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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad
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+#11 in our series by Joseph Conrad
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+A Personal Record
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+by Joseph Conrad
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+October 1996 [Etext #687]
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+
+Note:  I have omitted the running heads ["A FAMILIAR PREFACE" and
+"A PERSONAL RECORD"], and have made the following changes to
+the text:
+PAGE  LINE  ORIGINAL          CHANGED TO
+ 129     18  thinkin          thinking
+ 176     8  now          now.
+ 207    14  ful          full.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 soft 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 be cause 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 for bade 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 an other 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 an other as leagues used to follow in the days
+gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth
+itself, is One--one for all men and for all occupations.
+
+I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more
+mysterious and more wonderful to me.  Still, in writing, as in
+going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity.  Let me confess here
+that I was never one of those wonderful fellows that would go
+afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, and if I may pride
+myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the same with my
+writing.  Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages, and
+could do it, perhaps, sitting 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 every
+body.  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 over borne 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 al lowed 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 in 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 as sure 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 gang way 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 them selves.
+
+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 with out 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 up setting 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.  How
+ever 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
+man kind, 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.  Ever thing 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 where in 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 round about
+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 mi managed.  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. I t 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 Project Gutenberg's Etext of A Personal Record by Conrad
+