_
CHAPTER I
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration
may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a
river in the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to
look benignantly on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant
fancy that the shade of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be
(amongst other things) a descendant of Vikings--might have
hovered with amused interest over the decks of a 2000-ton steamer
called the "Adowa," on board of which, gripped by the inclement
winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter of "Almayer's
Folly" was begun. With interest, I say, for was not the kind
Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering voice the
last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like
hermit?
"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the
hills behind which the sun had sunk.". . .These words of
Almayer's romantic daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper
of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place. They
referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles and shaped themselves in my
mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas,
far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of the
northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual
youth, coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation:
"You've made it jolly warm in here."
It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a
tin under the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that
water will leak where steam will not. I am not aware of what my
young friend had been doing on deck all that morning, but the
hands he rubbed together vigorously were very red and imparted to
me a chilly feeling by their mere aspect. He has remained the
only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of
a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange
aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to
this sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the
strings under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"
It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and
simply turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive
secrecy: I could not have told him he had put to flight the
psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening speech of the tenth
chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which were to
follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night. I could not
have told him that Nina had said: "It has set at last." He
would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing
the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not
know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared,
though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with more
deference than, in our relative positions, I was strictly
entitled to.
He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking
through the port-hole. The round opening framed in its brass rim
a fragment of the quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen
ground and the tail-end of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a
blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned against the wheel. An idle,
strolling custom-house guard, belted over his blue capote, had
the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and the
monotony of official existence. The background of grimy houses
found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a
wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring
was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe
with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork,
corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering
the river. We had been shifted down there from another berth in
the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same port-hole
gave me a view of quite another sort of cafe--the best in the
town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his
wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere Renault, had some
refreshment after the memorable performance of an opera which was
the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of light
music.
I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern
Archipelago which I certainly hoped to see again. The story of
"Almayer's Folly" got put away under the pillow for that day. I
do not know that I had any occupation to keep me away from it;
the truth of the matter is that on board that ship we were
leading just then a contemplative life. I will not say anything
of my privileged position. I was there "just to oblige," as an
actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit
performance of a friend.
As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that
steamer at that time and in those circumstances. And perhaps I
was not even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship
"wants" an officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea
life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely
shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the well-
known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to
the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian
Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but there
was never anything tangible left from the F.C.T.C. It flourished
no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in
the dead of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure
and died before spring set in. But indubitably it was a company,
it had even a house-flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C.
artfully tangled up in a complicated monogram. We flew it at our
main-mast head, and now I have come to the conclusion that it was
the only flag of its kind in existence. All the same we on
board, for many days, had the impression of being a unit of a
large fleet with fortnightly departures for Montreal and Quebec
as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which came aboard in
a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we started
for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life of the F.C.T.C. lies
the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a
remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina
Almayer's story.
The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its
modest rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable
activity and the greatest devotion to his task. He is
responsible for what was my last association with a ship. I call
it that because it can hardly be called a sea-going experience.
Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to pay him the tribute
of affectionate familiarity at this distance of years--had very
sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the
whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He
organised for us courses of professional lectures, St. John
ambulance classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies
and members of Parliament on subjects touching the interests of
the service; and as to the oncoming of some inquiry or commission
relating to matters of the sea and to the work of seamen, it was
a perfect godsend to his need of exerting himself on our
corporate behalf. Together with this high sense of his official
duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a strong
disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent
master. And what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to
put him in the way of employment? Captain Froud did not see why
the Shipmasters' Society, besides its general guardianship of our
interests, should not be unofficially an employment agency of the
very highest class.
"I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come
to us for their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit
about our society, and I really don't see why they should not,"
he said once to me. "I am always telling the captains, too, that
all things being equal they ought to give preference to the
members of the society. In my position I can generally find for
them what they want amongst our members or our associate
members."
In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I
was very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were
a sort of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea,
could feel itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of
its choice--nearer there than on any other spot of the solid
earth. This resting-place used to be, at about five o'clock in
the afternoon, full of men and tobacco smoke, but Captain Froud
had the smaller room to himself and there he granted private
interviews, whose principal motive was to render service. Thus,
one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a crooked
finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.
"I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning," he said, getting
back to his desk and motioning me to a chair, "who is in want of
an officer. It's for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me
more than to be asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my
way. . ."
As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at
the closed door but he shook his head.
"Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of
them. But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship
wants an officer who can speak French fluently, and that's not so
easy to find. I do not know anybody myself but you. It's a
second officer's berth and, of course, you would not care. . .
would you now? I know that it isn't what you are looking for."
It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted
man who looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his
visions. But I admit that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a
man who could make a second officer for a steamer chartered by a
French company. I showed no sign of being haunted by the fate of
Nina and by the murmurs of tropical forests; and even my intimate
intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak character) had not put
a visible mark upon my features. For many years he and the world
of his story had been the companions of my imagination without, I
hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of sea
life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since
my return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day
of which I speak.
It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a
Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a
vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real
intercourse. I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore,
and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old
acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue. Before long, as was only
proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table and then
the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and gestures.
Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly
after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs
and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my attention.
They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the appeal,
I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems
now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of
these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand
to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground
of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of
hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth?
I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the
bearers of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a
printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated
in a decayed part of Belgravia. After all these years, each
leaving its evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly
say that it is a sentiment akin to piety which prompted me to
render in words assembled with conscientious care the memory of
things far distant and of men who had lived.
But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely
that I should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few
hours' notice the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer.
He explained to me that the ship was chartered by a French
company intending to establish a regular monthly line of sailings
from Rouen, for the transport of French emigrants to Canada.
But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me very much.
I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up the
reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it. But
the consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I
interviewed the Captain, and I believe we were impressed
favourably with each other. He explained that his chief mate was
an excellent man in every respect and that he could not think of
dismissing him so as to give me the higher position; but that if
I consented to come as second officer I would be given certain
special advantages--and so on.
I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
"I am sure," he insisted, "you will get on first rate with Mr.
Paramor."
I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was
in those circumstances that what was to be my last connection
with a ship began. And after all there was not even one single
trip. It may be that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of
that written word on my forehead which apparently forbade me,
through all my sea wanderings, ever to achieve the crossing of
the Western Ocean--using the words in that special sense in which
sailors speak of Western Ocean trade, of Western Ocean packets,
of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life attended closely upon
the old and the nine chapters of "Almayer's Folly" went with me
to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we started for Rouen.
I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man fated
never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of the
Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a
single passage. It might have been that of course; but the
obvious, gross obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four
hundred and sixty bunks for emigrants were put together in the
'tween decks by industrious carpenters while we lay in the
Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant turned up in Rouen--of
which, being a humane person, I confess I was glad. Some
gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and one
was said to be the Chairman--turned up indeed and went from end
to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the
deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it
that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough,
though, obviously, they had never seen anything of the sort
before. Their faces as they went ashore wore a cheerfully
inconclusive expression. Notwithstanding that this inspecting
ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to immediate sailing,
it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I received the
inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
charter-party would ever take place.
It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place.
When we first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony
well towards the centre of the town, and, all the street corners
being placarded with the tricolour posters announcing the birth
of our company, the petit bourgeois with his wife and family made
a Sunday holiday from the inspection of the ship. I was always
in evidence in my best uniform to give information as though I
had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter, while our quarter-
masters reaped a harvest of small change from personally
conducted parties. But when the move was made--that move which
carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the
desolation of solitude became our lot. It was a complete and
soundless stagnation; for, as we had the ship ready for sea to
the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the days short, we
were absolutely idle--idle to the point of blushing with shame
when the thought struck us that all the time our salaries went
on. Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, we could not
enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like this all
day: even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to
prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The
good Paramor--he was really a most excellent fellow--became
unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature, till one
dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should
employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up
on deck and turning them end for end.
For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. "Excellent idea!" but
directly his face fell. "Why. . .Yes! But we can't make that
job last more than three days," he muttered discontentedly. I
don't know how long he expected us to be stuck on the riverside
outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables got hauled up and
turned end for end according to my satanic suggestion, put down
again, and their very existence utterly forgotten, I believe,
before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down,
empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think that this
state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of
Almayer and his daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some
sort of evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as
related above, had arrested them short at the point of that
fateful sunset for many weeks together. It was always thus with
this book, begun in '89 and finished in '94--with that shortest
of all the novels which it was to be my lot to write. Between
its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner in his
wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the
God of Islam--"The Merciful, the Compassionate"--which closes the
book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to
use the elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the
scenes (some of them) of my childhood and the realisation of
childhood's vain words, expressing a light-hearted and romantic
whim.
It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while
looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on
the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that
continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an
amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:
"When I grow up I shall go there."
And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of
a century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin
of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes.
I did go there: there being the region of Stanley Falls which in
'68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured
surface. And the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," carried about me as
if it were a talisman or a treasure, went there too. That it
ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of
Providence; because a good many of my other properties,
infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind
through unfortunate accidents of transportation. I call to mind,
for instance, a specially awkward turn of the Congo between
Kinchassa and Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to
take it at night in a big canoe with only half the proper number
of paddlers. I failed in being the second white man on record
drowned at that interesting spot through the upsetting of a
canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer, but the accident
happened some months before my time, and he, too, I believe, was
going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still he was
going home. I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with
"Almayer's Folly" amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at
that delectable capital Boma, where before the departure of the
steamer which was to take me home I had the time to wish myself
dead over and over again with perfect sincerity. At that date
there were in existence only seven chapters of "Almayer's Folly,"
but the chapter in my history which followed was that of a long,
long illness and very dismal convalescence. Geneva, or more
precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is rendered
for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in the
history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth
are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper
management of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm
whose name does not matter. But that work, undertaken to
accustom myself again to the activities of a healthy existence,
soon came to an end. The earth had nothing to hold me with for
very long. And then that memorable story, like a cask of choice
Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the sea.
Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of course I
would not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it
certainly did nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a
faded look and an ancient, yellowish complexion. It became at
last unreasonable to suppose that anything in the world would
ever happen to Almayer and Nina. And yet something most unlikely
to happen on the high seas was to wake them up from their state
of suspended animation.
What is it that Novalis says? "It is certain my conviction gains
infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it." And what
is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence
strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer
than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected
episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo rapids brought it to
the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open sea. It
would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young
Cambridge man (he was a "passenger for his health" on board the
good ship Torrens outward bound to Australia) who was the first
reader of "Almayer's Folly"--the very first reader I ever had.
"Would it bore you very much reading a MS. in a handwriting like
mine?" I asked him one evening on a sudden impulse at the end of
a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History.
Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy
dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his own
travelling store.
"Not at all," he answered with his courteous intonation and a
faint smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused
curiosity gave him a watchful expression. I wonder what he
expected to see. A poem, maybe. All that's beyond guessing now.
He was not a cold but a calm man, still more subdued by disease--
a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general
intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our
sixty passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look.
In his attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic
voice he asked:
"What is this?" "It is a sort of tale," I answered with an
effort. "It is not even finished yet. Nevertheless I would like
to know what you think of it." He put the MS. in the breast-
pocket of his jacket; I remember perfectly his thin brown fingers
folding it lengthwise. "I will read it tomorrow," he remarked,
seizing the door-handle, and then, watching the roll of the ship
for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone. In the
moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the
swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens, and the subdued,
as if distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the growing
disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in
another half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails
would have to come off the ship.
Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered
my cabin. He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and
the MS. was in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look
but without a word. I took it in silence. He sat down on the
couch and still said nothing. I opened and shut a drawer under
my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide open in its
wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book I
was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I turned
my back squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques never
offered a word. "Well, what do you say?" I asked at last. "Is
it worth finishing?" This question expressed exactly the whole
of my thoughts.
"Distinctly," he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then
coughed a little.
"Were you interested?" I inquired further almost in a whisper.
"Very much!"
In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of
the ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain
of my bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the
bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin
door rattled slightly in the gusts of wind. It was in latitude
40 south, and nearly in the longitude of Greenwich, as far as I
can remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's and Nina's
resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged silence it
occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in
its action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were
being born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the
whistle of the officer of the watch and remained on the alert to
catch the order that was to follow this call to attention. It
reached me as a faint, fierce shout to "Square the yards."
"Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly blow coming on." Then I
turned to my very first reader who, alas! was not to live long
enough to know the end of the tale.
"Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to
you as it stands?"
He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
"Yes! Perfectly."
This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
"Almayer's Folly." We never spoke together of the book again. A
long period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but
for my duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to
keep close in his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first
reader of my prose went at once up-country, and died rather
suddenly in the end, either in Australia or it may be on the
passage while going home through the Suez Canal. I am not sure
which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard precisely;
though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
passengers who, wandering about to "see the country" during the
ship's stay in port, had come upon him here and there. At last
we sailed, homeward bound, and still not one line was added to
the careless scrawl of the many pages which poor Jacques had had
the patience to read with the very shadows of Eternity gathering
already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes.
The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final
"Distinctly" remained dormant, yet alive to await its
opportunity. I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled,
now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was
compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow
upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on
and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One--
one for all men and for all occupations.
I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more
mysterious and more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in
going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity. Let me confess here
that I was never one of those wonderful fellows that would go
afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, and if I may pride
myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the same with my
writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages, and
could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line; but
I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not consent to
write without something at least resembling a chair. Line by
line, rather than page by page, was the growth of "Almayer's
Folly."
And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now
to the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse
railway station (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to
Poland, or more precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy
morning changing trains in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a
refreshment-room. A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager rescued
it. Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the MS. but of all
the other things that were packed in the bag.
In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were
never exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while
the bag lay open on a chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at
a sporting club. A friend of my childhood (he had been in the
Diplomatic Service, but had turned to growing wheat on paternal
acres, and we had not seen each other for over twenty years) was
sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off there.
"You might tell me something of your life while you are
dressing," he suggested kindly.
I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or
later. The talk of the select little party with which he made me
dine was extremely animated and embraced most subjects under
heaven, from big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem
published in a very modernist review, edited by the very young
and patronised by the highest society. But it never touched upon
"Almayer's Folly," and next morning, in uninterrupted obscurity,
this inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the south-
east direction towards the Government of Kiev.
At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from
the railway station to the country house which was my
destination.
"Dear boy" (these words were always written in English), so ran
the last letter from that house received in London,--"Get
yourself driven to the only inn in the place, dine as well as you
can, and some time in the evening my own confidential servant,
factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S. (I warn you he is of noble
extraction), will present himself before you, reporting the
arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next
day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on
the road."
Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an
enormous barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door
opened and, in a travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin
cap and a short coat girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of
noble extraction), a man of about thirty-five, appeared with an
air of perplexity on his open and moustachioed countenance. I
got up from the table and greeted him in Polish, with, I hope,
the right shade of consideration demanded by his noble blood and
his confidential position. His face cleared up in a wonderful
way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our
understanding each other. He imagined I would talk to him in
some foreign language. I was told that his last words on getting
into the sledge to come to meet me shaped an anxious exclamation:
"Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to
make myself understood to our master's nephew."
We understood each other very well from the first. He took
charge of me as if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful
boyish feeling of coming home from school when he muffled me up
next morning in an enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and took
his seat protectively by my side. The sledge was a very small
one and it looked utterly insignificant, almost like a toy behind
the four big bays harnessed two and two. We three, counting the
coachman, filled it completely. He was a young fellow with clear
blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur coat framed his
cheery countenance and stood all round level with the top of his
head.
"Now, Joseph," my companion addressed him, "do you think we shall
manage to get home before six?" His answer was that we would
surely, with God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts
in the long stretch between certain villages whose names came
with an extremely familiar sound to my ears. He turned out an
excellent coachman with an instinct for keeping the road amongst
the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of getting the best
out of his horses.
"He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain
remembers. He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother
of holy memory," remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my
feet.
I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
grandmother. Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the
first time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-
in-hand whip outside the doors of the coach-house.
"What became of him?" I asked. "He is no longer serving, I
suppose."
"He served our master," was the reply. "But he died of cholera
ten years ago now--that great epidemic we had. And his wife died
at the same time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the
only boy that was left."
The MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was reposing in the bag under our
feet.
I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the
travels of my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the
snow in full view as if it were setting on the sea. It was
twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land;
and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid
expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining
a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees
about a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking
through a screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
That very evening the wandering MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was
unpacked and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my
room, the guest-room which had been, I was informed in an
affectedly careless tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or
so. It attracted no attention from the affectionate presence
hovering round the son of the favourite sister.
"You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with
me, brother," he said--this form of address borrowed from the
speech of our peasants being the usual expression of the highest
good humour in a moment of affectionate elation. "I shall be
always coming in for a chat."
As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the
retirement of his study where the principal feature was a
colossal silver inkstand presented to him on his fiftieth year by
a subscription of all his wards then living. He had been
guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from the three
southern provinces--ever since the year 1860. Some of them had
been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls
or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two
were older than myself--considerably older, too. One of them, a
visitor I remember in my early years, was the man who first put
me on horseback, and his four-horse bachelor turn-out, his
perfect horsemanship and general skill in manly exercises was one
of my earliest admirations. I seem to remember my mother looking
on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as I was
lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know, by the very Joseph--
the groom attached specially to my grandmother's service--who
died of cholera. It was certainly a young man in a dark blue,
tail-less coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery
of the men about the stables. It must have been in 1864, but
reckoning by another mode of calculating time, it was certainly
in the year in which my mother obtained permission to travel
south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had
followed my father. For that, too, she had had to ask
permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that favour
was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile
herself. Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest
brother who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts
of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St.
Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this
permission--it was officially called the "Highest Grace"--of a
three months' leave from exile.
This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my
mother with more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed,
silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding
sweetness; and I also remember the great gathering of all the
relations from near and far, and the grey heads of the family
friends paying her the homage of respect and love in the house of
her favourite brother who, a few years later, was to take the
place for me of both my parents.
I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the
time, though indeed I remember that doctors also came. There
were no signs of invalidism about her--but I think that already
they had pronounced her doom unless perhaps the change to a
southern climate could re-establish her declining strength. For
me it seems the very happiest period of my existence. There was
my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl, some months
younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as if she
were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and
not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung
the oppressive shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow
lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered
by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the
ill-omened rising of 1863.
This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the
public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of
an uneasy egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant
in their appeal. It is meet that something more should be left
for the novelist's children than the colours and figures of his
own hard-won creation. That which in their grown-up years may
appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of
their natures and perhaps must remain for ever obscure even to
themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
personalities are remotely derived.
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme
master of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of
authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety
towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a
writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own
experience.
Content of CHAPTER I [Joseph Conrad's book: Some Reminiscences]
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