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
+with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
+wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
+sufficiently literary. Indeed a man who never wrote a line for print
+till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
+and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations and
+emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession
+of his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
+three years ago, when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
+impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
+remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
+they recommended. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and
+its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
+what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
+their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
+It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I
+am incorrigible.
+
+Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
+sea-life, I have a special piety towards that form of my past; for its
+impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
+responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
+call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
+broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
+which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
+great distances from such natural affections as were still left to
+me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
+unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
+mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
+force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
+service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder then that
+in my two exclusively sea books, "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" and
+"The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "Youth"
+and "Typhoon"), I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
+vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
+simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
+something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
+hands and the objects of their care.
+
+One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
+seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made up one's mind to
+write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
+what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
+quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
+things; and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
+which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
+But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
+standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
+onwards so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
+much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
+
+It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
+I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts;
+of what the French would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of
+unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
+respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
+garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
+man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
+which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that
+I feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
+all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
+
+My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
+autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only
+express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom an
+open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
+virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
+always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
+humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either
+of laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason
+that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail
+to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No
+artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run
+to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a task which
+mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a
+regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for
+one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's
+work.
+
+And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
+earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
+pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
+for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
+source in weaknesses which must be recognised with smiling compassion as
+the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass into
+each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
+of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
+brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
+distant edge of the horizon.
+
+Yes! I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
+laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
+imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
+oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
+one's own breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their
+souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary
+intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the
+sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular
+wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may
+be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
+on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive
+horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of
+myself which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried
+my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I,
+who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of
+the Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks
+of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act,
+I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
+ineffable company of pure esthetes.
+
+As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
+mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
+of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not
+lovable or hate what was not hateful, out of deference for some general
+principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
+not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
+with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
+always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
+emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
+deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
+the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough perhaps and of
+necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
+pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
+this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
+victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
+and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
+blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
+emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
+giggles.
+
+These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
+condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
+duty. And least of all you can condemn an artist pursuing, however
+humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where
+his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
+adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
+or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
+Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
+
+And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
+open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those
+which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All
+intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even
+beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are
+mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said
+to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
+presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try
+for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
+appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. An
+historian of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet he penetrates
+further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very
+fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves
+admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect too. And he is not
+insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is
+not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic,
+not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by love,
+is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a
+sham.
+
+Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
+creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
+will what the gods will without perhaps being certain what their will
+is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
+and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
+How. As the Frenchman said, "Il y a toujours la maniere." Very true.
+Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
+indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
+in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
+truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
+
+Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world,
+rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as
+the hills. It rests notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At
+a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can
+expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my
+writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that
+it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute
+optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
+intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things;
+but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to
+special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a
+philosophical mind should be free. . .
+
+I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly
+discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of
+conversation--that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now.
+My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have
+been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them
+were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet
+this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
+follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
+disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with
+unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely
+that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of
+my recollections. "Alas!" I protested mildly. "Could I begin with the
+sacramental words, 'I was born on such a date in such a place'? The
+remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement of all
+interest. I haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be related
+seriatim. I haven't known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous
+remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs. This
+is but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't written
+it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own."
+
+But my objector was not placated. These were good reasons for not
+writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already, he said.
+
+I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a
+good reason for not writing at all. But since I have written them, all I
+want to say in their defence is that these memories put down without
+any regard for established conventions have not been thrown off without
+system and purpose. They have their hope and their aim. The hope that
+from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of
+a personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar
+as, for instance, "Almayer's Folly" and "The Secret Agent"--and yet a
+coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its action.
+This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely associated with the hope,
+is to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the
+feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and
+with my first contact with the sea.
+
+In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here
+and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.
+
+J.C.K.
+
+
+Chapter I.
+
+Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
+enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in
+the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly
+on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade
+of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (amongst other things) a
+descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
+the decks of a 2000-ton steamer called the "Adowa," on board of which,
+gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
+chapter of "Almayer's Folly" was begun. With interest, I say, for was
+not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering
+voice the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
+ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
+
+"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
+behind which the sun had sunk. . . ." These words of Almayer's romantic
+daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on
+the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
+and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
+and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town
+of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
+words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,
+coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation: "You've made it
+jolly warm in here."
+
+It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tin under
+the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak
+where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
+been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
+vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
+mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and
+being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling,
+by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have
+been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
+play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this
+sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the strings
+under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
+
+"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"
+
+It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
+turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
+have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
+opening speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
+wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.
+I could not have told him that Nina had said: "It has set at last."
+He would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
+precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
+sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing the
+impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not know this
+myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an
+excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our
+relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.
+
+He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking through the
+porthole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
+quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tailend
+of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen nightcap
+leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom-house guard, belted
+over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
+weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
+houses found a place in the picture framed by my porthole, across a
+wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring
+was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with
+curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding
+with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had
+been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the
+Opera House, where that same porthole gave me a view of quite another
+sort of cafe--the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where
+the worthy Bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere
+Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an
+opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of
+light music.
+
+I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern Archipelago
+which I certainly hoped to see again. The story of "Almayer's Folly"
+got put away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any
+occupation to keep me away from it; the truth of the matter is that on
+board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life. I
+will not say anything of my privileged position. I was there "just to
+oblige," as an actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit
+performance of a friend.
+
+As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that
+steamer at that time and in those circumstances. And perhaps I was not
+even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship "wants" an
+officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea life when I served
+shipowners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I
+do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which
+had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral
+Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but
+there was never anything tangible left from the F.C.T.C. It flourished
+no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead
+of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure and died
+before spring set in. But indubitably it was a company, it had even a
+house-flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C. artfully tangled up in
+a complicated monogram. We flew it at our main-mast head, and now I
+have come to the conclusion that it was the only flag of its kind in
+existence. All the same we on board, for many days, had the impression
+of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly departures for
+Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which
+came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we
+started for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life of the F.C.T.C. lies
+the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a remote
+sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina Almayer's story.
+
+The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its modest
+rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the
+greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last
+association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called
+a seagoing experience. Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to
+pay him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of
+years--had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and
+status for the whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He
+organised for us courses of professional lectures, St. John ambulance
+classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies and members of
+Parliament on subjects touching the interests of the service; and as to
+the oncoming of some inquiry or commission relating to matters of the
+sea and to the work of seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his need of
+exerting himself on our corporate behalf. Together with this high sense
+of his official duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a
+strong disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
+that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent master. And
+what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to put him in the way
+of employment? Captain Froud did not see why the Shipmasters' Society,
+besides its general guardianship of our interests, should not be
+unofficially an employment agency of the very highest class.
+
+"I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to
+us for their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about our
+society, and I really don't see why they should not," he said once to
+me. "I am always telling the captains, too, that all things being equal
+they ought to give preference to the members of the society. In my
+position I can generally find for them what they want amongst our
+members or our associate members."
+
+In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I was
+very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort
+of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel
+itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice--nearer
+there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting-place used
+to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco
+smoke, but Captain Froud had the smaller room to himself and there
+he granted private interviews, whose principal motive was to render
+service. Thus, one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a
+crooked finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
+perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.
+
+"I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning," he said, getting back
+to his desk and motioning me to a chair, "who is in want of an officer.
+It's for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be
+asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my way. . ."
+
+As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at the
+closed door but he shook his head.
+
+"Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them.
+But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship wants an officer
+who can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do
+not know anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth and, of
+course, you would not care . . . would you now? I know that it isn't what
+you are looking for."
+
+It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who
+looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit
+that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second
+officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign
+of being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical
+forests; and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak
+character) had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years
+he and the world of his story had been the companions of my imagination
+without, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of
+sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my
+return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day of which
+I speak.
+
+It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
+square that they first began to live again with a vividness and
+poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been
+treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of
+occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the
+rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined
+him round my table and then the rest of that Pantai band came full
+of words and gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my
+practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions
+of Malays, Arabs and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my
+attention. They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the
+appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems
+now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these
+beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express
+itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious
+fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the
+dwellers on this earth?
+
+I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers
+of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book
+before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
+Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
+blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety
+which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care
+the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.
+
+But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
+disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
+should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few hours' notice the
+unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
+the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a
+regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French
+emigrants to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest
+me very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping
+up the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it. But
+the consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed
+the Captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other.
+He explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect
+and that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the
+higher position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I
+would be given certain special advantages--and so on.
+
+I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
+
+"I am sure," he insisted, "you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor."
+
+I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in
+those circumstances that what was to be my last connection with a ship
+began. And after all there was not even one single trip. It may be
+that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written word on
+my forehead which apparently forbade me, through all my sea wanderings,
+ever to achieve the crossing of the Western Ocean--using the words in
+that special sense in which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade,
+of Western Ocean packets, of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life
+attended closely upon the old and the nine chapters of "Almayer's Folly"
+went with me to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we started for
+Rouen. I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man fated
+never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of the
+Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a single
+passage. It might have been that of course; but the obvious, gross
+obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four hundred and sixty bunks
+for emigrants were put together in the 'tween decks by industrious
+carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant
+turned up in Rouen--of which, being a humane person, I confess I was
+glad. Some gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and
+one was said to be the Chairman--turned up indeed and went from end
+to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the
+deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it that the
+interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though, obviously,
+they had never seen anything of the sort before. Their faces as they
+went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression. Notwithstanding
+that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to
+immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I
+received the inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
+charter-party would ever take place.
+
+It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When we
+first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony well towards the
+centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with
+the tricolour posters announcing the birth of our company, the petit
+bourgeois with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the
+inspection of the ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to
+give information as though I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter,
+while our quarter-masters reaped a harvest of small change from
+personally conducted parties. But when the move was made--that move
+which carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
+an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the desolation of
+solitude became our lot. It was a complete and soundless stagnation;
+for, as we had the ship ready for sea to the smallest detail, as the
+frost was hard and the days short, we were absolutely idle--idle to the
+point of blushing with shame when the thought struck us that all the
+time our salaries went on. Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said,
+we could not enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like
+this all day: even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to
+prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The good
+Paramor--he was really a most excellent fellow--became unhappy as far as
+was possible to his cheery nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out
+of sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the
+crew in hauling both cables up on deck and turning them end for end.
+
+For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. "Excellent idea!" but directly his
+face fell. "Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that job last more than three
+days," he muttered discontentedly. I don't know how long he expected
+us to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that
+the cables got hauled up and turned end for end according to my satanic
+suggestion, put down again, and their very existence utterly forgotten,
+I believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship
+down, empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think that
+this state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of
+Almayer and his daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort of
+evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as related above, had
+arrested them short at the point of that fateful sunset for many weeks
+together. It was always thus with this book, begun in '89 and finished
+in '94--with that shortest of all the novels which it was to be my lot
+to write. Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner
+in his wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the
+God of Islam--"The Merciful, the Compassionate"--which closes the
+book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the
+elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of
+them) of my childhood and the realisation of childhood's vain words,
+expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim.
+
+It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking
+at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space
+then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to
+myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no
+longer in my character now:
+
+"When I grow up I shall go there."
+
+And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a
+century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin of
+childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go
+there: there being the region of Stanley Falls which in '68 was the
+blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS.
+of "Almayer's Folly," carried about me as if it were a talisman or a
+treasure, went there too. That it ever came out of there seems a special
+dispensation of Providence; because a good many of my other properties,
+infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind through
+unfortunate accidents of transportation. I call to mind, for instance,
+a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinchassa and
+Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to take it at night in
+a big canoe with only half the proper number of paddlers. I failed in
+being the second white man on record drowned at that interesting spot
+through the upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer,
+but the accident happened some months before my time, and he, too, I
+believe, was going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still
+he was going home. I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
+was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with "Almayer's
+Folly" amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at that delectable
+capital Boma, where before the departure of the steamer which was to
+take me home I had the time to wish myself dead over and over again
+with perfect sincerity. At that date there were in existence only seven
+chapters of "Almayer's Folly," but the chapter in my history which
+followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal convalescence.
+Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is
+rendered for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in
+the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth are
+inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management of a
+waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not
+matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the
+activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had
+nothing to hold me with for very long. And then that memorable story,
+like a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro
+upon the sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of
+course I would not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it
+certainly did nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look
+and an ancient, yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable
+to suppose that anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and
+Nina. And yet something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to
+wake them up from their state of suspended animation.
+
+What is it that Novalis says? "It is certain my conviction gains
+infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it." And what is a
+novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
+take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose
+accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride
+of documentary history? Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo
+rapids brought it to the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open
+sea. It would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
+sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young Cambridge
+man (he was a "passenger for his health" on board the good ship Torrens
+outward bound to Australia) who was the first reader of "Almayer's
+Folly"--the very first reader I ever had. "Would it bore you very much
+reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?" I asked him one evening on
+a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was
+Gibbon's History. Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin
+one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his
+own travelling store.
+
+"Not at all," he answered with his courteous intonation and a faint
+smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him
+a watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe.
+All that's beyond guessing now. He was not a cold but a calm man, still
+more subdued by disease--a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty
+in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
+person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty
+passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look. In his
+attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic voice he asked:
+
+"What is this?" "It is a sort of tale," I answered with an effort. "It
+is not even finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to know what you
+think of it." He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I
+remember perfectly his thin brown fingers folding it lengthwise. "I
+will read it tomorrow," he remarked, seizing the door-handle, and then,
+watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the
+door and was gone. In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained
+booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens,
+and the subdued, as if distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the
+growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
+professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in another
+half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails would have to
+come off the ship.
+
+Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my
+cabin. He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and the MS. was
+in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look but without a word.
+I took it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said nothing.
+I opened and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate
+lay wide open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the
+sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I
+turned my back squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques never
+offered a word. "Well, what do you say?" I asked at last. "Is it worth
+finishing?" This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
+
+"Distinctly," he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then coughed a
+little.
+
+"Were you interested?" I inquired further almost in a whisper.
+
+"Very much!"
+
+In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the
+ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my
+bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp
+circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly
+in the gusts of wind. It was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the
+longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites
+of Almayer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged
+silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
+writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its
+action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were being
+born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the
+officer of the watch and remained on the alert to catch the order that
+was to follow this call to attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce
+shout to "Square the yards." "Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly
+blow coming on." Then I turned to my very first reader who, alas! was
+not to live long enough to know the end of the tale.
+
+"Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as
+it stands?"
+
+He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
+
+"Yes! Perfectly."
+
+This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
+"Almayer's Folly." We never spoke together of the book again. A long
+period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my
+duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in
+his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose
+went at once up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in
+Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez
+Canal. I am not sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard
+precisely; though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
+passengers who, wandering about to "see the country" during the ship's
+stay in port, had come upon him here and there. At last we sailed,
+homeward bound, and still not one line was added to the careless scrawl
+of the many pages which poor Jacques had had the patience to read with
+the very shadows of Eternity gathering already in the hollows of his
+kind, steadfast eyes.
+
+The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final "Distinctly"
+remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I am
+compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as
+in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves
+must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days
+gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is
+One--one for all men and for all occupations.
+
+I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and
+more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to
+wait my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those
+wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the
+fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just
+the same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway
+carriages, and could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a
+clothes-line; but I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not
+consent to write without something at least resembling a chair. Line by
+line, rather than page by page, was the growth of "Almayer's Folly."
+
+And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to
+the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse railway
+station (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to Poland, or more
+precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in
+a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and
+intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not
+thinking of the MS. but of all the other things that were packed in the
+bag.
+
+In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never
+exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while the bag lay
+open on a chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A
+friend of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but had
+turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each
+other for over twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to
+carry me off there.
+
+"You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing," he
+suggested kindly.
+
+I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or later.
+The talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was
+extremely animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from
+big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem published in a very
+modernist review, edited by the very young and patronised by the highest
+society. But it never touched upon "Almayer's Folly," and next morning,
+in uninterrupted obscurity, this inseparable companion went on rolling
+with me in the south-east direction towards the Government of Kiev.
+
+At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from the
+railway station to the country house which was my destination.
+
+"Dear boy" (these words were always written in English), so ran the last
+letter from that house received in London,--"Get yourself driven to the
+only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the
+evening my own confidential servant, factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S.
+(I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you,
+reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on
+the next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
+overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the
+road."
+
+Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous
+barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened and, in
+a travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin cap and a short coat
+girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of noble extraction), a man of
+about thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open and
+moustachioed countenance. I got up from the table and greeted him in
+Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his
+noble blood and his confidential position. His face cleared up in a
+wonderful way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
+assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our understanding
+each other. He imagined I would talk to him in some foreign language. I
+was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come to meet
+me shaped an anxious exclamation:
+
+"Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself
+understood to our master's nephew."
+
+We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of
+me as if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling
+of coming home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an
+enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and took his seat protectively by
+my side. The sledge was a very small one and it looked utterly
+insignificant, almost like a toy behind the four big bays harnessed two
+and two. We three, counting the coachman, filled it completely. He was
+a young fellow with clear blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur
+coat framed his cheery countenance and stood all round level with the
+top of his head.
+
+"Now, Joseph," my companion addressed him, "do you think we shall manage
+to get home before six?" His answer was that we would surely, with
+God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch
+between certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar
+sound to my ears. He turned out an excellent coachman with an instinct
+for keeping the road amongst the snow-covered fields and a natural gift
+of getting the best out of his horses.
+
+"He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain remembers.
+He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother of holy memory,"
+remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my feet.
+
+I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
+grandmother. Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the first
+time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-in-hand whip
+outside the doors of the coach-house.
+
+"What became of him?" I asked. "He is no longer serving, I suppose."
+
+"He served our master," was the reply. "But he died of cholera ten
+years ago now--that great epidemic we had. And his wife died at the
+same time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that was
+left."
+
+The MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was reposing in the bag under our feet.
+
+I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of
+my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view
+as if it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had
+seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which
+fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a
+white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps
+of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
+by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking through a
+screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
+
+That very evening the wandering MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was unpacked
+and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the
+guest-room which had been, I was informed in an affectedly careless
+tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no
+attention from the affectionate presence hovering round the son of the
+favourite sister.
+
+"You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me,
+brother," he said--this form of address borrowed from the speech of
+our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in
+a moment of affectionate elation. "I shall be always coming in for a
+chat."
+
+As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
+everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of
+his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand
+presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his
+wards then living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning
+families from the three southern provinces--ever since the year 1860.
+Some of them had been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of
+them, girls or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two
+were older than myself--considerably older, too. One of them, a visitor
+I remember in my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback,
+and his four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and
+general skill in manly exercises was one of my earliest admirations. I
+seem to remember my mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the
+dining-room windows as I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know,
+by the very Joseph--the groom attached specially to my grandmother's
+service--who died of cholera. It was certainly a young man in a dark
+blue, tailless coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery of
+the men about the stables. It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by
+another mode of calculating time, it was certainly in the year in which
+my mother obtained permission to travel south and visit her family, from
+the exile into which she had followed my father. For that, too, she had
+had to ask permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that
+favour was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile
+herself. Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest brother
+who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts of friends and
+a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg, some influential
+personages procured for her this permission--it was officially called
+the "Highest Grace"--of a three months' leave from exile.
+
+This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
+more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
+presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
+remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
+the grey heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect
+and love in the house of her favourite brother who, a few years later,
+was to take the place for me of both my parents.
+
+I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
+though indeed I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of
+invalidism about her--but I think that already they had pronounced her
+doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could re-establish
+her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest period of my
+existence. There was my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl,
+some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as
+if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
+There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a
+few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive
+shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow lowering with the
+darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of
+journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.
+
+This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the public
+record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
+egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal.
+It is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's
+children than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That
+which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the
+most enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain for ever
+obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the
+still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and
+their personalities are remotely derived.
+
+Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
+undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master
+of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic
+memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things
+human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the
+emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.
+
+
+
+Chapter II.
+
+As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London
+into Ukraine. The MS. of "Almayer's Folly"--my companion already for
+some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age--was
+deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two
+windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table
+was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same
+drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted
+up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering
+nephew. The blinds were down.
+
+Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
+peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
+the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
+beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
+lay the great unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly
+bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
+patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come
+ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the
+short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snowtrack; a quick tinkle
+of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful
+whisper.
+
+My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help
+me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary
+at the door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not
+like to tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than
+ten years younger than myself; I had not been--I won't say in that place
+but within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless
+physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was
+quite possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a
+grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar to me
+in my early childhood. As a matter of fact he had no such claim on my
+consideration. He was the product of some village near by and was there
+on his promotion, having learned the service in one or two houses as
+pantry-boy. I know this because I asked the worthy V-- next day. I might
+well have spared the question. I discovered before long that all the
+faces about the house and all the faces in the village: the grave faces
+with long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
+young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the handsome,
+tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts
+were as familiar to me as though I had known them all from childhood,
+and my childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday.
+
+The tinkle of the traveller's bels, after growing louder, had faded away
+quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed down
+at last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a small couch, smoked his
+long Turkish chibouk in silence.
+
+"This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my room," I
+remarked.
+
+"It is really your property," he said, keeping his eyes on me, with
+an interested and wistful expression as he had done ever since I had
+entered the house. "Forty years ago your mother used to write at this
+very table. In our house in Oratow it stood in the little sitting-room
+which, by a tacit arrangement, was given up to the girls--I mean to
+your mother and her sister who died so young. It was a present to them
+jointly from our uncle Nicholas B. when your mother was seventeen and
+your aunt two years younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that
+aunt of yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.
+She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind, in
+which your mother was far superior. It was her good sense, the admirable
+sweetness of her nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily
+relations that endeared her to everybody. Her death was a terrible
+grief and a serious moral loss for us all. Had she lived she would have
+brought the greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot
+to enter, as wife, mother and mistress of a household. She would have
+created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content which only
+those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke. Your mother--of
+far greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished in person, manner and
+intellect--had a less easy disposition. Being more brilliantly gifted
+she also expected more from life. At that trying time especially, we
+were greatly concerned about her state. Suffering in her health from the
+shock of her father's death (she was alone in the house with him when he
+died suddenly), she was torn by the inward struggle between her love for
+the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of her dead
+father's declared objection to that match. Unable to bring herself
+to disregard that cherished memory and that judgment she had always
+respected and trusted, and, on the other hand, feeling the impossibility
+to resist a sentiment so deep and so true, she could not have been
+expected to preserve her mental and moral balance. At war with herself,
+she could not give to others that feeling of peace which was not her
+own. It was only later, when united at last with the man of her
+choice that she developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which
+compelled the respect and admiration even of our foes. Meeting with calm
+fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national
+and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest
+conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing the exile
+of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our
+Uncle Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection.
+Apart from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really,
+I believe, only three people in the world: his mother--your
+great-grandmother, whom you have seen but cannot possibly remember; his
+brother, our father, in whose house he lived for so many years; and of
+all of us, his nephews and nieces grown up round him, your mother alone.
+The modest, lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem
+able to see. It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected stroke
+of death falling upon the family less than a year after I had become its
+head. It was terribly unexpected. Driving home one wintry afternoon to
+keep me company in our empty house, where I had to remain permanently
+administering the estate and attending to the complicated affairs--(the
+girls took it in turn week and week about)--driving, as I said, from
+the house of the Countess Tekla Potochka, where our invalid mother was
+staying then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a
+snowdrift. She was alone with the coachman and old Valery, the personal
+servant of our late father. Impatient of delay while they were trying
+to dig themselves out, she jumped out of the sledge and went to look for
+the road herself. All this happened in '51, not ten miles from the house
+in which we are sitting now. The road was soon found, but snow had begun
+to fall thickly again, and they were four more hours getting home. Both
+the men took off their sheepskin-lined great-coats and used all their
+own rugs to wrap her up against the cold, notwithstanding her protests,
+positive orders and even struggles, as Valery afterwards related to me.
+'How could I,' he remonstrated with her, 'go to meet the blessed soul
+of my late master if I let any harm come to you while there's a spark of
+life left in my body?' When they reached home at last the poor old man
+was stiff and speechless from exposure, and the coachman was in not much
+better plight, though he had the strength to drive round to the stables
+himself. To my reproaches for venturing out at all in such weather,
+she answered characteristically that she could not bear the thought of
+abandoning me to my cheerless solitude. It is incomprehensible how it
+was that she was allowed to start. I suppose it had to be! She made
+light of the cough which came on next day, but shortly afterwards
+inflammation of the lungs set in, and in three weeks she was no more!
+She was the first to be taken away of the young generation under my
+care. Behold the vanity of all hopes and fears! I was the most frail
+at birth of all the children. For years I remained so delicate that my
+parents had but little hope of bringing me up; and yet I have survived
+five brothers and two sisters, and many of my contemporaries; I have
+outlived my wife and daughter too--and from all those who have had some
+knowledge at least of these old times you alone are left. It has been
+my lot to lay in an early grave many honest hearts, many brilliant
+promises, many hopes full of life."
+
+He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me, saying: "We will dine in half
+an hour." Without moving I listened to his quick steps resounding on
+the waxed floor of the next room, traversing the anteroom lined with
+bookshelves, where he paused to put his chibouk in the pipe-stand before
+passing into the drawing-room (these were all en suite), where he became
+inaudible on the thick carpet. But I heard the door of his study-bedroom
+close. He was then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of
+a century the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
+extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I
+seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.
+
+As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in
+the French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of Marshal
+Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of Mounted Rifles in
+the Polish Army--such as it existed up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom
+established by the Congress of Vienna--I must say that from all that
+more distant past, known to me traditionally and a little de visu, and
+called out by the words of the man just gone away, he remains the most
+incomplete figure. It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for
+it is certain that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my
+mother for what he must have known would be the last time. From my early
+boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of mist rises
+before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed
+head of white hair (which is exceptional in the case of the B. family,
+where it is the rule for men to go bald in a becoming manner, before
+thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified nose, a feature in strict
+accordance with the physical tradition of the B. family. But it is not
+by these fragmentary remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my
+memory. I knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was
+a Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish Cross
+for valour Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these glorious facts
+inspired in me an admiring veneration; yet it is not that sentiment,
+strong as it was, which resumes for me the force and the significance
+of his personality. It is overborne by another and complex impression
+of awe, compassion and horror. Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the
+unfortunate and miserable (but heroic) being who once upon a time had
+eaten a dog.
+
+It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect has not
+worn off yet. I believe this is the very first, say, realistic, story I
+heard in my life; but all the same I don't know why I should have been
+so frightfully impressed. Of course I know what our village dogs look
+like--but still . . . No! At this very day, recalling the horror
+and compassion of my childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in
+disclosing to a cold and fastidious world that awful episode in the
+family history. I ask myself--is it right?--especially as the B. family
+had always been honourably known in a wide countryside for the delicacy
+of their tastes in the matter of eating and drinking. But upon the
+whole, and considering that this gastronomical degradation overtaking a
+gallant young officer lies really at the door of the Great Napoleon,
+I think that to cover it up by silence would be an exaggeration of
+literary restraint. Let the truth stand here. The responsibility rests
+with the Man of St. Helena in view of his deplorable levity in the
+conduct of the Russian campaign. It was during the memorable retreat
+from Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of two brother officers--as
+to whose morality and natural refinement I know nothing--bagged a dog
+on the outskirts of a village and subsequently devoured him. As far as
+I can remember the weapon used was a cavalry sabre, and the issue of the
+sporting episode was rather more of a matter of life and death than if
+it had been an encounter with a tiger. A picket of Cossacks was sleeping
+in that village lost in the depths of the great Lithuanian forest. The
+three sportsmen had observed them from a hiding-place making themselves
+very much at home amongst the huts just before the early winter darkness
+set in at four o'clock. They had observed them with disgust and perhaps
+with despair. Late in the night the rash counsels of hunger overcame
+the dictates of prudence. Crawling through the snow they crept up to the
+fence of dry branches which generally encloses a village in that part
+of Lithuania. What they expected to get and in what manner, and whether
+this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only knows. However, these
+Cossack parties, in most cases wandering without an officer, were known
+to guard themselves badly and often not at all. In addition, the village
+lying at a great distance from the line of French retreat, they could
+not suspect the presence of stragglers from the Grand Army. The three
+officers had strayed away in a blizzard from the main column and
+had been lost for days in the woods, which explains sufficiently the
+terrible straits to which they were reduced. Their plan was to try and
+attract the attention of the peasants in that one of the huts which was
+nearest to the enclosure; but as they were preparing to venture into
+the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is mighty strange
+that there was but one), a creature quite as formidable under the
+circumstances as a lion, began to bark on the other side of the
+fence. . . .
+
+At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by request)
+from the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my grandmother, I
+used to tremble with excitement.
+
+The dog barked. And if he had done no more than bark three officers of
+the Great Napoleon's army would have perished honourably on the points
+of Cossack's lances, or perchance escaping the chase would have died
+decently of starvation. But before they had time to think of running
+away, that fatal and revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of
+his zeal, dashed out through a gap in the fence. He dashed out and
+died. His head, I understand, was severed at one blow from his body.
+I understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
+snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit by
+the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to be distinctly
+unsatisfactory. It was not thin--on the contrary, it seemed unhealthily
+obese; its skin showed bare patches of an unpleasant character. However,
+they had not killed that dog for the sake of the pelt. He was
+large . . . He was eaten . . . The rest is silence . . .
+
+A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
+
+"I could not have eaten that dog."
+
+And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
+
+"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."
+
+I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to
+eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language
+of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on
+ancient salt junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake,
+of nondescript dishes containing things without a name--but of the
+Lithuanian village dog--never! I wish it to be distinctly understood
+that it is not I but my grand-uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed
+gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, &c. &c., who, in his young
+days, had eaten the Lithuanian dog.
+
+I wish he had not. The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly to
+the grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still if he really
+had to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on active
+service, while bearing up bravely against the greatest military disaster
+of modern history, and, in a manner, for the sake of his country. He had
+eaten him to appease his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of an
+unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith that
+lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled like a false
+beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a brave nation.
+
+Pro patria!
+
+Looked at in that light it appears a sweet and decorous meal.
+
+And looked at in the same light my own diet of la vache enragee appears
+a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for why should I,
+the son of a land which such men as these have turned up with their
+ploughshares and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of
+fantastic meals of salt junk and hard tack upon the wide seas? On
+the kindest view it seems an unanswerable question. Alas! I have the
+conviction that there are men of unstained rectitude who are ready
+to murmur scornfully the word desertion. Thus the taste of innocent
+adventure may be made bitter to the palate. The part of the inexplicable
+should be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where
+no explanation is final. No charge of faithlessness ought to be lightly
+uttered. The appearances of this perishable life are deceptive like
+everything that falls under the judgment of our imperfect senses. The
+inner voice may remain true enough in its secret counsel. The fidelity
+to a special tradition may last through the events of an unrelated
+existence, following faithfully too the traced way of an inexplicable
+impulse.
+
+It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of
+contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times
+the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible
+explanation. Indulgence--as somebody said--is the most intelligent of
+all the virtues. I venture to think that it is one of the least common,
+if not the most uncommon of all. I would not imply by this that men
+are foolish--or even most men. Far from it. The barber and the priest,
+backed by the whole opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct
+of the ingenious hidalgo who, sallying forth from his native place,
+broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffensive
+sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable.
+God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by
+hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a
+very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise
+the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the
+charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties.
+After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his
+very body from the intolerable reality of things. He wished to meet eye
+to eye the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose armour
+is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his
+arm, is the gate of a fortified city. O amiable and natural weakness!
+O blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! Who would not
+succumb to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless it was a form of
+self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a
+good citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their
+strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who
+used to say in his exile, "The people are never in fault"--one may admit
+that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole village.
+Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by
+the well of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by
+the fat, sly rogue of a landlord, has come very near perfection. He
+rides forth, his head encircled by a halo--the patron saint of all lives
+spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was
+not a good citizen.
+
+Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered
+exclamation of my tutor.
+
+It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have had a
+jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterwards, jolly enough in
+a way and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which I
+speak was the year of my last schoolboy holiday. There are other reasons
+why I should remember that year, but they are too long to state formally
+in this place. Moreover they have nothing to do with that holiday. What
+has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark
+was made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls of
+the Rhine, the Lake of Constance--in fact it was a memorable holiday of
+travel. Of late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of the Reuss.
+It was a delightful time. It was much more like a stroll than a tramp.
+Landing from a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves
+at the end of the second day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely
+footsteps, a little way beyond Hospenthal. This is not the day on which
+the remark was made: in the shadows of the deep valley and with the
+habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not upon the
+ethics of conduct but upon the simpler human problem of shelter and
+food. There did not seem anything of the kind in sight, and we were
+thinking of turning back when suddenly at a bend of the road we came
+upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.
+
+At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and that
+magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the
+unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the
+mountains. It was long though not big at all; it was low; it was built
+of boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with the white
+window-frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front. And
+yet it was an hotel; it had even a name which I have forgotten. But
+there was no gold-laced door-keeper at its humble door. A plain but
+vigorous servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who
+owned the place appeared. It was clear that no travellers were expected,
+or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostelry, which in its severe
+style resembled the house which surmounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls
+of the toy Noah's Arks, the universal possession of European childhood.
+However, its roof was not hinged and it was not full to the brim of
+slab-sided and painted animals of wood. Even the live tourist animal was
+nowhere in evidence. We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at
+one end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to my
+sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw plank, since
+there was no one at the other end to balance it against our two dusty
+and travel-stained figures. Then we hastened upstairs to bed in a room
+smelling of pine planks, and I was fast asleep before my head touched
+the pillow.
+
+In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow University) woke
+me up early, and as we were dressing remarked: "There seems to be a lot
+of people staying in this hotel. I have heard a noise of talking up till
+11 o'clock?" This statement surprised me; I had heard no noise whatever,
+having slept like a top.
+
+We went downstairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its long
+and narrow table. There were two rows of plates on it. At one of the
+many uncurtained windows stood a tall bony man with a bald head set off
+by a bunch of black hair above each ear and with a long black beard. He
+glanced up from the paper he was reading and seemed genuinely astonished
+at our intrusion. By-and-by more men came in. Not one of them looked
+like a tourist. Not a single woman appeared. These men seemed to
+know each other with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very
+talkative lot. The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the
+table. It all had the air of a family party. By-and-by, from one of the
+vigorous servant-girls in national costume, we discovered that the place
+was really a boarding-house for some English engineers engaged at the
+works of the St. Gothard Tunnel; and I could listen my fill to
+the sounds of the English language, as far as it is used at a
+breakfast-table by men who do not believe in wasting many words on the
+mere amenities of life.
+
+This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the tourist
+kind seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne--the kind which has no
+real existence in a workaday world. I know now that the bald-headed man
+spoke with a strong Scotch accent. I have met many of his kind since,
+both ashore and afloat. The second engineer of the steamer "Mavis", for
+instance, ought to have been his twin brother. I cannot help thinking
+that he really was, though for some reasons of his own he assured me
+that he never had a twin brother. Anyway the deliberate bald-headed Scot
+with the coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic and
+mysterious person.
+
+We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped-out route led over the Furca Pass
+towards the Rhone Glacier, with the further intention of following down
+the trend of the Hasli Valley. The sun was already declining when we
+found ourselves on the top of the pass, and the remark alluded to was
+presently uttered.
+
+We sat down by the side of the road to continue the argument begun half
+a mile or so before. I am certain it was an argument because I remember
+perfectly how my tutor argued and how without the power of reply I
+listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on the ground. A stir on the
+road made me look up--and then I saw my unforgettable Englishman. There
+are acquaintances of later years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember
+less clearly. He marched rapidly towards the east (attended by a
+hang-dog Swiss guide) with the mien of an ardent and fearless traveller.
+He was clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore
+short socks under his laced boots, for reasons which whether hygienic or
+conscientious were surely imaginative, his calves exposed to the public
+gaze and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the
+splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young
+ivory. He was the leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong,
+exalted satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains
+illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white
+whiskers, his innocently eager and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast
+a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny
+teeth towards the man and the boy sitting like dusty tramps by the
+roadside, with a modest knapsack lying at their feet. His white calves
+twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss guide with a surly mouth stalked
+like an unwilling bear at his elbow; a small train of three mules
+followed in single file the lead of this inspiring enthusiast. Two
+ladies rode past one behind the other, but from the way they sat I saw
+only their calm, uniform backs, and the long ends of blue veils hanging
+behind far down over their identical hat-brims. His two daughters
+surely. An industrious luggage-mule, with unstarched ears and guarded by
+a slouching, sallow driver, brought up the rear. My tutor, after pausing
+for a look and a faint smile, resumed his earnest argument.
+
+I tell you it was a memorable year! One does not meet such an Englishman
+twice in a lifetime. Was he in the mystic ordering of common events the
+ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment
+on the top of an Alpine pass, with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for
+mute and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable
+and comic ardour of his striving-forward appearance helped me to
+pull myself together. It must be stated that on that day and in the
+exhilarating atmosphere of that elevated spot I had been feeling utterly
+crushed. It was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my desire
+to go to sea. At first like those sounds that, ranging outside the
+scale to which men's ears are attuned, remain inaudible to our sense of
+hearing, this declaration passed unperceived. It was as if it had not
+been. Later on, by trying various tones I managed to arouse here and
+there a surprised momentary attention--the "What was that funny noise?"
+sort of inquiry. Later on it was--"Did you hear what that boy said? What
+an extraordinary outbreak!" Presently a wave of scandalised astonishment
+(it could not have been greater if I had announced the intention of
+entering a Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of the educational and
+academical town of Cracow spread itself over several provinces.
+It spread itself shallow but far-reaching. It stirred up a mass of
+remonstrance, indignation, pitying wonder, bitter irony and downright
+chaff. I could hardly breathe under its weight, and certainly had no
+words for an answer. People wondered what Mr. T.B. would do now with his
+worrying nephew and, I dare say, hoped kindly that he would make short
+work of my nonsense.
+
+What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine to have it out
+with me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial and just,
+taking his stand on the ground of wisdom and affection. As far as is
+possible for a boy whose power of expression is still unformed I opened
+the secret of my thoughts to him and he in return allowed me a glimpse
+into his mind and heart; the first glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble
+treasure of clear thought and warm feeling, which through life was to
+be mine to draw upon with a never-deceived love and confidence.
+Practically, after several exhaustive conversations, he concluded that
+he would not have me later on reproach him for having spoiled my life
+by an unconditional opposition. But I must take time for serious
+reflection. And I must not only think of myself but of others; weigh the
+claims of affection and conscience against my own sincerity of purpose.
+"Think well what it all means in the larger issues, my boy," he exhorted
+me finally with special friendliness. "And meantime try to get the best
+place you can at the yearly examinations."
+
+The scholastic year came to an end. I took a fairly good place at
+the exams., which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be a more
+difficult task than for other boys. In that respect I could enter with
+a good conscience upon that holiday which was like a long visit pour
+prendre conge of the mainland of old Europe I was to see so little of
+for the next four and twenty years. Such, however, was not the avowed
+purpose of that tour. It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to
+distract and occupy my thoughts in other directions. Nothing had been
+said for months of my going to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor
+and his influence over me were so well known that he must have received
+a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic folly. It was an
+excellently appropriate arrangement, as neither he nor I had ever had a
+single glimpse of the sea in our lives. That was to come by-and-by for
+both of us in Venice, from the outer shore of Lido. Meantime he had
+taken his mission to heart so well that I began to feel crushed before
+we reached Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he
+had argued away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove! Of
+his devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt. He had proved
+it already by two years of unremitting and arduous care. I could not
+hate him. But he had been crushing me slowly, and when he started to
+argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer a success
+than either he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing silence,
+feeling that ghostly, unrealised and desired sea of my dreams escape
+from the unnerved grip of my will.
+
+The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed--and the argument went on.
+What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years,
+either in ambition, honour or conscience? An unanswerable question. But
+I felt no longer crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion was
+visible in his as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked
+up the knapsack suddenly and got on to his feet.
+
+"You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That's what you are."
+
+I was surprised. I was only fifteen and did not know what he meant
+exactly. But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the immortal knight
+turning up in connection with my own folly, as some people would call it
+to my face. Alas! I don't think there was anything to be proud of. Mine
+was not the stuff the protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of
+this world's wrongs are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that
+best. Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and the
+priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.
+
+I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking back he
+stopped. The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over the Furca
+Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me and in full view of the
+Finster-Aarhorn, with his band of giant brothers rearing their
+monstrous heads against a brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder
+affectionately.
+
+"Well! That's enough. We will have no more of it."
+
+And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between
+us. There was to be no more question of it at all, nowhere or with any
+one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily. Eleven
+years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of the
+St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant Service. But
+the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was
+no longer living.
+
+That very year of our travels he took his degree of the Philosophical
+Faculty--and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to
+the call he entered at once upon the four-year course of the Medical
+Schools. A day came when, on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I
+opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had
+made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian
+Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of
+the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
+coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.
+
+How short his years and how clear his vision! What greater reward in
+ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to win for himself
+when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the end of
+my opening life.
+
+
+
+Chapter III.
+
+The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by my
+grand-uncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and famished
+scarecrows, symbolised, to my childish imagination, the whole horror of
+the retreat from Moscow and the immorality of a conqueror's ambition. An
+extreme distaste for that objectionable episode has tinged the views I
+hold as to the character and achievements of Napoleon the Great. I need
+not say that these are unfavourable. It was morally reprehensible for
+that great captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog
+by raising in his breast a false hope of national independence. It
+has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards of a
+hundred years on a diet of false hopes and--well--dog. It is, when one
+thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen. Some pride in the national
+constitution which has survived a long course of such dishes is really
+excusable. But enough of generalising. Returning to particulars, Mr.
+Nicholas B. confided to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his
+misanthropically laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been
+nearly "the death of him." This is not surprising. What surprises me is
+that the story was ever heard of; for grand-uncle Nicholas differed in
+this from the generality of military men of Napoleon's time (and perhaps
+of all time), that he did not like to talk of his campaigns, which began
+at Friedland and ended somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc.
+His admiration of the great Emperor was unreserved in everything but
+expression. Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a
+sentiment to be displayed before a world of little faith. Apart from
+that he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he
+had hardly ever seen a soldier in his life. Proud of his decorations
+earned before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear the ribbons at the
+buttonhole in the manner practised to this day in Europe and even was
+unwilling to display the insignia on festive occasions, as though he
+wished to conceal them in the fear of appearing boastful. "It is enough
+that I have them," he used to mutter. In the course of thirty years they
+were seen on his breast only twice--at an auspicious marriage in the
+family and at the funeral of an old friend. That the wedding which was
+thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only late in
+life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas B., who made amends
+at my birth by a long letter of congratulation containing the following
+prophecy: "He will see better times." Even in his embittered heart there
+lived a hope. But he was not a true prophet.
+
+He was a man of strange contradictions. Living for many years in his
+brother's house, the home of many children, a house full of life, of
+animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of many guests, he
+kept his habits of solitude and silence. Considered as obstinately
+secretive in all his purposes, he was in reality the victim of a most
+painful irresolution in all matters of civil life. Under his taciturn,
+phlegmatic behaviour was hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate
+anger. I suspect he had no talent for narrative; but it seemed to afford
+him sombre satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride over
+the bridge of the river Elster after the battle of Leipsic. Lest some
+construction favourable to his valour should be put on the fact he
+condescended to explain how it came to pass. It seems that shortly after
+the retreat began he was sent back to the town where some divisions
+of the French Army (and amongst them the Polish corps of Prince Joseph
+Poniatowski), jammed hopelessly in the streets, were being simply
+exterminated by the troops of the Allied Powers. When asked what it was
+like in there Mr. Nicholas B. muttered the only word "Shambles." Having
+delivered his message to the Prince he hastened away at once to render
+an account of his mission to the superior who had sent him. By that time
+the advance of the enemy had enveloped the town, and he was shot at from
+houses and chased all the way to the river bank by a disorderly mob of
+Austrian Dragoons and Prussian Hussars. The bridge had been mined
+early in the morning and his opinion was that the sight of the horsemen
+converging from many sides in the pursuit of his person alarmed the
+officer in command of the sappers and caused the premature firing of the
+charges. He had not gone more than 200 yards on the other side when he
+heard the sound of the fatal explosions. Mr. Nicholas B. concluded
+his bald narrative with the word "Imbecile" uttered with the utmost
+deliberation. It testified to his indignation at the loss of so many
+thousands of lives. But his phlegmatic physiognomy lighted up when he
+spoke of his only wound, with something resembling satisfaction. You
+will see that there was some reason for it when you learn that he was
+wounded in the heel. "Like his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon himself,"
+he reminded his hearers with assumed indifference. There can be no doubt
+that the indifference was assumed, if one thinks what very distinguished
+sort of wound it was. In all the history of warfare there are, I
+believe, only three warriors publicly known to have been wounded in
+the heel--Achilles and Napoleon--demi-gods indeed--to whom the familial
+piety of an unworthy descendant adds the name of the simple mortal,
+Nicholas B.
+
+The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B. staying with a distant relative
+of ours, owner of a small estate in Galicia. How he got there across the
+breadth of an armed Europe and after what adventures I am afraid will
+never be known now. All his papers were destroyed shortly before his
+death; but if there was amongst them, as he affirmed, a concise record
+of his life, then I am pretty sure it did not take up more than a
+half-sheet of foolscap or so. This relative of ours happened to be
+an Austrian officer, who had left the service after the battle of
+Austerlitz. Unlike Mr. Nicholas B., who concealed his decorations, he
+liked to display his honourable discharge in which he was mentioned as
+unschreckbar (fearless) before the enemy. No conjunction could seem more
+unpromising, yet it stands in the family tradition that these two got on
+very well together in their rural solitude.
+
+When asked whether he had not been sorely tempted during the Hundred
+Days to make his way again to France and join the service of his beloved
+Emperor, Mr. Nicholas B. used to mutter: "No money. No horse. Too far to
+walk."
+
+The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of national hopes affected adversely
+the character of Mr. Nicholas B. He shrank from returning to his
+province. But for that there was also another reason. Mr. Nicholas B.
+and his brother--my maternal grandfather--had lost their father early,
+while they were quite children. Their mother, young still and left
+very well off, married again a man of great charm and of an amiable
+disposition but without a penny. He turned out an affectionate and
+careful stepfather; it was unfortunate though that while directing the
+boys' education and forming their character by wise counsel he did his
+best to get hold of the fortune by buying and selling land in his own
+name and investing capital in such a manner as to cover up the traces
+of the real ownership. It seems that such practices can be successful
+if one is charming enough to dazzle one's own wife permanently and brave
+enough to defy the vain terrors of public opinion. The critical time
+came when the elder of the boys on attaining his majority in the year
+1811 asked for the accounts and some part at least of the inheritance
+to begin life upon. It was then that the stepfather declared with
+calm finality that there were no accounts to render and no property to
+inherit. The whole fortune was his very own. He was very good-natured
+about the young man's misapprehension of the true state of affairs, but
+of course felt obliged to maintain his position firmly. Old friends
+came and went busily, voluntary mediators appeared travelling on most
+horrible roads from the most distant corners of the three provinces;
+and the Marshal of the Nobility (ex-officio guardian of all well-born
+orphans) called a meeting of landowners to "ascertain in a friendly
+way how the misunderstanding between X and his stepsons had arisen and
+devise proper measures to remove the same." A deputation to that effect
+visited X, who treated them to excellent wines, but absolutely refused
+his ear to their remonstrances. As to the proposals for arbitration he
+simply laughed at them; yet the whole province must have been aware
+that fourteen years before, when he married the widow, all his
+visible fortune consisted (apart from his social qualities) in a smart
+four-horse turn-out with two servants, with whom he went about visiting
+from house to house; and as to any funds he might have possessed at that
+time their existence could only be inferred from the fact that he was
+very punctual in settling his modest losses at cards. But by the magic
+power of stubborn and constant assertion, there were found presently,
+here and there, people who mumbled that surely "there must be something
+in it." However, on his next name-day (which he used to celebrate by
+a great three-days' shooting-party), of all the invited crowd only two
+guests turned up, distant neighbours of no importance; one notoriously a
+fool, and the other a very pious and honest person but such a passionate
+lover of the gun that on his own confession he could not have refused
+an invitation to a shooting-party from the devil himself. X met this
+manifestation of public opinion with the serenity of an unstained
+conscience. He refused to be crushed. Yet he must have been a man
+of deep feeling, because, when his wife took openly the part of her
+children, he lost his beautiful tranquillity, proclaimed himself
+heart-broken and drove her out of the house, neglecting in his grief to
+give her enough time to pack her trunks.
+
+This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an abominable marvel of chicane,
+which by the use of every legal subterfuge was made to last for many
+years. It was also the occasion for a display of much kindness and
+sympathy. All the neighbouring houses flew open for the reception of the
+homeless. Neither legal aid nor material assistance in the prosecution
+of the suit was ever wanting. X, on his side, went about shedding
+tears publicly over his stepchildren's ingratitude and his wife's blind
+infatuation; but as at the same time he displayed great cleverness
+in the art of concealing material documents (he was even suspected of
+having burnt a lot of historically interesting family papers), this
+scandalous litigation had to be ended by a compromise lest worse should
+befall. It was settled finally by a surrender, out of the disputed
+estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, of two villages with the
+names of which I do not intend to trouble my readers. After this lame
+and impotent conclusion neither the wife nor the stepsons had anything
+to say to the man who had presented the world with such a successful
+example of self-help based on character, determination and industry; and
+my great-grandmother, her health completely broken down, died a
+couple of years later in Carlsbad. Legally secured by a decree in the
+possession of his plunder, X regained his wonted serenity and went on
+living in the neighbourhood in a comfortable style and in apparent peace
+of mind. His big shoots were fairly well attended again. He was never
+tired of assuring people that he bore no grudge for what was past;
+he protested loudly of his constant affection for his wife and
+stepchildren. It was true he said that they had tried their best to
+strip him as naked as a Turkish saint in the decline of his days; and
+because he had defended himself from spoliation, as anybody else in his
+place would have done, they had abandoned him now to the horrors of a
+solitary old age. Nevertheless, his love for them survived these cruel
+blows. And there might have been some truth in his protestations. Very
+soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his eldest stepson, my
+maternal grandfather; and when these were peremptorily rejected he went
+on renewing them again and again with characteristic obstinacy. For
+years he persisted in his efforts at reconciliation, promising my
+grandfather to execute a will in his favour if he only would be friends
+again to the extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close
+neighbourhood for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in
+an appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My grandfather was an
+ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as free from
+hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the liberal-minded
+Benedictines who directed the only public school of some standing then
+in the south, he had also read deeply the authors of the eighteenth
+century. In him Christian charity was joined to a philosophical
+indulgence for the failings of human nature. But the memory of these
+miserably anxious early years, his young man's years robbed of all
+generous illusions by the cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the
+way of forgiveness. He never succumbed to the fascination of the great
+shoot; and X, his heart set to the last on reconciliation with the draft
+of the will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died intestate.
+The fortune thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful management
+passed to some distant relatives whom he had never seen and who even did
+not bear his name.
+
+Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe. Mr.
+Nicholas B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the "fearless"
+Austrian officer, departed from Galicia, and without going near his
+native place, where the odious lawsuit was still going on, proceeded
+straight to Warsaw and entered the army of the newly constituted Polish
+kingdom under the sceptre of Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.
+
+This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgment to a
+nation of its former independent existence, included only the central
+provinces of the old Polish patrimony. A brother of the Emperor, the
+Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief,
+married morganatically to a Polish lady to whom he was fiercely
+attached, extended this affection to what he called "My Poles" in
+a capricious and savage manner. Sallow in complexion, with a Tartar
+physiognomy and fierce little eyes, he walked with his fists clenched,
+his body bent forward, darting suspicious glances from under an enormous
+cocked hat. His intelligence was limited and his sanity itself was
+doubtful. The hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by
+mystic leanings as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in their
+various ways, for one was mystically liberal and the other mystically
+autocratic), but by the fury of an uncontrollable temper which generally
+broke out in disgusting abuse on the parade ground. He was a passionate
+militarist and an amazing drill-master. He treated his Polish Army as a
+spoiled child treats a favourite toy, except that he did not take it to
+bed with him at night. It was not small enough for that. But he played
+with it all day and every day, delighting in the variety of pretty
+uniforms and in the fun of incessant drilling. This childish passion,
+not for war but for mere militarism, achieved a desirable result. The
+Polish Army, in its equipment, in its armament and in its battlefield
+efficiency, as then understood, became, by the end of the year 1830, a
+first-rate tactical instrument. Polish peasantry (not serfs) served in
+the ranks by enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly to the smaller
+nobility. Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had no difficulty
+in obtaining a lieutenancy, but the promotion in the Polish Army was
+slow, because, being a separate organisation, it took no part in the
+wars of the Russian Empire against Persia or Turkey. Its first campaign,
+against Russia itself, was to be its last. In 1831, on the outbreak of
+the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas B. was the senior captain of his regiment.
+Some time before he had been made head of the remount establishment
+quartered outside the kingdom in our southern provinces, whence almost
+all the horses for the Polish cavalry were drawn. For the first time
+since he went away from home at the age of eighteen to begin his
+military life by the battle of Friedland, Mr. Nicholas B. breathed the
+air of the "Border," his native air. Unkind fate was lying in wait for
+him amongst the scenes of his youth. At the first news of the rising
+in Warsaw all the remount establishment, officers, vets., and the very
+troopers, were put promptly under arrest and hurried off in a body
+beyond the Dnieper to the nearest town in Russia proper. From there they
+were dispersed to the distant parts of the Empire. On this occasion poor
+Mr. Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much farther than he ever did in
+the times of Napoleonic invasion, if much less willingly. Astrakhan was
+his destination. He remained there three years, allowed to live at
+large in the town but having to report himself every day at noon to the
+military commandant, who used to detain him frequently for a pipe and
+a chat. It is difficult to form a just idea of what a chat with Mr.
+Nicholas B. could have been like. There must have been much compressed
+rage under his taciturnity, for the commandant communicated to him the
+news from the theatre of war and this news was such as it could be,
+that is, very bad for the Poles. Mr. Nicholas B. received these
+communications with outward phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm
+sympathy for his prisoner. "As a soldier myself I understand your
+feelings. You, of course, would like to be in the thick of it. By
+heavens! I am fond of you. If it were not for the terms of the military
+oath I would let you go on my own responsibility. What difference could
+it make to us, one more or less of you?"
+
+At other times he wondered with simplicity.
+
+"Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch"--(my great-grandfather's name
+was Stephen and the commandant used the Russian form of polite
+address)--"tell me why is it that you Poles are always looking for
+trouble? What else could you expect from running up against Russia?"
+
+He was capable, too, of philosophical reflections.
+
+"Look at your Napoleon now. A great man. There is no denying it that he
+was a great man as long as he was content to thrash those Germans and
+Austrians and all those nations. But no! He must go to Russia looking
+for trouble, and what's the consequence? Such as you see me, I have
+rattled this sabre of mine on the pavements of Paris."
+
+After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B. described him as a "worthy
+man but stupid," whenever he could be induced to speak of the conditions
+of his exile. Declining the option offered him to enter the Russian Army
+he was retired with only half the pension of his rank. His nephew (my
+uncle and guardian) told me that the first lasting impression on his
+memory as a child of four was the glad excitement reigning in his
+parents' house on the day when Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home from his
+detention in Russia.
+
+Every generation has its memories. The first memories of Mr. Nicholas
+B. might have been shaped by the events of the last partition of Poland,
+and he lived long enough to suffer from the last armed rising in 1863,
+an event which affected the future of all my generation and has coloured
+my earliest impressions. His brother, in whose house he had sheltered
+for some seventeen years his misanthropical timidity before the
+commonest problems of life, having died in the early fifties, Mr.
+Nicholas B. had to screw his courage up to the sticking-point and come
+to some decision as to the future. After a long and agonising hesitation
+he was persuaded at last to become the tenant of some fifteen hundred
+acres out of the estate of a friend in the neighbourhood. The terms
+of the lease were very advantageous, but the retired situation of the
+village and a plain comfortable house in good repair were, I fancy, the
+greatest inducements. He lived there quietly for about ten years, seeing
+very few people and taking no part in the public life of the province,
+such as it could be under an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny. His
+character and his patriotism were above suspicion; but the organisers
+of the rising in their frequent journeys up and down the province
+scrupulously avoided coming near his house. It was generally felt that
+the repose of the old man's last years ought not to be disturbed. Even
+such intimates as my paternal grandfather, a comrade-in-arms during
+Napoleon's Moscow campaign and later on a fellow-officer in the Polish
+Army, refrained from visiting his crony as the date of the outbreak
+approached. My paternal grandfather's two sons and his only daughter
+were all deeply involved in the revolutionary work; he himself was of
+that type of Polish squire whose only ideal of patriotic action was to
+"get into the saddle and drive them out." But even he agreed that "dear
+Nicholas must not be worried." All this considerate caution on the part
+of friends, both conspirators and others, did not prevent Mr. Nicholas
+B. being made to feel the misfortunes of that ill-omened year.
+
+Less than forty-eight hours after the beginning of the rebellion in that
+part of the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks passed through the
+village and invaded the homestead. Most of them remained formed between
+the house and the stables, while several, dismounting, ransacked the
+various outbuildings. The officer in command, accompanied by two men,
+walked up to the front door. All the blinds on that side were down.
+The officer told the servant who received him that he wanted to see his
+master. He was answered that the master was away from home, which was
+perfectly true.
+
+I follow here the tale as told afterwards by the servant to my
+grand-uncle's friends and relatives, and as I have heard it repeated.
+
+On receiving this answer the Cossack officer, who had been standing in
+the porch, stepped into the house.
+
+"Where is the master gone, then?"
+
+"Our master went to J--" (the government town some fifty miles off),
+"the day before yesterday."
+
+"There are only two horses in the stables. Where are the others?"
+
+"Our master always travels with his own horses" (meaning: not by post).
+"He will be away a week or more. He was pleased to mention to me that he
+had to attend to some business in the Civil Court."
+
+While the servant was speaking the officer looked about the hall. There
+was a door facing him, a door to the right and a door to the left. The
+officer chose to enter the room on the left and ordered the blinds to
+be pulled up. It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s study with a couple of tall
+bookcases, some pictures on the walls, and so on. Besides the big centre
+table, with books and papers, there was a quite small writing-table
+with several drawers, standing between the door and the window in a good
+light; and at this table my grand-uncle usually sat either to read or
+write.
+
+On pulling up the blind the servant was startled by the discovery that
+the whole male population of the village was massed in front, trampling
+down the flower-beds. There were also a few women amongst them. He was
+glad to observe the village priest (of the Orthodox Church) coming up
+the drive. The good man in his haste had tucked up his cassock as high
+as the top of his boots.
+
+The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the bookcases.
+Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre-table and remarked
+easily:
+
+"Your master did not take you to town with him, then."
+
+"I am the head servant and he leaves me in charge of the house. It's a
+strong, young chap that travels with our master. If--God forbid--there
+was some accident on the road he would be of much more use than I."
+
+Glancing through the window he saw the priest arguing vehemently in the
+thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his interference. Three or
+four men, however, were talking with the Cossacks at the door.
+
+"And you don't think your master has gone to join the rebels maybe--eh?"
+asked the officer.
+
+"Our master would be too old for that surely. He's well over seventy
+and he's getting feeble too. It's some years now since he's been on
+horseback and he can't walk much either now."
+
+The officer sat there swinging his leg, very quiet and indifferent. By
+that time the peasants who had been talking with the Cossack troopers at
+the door had been permitted to get into the hall. One or two more left
+the crowd and followed them in. They were seven in all and amongst them
+the blacksmith, an ex-soldier. The servant appealed deferentially to the
+officer.
+
+"Won't your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to their
+homes? What do they want to push themselves into the house like this
+for? It's not proper for them to behave like this while our master's
+away and I am responsible for everything here."
+
+The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired:
+
+"Have you any arms in the house?"
+
+"Yes. We have. Some old things."
+
+"Bring them all, here, on to this table."
+
+The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.
+
+"Won't your honour tell these chaps? . . ."
+
+But the officer looked at him in silence in such a way that he gave it
+up at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help him collect
+the arms. Meantime the officer walked slowly through all the rooms in
+the house, examining them attentively but touching nothing. The peasants
+in the hall fell back and took off their caps when he passed through.
+He said nothing whatever to them. When he came back to the study all the
+arms to be found in the house were lying on the table. There was a pair
+of big flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry
+swords, one of the French the other of the Polish Army pattern, with a
+fowling-piece or two.
+
+The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords and guns, one
+after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up. The peasants in the
+hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen after him into the study. He
+gave not the slightest sign of being conscious of their existence and,
+his business being apparently concluded, strode out of the house without
+a word. Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps
+and began to smile at each other.
+
+The Cossacks rode away, passing through the yards of the home farm
+straight into the fields. The priest, still arguing with the peasants,
+moved gradually down the drive and his earnest eloquence was drawing the
+silent mob after him, away from the house. This justice must be rendered
+to the parish priests of the Greek Church that, strangers to the country
+as they were (being all drawn from the interior of Russia), the majority
+of them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the cause
+of peace and humanity. True to the spirit of their calling, they tried
+to soothe the passions of the excited peasantry and opposed rapine and
+violence whenever they could, with all their might. And this conduct
+they pursued against the express wishes of the authorities. Later on
+some of them were made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed
+abruptly to the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.
+
+The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had got into
+the house. What sort of conduct was that, he asked them, towards a man
+who was only a tenant, had been invariably good and considerate to the
+villagers for years; and only the other day had agreed to give up two
+meadows for the use of the village herd? He reminded them, too, of Mr.
+Nicholas B.'s devotion to the sick in the time of cholera. Every word
+of this was true and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch
+their heads and look irresolute. The speaker then pointed at the window,
+exclaiming: "Look! there's all your crowd going away quietly and you
+silly chaps had better go after them and pray God to forgive you your
+evil thoughts."
+
+This appeal was an unlucky inspiration. In crowding clumsily to the
+window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows overturned
+the little writing-table. As it fell over a chink of loose coin was
+heard. "There's money in that thing," cried the blacksmith. In a moment
+the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay
+exposed in a drawer eighty half-imperials. Gold coin was a rare sight in
+Russia even at that time; it put the peasants beside themselves. "There
+must be more of that in the house and we shall have it," yelled the
+ex-soldier blacksmith. "This is war time." The others were already
+shouting out of the window urging the crowd to come back and help. The
+priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms up and hurried
+away so as not to see what was going to happen.
+
+In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in the
+house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that, as the
+servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in
+the whole house. They broke some very fine mirrors, all the windows and
+every piece of glass and china. They threw the books and papers out
+on the lawn and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing
+apparently. Absolutely the only one solitary thing which they left whole
+was a small ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in
+the wrecked bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany and
+splintered boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead. Detecting
+the servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned tin box, they
+tore it from him, and because he resisted they threw him out of the
+dining-room window. The house was on one floor but raised well above the
+ground, and the fall was so serious that the man remained lying stunned
+till the cook and a stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their
+hiding-places and picked him up. By that time the mob had departed
+carrying off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money.
+Some distance from the house in the middle of a field they broke it
+open. They found inside documents engrossed on parchment and the two
+crosses of the Legion of Honour and For Valour. At the sight of these
+objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour given
+only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what they had
+done. They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.
+
+On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down
+completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him
+much. While he was still in bed from the shock the two crosses were
+found and returned to him. It helped somewhat his slow convalescence,
+but the tin box and the parchments, though searched for in all the
+ditches around, never turned up again. He could not get over the loss of
+his Legion of Honour Patent, whose preamble, setting forth his services,
+he knew by heart to the very letter, and after this blow volunteered
+sometimes to recite, tears standing in his eyes the while. Its terms
+haunted him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an
+extent that he used to repeat them to himself. This is confirmed by
+the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more intimate
+friends. "What makes my heart heavy is to hear our master in his room at
+night walking up and down and praying aloud in the French language."
+
+It must have been somewhat over a year afterwards that I saw Mr.
+Nicholas B., or, more correctly, that he saw me, for the last time.
+It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother had a three
+months' leave from exile, which she was spending in the house of her
+brother, and friends and relations were coming from far and near to do
+her honour. It is inconceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not have
+been of the number. The little child a few months old he had taken up in
+his arms on the day of his home-coming after years of war and exile was
+confessing her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her
+turn. I do not know whether he was present on the very day of our
+departure. I have already admitted that for me he is more especially
+the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a
+gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any
+remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated
+evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily
+buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr.
+Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his
+grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those he
+had seen in the course of his taciturn life.
+
+But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The
+elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-horses,
+standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns,
+four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups
+of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest
+neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on all the faces an air of sober
+concentration; my grandmother all in black gazing stoically, my uncle
+giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been
+placed already; at the top of the flight my little cousin in a short
+skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a
+small princess attended by the women of her own household: the head
+gourvernante, our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty
+years in the service of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor
+attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression,
+and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
+meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown paper.
+Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes only
+were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the
+silence with an appeal to me: "N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri." In
+three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only
+to speak French but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent
+playmate. In the distance, half way down to the great gates, a light,
+open trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn
+up on one side with the police-captain of the district sitting in it,
+the vizor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over his eyes.
+
+It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our going so
+carefully. Without wishing to treat with levity the just timidities of
+Imperialists all the world over, I may allow myself the reflection that
+a woman, practically condemned by the doctors, and a small boy not quite
+six years old could not be regarded as seriously dangerous even for
+the largest of conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of
+responsibilities. And this good man, I believe, did not think so either.
+
+I learned afterwards why he was present on that day. I don't remember
+any outward signs, but it seems that, about a month before, my mother
+became so unwell that there was a doubt whether she could be made fit to
+travel in the time. In this uncertainty the Governor-General in Kiev was
+petitioned to grant her a fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's
+house. No answer whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at
+dusk the police-captain of the district drove up to the house and told
+my uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak with
+the master in private, at once. Very much impressed (he thought it was
+going to be an arrest) the servant, "more dead than alive with fright,"
+as he related afterwards, smuggled him through the big drawing-room,
+which was dark (that room was not lighted every evening), on tiptoe, so
+as not to attract the attention of the ladies in the house, and led him
+by way of the orangery to my uncle's private apartments.
+
+The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my uncle's
+hands.
+
+"There. Pray read this. I have no business to show this paper to you. It
+is wrong of me. But I can't either eat or sleep with such a job hanging
+over me."
+
+That police-captain, a native of Great Russia, had been for many years
+serving in the district.
+
+My uncle unfolded and read the document. It was a service order issued
+from the Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with the matter of the
+petition and directing the police-captain to disregard all remonstrances
+and explanations in regard to that illness either from medical men or
+others, "and if she has not left her brother's house"--it went on to
+say--"on the morning of the day specified on her permit, you are
+to despatch her at once under escort, direct" (underlined) "to the
+prison-hospital in Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands."
+
+"For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your sister goes away punctually on
+that day. Don't give me this work to do with a woman--and with one of
+your family too. I simply cannot bear to think of it."
+
+He was absolutely wringing his hands. My uncle looked at him in silence.
+
+"Thank you for this warning. I assure you that even if she were dying
+she would be carried out to the carriage."
+
+"Yes--indeed--and what difference would it make--travel to Kiev or back
+to her husband. For she would have to go--death or no death. And mind,
+Mr. B., I will be here on the day, not that I doubt your promise, but
+because I must. I have got to. Duty. All the same my trade is not fit
+for a dog since some of you Poles will persist in rebelling, and all of
+you have got to suffer for it."
+
+This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap pulled
+up between the house and the great gates. I regret not being able
+to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in the rights of
+conquest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial greatness.
+On the other hand, I am in a position to state the name of the
+Governor-General who signed the order with the marginal note "to be
+carried out to the letter" in his own handwriting. The gentleman's name
+was Bezak. A high dignitary, an energetic official, the idol for a time
+of the Russian Patriotic Press.
+
+Each generation has its memories.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV.
+
+It must not be supposed that in setting forth the memories of this
+half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we met again at
+dinner, I am losing sight of "Almayer's Folly." Having confessed that my
+first novel was begun in idleness--a holiday task--I think I have also
+given the impression that it was a much-delayed book. It was never
+dismissed from my mind, even when the hope of ever finishing it was very
+faint. Many things came in its way: daily duties, new impressions,
+old memories. It was not the outcome of a need--the famous need of
+self-expression which artists find in their search for motives.
+The necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity, a
+completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon. Or perhaps some idle and
+frivolous magician (there must be magicians in London) had cast a spell
+over me through his parlour window as I explored the maze of streets
+east and west in solitary leisurely walks without chart and compass.
+Till I began to write that novel I had written nothing but letters and
+not very many these. I never made a note of a fact, of an impression or
+of an anecdote in my life. The conception of a planned book was entirely
+outside my mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of
+being an author had never turned up amongst these gracious imaginary
+existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and
+immobility of a day-dream: yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday
+that from the moment I had done blackening over the first manuscript
+page of "Almayer's Folly" (it contained about two hundred words and this
+proportion of words to a page has remained with me through the fifteen
+years of my writing life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of
+my heart and the amazing ignorance of my mind, written that page the die
+was cast. Never had Rubicon been more blindly forded, without invocation
+to the gods, without fear of men.
+
+That morning I got up from my breakfast, pushing the chair back, and
+rang the bell violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely, or perhaps
+I should say eagerly, I do not know. But manifestly it must have been
+a special ring of the bell, a common sound made impressive, like the
+ringing of a bell for the raising of the curtain upon a new scene.
+It was an unusual thing for me to do. Generally, I dawdled over my
+breakfast and I solemn took the trouble to ring the bell for the table
+to be cleared away; but on that morning for some reason hidden in the
+general mysteriousness of the event I did not dawdle. And yet I was
+not in a hurry. I pulled the cord casually and while the faint tinkling
+somewhere down in the basement went on, I charged my pipe in the usual
+way and I looked for the matchbox with glances distraught indeed but
+exhibiting, I am ready to swear, no signs of a fine frenzy. I was
+composed enough to perceive after some considerable time the matchbox
+lying there on the mantelpiece right under my nose. And all this was
+beautifully and safely usual. Before I had thrown down the match my
+landlady's daughter appeared with her calm, pale face and an inquisitive
+look, in the doorway. Of late it was the landlady's daughter who
+answered my bell. I mention this little fact with pride, because it
+proves that during the thirty or forty days of my tenancy I had produced
+a favourable impression. For a fortnight past I had been spared the
+unattractive sight of the domestic slave. The girls in that Bessborough
+Gardens house were often changed, but whether short or long, fair or
+dark, they were always untidy and particularly bedraggled as if in a
+sordid version of the fairy tale the ashbin cat had been changed into a
+maid. I was infinitely sensible of the privilege of being waited on by
+my landlady's daughter. She was neat if anaemic.
+
+"Will you please clear away all this at once?" I addressed her in
+convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting my pipe
+to draw. This, I admit, was an unusual request. Generally on getting up
+from breakfast I would sit down in the window with a book and let them
+clear the table when they liked; but if you think that on that morning
+I was in the least impatient, you are mistaken. I remember that I was
+perfectly calm. As a matter of fact I was not at all certain that I
+wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to
+write about. No, I was not impatient. I lounged between the mantelpiece
+and the window, not even consciously waiting for the table to be
+cleared. It was ten to one that before my landlady's daughter was done I
+would pick up a book and sit down with it all the morning in a spirit of
+enjoyable indolence. I affirm it with assurance, and I don't even know
+now what were the books then lying about the room. Whatever they were
+they were not the works of great masters, where the secret of clear
+thought and exact expression can be found. Since the age of five I have
+been a great reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was
+never aware of learning to read. At ten years of age I had read much
+of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in Polish and in French,
+history, voyages, novels; I knew "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote" in
+abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some
+French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before I began
+to write myself. I believe it was a novel and it is quite possible
+that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My
+acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English
+novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of
+European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was
+otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was
+"Nicholas Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could
+chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that
+language. As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned
+Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their native speech. It was, I
+have no doubt, an excellent translation. This must have been in the year
+'70. But I really believe that I am wrong. That book was not my first
+introduction to English literature. My first acquaintance was (or were)
+the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and that in the very MS. of my father's
+translation. It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been
+less than a year after my mother's death, because I remember myself
+in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning. We were
+living together, quite alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the
+town of T--. That afternoon, instead of going out to play in the large
+yard which we shared with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in
+which my father generally wrote. What emboldened me to clamber into
+his chair I am sure I don't know, but a couple of hours afterwards he
+discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my head
+held in both hands over the MS. of loose pages. I was greatly confused,
+expecting to get into trouble. He stood in the doorway looking at me
+with some surprise, but the only thing he said after a moment of silence
+was:
+
+"Read the page aloud."
+
+Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with erasures
+and corrections, and my father's handwriting was otherwise extremely
+legible. When I got to the end he nodded and I flew out of doors
+thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof for that piece of
+impulsive audacity. I have tried to discover since the reason of this
+mildness, and I imagine that all unknown to myself I had earned, in
+my father's mind, the right to some latitude in my relations with his
+writing-table. It was only a month before, or perhaps it was only a week
+before, that I had read to him aloud from beginning to end, and to his
+perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very well at the
+time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the
+Sea." Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and also my first
+introduction to the sea in literature. If I do not remember where, how
+and when I learned to read, I am not likely to forget the process of
+being trained in the art of reading aloud. My poor father, an admirable
+reader himself, was the most exacting of masters. I reflect proudly that
+I must have read that page of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" tolerably well
+at the age of eight. The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume
+edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in Falmouth,
+at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment of caulkers'
+mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship in dry dock. We had
+run in, in a sinking condition and with the crew refusing duty after a
+month of weary battling with the gales of the North Atlantic. Books are
+an integral part of one's life and my Shakespearean associations are
+with that first year of our bereavement, the last I spent with my father
+in exile (he sent me away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he
+could brace himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard
+gales, the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water
+and then by fire.
+
+Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my
+writing life began I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion that it
+might have been one of Trollope's political novels. And I remember,
+too, the character of the day. It was an autumn day with an opaline
+atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and
+flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the
+trees of the square with all their leaves gone were like tracings of
+indian ink on a sheet of tissue paper. It was one of those London days
+that have the charm of mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.
+The effect of opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on
+account of the nearness to the river.
+
+There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that day
+than on any other day, except that I stood for a long time looking out
+of the window after the landlady's daughter was gone with her spoil
+of cups and saucers. I heard her put the tray down in the passage and
+finally shut the door; and still I remained smoking with my back to the
+room. It is very clear that I was in no haste to take the plunge into my
+writing life, if as plunge this first attempt may be described. My whole
+being was steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the
+sea, the scene of never-ending labour and of unceasing duty. For utter
+surrender to indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that mood
+is on him, the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to the full.
+It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an
+impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years.
+What I am certain of is, that I was very far from thinking of writing a
+story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the
+man Almayer.
+
+I had seen him for the first time some four years before from the bridge
+of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or
+less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning and a slight mist, an
+opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only without the fiery flicks on
+roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun, promised to
+turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small dug-out canoe on the
+river there was nothing moving within sight. I had just come up yawning
+from my cabin. The serang and the Malay crew were overhauling the cargo
+chains and trying the winches; their voices sounded subdued on the
+deck below and their movements were languid. That tropical daybreak was
+chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something from the
+lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests above and below and
+on the opposite bank looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging
+upon the tightly stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a
+shuddering yawn that I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a
+patch of burnt grass, a blurred shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of
+a house behind him, a low house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves with a
+high-pitched roof of grass.
+
+He stepped upon the jetty. He was clad simply in flapping pyjamas of
+cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals on a disagreeable
+blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with short sleeves. His arms,
+bare to the elbow, were crossed on his chest. His black hair looked
+as if it had not been cut for a very long time and a curly wisp of it
+strayed across his forehead. I had heard of him at Singapore; I had
+heard of him on board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late
+at night; I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of
+him in a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who
+described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded civilised
+and progressive till you heard that the mine could not be worked at
+present because it was haunted by some particularly atrocious ghosts. I
+had heard of him in a place called Dongola, in the Island of Celebes,
+when the Rajah of that little-known seaport (you can get no anchorage
+there in less than fifteen fathom, which is extremely inconvenient) came
+on board in a friendly way with only two attendants, and drank bottle
+after bottle of soda-water on the after-skylight with my good friend and
+commander, Captain C--. At least I heard his name distinctly pronounced
+several times in a lot of talk in Malay language. Oh yes, I heard it
+quite distinctly--Almayer, Almayer--and saw Captain C-- smile while the
+fat dingy Rajah laughed audibly. To hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright
+is a rare experience I can assure you. And I overhead more of Almayer's
+name amongst our deck passengers (mostly wandering traders of good
+repute) as they sat all over the ship--each man fenced round with
+bundles and boxes--on mats, on pillows, on quilts, on billets of wood,
+conversing of Island affairs. Upon my word, I heard the mutter of
+Almayer's name faintly at midnight, while making my way aft from the
+bridge to look at the patent taffrail-log tinkling its quarter-miles in
+the great silence of the sea. I don't mean to say that our passengers
+dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is indubitable that two of them at
+least, who could not sleep apparently and were trying to charm away the
+trouble of insomnia by a little whispered talk at that ghostly hour,
+were referring in some way or other to Almayer. It was really impossible
+on board that ship to get away definitely from Almayer; and a very small
+pony tied up forward and whisking its tail inside the galley, to the
+great embarrassment of our Chinaman cook, was destined for Almayer. What
+he wanted with a pony goodness only knows, since I am perfectly certain
+he could not ride it; but here you have the man, ambitious, aiming at
+the grandiose, importing a pony, whereas in the whole settlement at
+which he used to shake daily his impotent fist, there was only one path
+that was practicable for a pony: a quarter of a mile at most, hedged
+in by hundreds of square leagues of virgin forest. But who knows? The
+importation of that Bali Pony might have been part of some deep scheme,
+of some diplomatic plan, of some hopeful intrigue. With Almayer one
+could never tell. He governed his conduct by considerations removed
+from the obvious, by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic
+impenetrable to any reasonable person. I learned all this later. That
+morning seeing the figure in pyjamas moving in the mist I said to
+myself: "That's the man."
+
+He came quite close to the ship's side and raised a harassed
+countenance, round and flat, with that curl of black hair over the
+forehead and a heavy, pained glance.
+
+"Good morning."
+
+"Good morning."
+
+He looked hard at me: I was a new face, having just replaced the chief
+mate he was accustomed to see; and I think that this novelty inspired
+him, as things generally did, with deep-seated mistrust.
+
+"Didn't expect you in till this evening," he remarked suspiciously.
+
+I don't know why he should have been aggrieved, but he seemed to be.
+I took pains to explain to him that having picked up the beacon at the
+mouth of the river just before dark and the tide serving, Captain C--
+was enabled to cross the bar and there was nothing to prevent him going
+up river at night.
+
+"Captain C-- knows this river like his own pocket," I concluded
+discursively, trying to get on terms.
+
+"Better," said Almayer.
+
+Leaning over the rail of the bridge I looked at Almayer, who looked down
+at the wharf in aggrieved thought. He shuffled his feet a little; he
+wore straw slippers with thick soles. The morning fog had thickened
+considerably. Everything round us dripped: the derricks, the rails,
+every single rope in the ship--as if a fit of crying had come upon the
+universe.
+
+Almayer again raised his head and in the accents of a man accustomed to
+the buffets of evil fortune asked hardly audibly:
+
+"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a pony on board?"
+
+I told him almost in a whisper, for he attuned my communications to his
+minor key, that we had such a thing as a pony, and I hinted, as gently
+as I could, that he was confoundedly in the way too. I was very anxious
+to have him landed before I began to handle the cargo. Almayer remained
+looking up at me for a long while with incredulous and melancholy
+eyes as though it were not a safe thing to believe my statement. This
+pathetic mistrust in the favourable issue of any sort of affair touched
+me deeply, and I added:
+
+"He doesn't seem a bit the worse for the passage. He's a nice pony too."
+
+Almayer was not to be cheered up; for all answer he cleared his throat
+and looked down again at his feet. I tried to close with him on another
+tack.
+
+"By Jove!" I said. "Aren't you afraid of catching pneumonia or
+bronchitis or something, walking about in a singlet in such a wet fog?"
+
+He was not to be propitiated by a show of interest in his health. His
+answer was a sinister "No fear," as much as to say that even that way of
+escape from inclement fortune was closed to him.
+
+"I just came down . . ." he mumbled after a while.
+
+"Well then, now you're here I will land that pony for you at once and
+you can lead him home. I really don't want him on deck. He's in the
+way."
+
+Almayer seemed doubtful. I insisted:
+
+"Why, I will just swing him out and land him on the wharf right in front
+of you. I'd much rather do it before the hatches are off. The little
+devil may jump down the hold or do some other deadly thing."
+
+"There's a halter?" postulated Almayer.
+
+"Yes, of course there's a halter." And without waiting any more I leaned
+over the bridge rail.
+
+"Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony."
+
+The cook hastened to shut the door of the galley and a moment later a
+great scuffle began on deck. The pony kicked with extreme energy, the
+kalashes skipped out of the way, the serang issued many orders in a
+cracked voice. Suddenly the pony leaped upon the fore-hatch. His little
+hoofs thundered tremendously; he plunged and reared. He had tossed his
+mane and his forelock into a state of amazing wildness, he dilated his
+nostrils, bits of foam flecked his broad little chest, his eyes blazed.
+He was something under eleven hands; he was fierce, terrible, angry,
+warlike, he said ha! ha! distinctly, he raged and thumped--and sixteen
+able-bodied kalashes stood round him like disconcerted nurses round a
+spoilt and passionate child. He whisked his tail incessantly; he arched
+his pretty neck; he was perfectly delightful; he was charmingly naughty.
+There was not an atom of vice in that performance; no savage baring of
+teeth and lying back of ears. On the contrary, he pricked them forward
+in a comically aggressive manner. He was totally unmoral and lovable; I
+would have liked to give him bread, sugar, carrots. But life is a stern
+thing and the sense of duty the only safe guide. So I steeled my heart
+and from my elevated position on the bridge I ordered the men to fling
+themselves upon him in a body.
+
+The elderly serang, emitting a strange inarticulate cry, gave the
+example. He was an excellent petty officer--very competent indeed, and a
+moderate opium smoker. The rest of them in one great rush smothered that
+pony. They hung on to his ears, to his mane, to his tail; they lay in
+piles across his back, seventeen in all. The carpenter, seizing the hook
+of the cargo-chain, flung himself on top of them. A very satisfactory
+petty officer too, but he stuttered. Have you ever heard a light-yellow,
+lean, sad, earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English? It's very weird
+indeed. He made the eighteenth. I could not see the pony at all; but
+from the swaying and heaving of that heap of men I knew that there was
+something alive inside.
+
+From the wharf Almayer hailed in quavering tones:
+
+"Oh, I say!"
+
+Where he stood he could not see what was going on on deck unless perhaps
+the tops of the men's heads; he could only hear the scuffle, the mighty
+thuds, as if the ship were being knocked to pieces. I looked over: "What
+is it?"
+
+"Don't let them break his legs," he entreated me plaintively.
+
+"Oh, nonsense! He's all right now. He can't move."
+
+By that time the cargo-chain had been hooked to the broad canvas belt
+round the pony's body, the kalashes sprang off simultaneously in all
+directions, rolling over each other, and the worthy serang, making a
+dash behind the winch, turned the steam on.
+
+"Steady!" I yelled, in great apprehension of seeing the animal snatched
+up to the very head of the derrick.
+
+On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw slippers uneasily. The rattle of
+the winch stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence that pony began to
+swing across the deck.
+
+How limp he was! Directly he felt himself in the air he relaxed every
+muscle in a most wonderful manner. His four hoofs knocked together in a
+bunch, his head hung down, and his tail remained pendent in a nerveless
+and absolute immobility. He reminded me vividly of the pathetic little
+sheep which hangs on the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece. I had
+no idea that anything in the shape of a horse could be so limp as that,
+either living or dead. His wild mane hung down lumpily, a mere mass of
+inanimate horsehair; his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went
+swaying slowly across the front of the bridge I noticed an astute gleam
+in his dreamy, half-closed eye. A trustworthy quartermaster, his glance
+anxious and his mouth on the broad grin, was easing over the derrick
+watchfully. I superintended, greatly interested.
+
+"So! That will do."
+
+The derrick-head stopped. The kalashes lined the rail. The rope of the
+halter hung perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull in front of
+Almayer. Everything was very still. I suggested amicably that he
+should catch hold of the rope and mind what he was about. He extended a
+provokingly casual and superior hand.
+
+"Look out then! Lower away!"
+
+Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently enough, but when the pony's
+hoofs touched the wharf he gave way all at once to a most foolish
+optimism. Without pausing, without thinking, almost without looking, he
+disengaged the hook suddenly from the sling, and the cargo-chain, after
+hitting the pony's quarters, swung back against the ship's side with
+a noisy, rattling slap. I suppose I must have blinked. I know I missed
+something, because the next thing I saw was Almayer lying flat on his
+back on the jetty. He was alone.
+
+Astonishment deprived me of speech long enough to give Almayer time to
+pick himself up in a leisurely and painful manner. The kalashes lining
+the rail had all their mouths open. The mist flew in the light breeze,
+and it had come over quite thick enough to hide the shore completely.
+
+"How on earth did you manage to let him get away?" I asked scandalised.
+
+Almayer looked into the smarting palm of his right hand, but did not
+answer my inquiry.
+
+"Where do you think he will get to?" I cried. "Are there any fences
+anywhere in this fog? Can he bolt into the forest? What's to be done
+now?"
+
+Almayer shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Some of my men are sure to be about. They will get hold of him sooner
+or later."
+
+"Sooner or later! That's all very fine, but what about my canvas
+sling--he's carried it off. I want it now, at once, to land two Celebes
+cows."
+
+Since Dongola we had on board a pair of the pretty little island cattle
+in addition to the pony. Tied up on the other side of the fore deck they
+had been whisking their tails into the other door of the galley. These
+cows were not for Almayer, however; they were invoiced to Abdullah bin
+Selim, his enemy. Almayer's disregard of my requisites was complete.
+
+"If I were you I would try to find out where he's gone," I insisted.
+"Hadn't you better call your men together or something? He will throw
+himself down and cut his knees. He may even break a leg, you know."
+
+But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, did not seem to want that
+pony any more. Amazed at this sudden indifference I turned all hands out
+on shore to hunt for him on my own account, or, at any rate, to hunt
+for the canvas sling which he had round his body. The whole crew of
+the steamer, with the exception of firemen and engineers, rushed up the
+jetty past the thoughtful Almayer and vanished from my sight. The white
+fog swallowed them up; and again there was a deep silence that seemed to
+extend for miles up and down the stream. Still taciturn, Almayer started
+to climb on board, and I went down from the bridge to meet him on the
+after deck.
+
+"Would you mind telling the captain that I want to see him very
+particularly?" he asked me in a low tone, letting his eyes stray all
+over the place.
+
+"Very well. I will go and see."
+
+With the door of his cabin wide open Captain C--, just back from the
+bathroom, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick, damp, iron-grey
+hair with two large brushes.
+
+"Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see you very particularly, sir."
+
+Saying these words I smiled. I don't know why I smiled except that it
+seemed absolutely impossible to mention Almayer's name without a smile
+of a sort. It had not to be necessarily a mirthful smile. Turning his
+head towards me Captain C-- smiled too, rather joylessly.
+
+"The pony got away from him--eh?"
+
+"Yes sir. He did."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Goodness only knows."
+
+"No. I mean Almayer. Let him come along."
+
+The captain's stateroom opening straight on deck under the bridge, I had
+only to beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who had remained aft, with
+downcast eyes, on the very spot where I had left him. He strolled up
+moodily, shook hands and at once asked permission to shut the cabin
+door.
+
+"I have a pretty story to tell you," were the last words I heard. The
+bitterness of tone was remarkable.
+
+I went away from the door, of course. For the moment I had no crew on
+board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag hung round his
+neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the empty decks knocking
+out the wedges of the hatches and dropping them into the bag
+conscientiously. Having nothing to do I joined our two engineers at the
+door of the engine-room. It was near breakfast time.
+
+"He's turned up early, hasn't he?" commented the second engineer, and
+smiled indifferently. He was an abstemious man with a good digestion and
+a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.
+
+"Yes," I said. "Shut up with the old man. Some very particular
+business."
+
+"He will spin him a damned endless yarn," observed the chief engineer.
+
+He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic and suffered from gnawing
+hunger in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two
+vertical folds on his shaven cheeks. And I smiled too, but I was not
+exactly amused. In that man, whose name apparently could not be uttered
+anywhere in the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing
+amusing whatever. That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking
+mostly into his cup. I informed him that my men came upon his pony
+capering in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in
+which he kept his store of guttah. The cover was off with no one near
+by, and the whole of my crew just missed going heels over head into
+that beastly hole. Jurumudi Itam, our best quartermaster, deft at fine
+needlework, he who mended the ship's flags and sewed buttons on our
+coats, was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.
+
+Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer's character. He
+mumbled:
+
+"Do you mean that pirate fellow?"
+
+"What pirate fellow? The man has been in the ship eleven years," I said
+indignantly.
+
+"It's his looks," Almayer muttered for all apology.
+
+The sun had eaten up the fog. From where we sat under the after awning
+we could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of Almayer's
+house, to a post of the verandah. We were silent for a long time. All at
+once Almayer, alluding evidently to the subject of his conversation in
+the captain's cabin, exclaimed anxiously across the table:
+
+"I really don't know what I can do now!"
+
+Captain C-- only raised his eyebrows at him, and got up from his chair.
+We dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half dressed as he was in
+his cretonne pyjamas and the thin cotton singlet, remained on board,
+lingering near the gangway as though he could not make up his mind
+whether to go home or stay with us for good. Our Chinamen boys gave
+him side glances as they went to and fro; and Ah Sing, our young chief
+steward, the handsomest and most sympathetic of Chinamen, catching my
+eye, nodded knowingly at his burly back. In the course of the morning I
+approached him for a moment.
+
+"Well, Mr. Almayer," I addressed him easily, "you haven't started on
+your letters yet."
+
+We had brought him his mail and he had held the bundle in his hand ever
+since we got up from breakfast. He glanced at it when I spoke and, for a
+moment, it looked as if he were on the point of opening his fingers and
+letting the whole lot fall overboard. I believe he was tempted to do so.
+I shall never forget that man afraid of his letters.
+
+"Have you been long out from Europe?" he asked me.
+
+"Not very. Not quite eight months," I told him. "I left a ship in
+Samarang with a hurt back and have been in the hospital in Singapore
+some weeks."
+
+He sighed.
+
+"Trade is very bad here."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Hopeless! . . . See these geese?"
+
+With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what resembled
+a patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant part of his
+compound. It disappeared behind some bushes.
+
+"The only geese on the East Coast," Almayer informed me in a perfunctory
+mutter without a spark of faith, hope or pride. Thereupon, with the same
+absence of any sort of sustaining spirit he declared his intention to
+silence a fat bird and send him on board for us not later than next day.
+
+I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as if it
+were a sort of Court decoration given only to the tried friends of the
+house. I had expected more pomp in the ceremony. The gift had surely
+its special quality, multiple and rare. From the only flock on the East
+Coast! He did not make half enough of it. That man did not understand
+his opportunities. However, I thanked him at some length.
+
+"You see," he interrupted abruptly in a very peculiar tone, "the worst
+of this country is that one is not able to realise . . . it's impossible
+to realise . . ." His voice sank into a languid mutter. "And when one
+has very large interests . . . very important interests . . ." he finished
+faintly . . . "up the river."
+
+We looked at each other. He astonished me by giving a start and making a
+very queer grimace.
+
+"Well, I must be off," he burst out hurriedly. "So long!"
+
+At the moment of stepping over the gangway he checked himself though, to
+give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that evening with my
+captain, an invitation which I accepted. I don't think it could have
+been possible for me to refuse.
+
+I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of free
+will "at any rate for practical purposes." Free, is it? For practical
+purposes! Bosh! How could I have refused to dine with that man? I did
+not refuse simply because I could not refuse. Curiosity, a healthy
+desire for a change of cooking, common civility, the talk and the smiles
+of the previous twenty days, every condition of my existence at that
+moment and place made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all
+that, there was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want
+of foreknowledge to counter-balance these imperative conditions of
+the problem. A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane. Nobody
+unless a surly lunatic would have refused. But if I had not got to know
+Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a
+line of mine in print.
+
+I accepted then--and I am paying yet the price of my sanity. The
+possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is responsible
+for the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far. The number of
+geese he had called into being under adverse climatic conditions was
+considerably more than fourteen. The tale of volumes will never overtake
+the counting of heads, I am safe to say; but my ambitions point not
+exactly that way, and whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me
+I have always thought kindly of Almayer.
+
+I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would have
+been? This is something not to be discovered in this world. But if we
+ever meet in the Elysian Fields--where I cannot depict him to myself
+otherwise than attended in the distance by his flock of geese (birds
+sacred to Jupiter)--and he addresses me in the stillness of that
+passionless region, neither light nor darkness, neither sound nor
+silence, and heaving endlessly with billowy mists from the impalpable
+multitudes of the swarming dead, I think I know what answer to make.
+
+I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone of his
+measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of course, the solemn
+eternity of stillness in the least--I would say something like this:
+
+"It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted your name
+to my own uses. But that is a very small larceny. What's in a name, O
+Shade? If so much of your old mortal weakness clings to you yet as
+to make you feel aggrieved (it was the note of your earthly voice,
+Almayer), then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our
+sublime fellow-Shade--with him who, in his transient existence as a
+poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You
+came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the
+disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name
+was the common property of the winds: it, as it were, floated naked over
+the waters about the Equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the
+royal mantle of the tropics and have essayed to put into the hollow
+sound the very anguish of paternity--feats which you did not demand from
+me--but remember that all the toil and all the pain were mine. In your
+earthly life you haunted me, Almayer. Consider that this was taking a
+great liberty. Since you were always complaining of being lost to the
+world, you should remember that if I had not believed enough in your
+existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens, you would
+have been much more lost. You affirm that had I been capable of looking
+at you with a more perfect detachment and a greater simplicity, I might
+have perceived better the inward marvellousness which, you insist,
+attended your career upon that tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible
+far, far below us, where both our graves lie. No doubt! But reflect, O
+complaining Shade! that this was not so much my fault as your crowning
+misfortune. I believed in you in the only way it was possible for me to
+believe. It was not worthy of your merits? So be it. But you were always
+an unlucky man, Almayer. Nothing was ever quite worthy of you. What made
+you so real to me was that you held this lofty theory with some force of
+conviction and with an admirable consistency."
+
+It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy
+expressions that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian Abode
+of Shades, since it has come to pass that having parted many years ago,
+we are never to meet again in this world.
+
+
+
+Chapter V.
+
+In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that
+literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the
+coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event.
+In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological
+cause which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts
+being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to
+boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen at any rate
+was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps a
+pen (the cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of
+penny stamps and halfpenny postcards. In fact, this was the epoch when
+by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made the reputation of
+a novel or two. And I too had a pen rolling about somewhere--the
+seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen
+rugged with the dried ink of abandoned attempts, of answers delayed
+longer than decency permitted, of letters begun with infinite reluctance
+and put off suddenly till next day--tell next week as likely as not! The
+neglected, uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and
+under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm, in a
+perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the beastly thing
+gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It might have been reposing
+behind the sofa for a day or so. My landlady's anaemic daughter (as
+Ollendorff would have expressed it), though commendably neat, had a
+lordly, careless manner of approaching her domestic duties. Or it
+might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side of
+the table-leg, and when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which
+would have discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me! "Never
+mind. This will do."
+
+O days without guile! If anybody had told me then that a devoted
+household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
+importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss
+I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my
+sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never deigned as much as the
+contemptuous smile of unbelief. There are imaginings too unlikely for
+any kind of notice, too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a
+smile. Perhaps, had that seer of the future been a friend, I should have
+been secretly saddened. "Alas!" I would have thought, looking at him
+with an unmoved face, "the poor fellow is going mad."
+
+I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world where the
+journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of heaven itself,
+blowing where it listeth, does so under the prophetical management of
+the Meteorological Office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot
+be captured either by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely
+that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness
+than that I should turn into a writer of tales.
+
+To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating
+pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied,
+the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of
+unseen forces, that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking
+here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded
+conceit--who really never rest in this world, and when out of it go
+on fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last
+habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I
+thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some
+aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a detached, impersonal
+glance upon themselves.
+
+And that's a pity. They are unlucky. These two kinds, together with
+the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate
+beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has
+put it) "the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness," miss,
+perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the
+abode of conflicting opinions. The ethical view of the universe involves
+us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last
+vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready
+to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot
+be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely
+spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you
+like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for despair! Those
+visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest
+is our affair--the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation,
+the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of
+a subtle mind--that's our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful
+attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our
+consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth. A task in which
+fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted
+with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the
+haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable serenity; to
+the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.
+
+Chi lo sa? It may be true. In this view there is room for every religion
+except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and cloak of arid
+despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every fair dream, for every
+charitable hope. The great aim is to remain true to the emotions called
+out of the deep encircled by the firmament of stars, whose infinite
+numbers and awful distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the
+Walrus or the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities
+of sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter nothing
+at all.
+
+The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem full of
+merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a purely spectacular
+universe, where inspiration of every sort has a rational existence, the
+artist of every kind finds a natural place; and amongst them the poet as
+the seer par excellence. Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble
+and more toilsome task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy
+of a place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps laughter
+out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry. Yes! Even he, the prose
+artist of fiction, which after all is but truth often dragged out of a
+well and clothed in the painted robe of imaged phrases--even he has his
+place amongst kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes,
+Cabinet Ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
+Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and
+constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
+itself.
+
+Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a subtle
+expression, as if the cat were out of the bag. I take the novelist's
+freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the exclamation,
+"That's it! The fellow talks pro domo."
+
+Indeed it was not the intention! When I shouldered the bag I was not
+aware of the cat inside. But, after all, why not? The fair courtyards of
+the House of Art are thronged by many humble retainers. And there is
+no retainer so devoted as he who is allowed to sit on the doorstep. The
+fellows who have got inside are apt to think too much of themselves.
+This last remark, I beg to state, is not malicious within the definition
+of the law of libel. It's fair comment on a matter of public interest.
+But never mind. Pro domo. So be it. For his house tant que vous voudrez.
+And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify my existence.
+The attempt would have been not only needless and absurd, but almost
+inconceivable, in a purely spectacular universe, where no such
+disagreeable necessity can possibly arise. It is sufficient for me to
+say (and I am saying it at some length in these pages): "J'ai vecu." I
+have existed, obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the
+Abbe Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to
+exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of the
+French Revolution. "J'ai vecu", as I apprehend most of us manage
+to exist, missing all along the varied forms of destruction by a
+hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear, and perhaps my soul
+also, but not without some damage here and there to the fine edge of my
+conscience, that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the group, of the
+family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks,
+the acts, and even by the silences and abstentions surrounding one's
+childhood; tinged in a complete scheme of delicate shades
+and crude colours by the inherited traditions, beliefs, or
+prejudices--unaccountable, despotic, persuasive, and often, in its
+texture, romantic.
+
+And often romantic! . . . The matter in hand, however, is to keep these
+reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary
+activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme
+thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence;
+for that such was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, visible to
+an unprejudiced eye. But then, you see, the man was not a writer of
+fiction. He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his
+anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of
+the French Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but
+a great outburst of morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual
+perusal of "Emile" will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is
+the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time
+to the play of his invention. Inspiration comes from the earth, which
+has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven.
+A writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist)
+stands confessed in his works. His conscience, his deeper sense of
+things, lawful and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world.
+Indeed, every one who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers
+(unless a moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except
+the one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of
+nothing else. It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of
+French prose writers, who says that we must recognise at last that,
+"failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only talk of
+ourselves."
+
+This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring
+match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules
+of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the
+memorable saying, "The good critic is he who relates the adventures of
+his soul amongst masterpieces," M. Anatole France maintained that there
+were no rules and no principles. And that may be very true. Rules,
+principles and standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all
+dead and vanished by this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free days
+of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the
+forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up
+presently in the old places. But what is interesting to a writer is the
+possession of an inward certitude that literary criticism will never
+die, for man (so variously defined) is, before everything else, a
+critical animal. And, as long as distinguished minds are ready to treat
+it in the spirit of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal
+to us with all the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal
+experience.
+
+For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task, any
+task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
+But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an adventurous spirit.
+They take risks, of course--one can hardly live without that. The daily
+bread is served out to us (however sparingly) with a pinch of salt.
+Otherwise one would get sick of the diet one prays for, and that would
+be not only improper, but impious. From impiety of that or any other
+kind--save us! An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense
+of proprieties, from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from
+weariness, induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
+adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes a mere
+"notice," as it were the relation of a journey where nothing but the
+distances and the geology of a new country should be set down; the
+glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the
+hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings too! I
+have no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept
+out; no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so
+that the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the
+part of a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most
+deplorable adventure. "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of,
+I should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the
+worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles." Neither
+is the writing of novels. It isn't really. Je vous donne ma parole
+d'honneur that it--is--not. Not all. I am thus emphatic because some
+years ago, I remember, the daughter of a general. . .
+
+Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then
+to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle Ages, to
+lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations of the world's
+superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their
+own bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of
+temperance, let us say, or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes
+or playing the flute. And thus this general's daughter came to me--or I
+should say one of the general's daughters did. There were three of
+these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
+farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The eldest
+warred against the decay of manners in the village children, and
+executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of
+curtseys. It sounds futile, but it was really a war for an idea. The
+second skirmished and scouted all over the country; and it was that one
+who pushed a reconnaissance right to my very table--I mean the one who
+wore stand-up collars. She was really calling upon my wife in the
+soft spirit of afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial
+determination. She marched into my room swinging her stick . . . but
+no--I mustn't exaggerate. It is not my speciality. I am not a humoristic
+writer. In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she had a
+stick to swing.
+
+No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the door too
+stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm, still sunshine of
+the wide fields. They lay around me infinitely helpful, but truth to
+say I had not known for weeks whether the sun shone upon the earth and
+whether the stars above still moved on their appointed courses. I was
+just then giving up some days of my allotted span to the last chapters
+of the novel "Nostromo," a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard,
+which is still mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
+connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction with the
+word "astonishing." I have no opinion on this discrepancy. It's the sort
+of difference that can never be settled. All I know is that, for twenty
+months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the
+humblest on this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with
+the Lord" for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the
+darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the
+sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes
+of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are,
+perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the
+intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and
+conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day,
+away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really
+lovable and gentle--something for which a material parallel can only be
+found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage
+round Cape Horn. For that too is the wrestling of men with the might
+of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without the
+amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a sense of
+over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be adequate, but for
+the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain longitude, once won,
+cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars and the shape of your earth
+are the witnesses of your gain; whereas a handful of pages, no matter
+how much you have made them your own, are at best but an obscure and
+questionable spoil. Here they are. "Failure"--"Astonishing": take your
+choice; or perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces
+of paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
+snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the sunshine.
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard nothing--no
+rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of
+premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence--just
+that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and
+the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height--a fall, let us say,
+from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the
+fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself
+up quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair stunned
+and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of
+one world and flung down into another--perfectly civil.
+
+"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"
+
+That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true
+reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la
+Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start
+upsetting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow
+myself to hint in any other way at the appalling magnitude of the
+disaster. The whole world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember,
+of my seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town,
+campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its
+soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
+geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine,
+and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name,
+cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over his head--in
+Linda Viola's voice), dominated even after death the dark gulf
+containing his conquests of treasure and love--all that had come down
+crashing about my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in
+that very moment I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"
+
+The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck training even
+in a merchant ship will do! This episode should give you a new view of
+the English and Scots seamen (a much-caricatured folk) who had the last
+say in the formation of my character. One is nothing if not modest,
+but in this disaster I think I have done some honour to their simple
+teaching. "Won't you sit down?" Very fair; very fair indeed. She sat
+down. Her amused glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of
+MS. on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a chair,
+single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners; there were there
+living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead pages that would be burnt
+at the end of the day--the litter of a cruel battlefield, of a long,
+long and desperate fray. Long! I suppose I went to bed sometimes, and
+got up the same number of times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the
+food put before me, and talked connectedly to my household on suitable
+occasions. But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily
+life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
+affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at that table
+surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days and nights on
+end. It seemed so, because of the intense weariness of which that
+interruption had made me aware--the awful disenchantment of a mind
+realising suddenly the futility of an enormous task, joined to a bodily
+fatigue such as no ordinary amount of fairly heavy physical labour could
+ever account for. I have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost
+double under a ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in
+the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know.
+
+And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concerned for the
+dignity and comeliness of their service. I was, most likely, the only
+writer that neat lady had ever caught in the exercise of his craft, and
+it distressed me not to be able to remember when it was that I dressed
+myself last, and how. No doubt that would be all right in essentials.
+The fortune of the house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes that
+would see to that. But I felt somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
+after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and dishevelled
+down to my very heels. And I am afraid I blinked stupidly. All this was
+bad for the honour of letters and the dignity of their service. Seen
+indistinctly through the dust of my collapsed universe, the good lady
+glanced about the room with a slightly amused serenity. And she was
+smiling. What on earth was she smiling at? She remarked casually:
+
+"I am afraid I interrupted you."
+
+"Not at all."
+
+She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was strictly true.
+Interrupted--indeed! She had robbed me of at least twenty lives, each
+infinitely more poignant and real than her own, because informed with
+passion, possessed of convictions, involved in great affairs created out
+of my own substance for an anxiously meditated end.
+
+She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all round
+at the litter of the fray:
+
+"And you sit like this here writing your--your . . ."
+
+"I--what? Oh, yes, I sit here all day."
+
+"It must be perfectly delightful."
+
+I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on the
+verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the porch, and my
+boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had espied him from afar.
+He came on straight and swift like a cannon-ball, and the noise of the
+fight, which burst suddenly upon our ears, was more than enough to scare
+away a fit of apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated the gallant
+animals. Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife--just
+round the corner, under the trees. She nodded and went off with her dog,
+leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she had lightly
+made--and with the awfully instructive sound of the word "delightful"
+lingering in my ears.
+
+Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate. I wanted
+to be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere novel that one
+should be rude to a lady on their account?), but mainly, to adopt the
+good sound Ollendorffian style, because I did not want the dog of the
+general's daughter to fight again (encore) with the faithful dog of
+my infant son (mon petit garcon).--Was I afraid that the dog of the
+general's daughter would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my
+child?--No, I was not afraid. . . . But away with the Ollendorff method.
+However appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything
+appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin, character
+and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the child from a
+man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian value, a man almost
+childlike in the impulsive movements of his untutored genius, the
+most single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of
+straight feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong
+if, perhaps, not fully conscious conviction. His art did not obtain,
+I fear, all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am
+alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of "The Red Badge
+of Courage," a work of imagination which found its short moment of
+celebrity in the last decade of the departed century. Other books
+followed. Not many. He had not the time. It was an individual and
+complete talent, which obtained but a grudging, somewhat supercilious
+recognition from the world at large. For himself one hesitates to regret
+his early death. Like one of the men in his "Open Boat," one felt that
+he was of those whom fate seldom allows to make a safe landing after
+much toil and bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding affection
+for that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient
+figure. He liked me even before we met on the strength of a page or
+two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he liked me
+still. He used to point out to me with great earnestness, and even with
+some severity, that "a boy ought to have a dog." I suspect that he
+was shocked at my neglect of parental duties. Ultimately it was he who
+provided the dog. Shortly afterwards, one day, after playing with the
+child on the rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he
+raised his head and declared firmly: "I shall teach your boy to ride."
+That was not to be. He was not given the time.
+
+But here is the dog--an old dog now. Broad and low on his bandy paws,
+with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black spot at
+the other end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad, smiles
+not altogether unkind. Grotesque and engaging in the whole of his
+appearance, his usual attitudes are meek, but his temperament discloses
+itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the presence of his kind. As he lies
+in the firelight, his head well up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed
+at the shadows of the room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in
+the calm consciousness of an unstained life. He has brought up one baby,
+and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is bringing up
+another with the same conscientious devotion, but with a more deliberate
+gravity of manner, the sign of greater wisdom and riper experience,
+but also of rheumatism, I fear. From the morning bath to the evening
+ceremonies of the cot you attend, old friend, the little two-legged
+creature of your adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of
+your duties with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by
+every person in the house--even as I myself am treated; only you
+deserve it more. The general's daughter would tell you that it must be
+"perfectly delightful."
+
+Aha! old dog. She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it's that poor
+left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you preserve a rigid
+immobility for fear of overturning the little two-legged creature. She
+has never seen your resigned smile when the little two-legged creature,
+interrogated sternly, "What are you doing to the good dog?" answers with
+a wide, innocent stare: "Nothing. Only loving him, mamma dear!"
+
+The general's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-imposed
+tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very rewards of rigid
+self-command. But we have lived together many years. We have grown
+older, too; and though our work is not quite done yet we may indulge now
+and then in a little introspection before the fire--meditate on the art
+of bringing up babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where
+so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly
+away.
+
+
+Chapter VI.
+
+In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary stage
+of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments, and even two
+distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its successive scenes,
+a certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable. I am conscious of it in
+these pages. This remark is put forward in no apologetic spirit. As
+years go by and the number of pages grows steadily, the feeling grows
+upon one too that one can write only for friends. Then why should one
+put them to the necessity of protesting (as a friend would do) that no
+apology is necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of
+one's discretion? So much as to the care due to those friends whom a
+word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the right
+place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety, has drawn
+from the great multitude of fellow-beings even as a fish is drawn from
+the depths of the sea. Fishing is notoriously (I am talking now of the
+deep sea) a matter of luck. As to one's enemies, those will take care of
+themselves.
+
+There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking, jumps
+upon me with both feet. This image has no grace, but it is exceedingly
+apt to the occasion--to the several occasions. I don't know precisely
+how long he had been indulging in that intermittent exercise, whose
+seasons are ruled by the custom of the publishing trade. Somebody
+pointed him out (in printed shape, of course) to my attention some time
+ago, and straightway I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for
+that robust man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for
+the writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain
+shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the
+sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has
+a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more estimable origin than the
+caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is, indeed, lawful, in so much
+that it is given (reluctantly) for a consideration, for several
+considerations. There is that robustness, for instance, so often the
+sign of good moral balance. That's a consideration. It is not, indeed,
+pleasant to be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation,
+implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into work
+whose qualities and defects, whatever they may be, are not so much on
+the surface, is something to be thankful for in view of the fact that it
+may happen to one's work to be condemned without being read at all. This
+is the most fatuous adventure that can well happen to a writer venturing
+his soul amongst criticisms. It can do one no harm, of course, but it
+is disagreeable. It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering
+a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot of folk in a third-class
+compartment. The open impudence of the whole transaction, appealing
+insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the brazen, shameless
+patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while insisting on the fairness of
+the game, give one a feeling of sickening disgust. The honest violence
+of a plain man playing a fair game fairly--even if he means to knock you
+over--may appear shocking, but it remains within the pale of decency.
+Damaging as it may be, it is in no sense offensive. One may well feel
+some regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's own vile body.
+But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not be stayed
+by explanations or placated by apologies. Were I to advance the plea of
+youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found in these pages, he would
+be likely to say "Bosh!" in a column and a half of fierce print. Yet a
+writer is no older than his first published book, and, notwithstanding
+the vain appearances of decay which attend us in this transitory life, I
+stand here with the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.
+
+With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of feeling
+and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that, upon the whole,
+my previous state of existence was not a good equipment for a literary
+life. Perhaps I should not have used the word literary. That word
+presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance with letters, a turn of mind and
+a manner of feeling to which I dare lay no claim. I only love letters;
+but the love of letters does not make a literary man, any more than the
+love of the sea makes a seaman. And it is very possible, too, that I
+love the letters in the same way a literary man may love the sea
+he looks at from the shore--a scene of great endeavour and of great
+achievements changing the face of the world, the great open way to all
+sorts of undiscovered countries. No, perhaps I had better say that the
+life at sea--and I don't mean a mere taste of it, but a good broad span
+of years, something that really counts as real service--is not, upon the
+whole, a good equipment for a writing life. God forbid, though, that I
+should be thought of as denying my masters of the quarter-deck. I am not
+capable of that sort of apostasy. I have confessed my attitude of piety
+towards their shades in three or four tales, and if any man on earth
+more than another needs to be true to himself as he hopes to be saved,
+it is certainly the writer of fiction.
+
+What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training does not
+prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary criticism. Only
+that, and no more. But this defect is not without gravity. If it be
+permissible to twist, invert, adapt (and spoil) M. Anatole France's
+definition of a good critic, then let us say that the good author is he
+who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures
+of his soul amongst criticisms. Far be from me the intention to mislead
+an attentive public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea.
+That would be dishonest, and even impolite. Everything can be found
+at sea, according to the spirit of your quest--strife, peace, romance,
+naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom, disgust,
+inspiration--and every conceivable opportunity, including the
+opportunity to make a fool of yourself--exactly as in the pursuit of
+literature. But the quarter-deck criticism is somewhat different from
+literary criticism. This much they have in common, that before the one
+and the other the answering back, as a general rule, does not pay.
+
+Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation--I tell you
+everything is to be found on salt water--criticism generally impromptu,
+and always viva voce, which is the outward, obvious difference from the
+literary operation of that kind, with consequent freshness and vigour
+which may be lacking in the printed word. With appreciation, which comes
+at the end, when the critic and the criticised are about to part, it
+is otherwise. The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the
+permanency of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal
+in its phrasing. There the literary master has the superiority, though
+he, too, can in effect but say--and often says it in the very phrase--"I
+can highly recommend." Only usually he uses the word "We," there being
+some occult virtue in the first person plural, which makes it specially
+fit for critical and royal declarations. I have a small handful of these
+sea appreciations, signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my
+writing-table's left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like
+a handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree of
+knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits of paper,
+headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the names of a
+few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced the astonished
+indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of a sort hard to
+bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been charged with the want of
+patriotism, the want of sense, and the want of heart too; that I went
+through agonies of self-conflict and shed secret tears not a few, and
+had the beauties of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called
+an "incorrigible Don Quixote," in allusion to the book-born madness of
+the knight. For that spoil! They rustle, those bits of paper--some dozen
+of them in all. In that faint, ghostly sound there live the memories of
+twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more, the strong voice of
+the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur
+of the great sea, which must have somehow reached my inland cradle and
+entered my unconscious ear, like that formula of Mohammedan faith the
+Mussulman father whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making
+him one of the faithful almost with his first breath. I do not know
+whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very
+faithful one. And after all there is that handful of "characters" from
+various ships to prove that all these years have not been altogether a
+dream. There they are, brief, and monotonous in tone, but as suggestive
+bits of writing to me as any inspired page to be found in literature.
+But then, you see, I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be
+helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist
+also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up
+to it, at whatever cost, for a change. With this end in view, I will
+confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to see my
+blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these suggestive bits
+of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain the words "strictly
+sober."
+
+Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's very gratifying, to be sure"?
+Well, yes, it is gratifying--thank you. It is at least as gratifying to
+be certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates
+would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association
+or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic
+institution such as the London County Council, for instance. The above
+prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general
+sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because
+a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published in
+a French translation, a Parisian critic--I am almost certain it was M.
+Gustave Kahn in the "Gil-Blas"--giving me a short notice, summed up
+his rapid impression of the writer's quality in the words un puissant
+reveur. So be it! Who would cavil at the words of a friendly reader? Yet
+perhaps not such an unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold
+to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of
+responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before
+the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of
+interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked
+form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be
+rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that
+comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried to be a sober
+worker all my life--all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt,
+having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession,
+but also from artistic conviction. Yet there are so many pitfalls on
+each side of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a
+little battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the
+mere daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept
+always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power, and
+truth, and peace.
+
+As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
+sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing in their
+time. I seem to hear your polite murmur that "Surely this might have
+been taken for granted." Well, no. It might not have been. That august
+academical body the Marine Department of the Board of Trade takes
+nothing for granted in the granting of its learned degrees. By its
+regulations issued under the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very word
+_sober_ must be written, or a whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the
+most enthusiastic appreciation will avail you nothing. The door of the
+examination rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.
+The most fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly
+fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board of
+Trade. As I have been face to face at various times with all the
+examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can be no doubt
+as to the force and the continuity of my abstemiousness. Three of them
+were examiners in seamanship, and it was my fate to be delivered into
+the hands of each of them at proper intervals of sea service. The first
+of all, tall, spare, with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet,
+kindly manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced
+to conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my
+appearance. His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his crossed
+legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice, and went on,
+went on. . . . It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange
+microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I
+could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly
+reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in
+my answers. But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept
+upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of
+untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got
+frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did
+not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious,
+and weird. "This ancient person," I said to myself, terrified, "is so
+near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is
+considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is all very well
+for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room
+into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
+landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the
+way to my hired home." This statement is not so much of a verbal
+exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through
+my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing
+to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this
+earth. I verily believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of
+languid way. At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last
+for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
+pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper
+to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting
+bow. . . .
+
+When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon,
+and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and
+tip him a shilling, said:
+
+"Well! I thought you were never coming out."
+
+"How long have I been in there?" I asked faintly.
+
+He pulled out his watch.
+
+"He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this ever
+happened with any of the gentlemen before."
+
+It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk on
+air. And the human animal being averse from change and timid before the
+unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really being examined
+by the same man on a future occasion. But when the time of ordeal
+came round again the doorkeeper let me into another room, with the
+now familiar paraphernalia of models of ships and tackle, a board for
+signals on the wall, a big long table covered with official forms,
+and having an unrigged mast fixed to the edge. The solitary tenant
+was unknown to me by sight, though not by reputation, which was simply
+execrable. Short and sturdy as far as I could judge, clad in an old,
+brown, morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his
+eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the other side
+of the table. He was motionless, mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with
+something mournful too in the pose, like that statue of Giuliano (I
+think) de' Medici shading his face on the tomb by Michael Angelo,
+though, of course, he was far, far from being beautiful. He began by
+trying to make me talk nonsense. But I had been warned of that fiendish
+trait, and contradicted him with great assurance. After a while he left
+off. So far good. But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the
+abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and more
+impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and then, placing
+me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under certain conditions of
+weather, season, locality, &c. &c.--all very clear and precise--ordered
+me to execute a certain manoeuvre. Before I was half through with it he
+did some material damage to the ship. Directly I had grappled with the
+difficulty he caused another to present itself, and when that too
+was met he stuck another ship before me, creating a very dangerous
+situation. I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity in piling up
+trouble upon a man.
+
+"I wouldn't have got into that mess," I suggested mildly. "I could have
+seen that ship before."
+
+He never stirred the least bit.
+
+"No, you couldn't. The weather's thick."
+
+"Oh! I didn't know," I apologised blankly.
+
+I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with
+sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on.
+You must understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me
+was, I gathered, a homeward passage--the sort of passage I would not
+wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ship seemed to labour under
+a most comprehensive curse. It's no use enlarging on these never-ending
+misfortunes; suffice it to say that long before the end I would have
+welcomed with gratitude an opportunity to exchange into the "Flying
+Dutchman." Finally he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and
+provided me with a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks--the Dutch coast
+presumably. Distance, eight miles. The evidence of such implacable
+animosity deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.
+
+"Well," he said--for our pace had been very smart indeed till then.
+
+"I will have to think a little, sir."
+
+"Doesn't look as if there were much time to think," he muttered
+sardonically from under his hand.
+
+"No, sir," I said with some warmth. "Not on board a ship I could see.
+But so many accidents have happened that I really can't remember what
+there's left for me to work with."
+
+Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made unexpectedly a
+grunting remark.
+
+"You've done very well."
+
+"Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?" I asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them both
+go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of testing
+resourcefulness came into play again.
+
+"But there's only one cable. You've lost the other."
+
+It was exasperating.
+
+"Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser on
+board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from
+that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have to
+go."
+
+"Nothing more to do, eh?"
+
+"No, sir. I could do no more."
+
+He gave a bitter half-laugh.
+
+"You could always say your prayers."
+
+He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly. It was a sallow,
+strong, unamiable face. He put me in a surly, bored fashion through the
+usual questions as to lights and signals, and I escaped from the room
+thankfully--passed! Forty minutes! And again I walked on air along Tower
+Hill, where so many good men had lost their heads, because, I suppose,
+they were not resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of hearts
+I had no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third and
+last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I should.
+I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an unreasonable
+time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .
+
+But not a bit of it. When I presented myself to be examined for Master
+the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face
+in grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.
+
+He commenced operations with an easy-going "Let's see. H'm. Suppose you
+tell me all you know of charter-parties." He kept it up in that style
+all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his
+own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in
+hand. It was very interesting. "What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?"
+he queried suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon
+a point of stowage.
+
+I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave
+him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange
+he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before,
+when in command of a 3000-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest
+contrivance imaginable. "May be of use to you some day," he concluded.
+"You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam."
+
+There he was wrong. I never went into steam--not really. If I only live
+long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort
+of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the dark ages who had never
+gone into steam--not really.
+
+Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few interesting
+details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.
+
+"The use of wire rigging became general about that time too," he
+observed. "I was a very young master then. That was before you were
+born."
+
+"Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857."
+
+"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder
+tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed
+under a Government charter.
+
+Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who
+so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in
+me the sense of the continuity of that sea-life into which I had stepped
+from outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of
+official relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as
+though he had been an ancestor.
+
+Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care on the
+slip of blue paper, he remarked:
+
+"You are of Polish extraction."
+
+"Born there, sir."
+
+He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for the
+first time.
+
+"Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I never
+remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea. Don't
+remember ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren't you?"
+
+I said yes--very much so. We were remote from the sea not only by
+situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect association, not
+being a commercial nation at all, but purely agricultural. He made then
+the quaint reflection that it was "a long way for me to come out to
+begin a sea-life"; as if sea-life were not precisely a life in which one
+goes a long way from home.
+
+I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much nearer
+my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was to be a
+seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other. It was a matter of
+deliberate choice.
+
+He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
+interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent a
+little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I
+did not want to present myself to the British Merchant Service in an
+altogether green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious
+vocation was so strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea.
+It was the exact truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat
+exceptional psychology of my sea-going, I fear.
+
+"I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at sea. Have
+you now?"
+
+I admitted I never had. The examiner had given himself up to the spirit
+of gossiping idleness. For myself, I was in no haste to leave that room.
+Not in the least. The era of examinations was over. I would never
+again see that friendly man who was a professional ancestor, a sort of
+grandfather in the craft. Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me,
+and of that there was no sign. As he remained silent, looking at me, I
+added:
+
+"But I have heard of one, some years ago. He seems to have been a boy
+serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not mistaken."
+
+"What was his name?"
+
+I told him.
+
+"How did you say that?" he asked, puckering up his eyes at the uncouth
+sound.
+
+I repeated the name very distinctly.
+
+"How do you spell it?"
+
+I told him. He moved his head at the impracticable nature of that name,
+and observed:
+
+"It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?"
+
+There was no hurry. I had passed for Master, and I had all the rest of
+my life before me to make the best of it. That seemed a long time. I
+went leisurely through a small mental calculation, and said:
+
+"Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir."
+
+"Is it?" The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the table to
+me, and rose from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very abrupt ending of
+our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part from that excellent man,
+who was master of a ship before the whisper of the sea had reached my
+cradle. He offered me his hand and wished me well. He even made a few
+steps towards the door with me, and ended with good-natured advice.
+
+"I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into steam.
+When a man has got his master's certificate it's the proper time. If I
+were you I would go into steam."
+
+I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era of
+examinations. But that time I did not walk on air, as on the first two
+occasions. I walked across the Hill of many beheadings with measured
+steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now a British master
+mariner beyond a doubt. It was not that I had an exaggerated sense of
+that very modest achievement, with which, however, luck, opportunity,
+or any extraneous influence could have had nothing to do. That
+fact, satisfactory and obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal
+significance. It was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even
+to some not very kind aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had
+been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I don't
+mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go
+to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough,
+in all conscience, the commotion of his little world had seemed a very
+considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the
+echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and
+retrospect meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
+voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed
+boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his
+impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called
+upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine
+was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking
+a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and
+associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort
+of "career" in my call. Of Russia or Germany there could be no question.
+The nationality, the antecedents, made it impossible. The feeling
+against the Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there
+would have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School at
+Pola. It would have meant six months' extra grinding at German, perhaps,
+but I was not past the age of admission, and in other respects I was
+well qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly was thought of--but
+not by me. I must admit that in that respect my negative was accepted
+at once. That order of feeling was comprehensible enough to the most
+inimical of my critics. I was not called upon to offer explanations; the
+truth is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but the sea.
+There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the language
+at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is with France that
+Poland has most connection. There were some facilities for having me a
+little looked after, at first. Letters were being written, answers
+were being received, arrangements were being made for my departure
+for Marseilles, where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in
+a roundabout fashion through various French channels, had promised
+good-naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent ship
+for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier de chien.
+
+I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own counsel.
+But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already
+the determined resolve, that "if a seaman, then an English seaman," was
+formulated in my head though, of course, in the Polish language. I did
+not know six words of English, and I was astute enough to understand
+that it was much better to say nothing of my purpose. As it was I was
+already looked upon as partly insane, at least by the more distant
+acquaintances. The principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in
+the good-natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
+shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.
+
+This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out a
+quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black, short beard,
+a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He was as jovial and
+good-natured as any boy could desire. I was still asleep in my room in
+a modest hotel near the quays of the old port, after the fatigues of
+the journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyons, when he burst in flinging the
+shutters open to the sun of Provence and chiding me boisterously for
+lying abed. How pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to
+be up and off instantly for a "three years' campaign in the South Seas."
+O magic words! "Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud"--that is
+the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.
+
+He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was unwearied;
+but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me in a very
+solemn spirit. He had been at sea himself, but had left off at the age
+of twenty-five, finding he could earn his living on shore in a much more
+agreeable manner. He was related to an incredible number of Marseilles
+well-to-do families of a certain class. One of his uncles was a
+ship-broker of good standing, with a large connection amongst English
+ships; other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts,
+sold chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers, shipwrights.
+His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
+Pilots. I made acquaintances amongst these people, but mainly amongst
+the pilots. The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by
+invitation, in a big half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs
+on the look-out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and
+the smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall Planier
+lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon with a white
+perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provencal
+seamen. Under the general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin I
+was made the guest of the Corporation of Pilots, and had the freedom
+of their boats night or day. And many a day and a night too did I spend
+cruising with these rough, kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy
+with the sea began. Many a time "the little friend of Baptistin" had the
+hooded cloak of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest
+hands while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch
+for the lights of ships. Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or shaved,
+lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the pilot-breed, and
+here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over my
+sea-infancy. The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of
+observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states
+of the weather. They gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited
+to sit in more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
+hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate
+by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
+daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses of black
+hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly white
+teeth.
+
+I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them,
+Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style,
+would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the
+Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old
+aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to
+make me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the
+master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense
+and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
+its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other
+men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and
+in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by a not very
+surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly
+of the belle Madame Delestang.
+
+Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose, and a
+perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as it were
+by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock's
+"grand air" and courtly solemnity. He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie
+only, and was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my
+needs. He was such an ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist
+that he used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary,
+I should say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money
+matters reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of
+post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
+of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were still
+promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur
+de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs. You must admit
+that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.
+Luckily in the counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of
+the Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts
+were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in
+making my wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist
+(I suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
+windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with
+heavily moulded cornices. I always felt on going out as though I had
+been in the temple of some very dignified but completely temporal
+religion. And it was generally on these occasions that under the great
+carriage gateway Lady Ded-- I mean Madame Delestang, catching sight of
+my raised hat, would beckon me with an amiable imperiousness to the side
+of the carriage, and suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, "Venez
+donc faire un tour avec nous," to which the husband would add an
+encouraging "C'est ca. Allons, montez, jeune homme." He questioned me
+sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as to the
+way I employed my time, and never failed to express the hope that I
+wrote regularly to my "honoured uncle." I made no secret of the way I
+employed my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots
+and so on entertained Madame Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman
+could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of his new
+experience amongst strange men and strange sensations. She expressed no
+opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in the
+gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and fleeting
+episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street, she
+offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight pressure, for a moment.
+While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she
+leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of warning in
+her leisurely tone: "Il faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater
+sa vie." I had never seen her face so close to mine before. She made
+my heart beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
+Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life. But
+she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed
+to me.
+
+
+Chapter VII.
+
+Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold
+suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on Political
+Economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible? Would it be right?
+With my feet on the very shores of the sea and about to embrace my
+blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's
+life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the
+last too of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
+bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress,
+like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so
+callous or so stupid as not to recognise there also the voice of
+kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning--because what can be the
+meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?--arrested one's attention
+by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before,
+the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole
+evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion
+of life as an enterprise that could be mismanaged. But I left off being
+thoughtful shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts
+of the past and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of
+the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of my friends. I knew where she
+would be waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a canal behind the
+Fort at the entrance of the harbour. The deserted quays looked very
+white and dry in the moonlight and as if frost-bound in the sharp air
+of that December night. A prowler or two slunk by noiselessly; a
+custom-house guard, soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced close under
+the bowsprits of the long row of ships moored bows on opposite the long,
+slightly curved, continuous flat wall of the tall houses that seemed
+to be one immense abandoned building with innumerable windows shuttered
+closely. Only here and there a small dingy cafe for sailors cast a
+yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones. Passing by, one
+heard a deep murmur of voices inside--nothing more. How quiet everything
+was at the end of the quays on the last night on which I went out for
+a service cruise as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! Not a footstep,
+except my own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo of the usual revelry
+going on in the narrow unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my
+ear--and suddenly, with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass,
+the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey swung round the corner
+of the dead wall which faces across the paved road the characteristic
+angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. Three horses trotted abreast with
+the clatter of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow, uproarious
+machine jolted violently behind them, fantastic, lighted up, perfectly
+empty and with the driver apparently asleep on his swaying perch above
+that amazing racket. I flattened myself against the wall and gasped. It
+was a stunning experience. Then after staggering on a few paces in
+the shadow of the Fort casting a darkness more intense than that of a
+clouded night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern standing
+on the quay, and became aware of muffled figures making towards it from
+various directions. Pilots of the Third Company hastening to embark.
+Too sleepy to be talkative they step on board in silence. But a few low
+grunts and an enormous yawn are heard. Somebody even ejaculates: "Ah!
+Coquin de sort!" and sighs wearily at his hard fate.
+
+The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of pilots
+at that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my friend Solary
+(Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep-chested man of forty, with a
+keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes. He greets me by a low,
+hearty, "He, l'ami. Comment va?" With his clipped moustache and massive
+open face, energetic and at the same time placid in expression, he is
+a fine specimen of the southerner of the calm type. For there is such
+a type in which the volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid
+force. He is fair, but no one could mistake him for a man of the north
+even by the dim gleam of the lantern standing on the quay. He is worth
+a dozen of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but then, in the whole
+immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, you could not find half a
+dozen men of his stamp.
+
+Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick jacket
+and bends his head over it in the light cast into the boat. Time's up.
+His pleasant voice commands in a quiet undertone "Larguez." A suddenly
+projected arm snatches the lantern off the quay--and, warped along by
+a line at first, then with the regular tug of four heavy sweeps in
+the bow, the big half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black
+breathless shadow of the Fort. The open water of the avant-port glitters
+under the moon as if sown over with millions of sequins, and the long
+white breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid silver. With a quick
+rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the sail is filled by a
+little breeze keen enough to have come straight down from the frozen
+moon, and the boat, after the clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems
+to stand at rest, surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and
+unearthly that it may be the rustling of the brilliant, over-powering
+moonrays breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless
+sea.
+
+I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the Third
+Company. I have known the spell of moonlight since, on various seas
+and coasts--coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand dunes--but no magic so
+perfect in its revelation of unsuspected character, as though one were
+allowed to look upon the mystic nature of material things. For hours I
+suppose no word was spoken in that boat. The pilots seated in two rows
+facing each other dozed with their arms folded and their chins resting
+upon their breasts. They displayed a great variety of caps: cloth, wool,
+leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque round beret or
+two pulled down over the brows; and one grandfather, with a shaved, bony
+face and a great beak of a nose, had a cloak with a hood which made him
+look in our midst like a cowled monk being carried off goodness knows
+where by that silent company of seamen--quiet enough to be dead.
+
+My fingers itched for the tiller and in due course my friend, the
+patron, surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the family
+coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road. There was a
+great solitude around us; the islets ahead, Monte Cristo and the
+Chateau d'If in full light, seemed to float towards us--so steady, so
+imperceptible was the progress of our boat. "Keep her in the furrow
+of the moon," the patron directed me in a quiet murmur, sitting down
+ponderously in the stern-sheets and reaching for his pipe.
+
+The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to the
+westward of the islets; and presently, as we approached the spot, the
+boat we were going to relieve swam into our view suddenly, on her way
+home, cutting black and sinister into the wake of the moon under a
+sable wing, while to them our sail must have been a vision of white
+and dazzling radiance. Without altering the course a hair's-breadth we
+slipped by each other within an oar's-length. A drawling sardonic hail
+came out of her. Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on
+their feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst out,
+a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter, which lasted till the boats were
+stern to stern, theirs all bright now and with a shining sail to our
+eyes, we turned all black to their vision, and drawing away from them
+under a sable wing. That extraordinary uproar died away almost as
+suddenly as it had begun; first one had enough of it and sat down, then
+another, then three or four together, and when all had left off with
+mutters and growling half-laughs the sound of hearty chuckling became
+audible, persistent, unnoticed. The cowled grandfather was very much
+entertained somewhere within his hood.
+
+He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved the
+least bit. He had remained quietly in his place against the foot of the
+mast. I had been given to understand long before that he had the rating
+of a second-class able seaman (matelot leger) in the fleet which sailed
+from Toulon for the conquest of Algeria in the year of grace 1830. And,
+indeed, I had seen and examined one of the buttons of his old brown
+patched coat, the only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and
+thin, with the words Equipages de ligne engraved on it. That sort of
+button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons. "I
+preserved it from the time of my Navy Service," he explained, nodding
+rapidly his frail, vulture-like head. It was not very likely that he had
+picked up that relic in the street. He looked certainly old enough to
+have fought at Trafalgar--or at any rate to have played his little part
+there as a powder-monkey. Shortly after we had been introduced he had
+informed me in a Franco-Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his
+toothless jaws, that when he was a "shaver no higher than that" he
+had seen the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba. It was at night,
+he narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and
+Antibes in the open country. A big fire had been lit at the side of the
+cross-roads. The population from several villages had collected there,
+old and young--down to the very children in arms, because the women had
+refused to stay at home. Tall soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood
+in a circle facing the people silently, and their stern eyes and big
+moustaches were enough to make everybody keep at a distance. He, "being
+an impudent little shaver," wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on his
+hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs, and peeping
+through discovered standing perfectly still in the light of the fire
+"a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat, buttoned up in a long
+straight coat, with a big pale face, inclined on one shoulder, looking
+something like a priest. His hands were clasped behind his back. . . .
+It appears that this was the Emperor," the Ancient commented with a
+faint sigh. He was staring from the ground with all his might, when "my
+poor father," who had been searching for his boy frantically everywhere,
+pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.
+
+The tale seems an authentic recollection. He related it to me many
+times, using the very same words. The grandfather honoured me by a
+special and somewhat embarrassing predilection. Extremes touch. He was
+the oldest member by a long way in that Company, and I was, if I may say
+so, its temporarily adopted baby. He had been a pilot longer than any
+man in the boat could remember; thirty--forty years. He did not seem
+certain himself, but it could be found out, he suggested, in the
+archives of the Pilot-office. He had been pensioned off years before,
+but he went out from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the
+Company once confided to me in a whisper, "the old chap did no harm.
+He was not in the way." They treated him with rough deference. One and
+another would address some insignificant remark to him now and again,
+but nobody really took any notice of what he had to say. He had survived
+his strength, his usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long, green,
+worsted stockings, pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of
+woollen nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet.
+Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen hands
+would be extended to help him on board, but afterwards he was left
+pretty much to his own thoughts. Of course he never did any work,
+except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed: "He, l'Ancien! let
+go the halyards there, at your hand"--or some such request of an easy
+kind.
+
+No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow of the
+hood. He kept it up for a long time with intense enjoyment. Obviously he
+had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused. But
+when his hilarity had exhausted itself, he made a professional remark in
+a self-assertive but quavering voice:
+
+"Can't expect much work on a night like this."
+
+No one took it up. It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas could be
+expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy splendour and
+spiritual stillness. We would have to glide idly to and fro, keeping our
+station within the appointed bearings, and, unless a fresh breeze sprang
+up with the dawn, we would land before sunrise on a small islet that,
+within two miles of us, shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to "break
+a crust and take a pull at the wine bottle." I was familiar with the
+procedure. The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
+capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth amenity
+of the classic sea when in a gentle mood. The crust broken, and the
+mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no more than that with this
+abstemious race--the pilots would pass the time stamping their feet on
+the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped fingers. One
+or two misanthropists would sit apart perched on boulders like man-like
+sea-fowl of solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip
+scandalously in little gesticulating knots; and there would be
+perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon
+with the long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
+piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
+brandishing and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a short
+turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boatful
+of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer for the old Phoenician
+port, dominated, watched over from the ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by
+the red-and-white-striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
+
+All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very
+recent experience. But also something not foreseen by me did happen,
+something which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots. It
+was on this occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side
+of an English ship.
+
+No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught
+got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy
+with a clean, colourless light. It was while we were all ashore on the
+islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like
+an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to
+her water-line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of
+smoke slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and
+headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an
+hour.
+
+She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met
+on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super structures,
+powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two
+hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear was not a matter of
+course in these days--and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in
+thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peaked caps--I suppose
+all her officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known
+well by sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship
+seen once so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I
+have not forgotten. How could I--the first English ship on whose side I
+ever laid my hand! The name--I read it letter by letter on the bow--was
+"James Westoll." Not very romantic you will say. The name of a very
+considerable, well-known and universally respected North-country
+shipowner, I believe. James Westoll! What better name could an
+honourable hard-working ship have? To me the very grouping of the
+letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw
+her floating motionless, and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere
+purity of the light.
+
+We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to
+pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on
+board while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us
+all through the night, went on gliding gently past the black glistening
+length of the ship. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then
+that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed
+in English--the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long
+friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of
+ease, and of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued,
+of remembered emotions--of my very dreams! And if (after being thus
+fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not claim
+it aloud as my own, then, at any rate the speech of my children. Thus
+small events grow memorable by the passage of time. As to the quality
+of the address itself I cannot say it was very striking. Too short for
+eloquence and devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the
+three words "Look out there," growled out huskily above my head.
+
+It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy double
+chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up very high,
+even to the level of his breast-bone, by a pair of braces quite exposed
+to public view. As where he stood there was no bulwark but only a
+rail and stanchions I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his
+voluminous person from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat,
+which sat like an absurd flanged cone on his big head. The grotesque and
+massive space of that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the
+lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much. My course of reading, of dreaming
+and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea-brother of that
+sort. I never met again a figure in the least like his except in the
+illustrations to Mr. W.W. Jacobs' most entertaining tales of barges and
+coasters; but the inspired talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun
+at poor, innocent sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its
+felicitous invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth,
+was not yet. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet. I fancy that, at
+most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had achieved at
+that early date.
+
+Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have been
+prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise. The object of
+his concise address was to call my attention to a rope which he
+incontinently flung down for me to catch. I caught it, though it was
+not really necessary, the ship having no way on her by that time. Then
+everything went on very swiftly. The dinghy came with a slight bump
+against the steamer's side, the pilot, grabbing the rope ladder, had
+scrambled halfway up before I knew that our task of boarding was done;
+the harsh, muffled clanging of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear
+through the iron plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to
+"shove off--push hard"; and when I bore against the smooth flank of
+the first English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already
+throbbing under my open palm.
+
+Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the miniature
+lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there, hardly
+distinguishable against the land. The dinghy danced a squashy, splashy
+jig in the wash of the wake and turning in my seat I followed the "James
+Westoll" with my eyes. Before she had gone in a quarter of a mile she
+hoisted her flag as the harbour regulations prescribe for arriving
+and departing ships. I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the
+flagstaff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere
+bathing the drab and grey masses of that southern land, the livid
+islets, the sea of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that
+cold sunrise, it was as far as the eye could reach the only spot of
+ardent colour--flame-like, intense, and presently as minute as the tiny
+red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire kindles in
+the clear heart of a globe of crystal. The Red Ensign--the symbolic,
+protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined
+for so many years to be the only roof over my head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+
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diff --git a/old/1316.zip b/old/1316.zip
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@@ -0,0 +1,4923 @@
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+#21 in our series by Joseph Conrad
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+Some Reminiscences
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+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME REMINISCENCES
+by
+Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+
+A Familiar Preface.
+
+As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
+ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly
+suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure.  I defended
+myself with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the
+friendly voice insisted:  "You know, you really must."
+
+It was not an argument, but I submitted at once.  If one must!. . .
+
+You perceive the force of a word.  He who wants to persuade
+should put his trust, not in the right argument, but in the right
+word.  The power of sound has always been greater than the power
+of sense.  I don't say this by way of disparagement.  It is
+better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective.  Nothing
+humanely great--great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass of
+lives--has come from reflection.  On the other hand, you cannot
+fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
+instance, or Pity.  I won't mention any more.  They are not far
+to seek.  Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with
+conviction, these two by their sound alone have set whole nations
+in motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our
+whole social fabric.  There's "virtue" for you if you like!. . .
+Of course the accent must be attended to.  The right accent.
+That's very important.  The capacious lung, the thundering or the
+tender vocal chords.  Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever.
+He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination.
+Mathematics command all my respect, but I have no use for
+engines.  Give me the right word and the right accent and I will
+move the world.
+
+What a dream--for a writer!  Because written words have their
+accent too.  Yes!  Let me only find the right word!  Surely it
+must be lying somewhere amongst the wreckage of all the plaints
+and all the exultations poured out aloud since the first day when
+hope, the undying, came down on earth.  It may be there, close
+by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand.  But it's no good.  I
+believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a pottle of
+hay at the first try.  For myself, I have never had such luck.
+
+And then there is that accent.  Another difficulty.  For who is
+going to tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word
+is shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind
+leaving the world unmoved.  Once upon a time there lived an
+Emperor who was a sage and something of a literary man.  He
+jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflections which
+chance has preserved for the edification of posterity.  Amongst
+other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember this solemn
+admonition:  "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth."
+The accent of heroic truth!  This is very fine, but I am thinking
+that it is an easy matter for an austere Emperor to jot down
+grandiose advice.  Most of the working truths on this earth are
+humble, not heroic:  and there have been times in the history of
+mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to nothing
+but derision.
+
+Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book
+words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible
+heroism.  However humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess
+that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me.  They are
+more fit for a moralist than for an artist.  Truth of a modest
+sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.  That complete,
+praise-worthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the
+hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with
+one's friends.
+
+"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression.  I can't imagine
+either amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for
+something to do as to quarrel with me.  "To disappoint one's
+friends" would be nearer the mark.  Most, almost all, friendships
+of the writing period of my life have come to me through my
+books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work.  He stands
+there, the only reality in an invented world, amongst imaginary
+things, happenings, and people.  Writing about them, he is only
+writing about himself.  But the disclosure is not complete.  He
+remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected
+rather than a seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the
+draperies of fiction.  In these personal notes there is no such
+veil.  And I cannot help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation
+of Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly,
+says that "there are persons esteemed on their reputation who by
+showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them."  This is
+the danger incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk
+about himself without disguise.
+
+While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was
+remonstrated with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form
+of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes.  It
+seems that I am not sufficiently literary.  Indeed a man who
+never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring
+himself to look upon his existence and his experience, upon the
+sum of his thoughts, sensations and emotions, upon his memories
+and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as only so
+much material for his hands.  Once before, some three years ago,
+when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of impressions
+and memories, the same remarks were made to me.  Practical
+remarks.  But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of
+thrift they recommended.  I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea,
+its ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much
+which has gone to make me what I am.  That seemed to me the only
+shape in which I could offer it to their shades.  There could not
+be a question in my mind of anything else.  It is quite possible
+that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am
+incorrigible.
+
+Having matured in the surroundings and under the special
+conditions of sea-life, I have a special piety towards that form
+of my past; for its impressions were vivid, its appeal direct,
+its demands such as could be responded to with the natural
+elation of youth and strength equal to the call.  There was
+nothing in them to perplex a young conscience.  Having broken
+away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
+which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed
+by great distances from such natural affections as were still
+left to me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the
+totally unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me
+so mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through
+the blind force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world
+and the merchant service my only home for a long succession of
+years.  No wonder then that in my two exclusively sea books, "The
+Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" and "The Mirror of the Sea" (and in
+the few short sea stories like "Youth" and "Typhoon"), I have
+tried with an almost filial regard to render the vibration of
+life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple
+men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
+something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures
+of their hands and the objects of their care.
+
+One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to
+memories and seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made
+up one's mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what
+it is, or praise it for what it is not, or--generally--to teach
+it how to behave.  Being neither quarrelsome, nor a flatterer,
+nor a sage, I have done none of these things; and I am prepared
+to put up serenely with the insignificance which attaches to
+persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other. But
+resignation is not indifference.  I would not like to be left
+standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream
+carrying onwards so many lives.  I would fain claim for myself
+the faculty of so much insight as can be expressed in a voice of
+sympathy and compassion.
+
+It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of
+criticism I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim
+acceptance of facts; of what the French would call secheresse du
+coeur.  Fifteen years of unbroken silence before praise or blame
+testify sufficiently to my respect for criticism, that fine
+flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.  But this
+is more of a personal matter, reaching the man behind the work,
+and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume which is a
+personal note in the margin of the public page.  Not that I feel
+hurt in the least.  The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
+all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
+
+My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an
+element of autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since
+the creator can only express himself in his creation--then there
+are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.
+I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint.  It is often
+merely temperamental.  But it is not always a sign of coldness.
+It may be pride.  There can be nothing more humiliating than to
+see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either of laughter
+or tears.  Nothing more humiliating!  And this for the reason
+that should the mark be missed, should the open display of
+emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust
+or contempt.  No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a
+risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront
+with impunity.  In a task which mainly consists in laying one's
+soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even
+at the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity
+which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.
+
+And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad
+on this earth.  The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon
+itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not
+all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man august
+in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be
+recognised with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of
+us all.  Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other,
+mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as
+mysterious as an over-shadowed ocean, while the dazzling
+brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still,
+on the distant edge of the horizon.
+
+Yes!  I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command
+over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest
+achievement of imaginative literature.  Only, to be a great
+magician one must surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible
+powers, either outside or within one's own breast.  We have all
+heard of simple men selling their souls for love or power to some
+grotesque devil.  The most ordinary intelligence can perceive
+without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be
+a fool's bargain.  I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
+of my dislike and distrust of such transactions.  It may be my
+sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
+on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a
+positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full
+possession of myself which is the first condition of good
+service.  And I have carried my notion of good service from my
+earlier into my later existence.  I, who have never sought in the
+written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful, I have
+carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
+more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act, I suppose,
+I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable
+company of pure esthetes.
+
+As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for
+himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the
+consistent narrowness of his outlook.  But I have never been able
+to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful, out of
+deference for some general principle.  Whether there be any
+courage in making this admission I know not.  After the middle
+turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil
+mind.  So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always
+suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
+emotions the debasing touch of insincerity.  In order to move
+others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried
+away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently
+enough perhaps and of necessity, like an actor who raises his
+voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation--but
+still we have to do that.  And surely this is no great sin.  But
+the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own
+exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the
+end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
+blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his
+insistent emotion.  From laughter and tears the descent is easy
+to snivelling and giggles.
+
+These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound
+morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity.  It
+is his clear duty.  And least of all you can condemn an artist
+pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim.  In
+that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking
+for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no
+policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of
+opinion to keep him within bounds.  Who then is going to say Nay
+to his temptations if not his conscience?
+
+And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of
+perfectly open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except
+those which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of
+mankind.  All intellectual and artistic ambitions are
+permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity.
+They can hurt no one.  If they are mad, then so much the worse
+for the artist.  Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions
+are their own reward.  Is it such a very mad presumption to
+believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other
+means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
+appeal of one's work?  To try to go deeper is not to be
+insensible.  An historian of hearts is not an historian of
+emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be,
+since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears.
+The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity.  They
+are worthy of respect too.  And he is not insensible who pays
+them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob,
+and of a smile which is not a grin.  Resignation, not mystic, not
+detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by
+love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible
+to become a sham.
+
+Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom.  I am too
+much the creature of my time for that.  But I think that the
+proper wisdom is to will what the gods will without perhaps being
+certain what their will is--or even if they have a will of their
+own.  And in this matter of life and art it is not the Why that
+matters so much to our happiness as the How.  As the Frenchman
+said, "Il y a toujours la maniere."  Very true.  Yes.  There is
+the manner.  The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
+indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love.
+The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human
+face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to
+look at their kind.
+
+Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
+world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must
+be as old as the hills.  It rests notably, amongst others, on the
+idea of Fidelity.  At a time when nothing which is not
+revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much
+attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings.  The
+revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees
+one from all scruples as regards ideas.  Its hard, absolute
+optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
+intolerance it contains.  No doubt one should smile at these
+things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.  All
+claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
+from which a philosophical mind should be free. . .
+
+I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be
+unduly discursive.  I have never been very well acquainted with
+the art of conversation--that art which, I understand, is
+supposed to be lost now.  My young days, the days when one's
+habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with
+long silences.  Such voices as broke into them were anything but
+conversational.  No.  I haven't got the habit.  Yet this
+discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
+follow.  They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
+disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime),
+with unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety).  I was
+told severely that the public would view with displeasure the
+informal character of my recollections.  "Alas!" I protested
+mildly.  "Could I begin with the sacramental words, 'I was born
+on such a date in such a place'?  The remoteness of the locality
+would have robbed the statement of all interest.  I haven't lived
+through wonderful adventures to be related seriatim.  I haven't
+known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous remarks.  I
+haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs.  This is
+but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't
+written it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own."
+
+But my objector was not placated.  These were good reasons for
+not writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already,
+he said.
+
+I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve
+as a good reason for not writing at all.  But since I have
+written them, all I want to say in their defence is that these
+memories put down without any regard for established conventions
+have not been thrown off without system and purpose.  They have
+their hope and their aim.  The hope that from the reading of
+these pages there may emerge at last the vision of a personality;
+the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar as, for
+instance, "Almayer's Folly" and "The Secret Agent"--and yet a
+coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its
+action.  This is the hope.  The immediate aim, closely associated
+with the hope, is to give the record of personal memories by
+presenting faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with
+the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the
+sea.
+
+In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend
+here and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.
+
+J.C.K.
+
+
+Chapter I.
+
+Books may be written in all sorts of places.  Verbal inspiration
+may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a
+river in the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to
+look benignantly on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant
+fancy that the shade of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be
+(amongst other things) a descendant of Vikings--might have
+hovered with amused interest over the decks of a 2000-ton steamer
+called the "Adowa," on board of which, gripped by the inclement
+winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter of "Almayer's
+Folly" was begun.  With interest, I say, for was not the kind
+Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering voice the
+last of the Romantics?  Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
+ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like
+hermit?
+
+"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the
+hills behind which the sun had sunk.". . .These words of
+Almayer's romantic daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper
+of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place.  They
+referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles and shaped themselves in my
+mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas,
+far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of the
+northern hemisphere.  But at that moment the mood of visions and
+words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual
+youth, coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation:
+"You've made it jolly warm in here."
+
+It was warm.  I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a
+tin under the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that
+water will leak where steam will not.  I am not aware of what my
+young friend had been doing on deck all that morning, but the
+hands he rubbed together vigorously were very red and imparted to
+me a chilly feeling by their mere aspect.  He has remained the
+only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of
+a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange
+aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
+written with an exclusive view to his person.  When he did not
+play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it.  He proceeded to
+this sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the
+strings under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
+
+"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"
+
+It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and
+simply turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive
+secrecy:  I could not have told him he had put to flight the
+psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening speech of the tenth
+chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which were to
+follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.  I could not
+have told him that Nina had said:  "It has set at last."  He
+would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
+precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
+sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing
+the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire.  I did not
+know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared,
+though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with more
+deference than, in our relative positions, I was strictly
+entitled to.
+
+He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking
+through the port-hole.  The round opening framed in its brass rim
+a fragment of the quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen
+ground and the tail-end of a great cart.  A red-nosed carter in a
+blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned against the wheel.  An idle,
+strolling custom-house guard, belted over his blue capote, had
+the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and the
+monotony of official existence.  The background of grimy houses
+found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a
+wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud.  The colouring
+was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe
+with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork,
+corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering
+the river.  We had been shifted down there from another berth in
+the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same port-hole
+gave me a view of quite another sort of cafe--the best in the
+town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his
+wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere Renault, had some
+refreshment after the memorable performance of an opera which was
+the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of light
+music.
+
+I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern
+Archipelago which I certainly hoped to see again.  The story of
+"Almayer's Folly" got put away under the pillow for that day.  I
+do not know that I had any occupation to keep me away from it;
+the truth of the matter is that on board that ship we were
+leading just then a contemplative life.  I will not say anything
+of my privileged position.  I was there "just to oblige," as an
+actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit
+performance of a friend.
+
+As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that
+steamer at that time and in those circumstances.  And perhaps I
+was not even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship
+"wants" an officer.  It was the first and last instance in my sea
+life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely
+shadowy to my apprehension.  I do not mean this for the well-
+known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to
+the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian
+Transport Company.  A death leaves something behind, but there
+was never anything tangible left from the F.C.T.C.  It flourished
+no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in
+the dead of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure
+and died before spring set in.  But indubitably it was a company,
+it had even a house-flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C.
+artfully tangled up in a complicated monogram.  We flew it at our
+main-mast head, and now I have come to the conclusion that it was
+the only flag of its kind in existence.  All the same we on
+board, for many days, had the impression of being a unit of a
+large fleet with fortnightly departures for Montreal and Quebec
+as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which came aboard in
+a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we started
+for Rouen, France.  And in the shadowy life of the F.C.T.C. lies
+the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a
+remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina
+Almayer's story.
+
+The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its
+modest rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable
+activity and the greatest devotion to his task.  He is
+responsible for what was my last association with a ship.  I call
+it that because it can hardly be called a sea-going experience.
+Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to pay him the tribute
+of affectionate familiarity at this distance of years--had very
+sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the
+whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine.  He
+organised for us courses of professional lectures, St. John
+ambulance classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies
+and members of Parliament on subjects touching the interests of
+the service; and as to the oncoming of some inquiry or commission
+relating to matters of the sea and to the work of seamen, it was
+a perfect godsend to his need of exerting himself on our
+corporate behalf.  Together with this high sense of his official
+duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a strong
+disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
+that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent
+master.  And what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to
+put him in the way of employment?  Captain Froud did not see why
+the Shipmasters' Society, besides its general guardianship of our
+interests, should not be unofficially an employment agency of the
+very highest class.
+
+"I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come
+to us for their men.  There is nothing of a trade-union spirit
+about our society, and I really don't see why they should not,"
+he said once to me.  "I am always telling the captains, too, that
+all things being equal they ought to give preference to the
+members of the society.  In my position I can generally find for
+them what they want amongst our members or our associate
+members."
+
+In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I
+was very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were
+a sort of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea,
+could feel itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of
+its choice--nearer there than on any other spot of the solid
+earth.  This resting-place used to be, at about five o'clock in
+the afternoon, full of men and tobacco smoke, but Captain Froud
+had the smaller room to himself and there he granted private
+interviews, whose principal motive was to render service.  Thus,
+one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a crooked
+finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
+perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.
+
+"I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning," he said, getting
+back to his desk and motioning me to a chair, "who is in want of
+an officer.  It's for a steamship.  You know, nothing pleases me
+more than to be asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my
+way. . ."
+
+As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at
+the closed door but he shook his head.
+
+"Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of
+them.  But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship
+wants an officer who can speak French fluently, and that's not so
+easy to find.  I do not know anybody myself but you.  It's a
+second officer's berth and, of course, you would not care. . .
+would you now?  I know that it isn't what you are looking for."
+
+It was not.  I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted
+man who looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his
+visions.  But I admit that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a
+man who could make a second officer for a steamer chartered by a
+French company.  I showed no sign of being haunted by the fate of
+Nina and by the murmurs of tropical forests; and even my intimate
+intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak character) had not put
+a visible mark upon my features.  For many years he and the world
+of his story had been the companions of my imagination without, I
+hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of sea
+life.  I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since
+my return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day
+of which I speak.
+
+It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a
+Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a
+vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real
+intercourse.  I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore,
+and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old
+acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue.  Before long, as was only
+proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table and then
+the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and gestures.
+Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly
+after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs
+and half-castes.  They did not clamour aloud for my attention.
+They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the appeal,
+I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity.  It seems
+now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of
+these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand
+to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground
+of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of
+hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth?
+
+I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the
+bearers of any gifts of profit or fame.  There was no vision of a
+printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated
+in a decayed part of Belgravia.  After all these years, each
+leaving its evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly
+say that it is a sentiment akin to piety which prompted me to
+render in words assembled with conscientious care the memory of
+things far distant and of men who had lived.
+
+But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
+disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely
+that I should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few
+hours' notice the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer.
+He explained to me that the ship was chartered by a French
+company intending to establish a regular monthly line of sailings
+from Rouen, for the transport of French emigrants to Canada.
+But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me very much.
+I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up the
+reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it.  But
+the consideration was just for form's sake.  The next day I
+interviewed the Captain, and I believe we were impressed
+favourably with each other.  He explained that his chief mate was
+an excellent man in every respect and that he could not think of
+dismissing him so as to give me the higher position; but that if
+I consented to come as second officer I would be given certain
+special advantages--and so on.
+
+I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
+
+"I am sure," he insisted, "you will get on first rate with Mr.
+Paramor."
+
+I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was
+in those circumstances that what was to be my last connection
+with a ship began.  And after all there was not even one single
+trip.  It may be that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of
+that written word on my forehead which apparently forbade me,
+through all my sea wanderings, ever to achieve the crossing of
+the Western Ocean--using the words in that special sense in which
+sailors speak of Western Ocean trade, of Western Ocean packets,
+of Western Ocean hard cases.  The new life attended closely upon
+the old and the nine chapters of "Almayer's Folly" went with me
+to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we started for Rouen.
+I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man fated
+never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of the
+Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a
+single passage.  It might have been that of course; but the
+obvious, gross obstacle was clearly the want of money.  Four
+hundred and sixty bunks for emigrants were put together in the
+'tween decks by industrious carpenters while we lay in the
+Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant turned up in Rouen--of
+which, being a humane person, I confess I was glad.  Some
+gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and one
+was said to be the Chairman--turned up indeed and went from end
+to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the
+deck-beams.  I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it
+that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough,
+though, obviously, they had never seen anything of the sort
+before.  Their faces as they went ashore wore a cheerfully
+inconclusive expression.  Notwithstanding that this inspecting
+ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to immediate sailing,
+it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I received the
+inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
+charter-party would ever take place.
+
+It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place.
+When we first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony
+well towards the centre of the town, and, all the street corners
+being placarded with the tricolour posters announcing the birth
+of our company, the petit bourgeois with his wife and family made
+a Sunday holiday from the inspection of the ship.  I was always
+in evidence in my best uniform to give information as though I
+had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter, while our quarter-
+masters reaped a harvest of small change from personally
+conducted parties.  But when the move was made--that move which
+carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
+an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the
+desolation of solitude became our lot.  It was a complete and
+soundless stagnation; for, as we had the ship ready for sea to
+the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the days short, we
+were absolutely idle--idle to the point of blushing with shame
+when the thought struck us that all the time our salaries went
+on.  Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, we could not
+enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like this all
+day:  even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to
+prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals.  The
+good Paramor--he was really a most excellent fellow--became
+unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature, till one
+dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should
+employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up
+on deck and turning them end for end.
+
+For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant.  "Excellent idea!" but
+directly his face fell.  "Why. . .Yes!  But we can't make that
+job last more than three days," he muttered discontentedly.  I
+don't know how long he expected us to be stuck on the riverside
+outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables got hauled up and
+turned end for end according to my satanic suggestion, put down
+again, and their very existence utterly forgotten, I believe,
+before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down,
+empty as she came, into the Havre roads.  You may think that this
+state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of
+Almayer and his daughter.  Yet it was not so.  As if it were some
+sort of evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as
+related above, had arrested them short at the point of that
+fateful sunset for many weeks together.  It was always thus with
+this book, begun in '89 and finished in '94--with that shortest
+of all the novels which it was to be my lot to write.  Between
+its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner in his
+wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the
+God of Islam--"The Merciful, the Compassionate"--which closes the
+book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to
+use the elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the
+scenes (some of them) of my childhood and the realisation of
+childhood's vain words, expressing a light-hearted and romantic
+whim.
+
+It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while
+looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on
+the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that
+continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an
+amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:
+
+"When I grow up I shall go there."
+
+And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of
+a century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin
+of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head.  Yes.
+I did go there:  there being the region of Stanley Falls which in
+'68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured
+surface.  And the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," carried about me as
+if it were a talisman or a treasure, went there too.  That it
+ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of
+Providence; because a good many of my other properties,
+infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind
+through unfortunate accidents of transportation.  I call to mind,
+for instance, a specially awkward turn of the Congo between
+Kinchassa and Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to
+take it at night in a big canoe with only half the proper number
+of paddlers.  I failed in being the second white man on record
+drowned at that interesting spot through the upsetting of a
+canoe.  The first was a young Belgian officer, but the accident
+happened some months before my time, and he, too, I believe, was
+going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still he was
+going home.  I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
+was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with
+"Almayer's Folly" amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at
+that delectable capital Boma, where before the departure of the
+steamer which was to take me home I had the time to wish myself
+dead over and over again with perfect sincerity.  At that date
+there were in existence only seven chapters of "Almayer's Folly,"
+but the chapter in my history which followed was that of a long,
+long illness and very dismal convalescence.  Geneva, or more
+precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is rendered
+for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in the
+history of Almayer's decline and fall.  The events of the ninth
+are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper
+management of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm
+whose name does not matter.  But that work, undertaken to
+accustom myself again to the activities of a healthy existence,
+soon came to an end.  The earth had nothing to hold me with for
+very long.  And then that memorable story, like a cask of choice
+Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the sea.
+Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of course I
+would not like to say.  As far as appearance is concerned it
+certainly did nothing of the kind.  The whole MS. acquired a
+faded look and an ancient, yellowish complexion.  It became at
+last unreasonable to suppose that anything in the world would
+ever happen to Almayer and Nina.  And yet something most unlikely
+to happen on the high seas was to wake them up from their state
+of suspended animation.
+
+What is it that Novalis says?  "It is certain my conviction gains
+infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it."  And what
+is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence
+strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer
+than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected
+episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
+Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo rapids brought it to
+the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open sea.  It
+would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
+sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young
+Cambridge man (he was a "passenger for his health" on board the
+good ship Torrens outward bound to Australia) who was the first
+reader of "Almayer's Folly"--the very first reader I ever had.
+"Would it bore you very much reading a MS. in a handwriting like
+mine?" I asked him one evening on a sudden impulse at the end of
+a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History.
+Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy
+dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his own
+travelling store.
+
+"Not at all," he answered with his courteous intonation and a
+faint smile.  As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused
+curiosity gave him a watchful expression.  I wonder what he
+expected to see.  A poem, maybe.  All that's beyond guessing now.
+He was not a cold but a calm man, still more subdued by disease--
+a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general
+intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
+person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our
+sixty passengers.  His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look.
+In his attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic
+voice he asked:
+
+"What is this?"  "It is a sort of tale," I answered with an
+effort.  "It is not even finished yet.  Nevertheless I would like
+to know what you think of it."  He put the MS. in the breast-
+pocket of his jacket; I remember perfectly his thin brown fingers
+folding it lengthwise.  "I will read it tomorrow," he remarked,
+seizing the door-handle, and then, watching the roll of the ship
+for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone.  In the
+moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the
+swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens, and the subdued,
+as if distant, roar of the rising sea.  I noted the growing
+disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
+professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in
+another half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails
+would have to come off the ship.
+
+Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered
+my cabin.  He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and
+the MS. was in his hand.  He tendered it to me with a steady look
+but without a word.  I took it in silence.  He sat down on the
+couch and still said nothing.  I opened and shut a drawer under
+my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide open in its
+wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book I
+was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book.  I turned
+my back squarely on the desk.  And even then Jacques never
+offered a word.  "Well, what do you say?" I asked at last.  "Is
+it worth finishing?"  This question expressed exactly the whole
+of my thoughts.
+
+"Distinctly," he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then
+coughed a little.
+
+"Were you interested?" I inquired further almost in a whisper.
+
+"Very much!"
+
+In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of
+the ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch.  The curtain
+of my bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the
+bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin
+door rattled slightly in the gusts of wind.  It was in latitude
+40 south, and nearly in the longitude of Greenwich, as far as I
+can remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's and Nina's
+resurrection were taking place.  In the prolonged silence it
+occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
+writing in the story as far as it went.  Was it intelligible in
+its action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were
+being born into the body of a seaman.  But I heard on deck the
+whistle of the officer of the watch and remained on the alert to
+catch the order that was to follow this call to attention.  It
+reached me as a faint, fierce shout to "Square the yards."
+"Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly blow coming on."  Then I
+turned to my very first reader who, alas! was not to live long
+enough to know the end of the tale.
+
+"Now let me ask you one more thing:  is the story quite clear to
+you as it stands?"
+
+He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
+
+"Yes!  Perfectly."
+
+This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
+"Almayer's Folly."  We never spoke together of the book again.  A
+long period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but
+for my duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to
+keep close in his cabin.  When we arrived in Adelaide the first
+reader of my prose went at once up-country, and died rather
+suddenly in the end, either in Australia or it may be on the
+passage while going home through the Suez Canal.  I am not sure
+which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard precisely;
+though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
+passengers who, wandering about to "see the country" during the
+ship's stay in port, had come upon him here and there.  At last
+we sailed, homeward bound, and still not one line was added to
+the careless scrawl of the many pages which poor Jacques had had
+the patience to read with the very shadows of Eternity gathering
+already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes.
+
+The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final
+"Distinctly" remained dormant, yet alive to await its
+opportunity.  I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled,
+now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was
+compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage.  Leaves must follow
+upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on
+and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One--
+one for all men and for all occupations.
+
+I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more
+mysterious and more wonderful to me.  Still, in writing, as in
+going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity.  Let me confess here
+that I was never one of those wonderful fellows that would go
+afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, and if I may pride
+myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the same with my
+writing.  Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages, and
+could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line; but
+I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not consent to
+write without something at least resembling a chair.  Line by
+line, rather than page by page, was the growth of "Almayer's
+Folly."
+
+And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now
+to the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse
+railway station (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to
+Poland, or more precisely to Ukraine.  On an early, sleepy
+morning changing trains in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a
+refreshment-room.  A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager rescued
+it.  Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the MS. but of all
+the other things that were packed in the bag.
+
+In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were
+never exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while
+the bag lay open on a chair.  I was dressing hurriedly to dine at
+a sporting club.  A friend of my childhood (he had been in the
+Diplomatic Service, but had turned to growing wheat on paternal
+acres, and we had not seen each other for over twenty years) was
+sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off there.
+
+"You might tell me something of your life while you are
+dressing," he suggested kindly.
+
+I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or
+later.  The talk of the select little party with which he made me
+dine was extremely animated and embraced most subjects under
+heaven, from big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem
+published in a very modernist review, edited by the very young
+and patronised by the highest society.  But it never touched upon
+"Almayer's Folly," and next morning, in uninterrupted obscurity,
+this inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the south-
+east direction towards the Government of Kiev.
+
+At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from
+the railway station to the country house which was my
+destination.
+
+"Dear boy" (these words were always written in English), so ran
+the last letter from that house received in London,--"Get
+yourself driven to the only inn in the place, dine as well as you
+can, and some time in the evening my own confidential servant,
+factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S. (I warn you he is of noble
+extraction), will present himself before you, reporting the
+arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next
+day.  I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
+overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on
+the road."
+
+Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an
+enormous barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door
+opened and, in a travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin
+cap and a short coat girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of
+noble extraction), a man of about thirty-five, appeared with an
+air of perplexity on his open and moustachioed countenance.  I
+got up from the table and greeted him in Polish, with, I hope,
+the right shade of consideration demanded by his noble blood and
+his confidential position.  His face cleared up in a wonderful
+way.  It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
+assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our
+understanding each other.  He imagined I would talk to him in
+some foreign language.  I was told that his last words on getting
+into the sledge to come to meet me shaped an anxious exclamation:
+
+"Well!  Well!  Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to
+make myself understood to our master's nephew."
+
+We understood each other very well from the first.  He took
+charge of me as if I were not quite of age.  I had a delightful
+boyish feeling of coming home from school when he muffled me up
+next morning in an enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and took
+his seat protectively by my side.  The sledge was a very small
+one and it looked utterly insignificant, almost like a toy behind
+the four big bays harnessed two and two.  We three, counting the
+coachman, filled it completely.  He was a young fellow with clear
+blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur coat framed his
+cheery countenance and stood all round level with the top of his
+head.
+
+"Now, Joseph," my companion addressed him, "do you think we shall
+manage to get home before six?"  His answer was that we would
+surely, with God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts
+in the long stretch between certain villages whose names came
+with an extremely familiar sound to my ears.  He turned out an
+excellent coachman with an instinct for keeping the road amongst
+the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of getting the best
+out of his horses.
+
+"He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain
+remembers.  He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother
+of holy memory," remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my
+feet.
+
+I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
+grandmother.  Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the
+first time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-
+in-hand whip outside the doors of the coach-house.
+
+"What became of him?" I asked.  "He is no longer serving, I
+suppose."
+
+"He served our master," was the reply.  "But he died of cholera
+ten years ago now--that great epidemic we had.  And his wife died
+at the same time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the
+only boy that was left."
+
+The MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was reposing in the bag under our
+feet.
+
+I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the
+travels of my childhood.  It set, clear and red, dipping into the
+snow in full view as if it were setting on the sea.  It was
+twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land;
+and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid
+expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining
+a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees
+about a village of the Ukrainian plain.  A cottage or two glided
+by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking
+through a screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
+
+That very evening the wandering MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was
+unpacked and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my
+room, the guest-room which had been, I was informed in an
+affectedly careless tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or
+so.  It attracted no attention from the affectionate presence
+hovering round the son of the favourite sister.
+
+"You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with
+me, brother," he said--this form of address borrowed from the
+speech of our peasants being the usual expression of the highest
+good humour in a moment of affectionate elation.  "I shall be
+always coming in for a chat."
+
+As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
+everlastingly intruding upon each other.  I invaded the
+retirement of his study where the principal feature was a
+colossal silver inkstand presented to him on his fiftieth year by
+a subscription of all his wards then living.  He had been
+guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from the three
+southern provinces--ever since the year 1860.  Some of them had
+been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls
+or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel.  One or two
+were older than myself--considerably older, too.  One of them, a
+visitor I remember in my early years, was the man who first put
+me on horseback, and his four-horse bachelor turn-out, his
+perfect horsemanship and general skill in manly exercises was one
+of my earliest admirations.  I seem to remember my mother looking
+on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as I was
+lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know, by the very Joseph--
+the groom attached specially to my grandmother's service--who
+died of cholera.  It was certainly a young man in a dark blue,
+tail-less coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery
+of the men about the stables.  It must have been in 1864, but
+reckoning by another mode of calculating time, it was certainly
+in the year in which my mother obtained permission to travel
+south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had
+followed my father.  For that, too, she had had to ask
+permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that favour
+was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile
+herself.  Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest
+brother who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts
+of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St.
+Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this
+permission--it was officially called the "Highest Grace"--of a
+three months' leave from exile.
+
+This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my
+mother with more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed,
+silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding
+sweetness; and I also remember the great gathering of all the
+relations from near and far, and the grey heads of the family
+friends paying her the homage of respect and love in the house of
+her favourite brother who, a few years later, was to take the
+place for me of both my parents.
+
+I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the
+time, though indeed I remember that doctors also came.  There
+were no signs of invalidism about her--but I think that already
+they had pronounced her doom unless perhaps the change to a
+southern climate could re-establish her declining strength.  For
+me it seems the very happiest period of my existence.  There was
+my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl, some months
+younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as if she
+were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
+There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and
+not a few whose very names I have forgotten.  Over all this hung
+the oppressive shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow
+lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered
+by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the
+ill-omened rising of 1863.
+
+This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the
+public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of
+an uneasy egotism.  These, too, are things human, already distant
+in their appeal.  It is meet that something more should be left
+for the novelist's children than the colours and figures of his
+own hard-won creation.  That which in their grown-up years may
+appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of
+their natures and perhaps must remain for ever obscure even to
+themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
+of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
+personalities are remotely derived.
+
+Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
+undeniable existence.  Imagination, not invention, is the supreme
+master of art as of life.  An imaginative and exact rendering of
+authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety
+towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a
+writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own
+experience.
+
+
+
+Chapter II.
+
+As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from
+London into Ukraine.  The MS. of "Almayer's Folly"--my companion
+already for some three years or more, and then in the ninth
+chapter of its age--was deposited unostentatiously on the
+writing-table placed between two windows.  It didn't occur to me
+to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my
+eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass
+handles.  Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up
+festally the room which had waited so many years for the
+wandering nephew. The blinds were down.
+
+Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the
+first peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal
+grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession
+of a member of the family; and beyond the village in the
+limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great
+unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread-
+giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
+patches of timber nestling in the hollows.  The road by which I
+had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the
+gates closing the short drive.  Somebody was abroad on the deep
+snowtrack; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the
+stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper.
+
+My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to
+help me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but
+unnecessary at the door of the room.  I did not want him in the
+least, but I did not like to tell him to go away.  He was a young
+fellow, certainly more than ten years younger than myself; I had
+not been--I won't say in that place but within sixty miles of it,
+ever since the year '67; yet his guileless physiognomy of the
+open peasant type seemed strangely familiar.  It was quite
+possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a
+grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar
+to me in my early childhood.  As a matter of fact he had no such
+claim on my consideration.  He was the product of some village
+near by and was there on his promotion, having learned the
+service in one or two houses as pantry-boy.  I know this because
+I asked the worthy V-- next day.  I might well have spared the
+question.  I discovered before long that all the faces about the
+house and all the faces in the village:  the grave faces with
+long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
+young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the
+handsome, tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the
+doors of the huts were as familiar to me as though I had known
+them all from childhood, and my childhood were a matter of the
+day before yesterday.
+
+The tinkle of the traveller's bels, after growing louder, had
+faded away quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village
+had calmed down at last.  My uncle, lounging in the corner of a
+small couch, smoked his long Turkish chibouk in silence.
+
+"This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my
+room," I remarked.
+
+"It is really your property," he said, keeping his eyes on me,
+with an interested and wistful expression as he had done ever
+since I had entered the house.  "Forty years ago your mother used
+to write at this very table. In our house in Oratow it stood in
+the little sitting-room which, by a tacit arrangement, was given
+up to the girls--I mean to your mother and her sister who died so
+young.  It was a present to them jointly from our uncle Nicholas
+B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two years
+younger.  She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of
+yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.
+She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated
+mind, in which your mother was far superior.  It was her good
+sense, the admirable sweetness of her nature, her exceptional
+facility and ease in daily relations that endeared her to
+everybody.  Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral
+loss for us all.  Had she lived she would have brought the
+greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot to
+enter, as wife, mother and mistress of a household.  She would
+have created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content
+which only those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke.
+Your mother--of far greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished
+in person, manner and intellect--had a less easy disposition.
+Being more brilliantly gifted she also expected more from life.
+At that trying time especially, we were greatly concerned about
+her state.  Suffering in her health from the shock of her
+father's death (she was alone in the house with him when he died
+suddenly), she was torn by the inward struggle between her love
+for the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of
+her dead father's declared objection to that match.  Unable to
+bring herself to disregard that cherished memory and that
+judgment she had always respected and trusted, and, on the other
+hand, feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and
+so true, she could not have been expected to preserve her mental
+and moral balance.  At war with herself, she could not give to
+others that feeling of peace which was not her own.  It was only
+later, when united at last with the man of her choice that she
+developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which compelled
+the respect and admiration even of our foes.  Meeting with calm
+fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national
+and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest
+conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing
+the exile of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of
+Polish womanhood.  Our Uncle Nicholas was not a man very
+accessible to feelings of affection.  Apart from his worship for
+Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only three people
+in the world:  his mother--your great-grandmother, whom you have
+seen but cannot possibly remember; his brother, our father, in
+whose house he lived for so many years; and of all of us, his
+nephews and nieces grown up round him, your mother alone.  The
+modest, lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem
+able to see.  It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected
+stroke of death falling upon the family less than a year after I
+had become its head.  It was terribly unexpected.  Driving home
+one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our empty house, where
+I had to remain permanently administering the estate and
+attending to the complicated affairs--(the girls took it in turn
+week and week about)--driving, as I said, from the house of the
+Countess Tekla Potochka, where our invalid mother was staying
+then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a
+snowdrift.  She was alone with the coachman and old Valery, the
+personal servant of our late father.  Impatient of delay while
+they were trying to dig themselves out, she jumped out of the
+sledge and went to look for the road herself.  All this happened
+in '51, not ten miles from the house in which we are sitting now.
+The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly
+again, and they were four more hours getting home.  Both the men
+took off their sheepskin-lined great-coats and used all their own
+rugs to wrap her up against the cold, notwithstanding her
+protests, positive orders and even struggles, as Valery
+afterwards related to me.  'How could I,' he remonstrated with
+her, 'go to meet the blessed soul of my late master if I let any
+harm come to you while there's a spark of life left in my body?'
+When they reached home at last the poor old man was stiff and
+speechless from exposure, and the coachman was in not much better
+plight, though he had the strength to drive round to the stables
+himself.  To my reproaches for venturing out at all in such
+weather, she answered characteristically that she could not bear
+the thought of abandoning me to my cheerless solitude.  It is
+incomprehensible how it was that she was allowed to start.  I
+suppose it had to be!  She made light of the cough which came on
+next day, but shortly afterwards inflammation of the lungs set
+in, and in three weeks she was no more!  She was the first to be
+taken away of the young generation under my care.  Behold the
+vanity of all hopes and fears!  I was the most frail at birth of
+all the children.  For years I remained so delicate that my
+parents had but little hope of bringing me up; and yet I have
+survived five brothers and two sisters, and many of my
+contemporaries; I have outlived my wife and daughter too--and
+from all those who have had some knowledge at least of these old
+times you alone are left.  It has been my lot to lay in an early
+grave many honest hearts, many brilliant promises, many hopes
+full of life."
+
+He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me, saying:  "We will dine
+in half an hour."  Without moving I listened to his quick steps
+resounding on the waxed floor of the next room, traversing the
+ante-room lined with bookshelves, where he paused to put his
+chibouk in the pipe-stand before passing into the drawing-room
+(these were all en suite), where he became inaudible on the thick
+carpet.  But I heard the door of his study-bedroom close.  He was
+then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of a century
+the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
+extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support
+which I seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts
+of the earth.
+
+As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813
+in the French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of
+Marshal Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of
+Mounted Rifles in the Polish Army--such as it existed up to 1830
+in the reduced kingdom established by the Congress of Vienna--I
+must say that from all that more distant past, known to me
+traditionally and a little de visu, and called out by the words
+of the man just gone away, he remains the most incomplete figure.
+It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for it is certain
+that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my mother
+for what he must have known would be the last time.  From my
+early boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort
+of mist rises before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely
+only a neatly brushed head of white hair (which is exceptional in
+the case of the B. family, where it is the rule for men to go
+bald in a becoming manner, before thirty) and a thin, curved,
+dignified nose, a feature in strict accordance with the physical
+tradition of the B. family.  But it is not by these fragmentary
+remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my memory.  I
+knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was a
+Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish
+Cross for valour Virtuti Militari.  The knowledge of these
+glorious facts inspired in me an admiring veneration; yet it is
+not that sentiment, strong as it was, which resumes for me the
+force and the significance of his personality.  It is overborne
+by another and complex impression of awe, compassion and horror.
+Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the unfortunate and miserable (but
+heroic) being who once upon a time had eaten a dog.
+
+It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect
+has not worn off yet.  I believe this is the very first, say,
+realistic, story I heard in my life; but all the same I don't
+know why I should have been so frightfully impressed.  Of course
+I know what our village dogs look like--but still. . .No!  At
+this very day, recalling the horror and compassion of my
+childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in disclosing to a
+cold and fastidious world that awful episode in the family
+history.  I ask myself--is it right?--especially as the B. family
+had always been honourably known in a wide country-side for the
+delicacy of their tastes in the matter of eating and drinking.
+But upon the whole, and considering that this gastronomical
+degradation overtaking a gallant young officer lies really at the
+door of the Great Napoleon, I think that to cover it up by
+silence would be an exaggeration of literary restraint.  Let the
+truth stand here.  The responsibility rests with the Man of St.
+Helena in view of his deplorable levity in the conduct of the
+Russian campaign.  It was during the memorable retreat from
+Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of two brother officers--
+as to whose morality and natural refinement I know nothing--
+bagged a dog on the outskirts of a village and subsequently
+devoured him.  As far as I can remember the weapon used was a
+cavalry sabre, and the issue of the sporting episode was rather
+more of a matter of life and death than if it had been an
+encounter with a tiger.  A picket of Cossacks was sleeping in
+that village lost in the depths of the great Lithuanian forest.
+The three sportsmen had observed them from a hiding-place making
+themselves very much at home amongst the huts just before the
+early winter darkness set in at four o'clock.  They had observed
+them with disgust and perhaps with despair.  Late in the night
+the rash counsels of hunger overcame the dictates of prudence.
+Crawling through the snow they crept up to the fence of dry
+branches which generally encloses a village in that part of
+Lithuania.  What they expected to get and in what manner, and
+whether this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only knows.
+However, these Cossack parties, in most cases wandering without
+an officer, were known to guard themselves badly and often not at
+all.  In addition, the village lying at a great distance from the
+line of French retreat, they could not suspect the presence of
+stragglers from the Grand Army.  The three officers had strayed
+away in a blizzard from the main column and had been lost for
+days in the woods, which explains sufficiently the terrible
+straits to which they were reduced.  Their plan was to try and
+attract the attention of the peasants in that one of the huts
+which was nearest to the enclosure; but as they were preparing to
+venture into the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is
+mighty strange that there was but one), a creature quite as
+formidable under the circumstances as a lion, began to bark on
+the other side of the fence. . .
+
+At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by
+request) from the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my
+grandmother, I used to tremble with excitement.
+
+The dog barked.  And if he had done no more than bark three
+officers of the Great Napoleon's army would have perished
+honourably on the points of Cossack's lances, or perchance
+escaping the chase would have died decently of starvation.  But
+before they had time to think of running away, that fatal and
+revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of his zeal,
+dashed out through a gap in the fence.  He dashed out and died.
+His head, I understand, was severed at one blow from his body.  I
+understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
+snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been
+lit by the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to
+be distinctly unsatisfactory.  It was not thin--on the contrary,
+it seemed unhealthily obese; its skin showed bare patches of an
+unpleasant character.  However, they had not killed that dog for
+the sake of the pelt.  He was large. . .He was eaten. . .The rest
+is silence. . .
+
+A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
+
+"I could not have eaten that dog."
+
+And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
+
+"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."
+
+I have learned something of it since.  Not that I have been
+reduced to eat dog.  I have fed on the emblematical animal,
+which, in the language of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache
+enragee; I have lived on ancient salt junk, I know the taste of
+shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript dishes containing
+things without a name--but of the Lithuanian village dog--never!
+I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is not I but my
+grand-uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier de
+la Legion d'Honneur, &c. &c., who, in his young days, had eaten
+the Lithuanian dog.
+
+I wish he had not.  The childish horror of the deed clings
+absurdly to the grizzled man.  I am perfectly helpless against
+it.  Still if he really had to, let us charitably remember that
+he had eaten him on active service, while bearing up bravely
+against the greatest military disaster of modern history, and, in
+a manner, for the sake of his country.  He had eaten him to
+appease his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of an
+unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith
+that lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled
+like a false beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a
+brave nation.
+
+Pro patria!
+
+Looked at in that light it appears a sweet and decorous meal.
+
+And looked at in the same light my own diet of la vache enragee
+appears a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for
+why should I, the son of a land which such men as these have
+turned up with their ploughshares and bedewed with their blood,
+undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of salt junk and hard
+tack upon the wide seas?  On the kindest view it seems an
+unanswerable question.  Alas! I have the conviction that there
+are men of unstained rectitude who are ready to murmur scornfully
+the word desertion.  Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be
+made bitter to the palate.  The part of the inexplicable should
+be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where
+no explanation is final.  No charge of faithlessness ought to be
+lightly uttered.  The appearances of this perishable life are
+deceptive like everything that falls under the judgment of our
+imperfect senses.  The inner voice may remain true enough in its
+secret counsel.  The fidelity to a special tradition may last
+through the events of an unrelated existence, following
+faithfully too the traced way of an inexplicable impulse.
+
+It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of
+contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at
+times the desperate shape of betrayal.  And perhaps there is no
+possible explanation.  Indulgence--as somebody said--is the most
+intelligent of all the virtues.  I venture to think that it is
+one of the least common, if not the most uncommon of all.  I
+would not imply by this that men are foolish--or even most men.
+Far from it.  The barber and the priest, backed by the whole
+opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the
+ingenious hidalgo who, sallying forth from his native place,
+broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of
+inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a
+certain stable.  God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape
+merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the
+sublime caballero.  His was a very noble, a very unselfish
+fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser
+mortals.  But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that
+exalted and dangerous figure.  He, too, had his frailties.  After
+reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his
+very body from the intolerable reality of things.  He wished to
+meet eye to eye the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of
+Arabia, whose armour is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose
+shield, strapped to his arm, is the gate of a fortified city.  O
+amiable and natural weakness!  O blessed simplicity of a gentle
+heart without guile!  Who would not succumb to such a consoling
+temptation?  Nevertheless it was a form of self-indulgence, and
+the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a good citizen.  The
+priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their strictures.
+Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who used to
+say in his exile, "The people are never in fault"--one may admit
+that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole
+village.  Mad!  Mad!  He who kept in pious meditation the ritual
+vigil-of-arms by the well of an inn and knelt reverently to be
+knighted at daybreak by the fat, sly rogue of a landlord, has
+come very near perfection.  He rides forth, his head encircled by
+a halo--the patron saint of all lives spoiled or saved by the
+irresistible grace of imagination.  But he was not a good
+citizen.
+
+Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered
+exclamation of my tutor.
+
+It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have
+had a jolly holiday.  There have been idle years afterwards,
+jolly enough in a way and not altogether without their lesson,
+but this year of which I speak was the year of my last schoolboy
+holiday.  There are other reasons why I should remember that
+year, but they are too long to state formally in this place.
+Moreover they have nothing to do with that holiday.  What has to
+do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark
+was made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls
+of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance--in fact it was a memorable
+holiday of travel.  Of late we had been tramping slowly up the
+Valley of the Reuss.  It was a delightful time.  It was much more
+like a stroll than a tramp.  Landing from a Lake of Lucerne
+steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves at the end of the second
+day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little
+way beyond Hospenthal.  This is not the day on which the remark
+was made:  in the shadows of the deep valley and with the
+habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not
+upon the ethics of conduct but upon the simpler human problem of
+shelter and food.  There did not seem anything of the kind in
+sight, and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly at a
+bend of the road we came upon a building, ghostly in the
+twilight.
+
+At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and
+that magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible
+for the unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very
+roots of the mountains.  It was long though not big at all; it
+was low; it was built of boards, without ornamentation, in
+barrack-hut style, with the white window-frames quite flush with
+the yellow face of its plain front.  And yet it was an hotel; it
+had even a name which I have forgotten.  But there was no gold-
+laced door-keeper at its humble door.  A plain but vigorous
+servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who
+owned the place appeared.  It was clear that no travellers were
+expected, or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostelry,
+which in its severe style resembled the house which surmounts the
+unseaworthy-looking hulls of the toy Noah's Arks, the universal
+possession of European childhood.  However, its roof was not
+hinged and it was not full to the brim of slabsided and painted
+animals of wood.  Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in
+evidence.  We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one
+end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to
+my sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw
+plank, since there was no one at the other end to balance it
+against our two dusty and travel-stained figures.  Then we
+hastened upstairs to bed in a room smelling of pine planks, and I
+was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.
+
+In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow
+University) woke me up early, and as we were dressing remarked:
+"There seems to be a lot of people staying in this hotel.  I have
+heard a noise of talking up till 11 o'clock?"  This statement
+surprised me; I had heard no noise whatever, having slept like a
+top.
+
+We went downstairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its
+long and narrow table.  There were two rows of plates on it.  At
+one of the many uncurtained windows stood a tall bony man with a
+bald head set off by a bunch of black hair above each ear and
+with a long black beard.  He glanced up from the paper he was
+reading and seemed genuinely astonished at our intrusion.  By-
+and-by more men came in.  Not one of them looked like a tourist.
+Not a single woman appeared.  These men seemed to know each other
+with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very talkative
+lot.  The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the
+table.  It all had the air of a family party.  By-and-by, from
+one of the vigorous servant-girls in national costume, we
+discovered that the place was really a boarding-house for some
+English engineers engaged at the works of the St. Gothard Tunnel;
+and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language,
+as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not
+believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life.
+
+This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the
+tourist kind seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne--the kind
+which has no real existence in a workaday world.  I know now that
+the bald-headed man spoke with a strong Scotch accent.  I have
+met many of his kind since, both ashore and afloat.  The second
+engineer of the steamer "Mavis", for instance, ought to have been
+his twin brother.  I cannot help thinking that he really was,
+though for some reasons of his own he assured me that he never
+had a twin brother.  Anyway the deliberate bald-headed Scot with
+the coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic
+and mysterious person.
+
+We slipped out unnoticed.  Our mapped-out route led over the
+Furca Pass towards the Rhone Glacier, with the further intention
+of following down the trend of the Hasli Valley.  The sun was
+already declining when we found ourselves on the top of the pass,
+and the remark alluded to was presently uttered.
+
+We sat down by the side of the road to continue the argument
+begun half a mile or so before.  I am certain it was an argument
+because I remember perfectly how my tutor argued and how without
+the power of reply I listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on
+the ground.  A stir on the road made me look up--and then I saw
+my unforgettable Englishman.  There are acquaintances of later
+years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember less clearly.  He
+marched rapidly towards the east (attended by a hang-dog Swiss
+guide) with the mien of an ardent and fearless traveller.  He was
+clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore
+short socks under his laced boots, for reasons which whether
+hygienic or conscientious were surely imaginative, his calves
+exposed to the public gaze and to the tonic air of high
+altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-
+like condition and their rich tone of young ivory.  He was the
+leader of a small caravan.  The light of a headlong, exalted
+satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains
+illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white
+whiskers, his innocently eager and triumphant eyes.  In passing
+he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big,
+sound, shiny teeth towards the man and the boy sitting like dusty
+tramps by the roadside, with a modest knapsack lying at their
+feet.  His white calves twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss
+guide with a surly mouth stalked like an unwilling bear at his
+elbow; a small train of three mules followed in single file the
+lead of this inspiring enthusiast.  Two ladies rode past one
+behind the other, but from the way they sat I saw only their
+calm, uniform backs, and the long ends of blue veils hanging
+behind far down over their identical hat-brims.  His two
+daughters surely.  An industrious luggage-mule, with unstarched
+ears and guarded by a slouching, sallow driver, brought up the
+rear.  My tutor, after pausing for a look and a faint smile,
+resumed his earnest argument.
+
+I tell you it was a memorable year!  One does not meet such an
+Englishman twice in a lifetime.  Was he in the mystic ordering of
+common events the ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the
+scale at a critical moment on the top of an Alpine pass, with the
+peaks of the Bernese Oberland for mute and solemn witnesses?  His
+glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and comic ardour of his
+striving-forward appearance helped me to pull myself together.
+It must be stated that on that day and in the exhilarating
+atmosphere of that elevated spot I had been feeling utterly
+crushed.  It was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my
+desire to go to sea.  At first like those sounds that, ranging
+outside the scale to which men's ears are attuned, remain
+inaudible to our sense of hearing, this declaration passed
+unperceived.  It was as if it had not been.  Later on, by trying
+various tones I managed to arouse here and there a surprised
+momentary attention--the "What was that funny noise?" sort of
+inquiry.  Later on it was--"Did you hear what that boy said?
+What an extraordinary outbreak!"  Presently a wave of scandalised
+astonishment (it could not have been greater if I had announced
+the intention of entering a Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of
+the educational and academical town of Cracow spread itself over
+several provinces.  It spread itself shallow but far-reaching.
+It stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying
+wonder, bitter irony and downright chaff.  I could hardly breathe
+under its weight, and certainly had no words for an answer.
+People wondered what Mr. T.B. would do now with his worrying
+nephew and, I dare say, hoped kindly that he would make short
+work of my nonsense.
+
+What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine to have it
+out with me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial and
+just, taking his stand on the ground of wisdom and affection.  As
+far as is possible for a boy whose power of expression is still
+unformed I opened the secret of my thoughts to him and he in
+return allowed me a glimpse into his mind and heart; the first
+glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble treasure of clear thought
+and warm feeling, which through life was to be mine to draw upon
+with a never-deceived love and confidence.  Practically, after
+several exhaustive conversations, he concluded that he would not
+have me later on reproach him for having spoiled my life by an
+unconditional opposition.  But I must take time for serious
+reflection.  And I must not only think of myself but of others;
+weigh the claims of affection and conscience against my own
+sincerity of purpose.  "Think well what it all means in the
+larger issues, my boy," he exhorted me finally with special
+friendliness.  "And meantime try to get the best place you can at
+the yearly examinations."
+
+The scholastic year came to an end.  I took a fairly good place
+at the exams., which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be
+a more difficult task than for other boys.  In that respect I
+could enter with a good conscience upon that holiday which was
+like a long visit pour prendre conge of the mainland of old
+Europe I was to see so little of for the next four and twenty
+years.  Such, however, was not the avowed purpose of that tour.
+It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to distract and occupy
+my thoughts in other directions.  Nothing had been said for
+months of my going to sea.  But my attachment to my young tutor
+and his influence over me were so well known that he must have
+received a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic
+folly.  It was an excellently appropriate arrangement, as neither
+he nor I had ever had a single glimpse of the sea in our lives.
+That was to come by-and-by for both of us in Venice, from the
+outer shore of Lido.  Meantime he had taken his mission to heart
+so well that I began to feel crushed before we reached Zurich.
+He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he had argued
+away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove!  Of his
+devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt.  He had
+proved it already by two years of unremitting and arduous care.
+I could not hate him.  But he had been crushing me slowly, and
+when he started to argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was
+perhaps nearer a success than either he or I imagined.  I
+listened to him in despairing silence, feeling that ghostly,
+unrealised and desired sea of my dreams escape from the unnerved
+grip of my will.
+
+The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed--and the argument went
+on.  What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my
+years, either in ambition, honour or conscience?  An unanswerable
+question.  But I felt no longer crushed.  Then our eyes met and a
+genuine emotion was visible in his as well as in mine.  The end
+came all at once.  He picked up the knapsack suddenly and got on
+to his feet.
+
+"You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote.  That's what you
+are."
+
+I was surprised.  I was only fifteen and did not know what he
+meant exactly.  But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the
+immortal knight turning up in connection with my own folly, as
+some people would call it to my face.  Alas! I don't think there
+was anything to be proud of.  Mine was not the stuff the
+protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of this world's
+wrongs are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that best.
+Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and
+the priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.
+
+I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking
+back he stopped.  The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening
+over the Furca Pass.  When I came up to him he turned to me and
+in full view of the Finster-Aarhorn, with his band of giant
+brothers rearing their monstrous heads against a brilliant sky,
+put his hand on my shoulder affectionately.
+
+"Well!  That's enough.  We will have no more of it."
+
+And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation
+between us.  There was to be no more question of it at all,
+nowhere or with any one.  We began the descent of the Furca Pass
+conversing merrily.  Eleven years later, month for month, I stood
+on Tower Hill on the steps of the St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a
+master in the British Merchant Service.  But the man who put his
+hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was no longer
+living.
+
+That very year of our travels he took his degree of the
+Philosophical Faculty--and only then his true vocation declared
+itself.  Obedient to the call he entered at once upon the four-
+year course of the Medical Schools. A day came when, on the deck
+of a ship moored in Calcutta, I opened a letter telling me of the
+end of an enviable existence.  He had made for himself a practice
+in some obscure little town of Austrian Galicia.  And the letter
+went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of the district,
+Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's coffin
+with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.
+
+How short his years and how clear his vision!  What greater
+reward in ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to
+win for himself when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me
+look well to the end of my opening life.
+
+
+
+Chapter III.
+
+The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by
+my grand-uncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and
+famished scarecrows, symbolised, to my childish imagination, the
+whole horror of the retreat from Moscow and the immorality of a
+conqueror's ambition.  An extreme distaste for that objectionable
+episode has tinged the views I hold as to the character and
+achievements of Napoleon the Great.  I need not say that these
+are unfavourable.  It was morally reprehensible for that great
+captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by
+raising in his breast a false hope of national independence.  It
+has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards
+of a hundred years on a diet of false hopes and--well--dog.  It
+is, when one thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen.  Some
+pride in the national constitution which has survived a long
+course of such dishes is really excusable.  But enough of
+generalising.  Returning to particulars, Mr. Nicholas B. confided
+to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his misanthropically
+laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been nearly "the
+death of him."  This is not surprising.  What surprises me is
+that the story was ever heard of; for grand-uncle Nicholas
+differed in this from the generality of military men of
+Napoleon's time (and perhaps of all time), that he did not like
+to talk of his campaigns, which began at Friedland and ended
+somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc.  His admiration of
+the great Emperor was unreserved in everything but expression.
+Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a sentiment
+to be displayed before a world of little faith.  Apart from that
+he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he
+had hardly ever seen a soldier in his life.  Proud of his
+decorations earned before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear
+the ribbons at the buttonhole in the manner practised to this day
+in Europe and even was unwilling to display the insignia on
+festive occasions, as though he wished to conceal them in the
+fear of appearing boastful.  "It is enough that I have them," he
+used to mutter.  In the course of thirty years they were seen on
+his breast only twice--at an auspicious marriage in the family
+and at the funeral of an old friend.  That the wedding which was
+thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only
+late in life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas B.,
+who made amends at my birth by a long letter of congratulation
+containing the following prophecy:  "He will see better times."
+Even in his embittered heart there lived a hope.  But he was not
+a true prophet.
+
+He was a man of strange contradictions.  Living for many years in
+his brother's house, the home of many children, a house full of
+life, of animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of
+many guests, he kept his habits of solitude and silence.
+Considered as obstinately secretive in all his purposes, he was
+in reality the victim of a most painful irresolution in all
+matters of civil life.  Under his taciturn, phlegmatic behaviour
+was hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate anger.  I suspect
+he had no talent for narrative; but it seemed to afford him
+sombre satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride
+over the bridge of the river Elster after the battle of Leipsic.
+Lest some construction favourable to his valour should be put on
+the fact he condescended to explain how it came to pass.  It
+seems that shortly after the retreat began he was sent back to
+the town where some divisions of the French Army (and amongst
+them the Polish corps of Prince Joseph Poniatowski), jammed
+hopelessly in the streets, were being simply exterminated by the
+troops of the Allied Powers.  When asked what it was like in
+there Mr. Nicholas B. muttered the only word "Shambles."  Having
+delivered his message to the Prince he hastened away at once to
+render an account of his mission to the superior who had sent
+him.  By that time the advance of the enemy had enveloped the
+town, and he was shot at from houses and chased all the way to
+the river bank by a disorderly mob of Austrian Dragoons and
+Prussian Hussars.  The bridge had been mined early in the morning
+and his opinion was that the sight of the horsemen converging
+from many sides in the pursuit of his person alarmed the officer
+in command of the sappers and caused the premature firing of the
+charges.  He had not gone more than 200 yards on the other side
+when he heard the sound of the fatal explosions.  Mr. Nicholas B.
+concluded his bald narrative with the word "Imbecile" uttered
+with the utmost deliberation.  It testified to his indignation at
+the loss of so many thousands of lives.  But his phlegmatic
+physiognomy lighted up when he spoke of his only wound, with
+something resembling satisfaction.  You will see that there was
+some reason for it when you learn that he was wounded in the
+heel.  "Like his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon himself," he
+reminded his hearers with assumed indifference.  There can be no
+doubt that the indifference was assumed, if one thinks what very
+distinguished sort of wound it was.  In all the history of
+warfare there are, I believe, only three warriors publicly known
+to have been wounded in the heel--Achilles and Napoleon--demi-
+gods indeed--to whom the familial piety of an unworthy descendant
+adds the name of the simple mortal, Nicholas B.
+
+The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B. staying with a distant
+relative of ours, owner of a small estate in Galicia.  How he got
+there across the breadth of an armed Europe and after what
+adventures I am afraid will never be known now.  All his papers
+were destroyed shortly before his death; but if there was amongst
+them, as he affirmed, a concise record of his life, then I am
+pretty sure it did not take up more than a half-sheet of foolscap
+or so.  This relative of ours happened to be an Austrian officer,
+who had left the service after the battle of Austerlitz.  Unlike
+Mr. Nicholas B., who concealed his decorations, he liked to
+display his honourable discharge in which he was mentioned as
+unschreckbar (fearless) before the enemy.  No conjunction could
+seem more unpromising, yet it stands in the family tradition that
+these two got on very well together in their rural solitude.
+
+When asked whether he had not been sorely tempted during the
+Hundred Days to make his way again to France and join the service
+of his beloved Emperor, Mr. Nicholas B. used to mutter:  "No
+money.  No horse.  Too far to walk."
+
+The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of national hopes affected
+adversely the character of Mr. Nicholas B.  He shrank from
+returning to his province.  But for that there was also another
+reason.  Mr. Nicholas B. and his brother--my maternal
+grandfather--had lost their father early, while they were quite
+children.  Their mother, young still and left very well off,
+married again a man of great charm and of an amiable disposition
+but without a penny.  He turned out an affectionate and careful
+stepfather; it was unfortunate though that while directing the
+boys' education and forming their character by wise counsel he
+did his best to get hold of the fortune by buying and selling
+land in his own name and investing capital in such a manner as to
+cover up the traces of the real ownership.  It seems that such
+practices can be successful if one is charming enough to dazzle
+one's own wife permanently and brave enough to defy the vain
+terrors of public opinion.  The critical time came when the elder
+of the boys on attaining his majority in the year 1811 asked for
+the accounts and some part at least of the inheritance to begin
+life upon.  It was then that the stepfather declared with calm
+finality that there were no accounts to render and no property to
+inherit.  The whole fortune was his very own.  He was very good-
+natured about the young man's misapprehension of the true state
+of affairs, but of course felt obliged to maintain his position
+firmly.  Old friends came and went busily, voluntary mediators
+appeared travelling on most horrible roads from the most distant
+corners of the three provinces; and the Marshal of the Nobility
+(ex-officio guardian of all well-born orphans) called a meeting
+of landowners to "ascertain in a friendly way how the
+misunderstanding between X and his stepsons had arisen and devise
+proper measures to remove the same."  A deputation to that effect
+visited X, who treated them to excellent wines, but absolutely
+refused his ear to their remonstrances.  As to the proposals for
+arbitration he simply laughed at them; yet the whole province
+must have been aware that fourteen years before, when he married
+the widow, all his visible fortune consisted (apart from his
+social qualities) in a smart four-horse turn-out with two
+servants, with whom he went about visiting from house to house;
+and as to any funds he might have possessed at that time their
+existence could only be inferred from the fact that he was very
+punctual in settling his modest losses at cards.  But by the
+magic power of stubborn and constant assertion, there were found
+presently, here and there, people who mumbled that surely "there
+must be something in it."  However, on his next name-day (which
+he used to celebrate by a great three-days' shooting-party), of
+all the invited crowd only two guests turned up, distant
+neighbours of no importance; one notoriously a fool, and the
+other a very pious and honest person but such a passionate lover
+of the gun that on his own confession he could not have refused
+an invitation to a shooting-party from the devil himself.  X met
+this manifestation of public opinion with the serenity of an
+unstained conscience.  He refused to be crushed.  Yet he must
+have been a man of deep feeling, because, when his wife took
+openly the part of her children, he lost his beautiful
+tranquillity, proclaimed himself heart-broken and drove her out
+of the house, neglecting in his grief to give her enough time to
+pack her trunks.
+
+This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an abominable marvel of
+chicane, which by the use of every legal subterfuge was made to
+last for many years.  It was also the occasion for a display of
+much kindness and sympathy.  All the neighbouring houses flew
+open for the reception of the homeless.  Neither legal aid nor
+material assistance in the prosecution of the suit was ever
+wanting.  X, on his side, went about shedding tears publicly over
+his stepchildren's ingratitude and his wife's blind infatuation;
+but as at the same time he displayed great cleverness in the art
+of concealing material documents (he was even suspected of having
+burnt a lot of historically interesting family papers), this
+scandalous litigation had to be ended by a compromise lest worse
+should befall.  It was settled finally by a surrender, out of the
+disputed estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, of two
+villages with the names of which I do not intend to trouble my
+readers.  After this lame and impotent conclusion neither the
+wife nor the stepsons had anything to say to the man who had
+presented the world with such a successful example of self-help
+based on character, determination and industry; and my great-
+grandmother, her health completely broken down, died a couple of
+years later in Carlsbad.  Legally secured by a decree in the
+possession of his plunder, X regained his wonted serenity and
+went on living in the neighbourhood in a comfortable style and in
+apparent peace of mind.  His big shoots were fairly well attended
+again.  He was never tired of assuring people that he bore no
+grudge for what was past; he protested loudly of his constant
+affection for his wife and stepchildren.  It was true he said
+that they had tried their best to strip him as naked as a Turkish
+saint in the decline of his days; and because he had defended
+himself from spoliation, as anybody else in his place would have
+done, they had abandoned him now to the horrors of a solitary old
+age.  Nevertheless, his love for them survived these cruel blows.
+And there might have been some truth in his protestations.  Very
+soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his eldest
+stepson, my maternal grandfather; and when these were
+peremptorily rejected he went on renewing them again and again
+with characteristic obstinacy.  For years he persisted in his
+efforts at reconciliation, promising my grandfather to execute a
+will in his favour if he only would be friends again to the
+extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close neighbourhood
+for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in an
+appearance for the great shoot on the name-day.  My grandfather
+was an ardent lover of every sport.  His temperament was as free
+from hardness and animosity as can be imagined.  Pupil of the
+liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the only public school
+of some standing then in the south, he had also read deeply the
+authors of the eighteenth century.  In him Christian charity was
+joined to a philosophical indulgence for the failings of human
+nature.  But the memory of these miserably anxious early years,
+his young man's years robbed of all generous illusions by the
+cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the way of forgiveness.
+He never succumbed to the fascination of the great shoot; and X,
+his heart set to the last on reconciliation with the draft of the
+will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died intestate.
+The fortune thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful
+management passed to some distant relatives whom he had never
+seen and who even did not bear his name.
+
+Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe.
+Mr. Nicholas B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the
+"fearless" Austrian officer, departed from Galicia, and without
+going near his native place, where the odious lawsuit was still
+going on, proceeded straight to Warsaw and entered the army of
+the newly constituted Polish kingdom under the sceptre of
+Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.
+
+This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgment
+to a nation of its former independent existence, included only
+the central provinces of the old Polish patrimony.  A brother of
+the Emperor, the Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its Viceroy
+and Commander-in-Chief, married morganatically to a Polish lady
+to whom he was fiercely attached, extended this affection to what
+he called "My Poles" in a capricious and savage manner.  Sallow
+in complexion, with a Tartar physiognomy and fierce little eyes,
+he walked with his fists clenched, his body bent forward, darting
+suspicious glances from under an enormous cocked hat.  His
+intelligence was limited and his sanity itself was doubtful.  The
+hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by mystic
+leanings as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in their
+various ways, for one was mystically liberal and the other
+mystically autocratic), but by the fury of an uncontrollable
+temper which generally broke out in disgusting abuse on the
+parade ground.  He was a passionate militarist and an amazing
+drill-master.  He treated his Polish Army as a spoiled child
+treats a favourite toy, except that he did not take it to bed
+with him at night.  It was not small enough for that.  But he
+played with it all day and every day, delighting in the variety
+of pretty uniforms and in the fun of incessant drilling.  This
+childish passion, not for war but for mere militarism, achieved a
+desirable result.  The Polish Army, in its equipment, in its
+armament and in its battlefield efficiency, as then understood,
+became, by the end of the year 1830, a first-rate tactical
+instrument.  Polish peasantry (not serfs) served in the ranks by
+enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly to the smaller
+nobility.  Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had no
+difficulty in obtaining a lieutenancy, but the promotion in the
+Polish Army was slow, because, being a separate organisation, it
+took no part in the wars of the Russian Empire against Persia or
+Turkey.  Its first campaign, against Russia itself, was to be its
+last.  In 1831, on the outbreak of the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas
+B. was the senior captain of his regiment.  Some time before he
+had been made head of the remount establishment quartered outside
+the kingdom in our southern provinces, whence almost all the
+horses for the Polish cavalry were drawn.  For the first time
+since he went away from home at the age of eighteen to begin his
+military life by the battle of Friedland, Mr. Nicholas B.
+breathed the air of the "Border," his native air.  Unkind fate
+was lying in wait for him amongst the scenes of his youth.  At
+the first news of the rising in Warsaw all the remount
+establishment, officers, vets., and the very troopers, were put
+promptly under arrest and hurried off in a body beyond the
+Dnieper to the nearest town in Russia proper.  From there they
+were dispersed to the distant parts of the Empire.  On this
+occasion poor Mr. Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much farther
+than he ever did in the times of Napoleonic invasion, if much
+less willingly.  Astrakhan was his destination.  He remained
+there three years, allowed to live at large in the town but
+having to report himself every day at noon to the military
+commandant, who used to detain him frequently for a pipe and a
+chat.  It is difficult to form a just idea of what a chat with
+Mr. Nicholas B. could have been like.  There must have been much
+compressed rage under his taciturnity, for the commandant
+communicated to him the news from the theatre of war and this
+news was such as it could be, that is, very bad for the Poles.
+Mr. Nicholas B. received these communications with outward
+phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm sympathy for his prisoner.
+"As a soldier myself I understand your feelings.  You, of course,
+would like to be in the thick of it.  By heavens! I am fond of
+you.  If it were not for the terms of the military oath I would
+let you go on my own responsibility.  What difference could it
+make to us, one more or less of you?"
+
+At other times he wondered with simplicity.
+
+"Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch"--(my great-grandfather's name
+was Stephen and the commandant used the Russian form of polite
+address)--"tell me why is it that you Poles are always looking
+for trouble?  What else could you expect from running up against
+Russia?"
+
+He was capable, too, of philosophical reflections.
+
+"Look at your Napoleon now.  A great man.  There is no denying it
+that he was a great man as long as he was content to thrash those
+Germans and Austrians and all those nations.  But no!  He must go
+to Russia looking for trouble, and what's the consequence?  Such
+as you see me, I have rattled this sabre of mine on the pavements
+of Paris."
+
+After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B. described him as a
+"worthy man but stupid," whenever he could be induced to speak of
+the conditions of his exile.  Declining the option offered him to
+enter the Russian Army he was retired with only half the pension
+of his rank.  His nephew (my uncle and guardian) told me that the
+first lasting impression on his memory as a child of four was the
+glad excitement reigning in his parents' house on the day when
+Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home from his detention in Russia.
+
+Every generation has its memories.  The first memories of Mr.
+Nicholas B. might have been shaped by the events of the last
+partition of Poland, and he lived long enough to suffer from the
+last armed rising in 1863, an event which affected the future of
+all my generation and has coloured my earliest impressions.  His
+brother, in whose house he had sheltered for some seventeen years
+his misanthropical timidity before the commonest problems of
+life, having died in the early fifties, Mr. Nicholas B. had to
+screw his courage up to the sticking-point and come to some
+decision as to the future.  After a long and agonising hesitation
+he was persuaded at last to become the tenant of some fifteen
+hundred acres out of the estate of a friend in the neighbourhood.
+The terms of the lease were very advantageous, but the retired
+situation of the village and a plain comfortable house in good
+repair were, I fancy, the greatest inducements. He lived there
+quietly for about ten years, seeing very few people and taking no
+part in the public life of the province, such as it could be
+under an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny.  His character and his
+patriotism were above suspicion; but the organisers of the rising
+in their frequent journeys up and down the province scrupulously
+avoided coming near his house.  It was generally felt that the
+repose of the old man's last years ought not to be disturbed.
+Even such intimates as my paternal grandfather, a comrade-in-arms
+during Napoleon's Moscow campaign and later on a fellow-officer
+in the Polish Army, refrained from visiting his crony as the date
+of the outbreak approached.  My paternal grandfather's two sons
+and his only daughter were all deeply involved in the
+revolutionary work; he himself was of that type of Polish squire
+whose only ideal of patriotic action was to "get into the saddle
+and drive them out."  But even he agreed that "dear Nicholas must
+not be worried."  All this considerate caution on the part of
+friends, both conspirators and others, did not prevent Mr.
+Nicholas B. being made to feel the misfortunes of that ill-omened
+year.
+
+Less than forty-eight hours after the beginning of the rebellion
+in that part of the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks
+passed through the village and invaded the homestead.  Most of
+them remained formed between the house and the stables, while
+several, dismounting, ransacked the various outbuildings.  The
+officer in command, accompanied by two men, walked up to the
+front door.  All the blinds on that side were down.  The officer
+told the servant who received him that he wanted to see his
+master.  He was answered that the master was away from home,
+which was perfectly true.
+
+I follow here the tale as told afterwards by the servant to my
+grand-uncle's friends and relatives, and as I have heard it
+repeated.
+
+On receiving this answer the Cossack officer, who had been
+standing in the porch, stepped into the house.
+
+"Where is the master gone, then?"
+
+"Our master went to J--" (the government town some fifty miles
+off), "the day before yesterday."
+
+"There are only two horses in the stables.  Where are the
+others?"
+
+"Our master always travels with his own horses" (meaning:  not by
+post).  "He will be away a week or more.  He was pleased to
+mention to me that he had to attend to some business in the Civil
+Court."
+
+While the servant was speaking the officer looked about the hall.
+There was a door facing him, a door to the right and a door to
+the left.  The officer chose to enter the room on the left and
+ordered the blinds to be pulled up.  It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s
+study with a couple of tall bookcases, some pictures on the
+walls, and so on.  Besides the big centre table, with books and
+papers, there was a quite small writing-table with several
+drawers, standing between the door and the window in a good
+light; and at this table my grand-uncle usually sat either to
+read or write.
+
+On pulling up the blind the servant was startled by the discovery
+that the whole male population of the village was massed in
+front, trampling down the flower-beds.  There were also a few
+women amongst them.  He was glad to observe the village priest
+(of the Orthodox Church) coming up the drive.  The good man in
+his haste had tucked up his cassock as high as the top of his
+boots.
+
+The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the
+bookcases. Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre-
+table and remarked easily:
+
+"Your master did not take you to town with him, then."
+
+"I am the head servant and he leaves me in charge of the house.
+It's a strong, young chap that travels with our master.  If--God
+forbid--there was some accident on the road he would be of much
+more use than I."
+
+Glancing through the window he saw the priest arguing vehemently
+in the thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his
+interference.  Three or four men, however, were talking with the
+Cossacks at the door.
+
+"And you don't think your master has gone to join the rebels
+maybe--eh?" asked the officer.
+
+"Our master would be too old for that surely.  He's well over
+seventy and he's getting feeble too.  It's some years now since
+he's been on horseback and he can't walk much either now."
+
+The officer sat there swinging his leg, very quiet and
+indifferent.  By that time the peasants who had been talking with
+the Cossack troopers at the door had been permitted to get into
+the hall.  One or two more left the crowd and followed them in.
+They were seven in all and amongst them the blacksmith, an ex-
+soldier.  The servant appealed deferentially to the officer.
+
+"Won't your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to
+their homes?  What do they want to push themselves into the house
+like this for? It's not proper for them to behave like this while
+our master's away and I am responsible for everything here."
+
+The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired:
+
+"Have you any arms in the house?"
+
+"Yes.  We have.  Some old things."
+
+"Bring them all, here, on to this table."
+
+The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.
+
+"Won't your honour tell these chaps. . .?"
+
+But the officer looked at him in silence in such a way that he
+gave it up at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help
+him collect the arms.  Meantime the officer walked slowly through
+all the rooms in the house, examining them attentively but
+touching nothing.  The peasants in the hall fell back and took
+off their caps when he passed through.  He said nothing whatever
+to them.  When he came back to the study all the arms to be found
+in the house were lying on the table.  There was a pair of big
+flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry
+swords, one of the French the other of the Polish Army pattern,
+with a fowling-piece or two.
+
+The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords and
+guns, one after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up.
+The peasants in the hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen
+after him into the study.  He gave not the slightest sign of
+being conscious of their existence and, his business being
+apparently concluded, strode out of the house without a word.
+Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps and
+began to smile at each other.
+
+The Cossacks rode away, passing through the yards of the home
+farm straight into the fields.  The priest, still arguing with
+the peasants, moved gradually down the drive and his earnest
+eloquence was drawing the silent mob after him, away from the
+house.  This justice must be rendered to the parish priests of
+the Greek Church that, strangers to the country as they were
+(being all drawn from the interior of Russia), the majority of
+them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the
+cause of peace and humanity.  True to the spirit of their
+calling, they tried to soothe the passions of the excited
+peasantry and opposed rapine and violence whenever they could,
+with all their might.  And this conduct they pursued against the
+express wishes of the authorities.  Later on some of them were
+made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed abruptly to
+the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.
+
+The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had
+got into the house.  What sort of conduct was that, he asked
+them, towards a man who was only a tenant, had been invariably
+good and considerate to the villagers for years; and only the
+other day had agreed to give up two meadows for the use of the
+village herd?  He reminded them, too, of Mr. Nicholas B.'s
+devotion to the sick in the time of cholera.  Every word of this
+was true and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch
+their heads and look irresolute.  The speaker then pointed at the
+window, exclaiming:  "Look! there's all your crowd going away
+quietly and you silly chaps had better go after them and pray God
+to forgive you your evil thoughts."
+
+This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.  In crowding clumsily to
+the window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows
+overturned the little writing-table.  As it fell over a chink of
+loose coin was heard.  "There's money in that thing," cried the
+blacksmith.  In a moment the top of the delicate piece of
+furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in a drawer eighty
+half-imperials.  Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia even at
+that time; it put the peasants beside themselves.  "There must be
+more of that in the house and we shall have it," yelled the ex-
+soldier blacksmith.  "This is war time."  The others were already
+shouting out of the window urging the crowd to come back and
+help.  The priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms
+up and hurried away so as not to see what was going to happen.
+
+In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in
+the house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that,
+as the servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding
+together left in the whole house.  They broke some very fine
+mirrors, all the windows and every piece of glass and china.
+They threw the books and papers out on the lawn and set fire to
+the heap for the mere fun of the thing apparently.  Absolutely
+the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small
+ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked
+bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany and splintered
+boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead.  Detecting the
+servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned tin box, they
+tore it from him, and because he resisted they threw him out of
+the dining-room window.  The house was on one floor but raised
+well above the ground, and the fall was so serious that the man
+remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable-boy ventured
+forth at dusk from their hiding-places and picked him up.  By
+that time the mob had departed carrying off the tin box, which
+they supposed to be full of paper money.  Some distance from the
+house in the middle of a field they broke it open.  They found
+inside documents engrossed on parchment and the two crosses of
+the Legion of Honour and For Valour.  At the sight of these
+objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour
+given only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what
+they had done.  They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and
+dispersed hastily.
+
+On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down
+completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect
+him much.  While he was still in bed from the shock the two
+crosses were found and returned to him.  It helped somewhat his
+slow convalescence, but the tin box and the parchments, though
+searched for in all the ditches around, never turned up again.
+He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent,
+whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to
+the very letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to
+recite, tears standing in his eyes the while.  Its terms haunted
+him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an
+extent that he used to repeat them to himself.  This is confirmed
+by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more
+intimate friends.  "What makes my heart heavy is to hear our
+master in his room at night walking up and down and praying aloud
+in the French language."
+
+It must have been somewhat over a year afterwards that I saw Mr.
+Nicholas B., or, more correctly, that he saw me, for the last
+time.  It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother
+had a three months' leave from exile, which she was spending in
+the house of her brother, and friends and relations were coming
+from far and near to do her honour.  It is inconceivable that Mr.
+Nicholas B. should not have been of the number.  The little child
+a few months old he had taken up in his arms on the day of his
+home-coming after years of war and exile was confessing her faith
+in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn.  I do not
+know whether he was present on the very day of our departure.  I
+have already admitted that for me he is more especially the man
+who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy
+forest of snow-loaded pines.  My memory cannot place him in any
+remembered scene.  A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an
+unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure
+militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on
+earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the
+memory of his grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I
+suppose, of all those he had seen in the course of his taciturn
+life.
+
+But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile.  The
+elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-
+horses, standing before the long front of the house with its
+eight columns, four on each side of the broad flight of stairs.
+On the steps, groups of servants, a few relations, one or two
+friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on all
+the faces an air of sober concentration; my grandmother all in
+black gazing stoically, my uncle giving his arm to my mother down
+to the carriage in which I had been placed already; at the top of
+the flight my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan pattern
+with a deal of red in it, and like a small princess attended by
+the women of her own household:  the head gourvernante, our dear,
+corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty years in the service
+of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor attendant, a
+handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression, and the
+good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
+meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown
+paper.  Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-
+natured eyes only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing
+voice alone that broke the silence with an appeal to me:
+"N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri."  In three months, simply
+by playing with us, she had taught me not only to speak French
+but to read it as well.  She was indeed an excellent playmate.
+In the distance, half way down to the great gates, a light, open
+trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn
+up on one side with the police-captain of the district sitting in
+it, the vizor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over
+his eyes.
+
+It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our
+going so carefully.  Without wishing to treat with levity the
+just timidities of Imperialists all the world over, I may allow
+myself the reflection that a woman, practically condemned by the
+doctors, and a small boy not quite six years old could not be
+regarded as seriously dangerous even for the largest of
+conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of
+responsibilities.  And this good man, I believe, did not think so
+either.
+
+I learned afterwards why he was present on that day.  I don't
+remember any outward signs, but it seems that, about a month
+before, my mother became so unwell that there was a doubt whether
+she could be made fit to travel in the time.  In this uncertainty
+the Governor-General in Kiev was petitioned to grant her a
+fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's house.  No answer
+whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at dusk the
+police-captain of the district drove up to the house and told my
+uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak
+with the master in private, at once.  Very much impressed (he
+thought it was going to be an arrest) the servant, "more dead
+than alive with fright," as he related afterwards, smuggled him
+through the big drawing-room, which was dark (that room was not
+lighted every evening), on tiptoe, so as not to attract the
+attention of the ladies in the house, and led him by way of the
+orangery to my uncle's private apartments.
+
+The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my
+uncle's hands.
+
+"There.  Pray read this.  I have no business to show this paper
+to you.  It is wrong of me.  But I can't either eat or sleep with
+such a job hanging over me."
+
+That police-captain, a native of Great Russia, had been for many
+years serving in the district.
+
+My uncle unfolded and read the document.  It was a service order
+issued from the Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with the
+matter of the petition and directing the police-captain to
+disregard all remonstrances and explanations in regard to that
+illness either from medical men or others, "and if she has not
+left her brother's house"--it went on to say--"on the morning of
+the day specified on her permit, you are to despatch her at once
+under escort, direct" (underlined) "to the prison-hospital in
+Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands."
+
+"For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your sister goes away
+punctually on that day.  Don't give me this work to do with a
+woman--and with one of your family too.  I simply cannot bear to
+think of it."
+
+He was absolutely wringing his hands.  My uncle looked at him in
+silence.
+
+"Thank you for this warning.  I assure you that even if she were
+dying she would be carried out to the carriage."
+
+"Yes--indeed--and what difference would it make--travel to Kiev
+or back to her husband.  For she would have to go--death or no
+death.  And mind, Mr. B., I will be here on the day, not that I
+doubt your promise, but because I must.  I have got to.  Duty.
+All the same my trade is not fit for a dog since some of you
+Poles will persist in rebelling, and all of you have got to
+suffer for it."
+
+This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap
+pulled up between the house and the great gates.  I regret not
+being able to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in
+the rights of conquest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of
+Imperial greatness.  On the other hand, I am in a position to
+state the name of the Governor-General who signed the order with
+the marginal note "to be carried out to the letter" in his own
+handwriting.  The gentleman's name was Bezak.  A high dignitary,
+an energetic official, the idol for a time of the Russian
+Patriotic Press.
+
+Each generation has its memories.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV.
+
+It must not be supposed that in setting forth the memories of
+this half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we
+met again at dinner, I am losing sight of "Almayer's Folly."
+Having confessed that my first novel was begun in idleness--a
+holiday task--I think I have also given the impression that it
+was a much-delayed book.  It was never dismissed from my mind,
+even when the hope of ever finishing it was very faint.  Many
+things came in its way:  daily duties, new impressions, old
+memories.  It was not the outcome of a need--the famous need of
+self-expression which artists find in their search for motives.
+The necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity,
+a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon.  Or perhaps
+some idle and frivolous magician (there must be magicians in
+London) had cast a spell over me through his parlour window as I
+explored the maze of streets east and west in solitary leisurely
+walks without chart and compass.  Till I began to write that
+novel I had written nothing but letters and not very many these.
+I never made a note of a fact, of an impression or of an anecdote
+in my life.  The conception of a planned book was entirely
+outside my mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of
+being an author had never turned up amongst these gracious
+imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in
+the stillness and immobility of a day-dream:  yet it stands clear
+as the sun at noonday that from the moment I had done blackening
+over the first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly" (it contained
+about two hundred words and this proportion of words to a page
+has remained with me through the fifteen years of my writing
+life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of my heart and
+the amazing ignorance of my mind, written that page the die was
+cast.  Never had Rubicon been more blindly forded, without
+invocation to the gods, without fear of men.
+
+That morning I got up from my breakfast, pushing the chair back,
+and rang the bell violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely,
+or perhaps I should say eagerly, I do not know.  But manifestly
+it must have been a special ring of the bell, a common sound made
+impressive, like the ringing of a bell for the raising of the
+curtain upon a new scene.  It was an unusual thing for me to do.
+Generally, I dawdled over my breakfast and I solemn took the
+trouble to ring the bell for the table to be cleared away; but on
+that morning for some reason hidden in the general mysteriousness
+of the event I did not dawdle.  And yet I was not in a hurry.  I
+pulled the cord casually and while the faint tinkling somewhere
+down in the basement went on, I charged my pipe in the usual way
+and I looked for the matchbox with glances distraught indeed but
+exhibiting, I am ready to swear, no signs of a fine frenzy.  I
+was composed enough to perceive after some considerable time the
+matchbox lying there on the mantelpiece right under my nose.  And
+all this was beautifully and safely usual.  Before I had thrown
+down the match my landlady's daughter appeared with her calm,
+pale face and an inquisitive look, in the doorway.  Of late it
+was the landlady's daughter who answered my bell.  I mention this
+little fact with pride, because it proves that during the thirty
+or forty days of my tenancy I had produced a favourable
+impression.  For a fortnight past I had been spared the
+unattractive sight of the domestic slave.  The girls in that
+Bessborough Gardens house were often changed, but whether short
+or long, fair or dark, they were always untidy and particularly
+bedraggled as if in a sordid version of the fairy tale the ashbin
+cat had been changed into a maid.  I was infinitely sensible of
+the privilege of being waited on by my landlady's daughter.  She
+was neat if anaemic.
+
+"Will you please clear away all this at once?" I addressed her in
+convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting my
+pipe to draw.  This, I admit, was an unusual request.  Generally
+on getting up from breakfast I would sit down in the window with
+a book and let them clear the table when they liked; but if you
+think that on that morning I was in the least impatient, you are
+mistaken.  I remember that I was perfectly calm.  As a matter of
+fact I was not at all certain that I wanted to write, or that I
+meant to write, or that I had anything to write about.  No, I was
+not impatient.  I lounged between the mantelpiece and the window,
+not even consciously waiting for the table to be cleared.  It was
+ten to one that before my landlady's daughter was done I would
+pick up a book and sit down with it all the morning in a spirit
+of enjoyable indolence.  I affirm it with assurance, and I don't
+even know now what were the books then lying about the room.
+Whatever they were they were not the works of great masters,
+where the secret of clear thought and exact expression can be
+found.  Since the age of five I have been a great reader, as is
+not perhaps wonderful in a child who was never aware of learning
+to read.  At ten years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and
+other romantics.  I had read in Polish and in French, history,
+voyages, novels; I knew "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote" in abridged
+editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some
+French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before
+I began to write myself.  I believe it was a novel and it is
+quite possible that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels.  It
+is very likely.  My acquaintance with him was then very recent.
+He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the
+first time in English.  With men of European reputation, with
+Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise.  My
+first introduction to English imaginative literature was
+"Nicholas Nickleby."  It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby
+could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph
+rage in that language.  As to the Crummles family and the family
+of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their
+native speech.  It was, I have no doubt, an excellent
+translation.  This must have been in the year '70.  But I really
+believe that I am wrong.  That book was not my first introduction
+to English literature.  My first acquaintance was (or were) the
+"Two Gentlemen of Verona," and that in the very MS. of my
+father's translation.  It was during our exile in Russia, and it
+must have been less than a year after my mother's death, because
+I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border of my
+heavy mourning.  We were living together, quite alone, in a small
+house on the outskirts of the town of T--.  That afternoon,
+instead of going out to play in the large yard which we shared
+with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in which my father
+generally wrote.  What emboldened me to clamber into his chair I
+am sure I don't know, but a couple of hours afterwards he
+discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my
+head held in both hands over the MS. of loose pages.  I was
+greatly confused, expecting to get into trouble.  He stood in the
+doorway looking at me with some surprise, but the only thing he
+said after a moment of silence was:
+
+"Read the page aloud."
+
+Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with
+erasures and corrections, and my father's handwriting was
+otherwise extremely legible. When I got to the end he nodded and
+I flew out of doors thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof
+for that piece of impulsive audacity.  I have tried to discover
+since the reason of this mildness, and I imagine that all unknown
+to myself I had earned, in my father's mind, the right to some
+latitude in my relations with his writing-table.  It was only a
+month before, or perhaps it was only a week before, that I had
+read to him aloud from beginning to end, and to his perfect
+satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very well at the
+time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of
+the Sea."  Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and
+also my first introduction to the sea in literature.  If I do not
+remember where, how and when I learned to read, I am not likely
+to forget the process of being trained in the art of reading
+aloud.  My poor father, an admirable reader himself, was the most
+exacting of masters.  I reflect proudly that I must have read
+that page of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" tolerably well at the age
+of eight.  The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume
+edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in
+Falmouth, at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment
+of caulkers' mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship
+in dry dock. We had run in, in a sinking condition and with the
+crew refusing duty after a month of weary battling with the gales
+of the North Atlantic.  Books are an integral part of one's life
+and my Shakespearean associations are with that first year of our
+bereavement, the last I spent with my father in exile (he sent me
+away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he could brace
+himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard gales,
+the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water
+and then by fire.
+
+Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my
+writing life began I have forgotten.  I have only a vague notion
+that it might have been one of Trollope's political novels.  And
+I remember, too, the character of the day.  It was an autumn day
+with an opaline atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day,
+with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and
+windows opposite, while the trees of the square with all their
+leaves gone were like tracings of indian ink on a sheet of tissue
+paper.  It was one of those London days that have the charm of
+mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.  The effect of
+opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on account
+of the nearness to the river.
+
+There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that
+day than on any other day, except that I stood for a long time
+looking out of the window after the landlady's daughter was gone
+with her spoil of cups and saucers.  I heard her put the tray
+down in the passage and finally shut the door; and still I
+remained smoking with my back to the room.  It is very clear that
+I was in no haste to take the plunge into my writing life, if as
+plunge this first attempt may be described.  My whole being was
+steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the sea, the
+scene of never-ending labour and of unceasing duty.  For utter
+surrender to indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that
+mood is on him, the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to
+the full.  It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but
+this is an impression which is hardly to be believed at this
+distance of years.  What I am certain of is, that I was very far
+from thinking of writing a story, though it is possible and even
+likely that I was thinking of the man Almayer.
+
+I had seen him for the first time some four years before from the
+bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles
+up, more or less, a Bornean river.  It was very early morning and
+a slight mist, an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only
+without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of
+the red London sun, promised to turn presently into a woolly fog.
+Barring a small dug-out canoe on the river there was nothing
+moving within sight.  I had just come up yawning from my cabin.
+The serang and the Malay crew were overhauling the cargo chains
+and trying the winches; their voices sounded subdued on the deck
+below and their movements were languid.  That tropical daybreak
+was chilly.  The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something
+from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly.  The forests
+above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank;
+wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck
+awnings, and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I
+caught sight of Almayer.  He was moving across a patch of burnt
+grass, a blurred shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of a house
+behind him, a low house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves with a
+high-pitched roof of grass.
+
+He stepped upon the jetty.  He was clad simply in flapping
+pyjamas of cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals
+on a disagreeable blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with
+short sleeves.  His arms, bare to the elbow, were crossed on his
+chest.  His black hair looked as if it had not been cut for a
+very long time and a curly wisp of it strayed across his
+forehead.  I had heard of him at Singapore; I had heard of him on
+board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late at night;
+I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of him in
+a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who
+described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded
+civilised and progressive till you heard that the mine could not
+be worked at present because it was haunted by some particulary
+atrocious ghosts.  I had heard of him in a place called Dongola,
+in the Island of Celebes, when the Rajah of that little-known
+seaport (you can get no anchorage there in less than fifteen
+fathom, which is extremely inconvenient) came on board in a
+friendly way with only two attendants, and drank bottle after
+bottle of soda-water on the after-skylight with my good friend
+and commander, Captain C--.  At least I heard his name distinctly
+pronounced several times in a lot of talk in Malay language.  Oh
+yes, I heard it quite distinctly--Almayer, Almayer--and saw
+Captain C-- smile while the fat dingy Rajah laughed audibly.  To
+hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright is a rare experience I can
+assure you.  And I overhead more of Almayer's name amongst our
+deck passengers (mostly wandering traders of good repute) as they
+sat all over the ship--each man fenced round with bundles and
+boxes--on mats, on pillows, on quilts, on billets of wood,
+conversing of Island affairs.  Upon my word, I heard the mutter
+of Almayer's name faintly at midnight, while making my way aft
+from the bridge to look at the patent taffrail-log tinkling its
+quarter-miles in the great silence of the sea.  I don't mean to
+say that our passengers dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is
+indubitable that two of them at least, who could not sleep
+apparently and were trying to charm away the trouble of insomnia
+by a little whispered talk at that ghostly hour, were referring
+in some way or other to Almayer.  It was really impossible on
+board that ship to get away definitely from Almayer; and a very
+small pony tied up forward and whisking its tail inside the
+galley, to the great embarrassment of our Chinaman cook, was
+destined for Almayer.  What he wanted with a pony goodness only
+knows, since I am perfectly certain he could not ride it; but
+here you have the man, ambitious, aiming at the grandiose,
+importing a pony, whereas in the whole settlement at which he
+used to shake daily his impotent fist, there was only one path
+that was practicable for a pony:  a quarter of a mile at most,
+hedged in by hundreds of square leagues of virgin forest.  But
+who knows?  The importation of that Bali Pony might have been
+part of some deep scheme, of some diplomatic plan, of some
+hopeful intrigue.  With Almayer one could never tell.  He
+governed his conduct by considerations removed from the obvious,
+by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic impenetrable
+to any reasonable person.  I learned all this later.  That
+morning seeing the figure in pyjamas moving in the mist I said to
+myself:  "That's the man."
+
+He came quite close to the ship's side and raised a harassed
+countenance, round and flat, with that curl of black hair over
+the forehead and a heavy, pained glance.
+
+"Good morning."
+
+"Good morning."
+
+He looked hard at me:  I was a new face, having just replaced
+the chief mate he was accustomed to see; and I think that this
+novelty inspired him, as things generally did, with deep-seated
+mistrust.
+
+"Didn't expect you in till this evening," he remarked
+suspiciously.
+
+I don't know why he should have been aggrieved, but he seemed to
+be.  I took pains to explain to him that having picked up the
+beacon at the mouth of the river just before dark and the tide
+serving, Captain C-- was enabled to cross the bar and there was
+nothing to prevent him going up river at night.
+
+"Captain C-- knows this river like his own pocket," I concluded
+discursively, trying to get on terms.
+
+"Better," said Almayer.
+
+Leaning over the rail of the bridge I looked at Almayer, who
+looked down at the wharf in aggrieved thought.  He shuffled his
+feet a little; he wore straw slippers with thick soles.  The
+morning fog had thickened considerably.  Everything round us
+dripped:  the derricks, the rails, every single rope in the ship-
+-as if a fit of crying had come upon the universe.
+
+Almayer again raised his head and in the accents of a man
+accustomed to the buffets of evil fortune asked hardly audibly:
+
+"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a pony on board?"
+
+I told him almost in a whisper, for he attuned my communications
+to his minor key, that we had such a thing as a pony, and I
+hinted, as gently as I could, that he was confoundedly in the way
+too.  I was very anxious to have him landed before I began to
+handle the cargo.  Almayer remained looking up at me for a long
+while with incredulous and melancholy eyes as though it were not
+a safe thing to believe my statement.  This pathetic mistrust in
+the favourable issue of any sort of affair touched me deeply, and
+I added:
+
+"He doesn't seem a bit the worse for the passage.  He's a nice
+pony too."
+
+Almayer was not to be cheered up; for all answer he cleared his
+throat and looked down again at his feet.  I tried to close with
+him on another tack.
+
+"By Jove!" I said.  "Aren't you afraid of catching pneumonia or
+bronchitis or something, walking about in a singlet in such a wet
+fog?"
+
+He was not to be propitiated by a show of interest in his health.
+His answer was a sinister "No fear," as much as to say that even
+that way of escape from inclement fortune was closed to him.
+
+"I just came down. . ." he mumbled after a while.
+
+"Well then, now you're here I will land that pony for you at once
+and you can lead him home.  I really don't want him on deck.
+He's in the way."
+
+Almayer seemed doubtful.  I insisted:
+
+"Why, I will just swing him out and land him on the wharf right
+in front of you.  I'd much rather do it before the hatches are
+off.  The little devil may jump down the hold or do some other
+deadly thing."
+
+"There's a halter?" postulated Almayer.
+
+"Yes, of course there's a halter."  And without waiting any more
+I leaned over the bridge rail.
+
+"Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony."
+
+The cook hastened to shut the door of the galley and a moment
+later a great scuffle began on deck.  The pony kicked with
+extreme energy, the kalashes skipped out of the way, the serang
+issued many orders in a cracked voice.  Suddenly the pony leaped
+upon the fore-hatch.  His little hoofs thundered tremendously; he
+plunged and reared.  He had tossed his mane and his forelock into
+a state of amazing wildness, he dilated his nostrils, bits of
+foam flecked his broad little chest, his eyes blazed.  He was
+something under eleven hands; he was fierce, terrible, angry,
+warlike, he said ha! ha! distinctly, he raged and thumped--and
+sixteen able-bodied kalashes stood round him like disconcerted
+nurses round a spoilt and passionate child.  He whisked his tail
+incessantly; he arched his pretty neck; he was perfectly
+delightful; he was charmingly naughty.  There was not an atom of
+vice in that performance; no savage baring of teeth and lying
+back of ears.  On the contrary, he pricked them forward in a
+comically aggressive manner.  He was totally unmoral and lovable;
+I would have liked to give him bread, sugar, carrots.  But life
+is a stern thing and the sense of duty the only safe guide.  So I
+steeled my heart and from my elevated position on the bridge I
+ordered the men to fling themselves upon him in a body.
+
+The elderly serang, emitting a strange inarticulate cry, gave the
+example. He was an excellent petty officer--very competent
+indeed, and a moderate opium smoker.  The rest of them in one
+great rush smothered that pony. They hung on to his ears, to his
+mane, to his tail; they lay in piles across his back, seventeen
+in all.  The carpenter, seizing the hook of the cargo-chain,
+flung himself on top of them.  A very satisfactory petty officer
+too, but he stuttered.  Have you ever heard a light-yellow, lean,
+sad, earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English?  It's very weird
+indeed. He made the eighteenth.  I could not see the pony at all;
+but from the swaying and heaving of that heap of men I knew that
+there was something alive inside.
+
+From the wharf Almayer hailed in quavering tones:
+
+"Oh, I say!"
+
+Where he stood he could not see what was going on on deck unless
+perhaps the tops of the men's heads; he could only hear the
+scuffle, the mighty thuds, as if the ship were being knocked to
+pieces.  I looked over:  "What is it?"
+
+"Don't let them break his legs," he entreated me plaintively.
+
+"Oh, nonsense!  He's all right now.  He can't move."
+
+By that time the cargo-chain had been hooked to the broad canvas
+belt round the pony's body, the kalashes sprang off
+simultaneously in all directions, rolling over each other, and
+the worthy serang, making a dash behind the winch, turned the
+steam on.
+
+"Steady!" I yelled, in great apprehension of seeing the animal
+snatched up to the very head of the derrick.
+
+On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw slippers uneasily.  The
+rattle of the winch stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence
+that pony began to swing across the deck.
+
+How limp he was!  Directly he felt himself in the air he relaxed
+every muscle in a most wonderful manner.  His four hoofs knocked
+together in a bunch, his head hung down, and his tail remained
+pendent in a nerveless and absolute immobility.  He reminded me
+vividly of the pathetic little sheep which hangs on the collar of
+the Order of the Golden Fleece.  I had no idea that anything in
+the shape of a horse could be so limp as that, either living or
+dead.  His wild mane hung down lumpily, a mere mass of inanimate
+horsehair; his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went
+swaying slowly across the front of the bridge I noticed an astute
+gleam in his dreamy, half-closed eye.  A trustworthy
+quartermaster, his glance anxious and his mouth on the broad
+grin, was easing over the derrick watchfully.  I superintended,
+greatly interested.
+
+"So!  That will do."
+
+The derrick-head stopped.  The kalashes lined the rail.  The rope
+of the halter hung perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull
+in front of Almayer.  Everything was very still.  I suggested
+amicably that he should catch hold of the rope and mind what he
+was about.  He extended a provokingly casual and superior hand.
+
+"Look out then!  Lower away!"
+
+Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently enough, but when the
+pony's hoofs touched the wharf he gave way all at once to a most
+foolish optimism.  Without pausing, without thinking, almost
+without looking, he disengaged the hook suddenly from the sling,
+and the cargo-chain, after hitting the pony's quarters, swung
+back against the ship's side with a noisy, rattling slap.  I
+suppose I must have blinked.  I know I missed something, because
+the next thing I saw was Almayer lying flat on his back on the
+jetty.  He was alone.
+
+Astonishment deprived me of speech long enough to give Almayer
+time to pick himself up in a leisurely and painful manner.  The
+kalashes lining the rail had all their mouths open.  The mist
+flew in the light breeze, and it had come over quite thick enough
+to hide the shore completely.
+
+"How on earth did you manage to let him get away?" I asked
+scandalised.
+
+Almayer looked into the smarting palm of his right hand, but did
+not answer my inquiry.
+
+"Where do you think he will get to?" I cried.  "Are there any
+fences anywhere in this fog?  Can he bolt into the forest?
+What's to be done now?"
+
+Almayer shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Some of my men are sure to be about.  They will get hold of him
+sooner or later."
+
+"Sooner or later!  That's all very fine, but what about my canvas
+sling--he's carried it off.  I want it now, at once, to land two
+Celebes cows."
+
+Since Dongola we had on board a pair of the pretty little island
+cattle in addition to the pony.  Tied up on the other side of the
+fore deck they had been whisking their tails into the other door
+of the galley.  These cows were not for Almayer, however; they
+were invoiced to Abdullah bin Selim, his enemy.  Almayer's
+disregard of my requisites was complete.
+
+"If I were you I would try to find out where he's gone," I
+insisted.  "Hadn't you better call your men together or
+something?  He will throw himself down and cut his knees.  He may
+even break a leg, you know."
+
+But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, did not seem to want
+that pony any more.  Amazed at this sudden indifference I turned
+all hands out on shore to hunt for him on my own account, or, at
+any rate, to hunt for the canvas sling which he had round his
+body.  The whole crew of the steamer, with the exception of
+firemen and engineers, rushed up the jetty past the thoughtful
+Almayer and vanished from my sight.  The white fog swallowed them
+up; and again there was a deep silence that seemed to extend for
+miles up and down the stream.  Still taciturn, Almayer started to
+climb on board, and I went down from the bridge to meet him on
+the after deck.
+
+"Would you mind telling the captain that I want to see him very
+particularly?" he asked me in a low tone, letting his eyes stray
+all over the place.
+
+"Very well.  I will go and see."
+
+With the door of his cabin wide open Captain C--, just back from
+the bathroom, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick,
+damp, iron-grey hair with two large brushes.
+
+"Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see you very particularly,
+sir."
+
+Saying these words I smiled.  I don't know why I smiled except
+that it seemed absolutely impossible to mention Almayer's name
+without a smile of a sort.  It had not to be necessarily a
+mirthful smile.  Turning his head towards me Captain C-- smiled
+too, rather joylessly.
+
+"The pony got away from him--eh?"
+
+"Yes sir.  He did."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Goodness only knows."
+
+"No.  I mean Almayer.  Let him come along."
+
+The captain's stateroom opening straight on deck under the
+bridge, I had only to beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who had
+remained aft, with downcast eyes, on the very spot where I had
+left him.  He strolled up moodily, shook hands and at once asked
+permission to shut the cabin door.
+
+"I have a pretty story to tell you," were the last words I heard.
+The bitterness of tone was remarkable.
+
+I went away from the door, of course.  For the moment I had no
+crew on board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag
+hung round his neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the
+empty decks knocking out the wedges of the hatches and dropping
+them into the bag conscientiously.  Having nothing to do I joined
+our two engineers at the door of the engine-room.  It was near
+breakfast time.
+
+"He's turned up early, hasn't he?" commented the second engineer,
+and smiled indifferently.  He was an abstemious man with a good
+digestion and a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.
+
+"Yes," I said.  "Shut up with the old man.  Some very particular
+business."
+
+"He will spin him a damned endless yarn," observed the chief
+engineer.
+
+He smiled rather sourly.  He was dyspeptic and suffered from
+gnawing hunger in the morning.  The second smiled broadly, a
+smile that made two vertical folds on his shaven cheeks.  And I
+smiled too, but I was not exactly amused.  In that man, whose
+name apparently could not be uttered anywhere in the Malay
+Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing amusing whatever.
+That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking mostly into
+his cup.  I informed him that my men came upon his pony capering
+in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which
+he kept his store of guttah.  The cover was off with no one near
+by, and the whole of my crew just missed going heels over head
+into that beastly hole.  Jurumudi Itam, our best quartermaster,
+deft at fine needlework, he who mended the ship's flags and sewed
+buttons on our coats, was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.
+
+Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer's character.
+He mumbled:
+
+"Do you mean that pirate fellow?"
+
+"What pirate fellow?  The man has been in the ship eleven years,"
+I said indignantly.
+
+"It's his looks," Almayer muttered for all apology.
+
+The sun had eaten up the fog.  From where we sat under the after
+awning we could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of
+Almayer's house, to a post of the verandah.  We were silent for a
+long time.  All at once Almayer, alluding evidently to the
+subject of his conversation in the captain's cabin, exclaimed
+anxiously across the table:
+
+"I really don't know what I can do now!"
+
+Captain C-- only raised his eyebrows at him, and got up from his
+chair.  We dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half dressed as
+he was in his cretonne pyjamas and the thin cotton singlet,
+remained on board, lingering near the gangway as though he could
+not make up his mind whether to go home or stay with us for good.
+Our Chinamen boys gave him side glances as they went to and fro;
+and Ah Sing, our young chief steward, the handsomest and most
+sympathetic of Chinamen, catching my eye, nodded knowingly at his
+burly back.  In the course of the morning I approached him for a
+moment.
+
+"Well, Mr. Almayer," I addressed him easily, "you haven't started
+on your letters yet."
+
+We had brought him his mail and he had held the bundle in his
+hand ever since we got up from breakfast.  He glanced at it when
+I spoke and, for a moment, it looked as if he were on the point
+of opening his fingers and letting the whole lot fall overboard.
+I believe he was tempted to do so. I shall never forget that man
+afraid of his letters.
+
+"Have you been long out from Europe?" he asked me.
+
+"Not very.  Not quite eight months," I told him.  "I left a ship
+in Samarang with a hurt back and have been in the hospital in
+Singapore some weeks."
+
+He sighed.
+
+"Trade is very bad here."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Hopeless!. . .See these geese?"
+
+With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what
+resembled a patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant
+part of his compound.  It disappeared behind some bushes.
+
+"The only geese on the East Coast," Almayer informed me in a
+perfunctory mutter without a spark of faith, hope or pride.
+Thereupon, with the same absence of any sort of sustaining spirit
+he declared his intention to silence a fat bird and send him on
+board for us not later than next day.
+
+I had heard of these largesses before.  He conferred a goose as
+if it were a sort of Court decoration given only to the tried
+friends of the house.  I had expected more pomp in the ceremony.
+The gift had surely its special quality, multiple and rare.  From
+the only flock on the East Coast!  He did not make half enough of
+it.  That man did not understand his opportunities.  However, I
+thanked him at some length.
+
+"You see," he interrupted abruptly in a very peculiar tone, "the
+worst of this country is that one is not able to realise. . .it's
+impossible to realise. . ."  His voice sank into a languid
+mutter.  "And when one has very large interests. . .very
+important interests. . ." he finished faintly. . ."up the river."
+
+We looked at each other.  He astonished me by giving a start and
+making a very queer grimace.
+
+"Well, I must be off," he burst out hurriedly.  "So long!"
+
+At the moment of stepping over the gangway he checked himself
+though, to give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that
+evening with my captain, an invitation which I accepted.  I don't
+think it could have been possible for me to refuse.
+
+I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of
+free will "at any rate for practical purposes."  Free, is it?
+For practical purposes!  Bosh!  How could I have refused to dine
+with that man?  I did not refuse simply because I could not
+refuse.  Curiosity, a healthy desire for a change of cooking,
+common civility, the talk and the smiles of the previous twenty
+days, every condition of my existence at that moment and place
+made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all that, there
+was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want of
+foreknowledge to counter-balance these imperative conditions of
+the problem.  A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane.
+Nobody unless a surly lunatic would have refused.  But if I had
+not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there
+would never have been a line of mine in print.
+
+I accepted then--and I am paying yet the price of my sanity.  The
+possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is
+responsible for the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far.
+The number of geese he had called into being under adverse
+climatic conditions was considerably more than fourteen.  The
+tale of volumes will never overtake the counting of heads, I am
+safe to say; but my ambitions point not exactly that way, and
+whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me I have always
+thought kindly of Almayer.
+
+I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would
+have been?  This is something not to be discovered in this world.
+But if we ever meet in the Elysian Fields--where I cannot depict
+him to myself otherwise than attended in the distance by his
+flock of geese (birds sacred to Jupiter)--and he addresses me in
+the stillness of that passionless region, neither light nor
+darkness, neither sound nor silence, and heaving endlessly with
+billowy mists from the impalpable multitudes of the swarming
+dead, I think I know what answer to make.
+
+I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone
+of his measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of
+course, the solemn eternity of stillness in the least--I would
+say something like this:
+
+"It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted
+your name to my own uses.  But that is a very small larceny.
+What's in a name, O Shade?  If so much of your old mortal
+weakness clings to you yet as to make you feel aggrieved (it was
+the note of your earthly voice, Almayer), then, I entreat you,
+seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade--with him
+who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the
+smell of the rose.  He will comfort you.  You came to me stripped
+of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful
+chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands.  Your name was
+the common property of the winds:  it, as it were, floated naked
+over the waters about the Equator.  I wrapped round its
+unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics and have essayed
+to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity--feats
+which you did not demand from me--but remember that all the toil
+and all the pain were mine.  In your earthly life you haunted me,
+Almayer.  Consider that this was taking a great liberty.  Since
+you were always complaining of being lost to the world, you
+should remember that if I had not believed enough in your
+existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens, you
+would have been much more lost.  You affirm that had I been
+capable of looking at you with a more perfect detachment and a
+greater simplicity, I might have perceived better the inward
+marvellousness which, you insist, attended your career upon that
+tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible far, far below us, where
+both our graves lie.  No doubt!  But reflect, O complaining
+Shade! that this was not so much my fault as your crowning
+misfortune.  I believed in you in the only way it was possible
+for me to believe.  It was not worthy of your merits?  So be it.
+But you were always an unlucky man, Almayer.  Nothing was ever
+quite worthy of you.  What made you so real to me was that you
+held this lofty theory with some force of conviction and with an
+admirable consistency."
+
+It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy
+expressions that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian
+Abode of Shades, since it has come to pass that having parted
+many years ago, we are never to meet again in this world.
+
+
+
+Chapter V.
+
+In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense
+that literary ambition had never entered the world of his
+imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite
+an inexplicable event.  In my own case I cannot trace it back to
+any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and
+hold to.  The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity
+for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational
+stimulus for taking up a pen.  The pen at any rate was there, and
+there is nothing wonderful in that.  Everybody keeps a pen (the
+cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of
+penny stamps and halfpenny postcards.  In fact, this was the
+epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made
+the reputation of a novel or two.  And I too had a pen rolling
+about somewhere--the seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of
+a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned
+attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency permitted, of
+letters begun with infinite reluctance and put off suddenly till
+next day--tell next week as likely as not!  The neglected,
+uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and
+under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm,
+in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the
+beastly thing gone to?" ungracious spirit.  Where indeed!  It
+might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so.  My
+landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed
+it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner of
+approaching her domestic duties.  Or it might even be resting
+delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and
+when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which would have
+discouraged any man of literary instincts.  But not me!  "Never
+mind.  This will do."
+
+O days without guile!  If anybody had told me then that a devoted
+household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
+importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the
+fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had
+touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never
+deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief.  There are
+imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice, too wild for
+indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile.  Perhaps, had that
+seer of the future been a friend, I should have been secretly
+saddened.  "Alas!" I would have thought, looking at him with an
+unmoved face, "the poor fellow is going mad."
+
+I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world
+where the journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of
+heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does so under the
+prophetical management of the Meteorological Office, but where
+the secret of human hearts cannot be captured either by prying or
+praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my
+friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I
+should turn into a writer of tales.
+
+To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a
+fascinating pursuit for idle hours.  The field is so wide, the
+surprises so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable but
+curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not
+weary easily of it.  I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who
+rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who
+really never rest in this world, and when out of it go on
+fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last
+habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality.  Neither
+am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking
+forward to some aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a
+detached, impersonal glance upon themselves.
+
+And that's a pity.  They are unlucky.  These two kinds, together
+with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those
+unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great
+French writer has put it) "the whole universe vanishes into blank
+nothingness," miss, perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is
+short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions.  The
+ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel
+and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith,
+hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish,
+that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be
+ethical at all.  I would fondly believe that its object is purely
+spectacular:  a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if
+you like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for
+despair!  Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end
+in themselves.  The rest is our affair--the laughter, the tears,
+the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a
+steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that's
+our affair!  And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every
+phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may
+be our appointed task on this earth.  A task in which fate has
+perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with
+a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder,
+the haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable
+serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the
+sublime spectacle.
+
+Chi lo sa?  It may be true.  In this view there is room for every
+religion except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and
+cloak of arid despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every
+fair dream, for every charitable hope.  The great aim is to
+remain true to the emotions called out of the deep encircled by
+the firmament of stars, whose infinite numbers and awful
+distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or
+the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities of
+sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter
+nothing at all.
+
+The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem
+full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a
+purely spectacular universe, where inspiration of every sort has
+a rational existence, the artist of every kind finds a natural
+place; and amongst them the poet as the seer par excellence.
+Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome
+task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy of a
+place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps
+laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry.  Yes!  Even
+he, the prose artist of fiction, which after all is but truth
+often dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of
+imaged phrases--even he has his place amongst kings, demagogues,
+priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, Cabinet Ministers, Fabians,
+bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, Kaffirs, soldiers,
+sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and constellations
+of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself.
+
+Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a
+subtle expression, as if the cat were out of the bag.  I take the
+novelist's freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the
+exclamation, "That's it!  The fellow talks pro domo."
+
+Indeed it was not the intention!  When I shouldered the bag I was
+not aware of the cat inside.  But, after all, why not?  The fair
+courtyards of the House of Art are thronged by many humble
+retainers.  And there is no retainer so devoted as he who is
+allowed to sit on the doorstep.  The fellows who have got inside
+are apt to think too much of themselves.  This last remark, I beg
+to state, is not malicious within the definition of the law of
+libel.  It's fair comment on a matter of public interest.  But
+never mind.  Pro domo.  So be it.  For his house tant que vous
+voudrez.  And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify
+my existence.  The attempt would have been not only needless and
+absurd, but almost inconceivable, in a purely spectacular
+universe, where no such disagreeable necessity can possibly
+arise.  It is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at
+some length in these pages):  "J'ai vecu."  I have existed,
+obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe
+Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to
+exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of
+the French Revolution.  "J'ai vecu", as I apprehend most of us
+manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms of
+destruction by a hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear,
+and perhaps my soul also, but not without some damage here and
+there to the fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the
+ages, of the race, of the group, of the family, colourable and
+plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, and even by
+the silences and abstentions surrounding one's childhood; tinged
+in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the
+inherited traditions, beliefs, or prejudices--unaccountable,
+despotic, persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.
+
+And often romantic!. . .The matter in hand, however, is to keep
+these reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of
+literary activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account
+of the extreme thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying
+his own existence; for that such was his purpose is palpably,
+even grossly, visible to an unprejudiced eye.  But then, you see,
+the man was not a writer of fiction.  He was an artless moralist,
+as is clearly demonstrated by his anniversaries being celebrated
+with marked emphasis by the heirs of the French Revolution, which
+was not a political movement at all, but a great outburst of
+morality.  He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of
+"Emile" will prove.  He was no novelist, whose first virtue is
+the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of
+his time to the play of his invention.  Inspiration comes from
+the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the
+cold and immutable heaven.  A writer of imaginative prose (even
+more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his
+works.  His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful and
+unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world.  Indeed, every
+one who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers (unless a
+moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the
+one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of
+nothing else.  It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and
+just of French prose writers, who says that we must recognise at
+last that, "failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only
+talk of ourselves."
+
+This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a
+sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the
+principles and rules of literary criticism.  As was fitting for a
+man to whom we owe the memorable saying, "The good critic is he
+who relates the adventures of his soul amongst masterpieces," M.
+Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no
+principles.  And that may be very true.  Rules, principles and
+standards die and vanish every day.  Perhaps they are all dead
+and vanished by this time.  These, if ever, are the brave, free
+days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy
+inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to
+think, will be set up presently in the old places.  But what is
+interesting to a writer is the possession of an inward certitude
+that literary criticism will never die, for man (so variously
+defined) is, before everything else, a critical animal.  And, as
+long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit
+of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal to us with all
+the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience.
+
+For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task,
+any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit
+of romance.  But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an
+adventurous spirit.  They take risks, of course--one can hardly
+live without that.  The daily bread is served out to us (however
+sparingly) with a pinch of salt.  Otherwise one would get sick of
+the diet one prays for, and that would be not only improper, but
+impious.  From impiety of that or any other kind--save us!  An
+ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense of proprieties,
+from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness,
+induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
+adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes
+a mere "notice," as it were the relation of a journey where
+nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should
+be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood
+and field, the hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh,
+the sufferings too!  I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the
+traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful
+plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance
+looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen
+running in a desert.  A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
+adventure.  "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I
+should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to
+the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."
+Neither is the writing of novels.  It isn't really.  Je vous
+donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not.  Not all.  I am thus
+emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a
+general. . .
+
+Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and
+then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle
+Ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations
+of the world's superficial judgment, shocking to the souls
+concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of
+sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say, or of
+art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute.  And
+thus this general's daughter came to me--or I should say one of
+the general's daughters did.  There were three of these bachelor
+ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
+farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation.  The
+eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village
+children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers
+for the conquest of curtseys.  It sounds futile, but it was
+really a war for an idea.  The second skirmished and scouted all
+over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance
+right to my very table--I mean the one who wore stand-up collars.
+She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of
+afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination.
+She marched into my room swinging her stick. . .but no--I mustn't
+exaggerate.  It is not my speciality.  I am not a humoristic
+writer.  In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she
+had a stick to swing.
+
+No ditch or wall encompassed my abode.  The window was open; the
+door too stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm,
+still sunshine of the wide fields.  They lay around me infinitely
+helpful, but truth to say I had not known for weeks whether the
+sun shone upon the earth and whether the stars above still moved
+on their appointed courses.  I was just then giving up some days
+of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel "Nostromo,"
+a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still
+mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
+connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction
+with the word "astonishing."  I have no opinion on this
+discrepancy.  It's the sort of difference that can never be
+settled.  All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the
+common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this
+earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with the Lord"
+for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness
+of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the
+sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the
+shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile.
+These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to
+characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative
+effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the
+full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to
+the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle--
+something for which a material parallel can only be found in the
+everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round
+Cape Horn.  For that too is the wrestling of men with the might
+of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without
+the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a
+sense of over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be
+adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude.  Yet a certain
+longitude, once won, cannot be disputed.  The sun and the stars
+and the shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain;
+whereas a handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them
+your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil.
+Here they are.  "Failure"--"Astonishing":  take your choice; or
+perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of
+paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
+snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the
+sunshine.
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+It was the greeting of the general's daughter.  I had heard
+nothing--no rustle, no footsteps.  I had felt only a moment
+before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an
+inauspicious presence--just that much warning and no more; and
+then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible
+fall from a great height--a fall, let us say, from the highest of
+the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the
+faint westerly air of that July afternoon.  I picked myself up
+quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair
+stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being
+uprooted out of one world and flung down into another--perfectly
+civil.
+
+"Oh!  How do you do?  Won't you sit down?"
+
+That's what I said.  This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly
+true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of
+confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do.  Observe!  I
+didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself
+on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other way
+at the appalling magnitude of the disaster.  The whole world of
+Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my seaboard tale),
+men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was
+not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not
+placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
+geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's
+silver-mine, and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de
+Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham
+heard it pass over his head--in Linda Viola's voice), dominated
+even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of
+treasure and love--all that had come down crashing about my ears.
+I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in that very moment
+I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"
+
+The sea is strong medicine.  Behold what the quarter-deck
+training even in a merchant ship will do!  This episode should
+give you a new view of the English and Scots seamen (a much-
+caricatured folk) who had the last say in the formation of my
+character.  One is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster I
+think I have done some honour to their simple teaching.  "Won't
+you sit down?"  Very fair; very fair indeed.  She sat down.  Her
+amused glance strayed all over the room.  There were pages of MS.
+on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a
+chair, single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners;
+there were there living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead
+pages that would be burnt at the end of the day--the litter of a
+cruel battlefield, of a long, long and desperate fray.  Long!  I
+suppose I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of
+times.  Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the food put before me,
+and talked connectedly to my household on suitable occasions.
+But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily life, made
+easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
+affection.  Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at
+that table surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days
+and nights on end.  It seemed so, because of the intense
+weariness of which that interruption had made me aware--the awful
+disenchantment of a mind realising suddenly the futility of an
+enormous task, joined to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary
+amount of fairly heavy physical labour could ever account for.  I
+have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a
+ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the
+evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to
+know.
+
+And I love letters.  I am jealous of their honour and concerned
+for the dignity and comeliness of their service.  I was, most
+likely, the only writer that neat lady had ever caught in the
+exercise of his craft, and it distressed me not to be able to
+remember when it was that I dressed myself last, and how.  No
+doubt that would be all right in essentials.  The fortune of the
+house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes that would see
+to that.  But I felt somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
+after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and
+dishevelled down to my very heels.  And I am afraid I blinked
+stupidly.  All this was bad for the honour of letters and the
+dignity of their service.  Seen indistinctly through the dust of
+my collapsed universe, the good lady glanced about the room with
+a slightly amused serenity.  And she was smiling.  What on earth
+was she smiling at?  She remarked casually:
+
+"I am afraid I interrupted you."
+
+"Not at all."
+
+She accepted the denial in perfect good faith.  And it was
+strictly true. Interrupted--indeed!  She had robbed me of at
+least twenty lives, each infinitely more poignant and real than
+her own, because informed with passion, possessed of convictions,
+involved in great affairs created out of my own substance for an
+anxiously meditated end.
+
+She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all
+round at the litter of the fray:
+
+"And you sit like this here writing your--your. . ."
+
+"I--what?  Oh, yes, I sit here all day."
+
+"It must be perfectly delightful."
+
+I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on
+the verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the
+porch, and my boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had
+espied him from afar.  He came on straight and swift like a
+cannon-ball, and the noise of the fight, which burst suddenly
+upon our ears, was more than enough to scare away a fit of
+apoplexy.  We went out hastily and separated the gallant animals.
+Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife--just
+round the corner, under the trees.  She nodded and went off with
+her dog, leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she
+had lightly made--and with the awfully instructive sound of the
+word "delightful" lingering in my ears.
+
+Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate.  I
+wanted to be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere
+novel that one should be rude to a lady on their account?), but
+mainly, to adopt the good sound Ollendorffian style, because I
+did not want the dog of the general's daughter to fight again
+(encore) with the faithful dog of my infant son (mon petit
+garcon).--Was I afraid that the dog of the general's daughter
+would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my child?--No, I
+was not afraid. . .But away with the Ollendorff method.  However
+appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything
+appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin,
+character and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the
+child from a man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian
+value, a man almost childlike in the impulsive movements of his
+untutored genius, the most single-minded of verbal
+impressionists, using his great gifts of straight feeling and
+right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong if, perhaps,
+not fully conscious conviction.  His art did not obtain, I fear,
+all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved.  I am
+alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of "The Red Badge
+of Courage," a work of imagination which found its short moment
+of celebrity in the last decade of the departed century.  Other
+books followed.  Not many.  He had not the time.  It was an
+individual and complete talent, which obtained but a grudging,
+somewhat supercilious recognition from the world at large.  For
+himself one hesitates to regret his early death.  Like one of the
+men in his "Open Boat," one felt that he was of those whom fate
+seldom allows to make a safe landing after much toil and
+bitterness at the oar.  I confess to an abiding affection for
+that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient
+figure.  He liked me even before we met on the strength of a page
+or two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he
+liked me still.  He used to point out to me with great
+earnestness, and even with some severity, that "a boy ought to
+have a dog."  I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect of
+parental duties.  Ultimately it was he who provided the dog.
+Shortly afterwards, one day, after playing with the child on the
+rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he raised
+his head and declared firmly:  "I shall teach your boy to ride."
+That was not to be.  He was not given the time.
+
+But here is the dog--an old dog now.  Broad and low on his bandy
+paws, with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black
+spot at the other end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad,
+smiles not altogether unkind.  Grotesque and engaging in the
+whole of his appearance, his usual attitudes are meek, but his
+temperament discloses itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the
+presence of his kind.  As he lies in the firelight, his head well
+up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed at the shadows of the
+room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in the calm
+consciousness of an unstained life.  He has brought up one baby,
+and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is
+bringing up another with the same conscientious devotion, but
+with a more deliberate gravity of manner, the sign of greater
+wisdom and riper experience, but also of rheumatism, I fear.
+From the morning bath to the evening ceremonies of the cot you
+attend, old friend, the little two-legged creature of your
+adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of your duties
+with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by every
+person in the house--even as I myself am treated; only you
+deserve it more.  The general's daughter would tell you that it
+must be "perfectly delightful."
+
+Aha! old dog.  She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it's
+that poor left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you
+preserve a rigid immobility for fear of overturning the little
+two-legged creature.  She has never seen your resigned smile when
+the little two-legged creature, interrogated sternly, "What are
+you doing to the good dog?" answers with a wide, innocent stare:
+"Nothing.  Only loving him, mamma dear!"
+
+The general's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-
+imposed tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very
+rewards of rigid self-command.  But we have lived together many
+years.  We have grown older, too; and though our work is not
+quite done yet we may indulge now and then in a little
+introspection before the fire--meditate on the art of bringing up
+babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where so many
+lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly
+away.
+
+
+Chapter VI.
+
+In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary
+stage of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments,
+and even two distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its
+successive scenes, a certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable.
+I am conscious of it in these pages.  This remark is put forward
+in no apologetic spirit.  As years go by and the number of pages
+grows steadily, the feeling grows upon one too that one can write
+only for friends.  Then why should one put them to the necessity
+of protesting (as a friend would do) that no apology is
+necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of one's
+discretion?  So much as to the care due to those friends whom a
+word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the
+right place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety,
+has drawn from the great multitude of fellow-beings even as a
+fish is drawn from the depths of the sea.  Fishing is notoriously
+(I am talking now of the deep sea) a matter of luck.  As to one's
+enemies, those will take care of themselves.
+
+There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking,
+jumps upon me with both feet.  This image has no grace, but it is
+exceedingly apt to the occasion--to the several occasions.  I
+don't know precisely how long he had been indulging in that
+intermittent exercise, whose seasons are ruled by the custom of
+the publishing trade.  Somebody pointed him out (in printed
+shape, of course) to my attention some time ago, and straightway
+I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man.
+He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden:  for the
+writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain
+shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds.  Not a shred!
+Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or
+perversity.  It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more
+estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness.  It
+is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given (reluctantly) for
+a consideration, for several considerations.  There is that
+robustness, for instance, so often the sign of good moral
+balance.  That's a consideration.  It is not, indeed, pleasant to
+be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation,
+implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into
+work whose qualities and defects, whatever they may be, are not
+so much on the surface, is something to be thankful for in view
+of the fact that it may happen to one's work to be condemned
+without being read at all.  This is the most fatuous adventure
+that can well happen to a writer venturing his soul amongst
+criticisms.  It can do one no harm, of course, but it is
+disagreeable.  It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering
+a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot of folk in a third-
+class compartment.  The open impudence of the whole transaction,
+appealing insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the
+brazen, shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while
+insisting on the fairness of the game, give one a feeling of
+sickening disgust.  The honest violence of a plain man playing a
+fair game fairly--even if he means to knock you over--may appear
+shocking, but it remains within the pale of decency.  Damaging as
+it may be, it is in no sense offensive.  One may well feel some
+regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's own vile body.
+But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not be
+stayed by explanations or placated by apologies.  Were I to
+advance the plea of youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found
+in these pages, he would be likely to say "Bosh!" in a column and
+a half of fierce print.  Yet a writer is no older than his first
+published book, and, notwithstanding the vain appearances of
+decay which attend us in this transitory life, I stand here with
+the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.
+
+With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of
+feeling and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that,
+upon the whole, my previous state of existence was not a good
+equipment for a literary life. Perhaps I should not have used the
+word literary.  That word presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance
+with letters, a turn of mind and a manner of feeling to which I
+dare lay no claim.  I only love letters; but the love of letters
+does not make a literary man, any more than the love of the sea
+makes a seaman.  And it is very possible, too, that I love the
+letters in the same way a literary man may love the sea he looks
+at from the shore--a scene of great endeavour and of great
+achievements changing the face of the world, the great open way
+to all sorts of undiscovered countries.  No, perhaps I had better
+say that the life at sea--and I don't mean a mere taste of it,
+but a good broad span of years, something that really counts as
+real service--is not, upon the whole, a good equipment for a
+writing life.  God forbid, though, that I should be thought of as
+denying my masters of the quarter-deck.  I am not capable of that
+sort of apostasy.  I have confessed my attitude of piety towards
+their shades in three or four tales, and if any man on earth more
+than another needs to be true to himself as he hopes to be saved,
+it is certainly the writer of fiction.
+
+What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training
+does not prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary
+criticism.  Only that, and no more.  But this defect is not
+without gravity.  If it be permissible to twist, invert, adapt
+(and spoil) M. Anatole France's definition of a good critic, then
+let us say that the good author is he who contemplates without
+marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst
+criticisms.  Far be from me the intention to mislead an attentive
+public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea.  That
+would be dishonest, and even impolite.  Everything can be found
+at sea, according to the spirit of your quest--strife, peace,
+romance, naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom,
+disgust, inspiration--and every conceivable opportunity,
+including the opportunity to make a fool of yourself--exactly as
+in the pursuit of literature.  But the quarter-deck criticism is
+somewhat different from literary criticism.  This much they have
+in common, that before the one and the other the answering back,
+as a general rule, does not pay.
+
+Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation--I tell you
+everything is to be found on salt water--criticism generally
+impromptu, and always viva voce, which is the outward, obvious
+difference from the literary operation of that kind, with
+consequent freshness and vigour which may be lacking in the
+printed word.  With appreciation, which comes at the end, when
+the critic and the criticised are about to part, it is otherwise.
+The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the permanency
+of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal in
+its phrasing.  There the literary master has the superiority,
+though he, too, can in effect but say--and often says it in the
+very phrase--"I can highly recommend."  Only usually he uses the
+word "We," there being some occult virtue in the first person
+plural, which makes it specially fit for critical and royal
+declarations.  I have a small handful of these sea appreciations,
+signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my writing-table's
+left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a
+handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree
+of knowledge.  Strange!  It seems that it is for these few bits
+of paper, headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the
+names of a few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced
+the astonished indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of
+a sort hard to bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been
+charged with the want of patriotism, the want of sense, and the
+want of heart too; that I went through agonies of self-conflict
+and shed secret tears not a few, and had the beauties of the
+Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called an "incorrigible
+Don Quixote," in allusion to the book-born madness of the knight.
+For that spoil!  They rustle, those bits of paper--some dozen of
+them in all.  In that faint, ghostly sound there live the
+memories of twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more,
+the strong voice of the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a
+mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea, which must have
+somehow reached my inland cradle and entered my unconscious ear,
+like that formula of Mohammedan faith the Mussulman father
+whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making him one of
+the faithful almost with his first breath.  I do not know whether
+I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful
+one.  And after all there is that handful of "characters" from
+various ships to prove that all these years have not been
+altogether a dream.  There they are, brief, and monotonous in
+tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me as any inspired
+page to be found in literature.  But then, you see, I have been
+called romantic.  Well, that can't be helped.  But stay.  I seem
+to remember that I have been called a realist also.  And as that
+charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at
+whatever cost, for a change.  With this end in view, I will
+confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to
+see my blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these
+suggestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain
+the words "strictly sober."
+
+Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's very gratifying, to be
+sure"?  Well, yes, it is gratifying--thank you.  It is at least
+as gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified romantic,
+though such certificates would not qualify one for the
+secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of
+official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as
+the London County Council, for instance.  The above prosaic
+reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general
+sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs.  I make a point of it
+because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine
+being published in a French translation, a Parisian critic--I am
+almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn in the "Gil-Blas"--giving
+me a short notice, summed up his rapid impression of the writer's
+quality in the words un puissant reveur.  So be it!  Who would
+cavil at the words of a friendly reader?  Yet perhaps not such an
+unconditional dreamer as all that.  I will make bold to say that
+neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of
+responsibility.  There is more than one sort of intoxication.
+Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful
+of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment,
+in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it,
+such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame.  It is but a
+maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength
+of wine.  I have tried to be a sober worker all my life--all my
+two lives.  I did so from taste, no doubt, having an instinctive
+horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also from
+artistic conviction.  Yet there are so many pitfalls on each side
+of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a little
+battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the mere
+daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept
+always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power,
+and truth, and peace.
+
+As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
+sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing
+in their time.  I seem to hear your polite murmur that "Surely
+this might have been taken for granted."  Well, no.  It might not
+have been.  That august academical body the Marine Department of
+the Board of Trade takes nothing for granted in the granting of
+its learned degrees.  By its regulations issued under the first
+Merchant Shipping Act, the very word SOBER must be written, or a
+whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the most enthusiastic
+appreciation will avail you nothing.  The door of the examination
+rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.  The most
+fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly
+fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board
+of Trade.  As I have been face to face at various times with all
+the examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can
+be no doubt as to the force and the continuity of my
+abstemiousness.  Three of them were examiners in seamanship, and
+it was my fate to be delivered into the hands of each of them at
+proper intervals of sea service.  The first of all, tall, spare,
+with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet, kindly
+manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced to
+conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my
+appearance.  His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his
+crossed legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice,
+and went on, went on. . .It lasted for hours, for hours.  Had I
+been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to
+the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more
+microscopic examination.  Greatly reassured by his apparent
+benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers.  But
+at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me.
+And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold
+ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries.  Then I got
+frightened.  I was not frightened of being plucked; that
+eventuality did not even present itself to my mind.  It was
+something much more serious, and weird.  "This ancient person," I
+said to myself, terrified, "is so near his grave that he must
+have lost all notion of time.  He is considering this examination
+in terms of eternity.  It is all very well for him.  His race is
+run.  But I may find myself coming out of this room into the
+world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
+landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to
+remember the way to my hired home."  This statement is not so
+much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed.  Some very
+queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my
+answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor
+yet with anything reasonable known to this earth.  I verily
+believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of languid way.
+At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for
+ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
+pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen.  He extended the scrap of
+paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my
+parting bow. . .
+
+When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed
+lemon, and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to
+get my hat and tip him a shilling, said:
+
+"Well! I thought you were never coming out."
+
+"How long have I been in there?" I asked faintly.
+
+He pulled out his watch.
+
+"He kept you, sir, just under three hours.  I don't think this
+ever happened with any of the gentlemen before."
+
+It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk
+on air.  And the human animal being averse from change and timid
+before the unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really
+being examined by the same man on a future occasion.  But when
+the time of ordeal came round again the doorkeeper let me into
+another room, with the now familiar paraphernalia of models of
+ships and tackle, a board for signals on the wall, a big long
+table covered with official forms, and having an unrigged mast
+fixed to the edge.  The solitary tenant was unknown to me by
+sight, though not by reputation, which was simply execrable.
+Short and sturdy as far as I could judge, clad in an old, brown,
+morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his
+eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the
+other side of the table.  He was motionless, mysterious, remote,
+enigmatical, with something mournful too in the pose, like that
+statue of Giuliano (I think) de' Medici shading his face on the
+tomb by Michael Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far from
+being beautiful.  He began by trying to make me talk nonsense.
+But I had been warned of that fiendish trait, and contradicted
+him with great assurance. After a while he left off.  So far
+good.  But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the
+abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and
+more impressive.  He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and
+then, placing me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under
+certain conditions of weather, season, locality, &c. &c.--all
+very clear and precise--ordered me to execute a certain
+manoeuvre.  Before I was half through with it he did some
+material damage to the ship.  Directly I had grappled with the
+difficulty he caused another to present itself, and when that too
+was met he stuck another ship before me, creating a very
+dangerous situation.  I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity
+in piling up trouble upon a man.
+
+"I wouldn't have got into that mess," I suggested mildly.  "I
+could have seen that ship before."
+
+He never stirred the least bit.
+
+"No, you couldn't.  The weather's thick."
+
+"Oh!  I didn't know," I apologised blankly.
+
+I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with
+sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business
+went on.  You must understand that the scheme of the test he was
+applying to me was, I gathered, a homeward passage--the sort of
+passage I would not wish to my bitterest enemy.  That imaginary
+ship seemed to labour under a most comprehensive curse.  It's no
+use enlarging on these never-ending misfortunes; suffice it to
+say that long before the end I would have welcomed with gratitude
+an opportunity to exchange into the "Flying Dutchman."  Finally
+he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and provided me with
+a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks--the Dutch coast presumably.
+Distance, eight miles.  The evidence of such implacable animosity
+deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.
+
+"Well," he said--for our pace had been very smart indeed till
+then.
+
+"I will have to think a little, sir."
+
+"Doesn't look as if there were much time to think," he muttered
+sardonically from under his hand.
+
+"No, sir," I said with some warmth.  "Not on board a ship I could
+see.  But so many accidents have happened that I really can't
+remember what there's left for me to work with."
+
+Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made
+unexpectedly a grunting remark.
+
+"You've done very well."
+
+"Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?" I asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them
+both go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of
+testing resourcefulness came into play again.
+
+"But there's only one cable.  You've lost the other."
+
+It was exasperating.
+
+"Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser
+on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she
+parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing.
+She would have to go."
+
+"Nothing more to do, eh?"
+
+"No, sir.  I could do no more."
+
+He gave a bitter half-laugh.
+
+"You could always say your prayers."
+
+He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly.  It was a
+sallow, strong, unamiable face.  He put me in a surly, bored
+fashion through the usual questions as to lights and signals, and
+I escaped from the room thankfully--passed!  Forty minutes!  And
+again I walked on air along Tower Hill, where so many good men
+had lost their heads, because, I suppose, they were not
+resourceful enough to save them.  And in my heart of hearts I had
+no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third
+and last ordeal became due in another year or so.  I even hoped I
+should.  I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an
+unreasonable time.  Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .
+
+But not a bit of it.  When I presented myself to be examined for
+Master the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a
+round, soft face in grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious
+lips.
+
+He commenced operations with an easy-going "Let's see.  H'm.
+Suppose you tell me all you know of charter-parties."  He kept it
+up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of
+comment into bits out of his own life, then pulling himself up
+short and returning to the business in hand. It was very
+interesting.  "What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?" he queried
+suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a
+point of stowage.
+
+I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea,
+and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-
+book.  In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had
+invented himself years before, when in command of a 3000-ton
+steamer.  It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance
+imaginable.  "May be of use to you some day," he concluded.  "You
+will go into steam presently.  Everybody goes into steam."
+
+There he was wrong.  I never went into steam--not really.  If I
+only live long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead
+barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the
+dark ages who had never gone into steam--not really.
+
+Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few
+interesting details of the transport service in the time of the
+Crimean War.
+
+"The use of wire rigging became general about that time too," he
+observed. "I was a very young master then.  That was before you
+were born."
+
+"Yes, sir.  I am of the year 1857."
+
+"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if to himself, adding in a
+louder tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of
+Bengal, employed under a Government charter.
+
+Clearly the transport service had been the making of this
+examiner, who so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his
+existence, awakening in me the sense of the continuity of that
+sea-life into which I had stepped from outside; giving a touch of
+human intimacy to the machinery of official relations.  I felt
+adopted.  His experience was for me, too, as though he had been
+an ancestor.
+
+Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care
+on the slip of blue paper, he remarked:
+
+"You are of Polish extraction."
+
+"Born there, sir."
+
+He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for
+the first time.
+
+"Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think.  I
+never remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea.
+Don't remember ever hearing of one.  An inland people, aren't
+you?"
+
+I said yes--very much so.  We were remote from the sea not only
+by situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect
+association, not being a commercial nation at all, but purely
+agricultural.  He made then the quaint reflection that it was "a
+long way for me to come out to begin a sea-life"; as if sea-life
+were not precisely a life in which one goes a long way from home.
+
+I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much
+nearer my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was
+to be a seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other.  It
+was a matter of deliberate choice.
+
+He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
+interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent
+a little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West
+Indies.  I did not want to present myself to the British Merchant
+Service in an altogether green state.  It was no use telling him
+that my mysterious vocation was so strong that my very wild oats
+had to be sown at sea.  It was the exact truth, but he would not
+have understood the somewhat exceptional psychology of my sea-
+going, I fear.
+
+"I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at
+sea.  Have you now?"
+
+I admitted I never had.  The examiner had given himself up to the
+spirit of gossiping idleness.  For myself, I was in no haste to
+leave that room.  Not in the least.  The era of examinations was
+over.  I would never again see that friendly man who was a
+professional ancestor, a sort of grandfather in the craft.
+Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me, and of that there
+was no sign.  As he remained silent, looking at me, I added:
+
+"But I have heard of one, some years ago.  He seems to have been
+a boy serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not
+mistaken."
+
+"What was his name?"
+
+I told him.
+
+"How did you say that?" he asked, puckering up his eyes at the
+uncouth sound.
+
+I repeated the name very distinctly.
+
+"How do you spell it?"
+
+I told him.  He moved his head at the impracticable nature of
+that name, and observed:
+
+"It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?"
+
+There was no hurry.  I had passed for Master, and I had all the
+rest of my life before me to make the best of it.  That seemed a
+long time.  I went leisurely through a small mental calculation,
+and said:
+
+"Not quite.  Shorter by two letters, sir."
+
+"Is it?"  The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the
+table to me, and rose from his chair.  Somehow this seemed a very
+abrupt ending of our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part
+from that excellent man, who was master of a ship before the
+whisper of the sea had reached my cradle. He offered me his hand
+and wished me well.  He even made a few steps towards the door
+with me, and ended with good-natured advice.
+
+"I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into
+steam.  When a man has got his master's certificate it's the
+proper time.  If I were you I would go into steam."
+
+I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era
+of examinations.  But that time I did not walk on air, as on the
+first two occasions.  I walked across the Hill of many beheadings
+with measured steps.  It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was
+now a British master mariner beyond a doubt.  It was not that I
+had an exaggerated sense of that very modest achievement, with
+which, however, luck, opportunity, or any extraneous influence
+could have had nothing to do.  That fact, satisfactory and
+obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal significance.  It
+was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even to some
+not very kind aspersions.  I had vindicated myself from what had
+been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice.  I
+don't mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my
+desire to go to sea.  But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen,
+sensitive enough, in all conscience, the commotion of his little
+world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed.  So
+considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to
+this day.  I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect
+meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
+voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed
+boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of
+his impulses to himself.  I understood no more than the people
+who called upon me to explain myself.  There was no precedent.  I
+verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality
+and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his
+racial surroundings and associations.  For you must understand
+that there was no idea of any sort of "career" in my call.  Of
+Russia or Germany there could be no question.  The nationality,
+the antecedents, made it impossible.  The feeling against the
+Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there would
+have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School
+at Pola.  It would have meant six months' extra grinding at
+German, perhaps, but I was not past the age of admission, and in
+other respects I was well qualified.  This expedient to palliate
+my folly was thought of--but not by me.  I must admit that in
+that respect my negative was accepted at once.  That order of
+feeling was comprehensible enough to the most inimical of my
+critics.  I was not called upon to offer explanations; the truth
+is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but the sea.
+There seemed no way open to it but through France.  I had the
+language at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is
+with France that Poland has most connection.  There were some
+facilities for having me a little looked after, at first.
+Letters were being written, answers were being received,
+arrangements were being made for my departure for Marseilles,
+where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in a roundabout
+fashion through various French channels, had promised good-
+naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent
+ship for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier
+de chien.
+
+I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own
+counsel.  But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly
+true.  Already the determined resolve, that "if a seaman, then an
+English seaman," was formulated in my head though, of course, in
+the Polish language.  I did not know six words of English, and I
+was astute enough to understand that it was much better to say
+nothing of my purpose.  As it was I was already looked upon as
+partly insane, at least by the more distant acquaintances. The
+principal thing was to get away.  I put my trust in the good-
+natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
+shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.
+
+This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned
+out a quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black,
+short beard, a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes.  He
+was as jovial and good-natured as any boy could desire.  I was
+still asleep in my room in a modest hotel near the quays of the
+old port, after the fatigues of the journey via Vienna, Zurich,
+Lyons, when he burst in flinging the shutters open to the sun of
+Provence and chiding me boisterously for lying abed.  How
+pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to be up and
+off instantly for a "three years' campaign in the South Seas."  O
+magic words!  Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud"--
+that is the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.
+
+He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was
+unwearied; but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship
+for me in a very solemn spirit.  He had been at sea himself, but
+had left off at the age of twenty-five, finding he could earn his
+living on shore in a much more agreeable manner.  He was related
+to an incredible number of Marseilles well-to-do families of a
+certain class.  One of his uncles was a ship-broker of good
+standing, with a large connection amongst English ships; other
+relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts, sold
+chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers,
+shipwrights.  His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a
+kind, the Syndic of the Pilots.  I made acquaintances amongst
+these people, but mainly amongst the pilots.  The very first
+whole day I ever spent on salt water was by invitation, in a big
+half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs on the look-
+out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and the
+smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall
+Planier lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon
+with a white perpendicular stroke.  They were hospitable souls,
+these sturdy Provencal seamen.  Under the general designation of
+le petit ami de Baptistin I was made the guest of the Corporation
+of Pilots, and had the freedom of their boats night or day.  And
+many a day and a night too did I spend cruising with these rough,
+kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy with the sea began.
+Many a time "the little friend of Baptistin" had the hooded cloak
+of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest hands
+while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch
+for the lights of ships.  Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or
+shaved, lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the
+pilot-breed, and here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a
+hairy ear, bent over my sea-infancy.  The first operation of
+seamanship I had an opportunity of observing was the boarding of
+ships at sea, at all times, in all states of the weather.  They
+gave it to me to the full.  And I have been invited to sit in
+more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
+hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick
+plate by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
+daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses
+of black hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and
+dazzlingly white teeth.
+
+I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort.  One of
+them, Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a
+statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front
+seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable
+airing.  She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in
+the south.  In her haughty weariness she used to make me think of
+Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the master for
+which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and
+unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
+its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of
+other men's work.  I have read it innumerable times, both in
+Polish and in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by
+a not very surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book
+reminded me strongly of the belle Madame Delestang.
+
+Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose,
+and a perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as
+it were by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir
+Leicester Dedlock's "grand air" and courtly solemnity.  He
+belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was a banker, with
+whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs. He was such an
+ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he used in
+current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should say,
+with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money matters
+reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of post-
+Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
+of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were
+still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles,
+and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime
+affairs.  You must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth
+century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.  Luckily in the counting-
+house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the Delestang town
+residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts were kept in
+modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my
+wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist (I
+suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
+windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty
+ceilings with heavily moulded cornices.  I always felt on going
+out as though I had been in the temple of some very dignified but
+completely temporal religion.  And it was generally on these
+occasions that under the great carriage gateway Lady Ded-- I mean
+Madame Delestang, catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon
+me with an amiable imperiousness to the side of the carriage, and
+suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, "Venez donc faire un
+tour avec nous," to which the husband would add an encouraging
+"C'est ca.  Allons, montez, jeune homme."  He questioned me
+sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as
+to the way I employed my time, and never failed to express the
+hope that I wrote regularly to my "honoured uncle."  I made no
+secret of the way I employed my time, and I rather fancy that my
+artless tales of the pilots and so on entertained Madame
+Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman could be entertained by
+the prattle of a youngster very full of his new experience
+amongst strange men and strange sensations.  She expressed no
+opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in
+the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and
+fleeting episode.  One day, after putting me down at the corner
+of a street, she offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight
+pressure, for a moment.  While the husband sat motionless and
+looking straight before him, she leaned forward in the carriage
+to say, with just a shade of warning in her leisurely tone:  "Il
+faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater sa vie."  I had
+never seen her face so close to mine before.  She made my heart
+beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
+Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life.
+But she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that
+danger seemed to me.
+
+
+Chapter VII.
+
+Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
+cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on
+Political Economy?  I ask--is it conceivable?  Is it possible?
+Would it be right?  With my feet on the very shores of the sea
+and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a good-
+natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my youthful
+passion?  It was the most unexpected and the last too of the many
+warnings I had received.  It sounded to me very bizarre--and,
+uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress, like
+the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance.  But I was not so
+callous or so stupid as not to recognise there also the voice of
+kindness.  And then the vagueness of the warning--because what
+can be the meaning of the phrase:  to spoil one's life?--arrested
+one's attention by its air of wise profundity.  At any rate, as I
+have said before, the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me
+thoughtful for a whole evening.  I tried to understand and tried
+in vain, not having any notion of life as an enterprise that
+could be mismanaged.  But I left off being thoughtful shortly
+before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts of the past
+and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of the
+Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of my friends.  I knew where
+she would be waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a canal
+behind the Fort at the entrance of the harbour.  The deserted
+quays looked very white and dry in the moonlight and as if frost-
+bound in the sharp air of that December night.  A prowler or two
+slunk by noiselessly; a custom-house guard, soldier-like, a sword
+by his side, paced close under the bowsprits of the long row of
+ships moored bows on opposite the long, slightly curved,
+continuous flat wall of the tall houses that seemed to be one
+immense abandoned building with innumerable windows shuttered
+closely.  Only here and there a small dingy cafe for sailors cast
+a yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones.  Passing
+by, one heard a deep murmur of voices inside--nothing more.  How
+quiet everything was at the end of the quays on the last night on
+which I went out for a service cruise as a guest of the
+Marseilles pilots!  Not a footstep, except my own, not a sigh,
+not a whispering echo of the usual revelry going on in the narrow
+unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my ear--and suddenly,
+with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass, the omnibus of
+the Jolliette on its last journey swung round the corner of the
+dead wall which faces across the paved road the characteristic
+angular mass of the Fort St. Jean.  Three horses trotted abreast
+with the clatter of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow,
+uproarious machine jolted violently behind them, fantastic,
+lighted up, perfectly empty and with the driver apparently asleep
+on his swaying perch above that amazing racket.  I flattened
+myself against the wall and gasped.  It was a stunning
+experience.  Then after staggering on a few paces in the shadow
+of the Fort casting a darkness more intense than that of a
+clouded night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern
+standing on the quay, and became aware of muffled figures making
+towards it from various directions.  Pilots of the Third Company
+hastening to embark.  Too sleepy to be talkative they step on
+board in silence.  But a few low grunts and an enormous yawn are
+heard.  Somebody even ejaculates:  "Ah!  Coquin de sort!" and
+sighs wearily at his hard fate.
+
+The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of
+pilots at that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my
+friend Solary (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep-chested man
+of forty, with a keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes.
+He greets me by a low, hearty,  "He, l'ami.  Comment va?"  With
+his clipped moustache and massive open face, energetic and at the
+same time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen of the
+southerner of the calm type.  For there is such a type in which
+the volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid force.  He
+is fair, but no one could mistake him for a man of the north even
+by the dim gleam of the lantern standing on the quay.  He is
+worth a dozen of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but then, in
+the whole immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, you could
+not find half a dozen men of his stamp.
+
+Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick
+jacket and bends his head over it in the light cast into the
+boat.  Time's up.  His pleasant voice commands in a quiet
+undertone "Larguez."  A suddenly projected arm snatches the
+lantern off the quay--and, warped along by a line at first, then
+with the regular tug of four heavy sweeps in the bow, the big
+half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black breathless
+shadow of the Fort.  The open water of the avant-port glitters
+under the moon as if sown over with millions of sequins, and the
+long white breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid silver.
+With a quick rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the
+sail is filled by a little breeze keen enough to have come
+straight down from the frozen moon, and the boat, after the
+clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at rest,
+surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and unearthly that
+it may be the rustling of the brilliant, over-powering moonrays
+breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless
+sea.
+
+I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the
+Third Company.  I have known the spell of moonlight since, on
+various seas and coasts--coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand
+dunes--but no magic so perfect in its revelation of unsuspected
+character, as though one were allowed to look upon the mystic
+nature of material things.  For hours I suppose no word was
+spoken in that boat.  The pilots seated in two rows facing each
+other dozed with their arms folded and their chins resting upon
+their breasts.  They displayed a great variety of caps:  cloth,
+wool, leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque
+round beret or two pulled down over the brows; and one
+grandfather, with a shaved, bony face and a great beak of a nose,
+had a cloak with a hood which made him look in our midst like a
+cowled monk being carried off goodness knows where by that silent
+company of seamen--quiet enough to be dead.
+
+My fingers itched for the tiller and in due course my friend, the
+patron, surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the
+family coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road.
+There was a great solitude around us; the islets ahead, Monte
+Cristo and the Chateau d'If in full light, seemed to float
+towards us--so steady, so imperceptible was the progress of our
+boat.  "Keep her in the furrow of the moon," the patron directed
+me in a quiet murmur, sitting down ponderously in the stern-
+sheets and reaching for his pipe.
+
+The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to
+the westward of the islets; and presently, as we approached the
+spot, the boat we were going to relieve swam into our view
+suddenly, on her way home, cutting black and sinister into the
+wake of the moon under a sable wing, while to them our sail must
+have been a vision of white and dazzling radiance.  Without
+altering the course a hair's-breadth we slipped by each other
+within an oar's-length.  A drawling sardonic hail came out of
+her.  Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their
+feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst
+out, a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter, which lasted till
+the boats were stern to stern, theirs all bright now and with a
+shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black to their vision,
+and drawing away from them under a sable wing.  That
+extraordinary uproar died away almost as suddenly as it had
+begun; first one had enough of it and sat down, then another,
+then three or four together, and when all had left off with
+mutters and growling half-laughs the sound of hearty chuckling
+became audible, persistent, unnoticed.  The cowled grandfather
+was very much entertained somewhere within his hood.
+
+He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved
+the least bit.  He had remained quietly in his place against the
+foot of the mast.  I had been given to understand long before
+that he had the rating of a second-class able seaman (matelot
+leger) in the fleet which sailed from Toulon for the conquest of
+Algeria in the year of grace 1830.  And, indeed, I had seen and
+examined one of the buttons of his old brown patched coat, the
+only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin, with
+the words Equipages de ligne engraved on it.  That sort of
+button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons.
+"I preserved it from the time of my Navy Service," he explained,
+nodding rapidly his frail, vulture-like head.  It was not very
+likely that he had picked up that relic in the street.  He looked
+certainly old enough to have fought at Trafalgar--or at any rate
+to have played his little part there as a powder-monkey.  Shortly
+after we had been introduced he had informed me in a Franco-
+Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless jaws,
+that when he was a "shaver no higher than that" he had seen the
+Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba.  It was at night, he
+narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and
+Antibes in the open country.  A big fire had been lit at the side
+of the cross-roads.  The population from several villages had
+collected there, old and young--down to the very children in
+arms, because the women had refused to stay at home.  Tall
+soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood in a circle facing the
+people silently, and their stern eyes and big moustaches were
+enough to make everybody keep at a distance.  He, "being an
+impudent little shaver," wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on
+his hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs,
+and peeping through discovered standing perfectly still in the
+light of the fire "a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat,
+buttoned up in a long straight coat, with a big pale face,
+inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest.  His
+hands were clasped behind his back. . .It appears that this was
+the Emperor," the Ancient commented with a faint sigh.  He was
+staring from the ground with all his might, when "my poor
+father," who had been searching for his boy frantically
+everywhere, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.
+
+The tale seems an authentic recollection.  He related it to me
+many times, using the very same words.  The grandfather honoured
+me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection.  Extremes
+touch.  He was the oldest member by a long way in that Company,
+and I was, if I may say so, its temporarily adopted baby.  He had
+been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember;
+thirty--forty years.  He did not seem certain himself, but it
+could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the Pilot-
+office.  He had been pensioned off years before, but he went out
+from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the Company
+once confided to me in a whisper, "the old chap did no harm.  He
+was not in the way."  They treated him with rough deference.  One
+and another would address some insignificant remark to him now
+and again, but nobody really took any notice of what he had to
+say.  He had survived his strength, his usefulness, his very
+wisdom.  He wore long, green, worsted stockings, pulled up above
+the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen nightcap on his
+hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet.  Without his
+hooded cloak he looked like a peasant.  Half a dozen hands would
+be extended to help him on board, but afterwards he was left
+pretty much to his own thoughts.  Of course he never did any
+work, except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed:  "He,
+l'Ancien! let go the halyards there, at your hand"--or some such
+request of an easy kind.
+
+No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow
+of the hood.  He kept it up for a long time with intense
+enjoyment.  Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of
+mind which is easily amused.  But when his hilarity had exhausted
+itself, he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but
+quavering voice:
+
+"Can't expect much work on a night like this."
+
+No one took it up.  It was a mere truism.  Nothing under canvas
+could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy
+splendour and spiritual stillness.  We would have to glide idly
+to and fro, keeping our station within the appointed bearings,
+and, unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the dawn, we would land
+before sunrise on a small islet that, within two miles of us,
+shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to "break a crust and take
+a pull at the wine bottle."  I was familiar with the procedure.
+The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
+capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth
+amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood.  The crust
+broken, and the mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no
+more than that with this abstemious race--the pilots would pass
+the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and
+blowing into their nipped fingers.  One or two misanthropists
+would sit apart perched on boulders like man-like sea-fowl of
+solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip scandalously
+in little gesticulating knots; and there would be perpetually one
+or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with the
+long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
+piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
+brandishing and levelling movements.  Then about noon (it was a
+short turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours)
+another boatful of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer
+for the old Phoenician port, dominated, watched over from the
+ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by the red-and-white-striped pile
+of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
+
+All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my
+very recent experience.  But also something not foreseen by me
+did happen, something which causes me to remember my last outing
+with the pilots.  It was on this occasion that my hand touched,
+for the first time, the side of an English ship.
+
+No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little
+draught got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became
+bright and glassy with a clean, colourless light.  It was while
+we were all ashore on the islet that a steamer was picked up by
+the telescope, a black speck like an insect posed on the hard
+edge of the offing.  She emerged rapidly to her water-line and
+came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke
+slanting away from the rising sun.  We embarked in a hurry, and
+headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles
+an hour.
+
+She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be
+met on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super-
+structures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards
+on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear
+was not a matter of course in these days--and with them on the
+bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced,
+muffled up, with peaked caps--I suppose all her officers.  There
+are ships I have met more than once and known well by sight whose
+names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once so
+many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I have
+not forgotten.  How could I--the first English ship on whose side
+I ever laid my hand!  The name--I read it letter by letter on the
+bow--was "James Westoll."  Not very romantic you will say.  The
+name of a very considerable, well-known and universally respected
+North-country shipowner, I believe.  James Westoll!  What better
+name could an honourable hard-working ship have?  To me the very
+grouping of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her
+reality as I saw her floating motionless, and borrowing an ideal
+grace from the austere purity of the light.
+
+We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I
+volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to
+put the pilot on board while our boat, fanned by the faint air
+which had attended us all through the night, went on gliding
+gently past the black glistening length of the ship.  A few
+strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very
+first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English--the
+speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of
+the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and
+of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of
+remembered emotions--of my very dreams!  And if (after being thus
+fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not
+claim it aloud as my own, then, at any rate the speech of my
+children.  Thus small events grow memorable by the passage of
+time.  As to the quality of the address itself I cannot say it
+was very striking.  Too short for eloquence and devoid of all
+charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the three words "Look
+out there," growled out huskily above my head.
+
+It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy
+double chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up
+very high, even to the level of his breast-bone, by a pair of
+braces quite exposed to public view.  As where he stood there was
+no bulwark but only a rail and stanchions I was able to take in
+at a glance the whole of his voluminous person from his feet to
+the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat like an absurd
+flanged cone on his big head.  The grotesque and massive space of
+that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the lamp-
+trimmer) surprised me very much.  My course of reading, of
+dreaming and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea-
+brother of that sort.  I never met again a figure in the least
+like his except in the illustrations to Mr. W.W. Jacobs' most
+entertaining tales of barges and coasters; but the inspired
+talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun at poor, innocent
+sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its felicitous
+invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth, was
+not yet.  Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet.  I fancy that,
+at most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had
+achieved at that early date.
+
+Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have
+been prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise.  The
+object of his concise address was to call my attention to a rope
+which he incontinently flung down for me to catch.  I caught it,
+though it was not really necessary, the ship having no way on her
+by that time.  Then everything went on very swiftly.  The dinghy
+came with a slight bump against the steamer's side, the pilot,
+grabbing the rope ladder, had scrambled halfway up before I knew
+that our task of boarding was done; the harsh, muffled clanging
+of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear through the iron
+plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to "shove off--
+push hard"; and when I bore against the smooth flank of the first
+English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already
+throbbing under my open palm.
+
+Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the
+miniature lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there,
+hardly distinguishable against the land.  The dinghy danced a
+squashy, splashy jig in the wash of the wake and turning in my
+seat I followed the "James Westoll" with my eyes.  Before she had
+gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag as the harbour
+regulations prescribe for arriving and departing ships.  I saw it
+suddenly flicker and stream out on the flagstaff.  The Red
+Ensign!  In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing the drab
+and grey masses of that southern land, the livid islets, the sea
+of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that cold
+sunrise, it was as far as the eye could reach the only spot of
+ardent colour--flame-like, intense, and presently as minute as
+the tiny red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire
+kindles in the clear heart of a globe of crystal.  The Red
+Ensign--the symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide
+upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof
+over my head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Reminiscences, by Joseph Conrad
+
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