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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Personal Record, 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: A Personal Record
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #687]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PERSONAL RECORD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+A PERSONAL RECORD
+
+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 commands 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
+among 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. Among 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 among
+either 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, friend ships 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, among
+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 recommend. 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 toward 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
+onward 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 of either 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 recognized with smiling com passion
+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 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 my self 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 can you 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 upward 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. A historian of hearts is
+not a 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, among 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 danger
+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 defense 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 defense 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.
+
+
+
+
+A PERSONAL RECORD
+
+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 (among other things) a
+descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
+the docks of a 2,000-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 mustaches 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 gray 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 night-cap
+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 mainmast 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
+organized 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 among 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 pity
+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 toward the
+centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with
+the tricolor 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 quartermasters 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 realization 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” among 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 forever 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 in 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 bring 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 to-morrow,” 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 farthest, the topgallant 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 if 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, while 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 one another 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 crossed-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 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 the 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 patronized 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 southeast direction toward 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 majordomo, 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 sheepskin 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 mustached 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 bearskin 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 among 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 that 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 affectionately 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 school fellows 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 four 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 gray 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 forever
+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 toward all things human
+which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions
+of the man reviewing his own experience.
+
+
+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 snow track; 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 mustaches 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 bells, 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 your 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 realized 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 around 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 at tending 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 Potocka, where our invalid
+mother was staying then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got
+stuck in a snow drift. 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 greatcoats and used all their own rugs to wrap her up
+against the cold, notwithstanding her protests, positive orders, and
+even struggles, as Valery afterward 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 afterward
+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 briskly, 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; afterward captain in the 2d 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, 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 granduncle 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 among 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 Cossacks' 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
+the 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 granduncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed
+gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, etc., 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
+plowshares and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of
+fantastic meals of salt junk and hardtack 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. Oh, amiable and natural weakness!
+Oh, 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 afterward, jolly enough in a
+way and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which
+I speak was the year of my last school-boy 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 Fluelen, 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 a hotel; it had even a name, which I have forgotten. But
+there was no gold laced doorkeeper 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 sur mounts 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 up stairs 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 eleven o'clock.” This statement surprised me; I had heard no noise
+whatever, having slept like a top.
+
+We went down-stairs 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 curtained 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 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 reason 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
+toward 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 toward 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 toward 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 scandalized
+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 think not only 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, unrealized, 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 onto 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 of protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of
+this world's wrong 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, no where 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?
+
+
+III
+
+The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by my
+granduncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and famished
+scarecrows, symbolized, 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 upward 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 generalizing. 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 granduncle 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 some where 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 among 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 only the 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 two hundred 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 a 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--demigods 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 among 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
+un schreckbar (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 grand father--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 turnout 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 some thing
+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
+heartbroken, 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 burned 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 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 those 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 battle-field
+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 organization, it took no part in the
+wars of the Russian Empire against either 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 among 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. Astrakan 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 agonizing 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 organizers 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,
+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 afterward by the servant to my
+granduncle'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 granduncle 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 among 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 among 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, onto 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, toward 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 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. But 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 in side 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 afterward 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 grandnephew, 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
+gouvernante, 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 toward 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 timidites 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 afterward 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 afterward, 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 right 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.
+
+
+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 of 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 among those 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 seldom 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 match-box 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 match-box
+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 ash-bin 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 anemic.
+
+“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. What ever 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 afterward 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 for 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 calkers' 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 Shakespearian 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 the tracings
+of India 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 burned 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 pajamas 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 civilized
+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-sky light 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 overheard
+more of Almayer's name among 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 pajamas 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 till this evening,” he remarked, suspiciously.
+
+I didn'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 the 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 in 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 some thing, 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
+spoiled 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 laying 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 the 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 all had 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, scandalized.
+
+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 requirements 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 bath-room, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick, damp,
+iron-gray 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 toward 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 veranda. 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 pajamas 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 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 select 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 realize . . . it's impossible
+to realize. . . .” 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 fore knowledge to counterbalance 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.
+
+
+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 post-cards. 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--till next week, as like
+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 anemic
+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 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 aggrandizement, 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 among 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 imagined phrases--even he has
+his place among kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes,
+cabinet ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
+Kafirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and
+constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
+itself.
+
+Here I perceive (without speaking offense) 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 among 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, everyone 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 recognize 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 among 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
+hairbreadth 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
+farm-house 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
+courtesies. 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 specialty. 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 in 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 characterize other wise
+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
+overmatched 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 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 burned at the end of the day--the litter of a cruel
+battle-field, 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 realizing 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 gray-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. Afterward 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 afterward, 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 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.
+
+
+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, they 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 has 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 among 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 among 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, not
+withstanding 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
+toward 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) Mr. 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 among 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 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 could 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 mustache, 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 light-headed 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 doorkeeper 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 really would not mind 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 Giugliano (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 conditions of weather,
+season, locality, etc.--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 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 apologized 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 sand-banks--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 thank fully--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 my self to be examined for master
+the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face
+in gray, 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 three-thousand-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 of 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 toward 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 forever 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;
+but 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 among English
+ships; other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts,
+sold chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, calkers, shipwrights.
+
+His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
+Pilots. I made acquaintances among these people, but mainly among 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 lookout, 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 daft 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 molded 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 some times,
+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 among 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.
+
+
+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 recognize 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 frostbound 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 around 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 toward 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
+mustache 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 break water 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, overpowering
+moon rays 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 daft in full light, seemed to float toward 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 drew 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
+mustaches 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 every
+where, 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 afterward 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
+manlike 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-gray, 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 superstructures, 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 peak 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
+ship-owner, 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 breastbone, 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 aspect 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's 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 for the rope ladder, had
+scrambled half-way 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 toward 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
+flag staff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere
+bathing the drab and gray 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 A Personal Record, by Joseph Conrad
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