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SOME REMINISCENCES
by
Joseph Conrad




A Familiar Preface.

As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly
suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure.  I defended
myself with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the
friendly voice insisted:  "You know, you really must."

It was not an argument, but I submitted at once.  If one must!. . .

You perceive the force of a word.  He who wants to persuade
should put his trust, not in the right argument, but in the right
word.  The power of sound has always been greater than the power
of sense.  I don't say this by way of disparagement.  It is
better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective.  Nothing
humanely great--great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass of
lives--has come from reflection.  On the other hand, you cannot
fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
instance, or Pity.  I won't mention any more.  They are not far
to seek.  Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with
conviction, these two by their sound alone have set whole nations
in motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our
whole social fabric.  There's "virtue" for you if you like!. . .
Of course the accent must be attended to.  The right accent.
That's very important.  The capacious lung, the thundering or the
tender vocal chords.  Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever.
He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination.
Mathematics command all my respect, but I have no use for
engines.  Give me the right word and the right accent and I will
move the world.

What a dream--for a writer!  Because written words have their
accent too.  Yes!  Let me only find the right word!  Surely it
must be lying somewhere amongst the wreckage of all the plaints
and all the exultations poured out aloud since the first day when
hope, the undying, came down on earth.  It may be there, close
by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand.  But it's no good.  I
believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a pottle of
hay at the first try.  For myself, I have never had such luck.

And then there is that accent.  Another difficulty.  For who is
going to tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word
is shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind
leaving the world unmoved.  Once upon a time there lived an
Emperor who was a sage and something of a literary man.  He
jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflections which
chance has preserved for the edification of posterity.  Amongst
other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember this solemn
admonition:  "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth."
The accent of heroic truth!  This is very fine, but I am thinking
that it is an easy matter for an austere Emperor to jot down
grandiose advice.  Most of the working truths on this earth are
humble, not heroic:  and there have been times in the history of
mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to nothing
but derision.

Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book
words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible
heroism.  However humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess
that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me.  They are
more fit for a moralist than for an artist.  Truth of a modest
sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.  That complete,
praise-worthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the
hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with
one's friends.

"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression.  I can't imagine
either amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for
something to do as to quarrel with me.  "To disappoint one's
friends" would be nearer the mark.  Most, almost all, friendships
of the writing period of my life have come to me through my
books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work.  He stands
there, the only reality in an invented world, amongst imaginary
things, happenings, and people.  Writing about them, he is only
writing about himself.  But the disclosure is not complete.  He
remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected
rather than a seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the
draperies of fiction.  In these personal notes there is no such
veil.  And I cannot help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation
of Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly,
says that "there are persons esteemed on their reputation who by
showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them."  This is
the danger incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk
about himself without disguise.

While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was
remonstrated with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form
of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes.  It
seems that I am not sufficiently literary.  Indeed a man who
never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring
himself to look upon his existence and his experience, upon the
sum of his thoughts, sensations and emotions, upon his memories
and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as only so
much material for his hands.  Once before, some three years ago,
when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of impressions
and memories, the same remarks were made to me.  Practical
remarks.  But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of
thrift they recommended.  I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea,
its ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much
which has gone to make me what I am.  That seemed to me the only
shape in which I could offer it to their shades.  There could not
be a question in my mind of anything else.  It is quite possible
that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am
incorrigible.

Having matured in the surroundings and under the special
conditions of sea-life, I have a special piety towards that form
of my past; for its impressions were vivid, its appeal direct,
its demands such as could be responded to with the natural
elation of youth and strength equal to the call.  There was
nothing in them to perplex a young conscience.  Having broken
away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed
by great distances from such natural affections as were still
left to me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the
totally unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me
so mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through
the blind force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world
and the merchant service my only home for a long succession of
years.  No wonder then that in my two exclusively sea books, "The
Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" and "The Mirror of the Sea" (and in
the few short sea stories like "Youth" and "Typhoon"), I have
tried with an almost filial regard to render the vibration of
life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple
men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures
of their hands and the objects of their care.

One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to
memories and seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made
up one's mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what
it is, or praise it for what it is not, or--generally--to teach
it how to behave.  Being neither quarrelsome, nor a flatterer,
nor a sage, I have done none of these things; and I am prepared
to put up serenely with the insignificance which attaches to
persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other. But
resignation is not indifference.  I would not like to be left
standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream
carrying onwards so many lives.  I would fain claim for myself
the faculty of so much insight as can be expressed in a voice of
sympathy and compassion.

It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of
criticism I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim
acceptance of facts; of what the French would call secheresse du
coeur.  Fifteen years of unbroken silence before praise or blame
testify sufficiently to my respect for criticism, that fine
flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.  But this
is more of a personal matter, reaching the man behind the work,
and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume which is a
personal note in the margin of the public page.  Not that I feel
hurt in the least.  The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.

My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an
element of autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since
the creator can only express himself in his creation--then there
are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.
I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint.  It is often
merely temperamental.  But it is not always a sign of coldness.
It may be pride.  There can be nothing more humiliating than to
see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either of laughter
or tears.  Nothing more humiliating!  And this for the reason
that should the mark be missed, should the open display of
emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust
or contempt.  No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a
risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront
with impunity.  In a task which mainly consists in laying one's
soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even
at the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity
which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.

And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad
on this earth.  The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon
itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not
all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man august
in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be
recognised with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of
us all.  Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other,
mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as
mysterious as an over-shadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still,
on the distant edge of the horizon.

Yes!  I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command
over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest
achievement of imaginative literature.  Only, to be a great
magician one must surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible
powers, either outside or within one's own breast.  We have all
heard of simple men selling their souls for love or power to some
grotesque devil.  The most ordinary intelligence can perceive
without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be
a fool's bargain.  I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
of my dislike and distrust of such transactions.  It may be my
sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a
positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full
possession of myself which is the first condition of good
service.  And I have carried my notion of good service from my
earlier into my later existence.  I, who have never sought in the
written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful, I have
carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act, I suppose,
I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable
company of pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for
himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the
consistent narrowness of his outlook.  But I have never been able
to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful, out of
deference for some general principle.  Whether there be any
courage in making this admission I know not.  After the middle
turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil
mind.  So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always
suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
emotions the debasing touch of insincerity.  In order to move
others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried
away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently
enough perhaps and of necessity, like an actor who raises his
voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation--but
still we have to do that.  And surely this is no great sin.  But
the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own
exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the
end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his
insistent emotion.  From laughter and tears the descent is easy
to snivelling and giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound
morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity.  It
is his clear duty.  And least of all you can condemn an artist
pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim.  In
that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking
for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no
policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of
opinion to keep him within bounds.  Who then is going to say Nay
to his temptations if not his conscience?

And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of
perfectly open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except
those which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of
mankind.  All intellectual and artistic ambitions are
permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity.
They can hurt no one.  If they are mad, then so much the worse
for the artist.  Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions
are their own reward.  Is it such a very mad presumption to
believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other
means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
appeal of one's work?  To try to go deeper is not to be
insensible.  An historian of hearts is not an historian of
emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be,
since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears.
The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity.  They
are worthy of respect too.  And he is not insensible who pays
them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob,
and of a smile which is not a grin.  Resignation, not mystic, not
detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by
love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible
to become a sham.

Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom.  I am too
much the creature of my time for that.  But I think that the
proper wisdom is to will what the gods will without perhaps being
certain what their will is--or even if they have a will of their
own.  And in this matter of life and art it is not the Why that
matters so much to our happiness as the How.  As the Frenchman
said, "Il y a toujours la maniere."  Very true.  Yes.  There is
the manner.  The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love.
The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human
face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to
look at their kind.

Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must
be as old as the hills.  It rests notably, amongst others, on the
idea of Fidelity.  At a time when nothing which is not
revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much
attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings.  The
revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees
one from all scruples as regards ideas.  Its hard, absolute
optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
intolerance it contains.  No doubt one should smile at these
things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.  All
claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
from which a philosophical mind should be free. . .

I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be
unduly discursive.  I have never been very well acquainted with
the art of conversation--that art which, I understand, is
supposed to be lost now.  My young days, the days when one's
habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with
long silences.  Such voices as broke into them were anything but
conversational.  No.  I haven't got the habit.  Yet this
discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
follow.  They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime),
with unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety).  I was
told severely that the public would view with displeasure the
informal character of my recollections.  "Alas!" I protested
mildly.  "Could I begin with the sacramental words, 'I was born
on such a date in such a place'?  The remoteness of the locality
would have robbed the statement of all interest.  I haven't lived
through wonderful adventures to be related seriatim.  I haven't
known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous remarks.  I
haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs.  This is
but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't
written it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own."

But my objector was not placated.  These were good reasons for
not writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already,
he said.

I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve
as a good reason for not writing at all.  But since I have
written them, all I want to say in their defence is that these
memories put down without any regard for established conventions
have not been thrown off without system and purpose.  They have
their hope and their aim.  The hope that from the reading of
these pages there may emerge at last the vision of a personality;
the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar as, for
instance, "Almayer's Folly" and "The Secret Agent"--and yet a
coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its
action.  This is the hope.  The immediate aim, closely associated
with the hope, is to give the record of personal memories by
presenting faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with
the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the
sea.

In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend
here and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.

J.C.K.


Chapter I.

Books may be written in all sorts of places.  Verbal inspiration
may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a
river in the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to
look benignantly on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant
fancy that the shade of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be
(amongst other things) a descendant of Vikings--might have
hovered with amused interest over the decks of a 2000-ton steamer
called the "Adowa," on board of which, gripped by the inclement
winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter of "Almayer's
Folly" was begun.  With interest, I say, for was not the kind
Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering voice the
last of the Romantics?  Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like
hermit?

"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the
hills behind which the sun had sunk.". . .These words of
Almayer's romantic daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper
of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place.  They
referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles and shaped themselves in my
mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas,
far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of the
northern hemisphere.  But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual
youth, coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation:
"You've made it jolly warm in here."

It was warm.  I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a
tin under the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that
water will leak where steam will not.  I am not aware of what my
young friend had been doing on deck all that morning, but the
hands he rubbed together vigorously were very red and imparted to
me a chilly feeling by their mere aspect.  He has remained the
only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of
a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange
aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
written with an exclusive view to his person.  When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it.  He proceeded to
this sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the
strings under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:

"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"

It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and
simply turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive
secrecy:  I could not have told him he had put to flight the
psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening speech of the tenth
chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which were to
follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.  I could not
have told him that Nina had said:  "It has set at last."  He
would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing
the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire.  I did not
know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared,
though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with more
deference than, in our relative positions, I was strictly
entitled to.

He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking
through the port-hole.  The round opening framed in its brass rim
a fragment of the quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen
ground and the tail-end of a great cart.  A red-nosed carter in a
blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned against the wheel.  An idle,
strolling custom-house guard, belted over his blue capote, had
the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and the
monotony of official existence.  The background of grimy houses
found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a
wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud.  The colouring
was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe
with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork,
corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering
the river.  We had been shifted down there from another berth in
the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same port-hole
gave me a view of quite another sort of cafe--the best in the
town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his
wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere Renault, had some
refreshment after the memorable performance of an opera which was
the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of light
music.

I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern
Archipelago which I certainly hoped to see again.  The story of
"Almayer's Folly" got put away under the pillow for that day.  I
do not know that I had any occupation to keep me away from it;
the truth of the matter is that on board that ship we were
leading just then a contemplative life.  I will not say anything
of my privileged position.  I was there "just to oblige," as an
actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit
performance of a friend.

As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that
steamer at that time and in those circumstances.  And perhaps I
was not even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship
"wants" an officer.  It was the first and last instance in my sea
life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely
shadowy to my apprehension.  I do not mean this for the well-
known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to
the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian
Transport Company.  A death leaves something behind, but there
was never anything tangible left from the F.C.T.C.  It flourished
no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in
the dead of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure
and died before spring set in.  But indubitably it was a company,
it had even a house-flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C.
artfully tangled up in a complicated monogram.  We flew it at our
main-mast head, and now I have come to the conclusion that it was
the only flag of its kind in existence.  All the same we on
board, for many days, had the impression of being a unit of a
large fleet with fortnightly departures for Montreal and Quebec
as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which came aboard in
a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we started
for Rouen, France.  And in the shadowy life of the F.C.T.C. lies
the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a
remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina
Almayer's story.

The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its
modest rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable
activity and the greatest devotion to his task.  He is
responsible for what was my last association with a ship.  I call
it that because it can hardly be called a sea-going experience.
Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to pay him the tribute
of affectionate familiarity at this distance of years--had very
sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the
whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine.  He
organised for us courses of professional lectures, St. John
ambulance classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies
and members of Parliament on subjects touching the interests of
the service; and as to the oncoming of some inquiry or commission
relating to matters of the sea and to the work of seamen, it was
a perfect godsend to his need of exerting himself on our
corporate behalf.  Together with this high sense of his official
duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a strong
disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent
master.  And what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to
put him in the way of employment?  Captain Froud did not see why
the Shipmasters' Society, besides its general guardianship of our
interests, should not be unofficially an employment agency of the
very highest class.

"I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come
to us for their men.  There is nothing of a trade-union spirit
about our society, and I really don't see why they should not,"
he said once to me.  "I am always telling the captains, too, that
all things being equal they ought to give preference to the
members of the society.  In my position I can generally find for
them what they want amongst our members or our associate
members."

In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I
was very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were
a sort of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea,
could feel itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of
its choice--nearer there than on any other spot of the solid
earth.  This resting-place used to be, at about five o'clock in
the afternoon, full of men and tobacco smoke, but Captain Froud
had the smaller room to himself and there he granted private
interviews, whose principal motive was to render service.  Thus,
one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a crooked
finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.

"I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning," he said, getting
back to his desk and motioning me to a chair, "who is in want of
an officer.  It's for a steamship.  You know, nothing pleases me
more than to be asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my
way. . ."

As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at
the closed door but he shook his head.

"Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of
them.  But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship
wants an officer who can speak French fluently, and that's not so
easy to find.  I do not know anybody myself but you.  It's a
second officer's berth and, of course, you would not care. . .
would you now?  I know that it isn't what you are looking for."

It was not.  I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted
man who looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his
visions.  But I admit that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a
man who could make a second officer for a steamer chartered by a
French company.  I showed no sign of being haunted by the fate of
Nina and by the murmurs of tropical forests; and even my intimate
intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak character) had not put
a visible mark upon my features.  For many years he and the world
of his story had been the companions of my imagination without, I
hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of sea
life.  I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since
my return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day
of which I speak.

It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a
Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a
vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real
intercourse.  I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore,
and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old
acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue.  Before long, as was only
proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table and then
the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and gestures.
Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly
after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs
and half-castes.  They did not clamour aloud for my attention.
They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the appeal,
I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity.  It seems
now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of
these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand
to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground
of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of
hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth?

I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the
bearers of any gifts of profit or fame.  There was no vision of a
printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated
in a decayed part of Belgravia.  After all these years, each
leaving its evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly
say that it is a sentiment akin to piety which prompted me to
render in words assembled with conscientious care the memory of
things far distant and of men who had lived.

But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely
that I should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few
hours' notice the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer.
He explained to me that the ship was chartered by a French
company intending to establish a regular monthly line of sailings
from Rouen, for the transport of French emigrants to Canada.
But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me very much.
I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up the
reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it.  But
the consideration was just for form's sake.  The next day I
interviewed the Captain, and I believe we were impressed
favourably with each other.  He explained that his chief mate was
an excellent man in every respect and that he could not think of
dismissing him so as to give me the higher position; but that if
I consented to come as second officer I would be given certain
special advantages--and so on.

I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.

"I am sure," he insisted, "you will get on first rate with Mr.
Paramor."

I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was
in those circumstances that what was to be my last connection
with a ship began.  And after all there was not even one single
trip.  It may be that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of
that written word on my forehead which apparently forbade me,
through all my sea wanderings, ever to achieve the crossing of
the Western Ocean--using the words in that special sense in which
sailors speak of Western Ocean trade, of Western Ocean packets,
of Western Ocean hard cases.  The new life attended closely upon
the old and the nine chapters of "Almayer's Folly" went with me
to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we started for Rouen.
I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man fated
never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of the
Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a
single passage.  It might have been that of course; but the
obvious, gross obstacle was clearly the want of money.  Four
hundred and sixty bunks for emigrants were put together in the
'tween decks by industrious carpenters while we lay in the
Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant turned up in Rouen--of
which, being a humane person, I confess I was glad.  Some
gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and one
was said to be the Chairman--turned up indeed and went from end
to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the
deck-beams.  I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it
that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough,
though, obviously, they had never seen anything of the sort
before.  Their faces as they went ashore wore a cheerfully
inconclusive expression.  Notwithstanding that this inspecting
ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to immediate sailing,
it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I received the
inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
charter-party would ever take place.

It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place.
When we first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony
well towards the centre of the town, and, all the street corners
being placarded with the tricolour posters announcing the birth
of our company, the petit bourgeois with his wife and family made
a Sunday holiday from the inspection of the ship.  I was always
in evidence in my best uniform to give information as though I
had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter, while our quarter-
masters reaped a harvest of small change from personally
conducted parties.  But when the move was made--that move which
carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the
desolation of solitude became our lot.  It was a complete and
soundless stagnation; for, as we had the ship ready for sea to
the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the days short, we
were absolutely idle--idle to the point of blushing with shame
when the thought struck us that all the time our salaries went
on.  Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, we could not
enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like this all
day:  even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to
prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals.  The
good Paramor--he was really a most excellent fellow--became
unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature, till one
dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should
employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up
on deck and turning them end for end.

For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant.  "Excellent idea!" but
directly his face fell.  "Why. . .Yes!  But we can't make that
job last more than three days," he muttered discontentedly.  I
don't know how long he expected us to be stuck on the riverside
outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables got hauled up and
turned end for end according to my satanic suggestion, put down
again, and their very existence utterly forgotten, I believe,
before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down,
empty as she came, into the Havre roads.  You may think that this
state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of
Almayer and his daughter.  Yet it was not so.  As if it were some
sort of evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as
related above, had arrested them short at the point of that
fateful sunset for many weeks together.  It was always thus with
this book, begun in '89 and finished in '94--with that shortest
of all the novels which it was to be my lot to write.  Between
its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner in his
wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the
God of Islam--"The Merciful, the Compassionate"--which closes the
book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to
use the elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the
scenes (some of them) of my childhood and the realisation of
childhood's vain words, expressing a light-hearted and romantic
whim.

It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while
looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on
the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that
continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an
amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:

"When I grow up I shall go there."

And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of
a century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin
of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head.  Yes.
I did go there:  there being the region of Stanley Falls which in
'68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured
surface.  And the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," carried about me as
if it were a talisman or a treasure, went there too.  That it
ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of
Providence; because a good many of my other properties,
infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind
through unfortunate accidents of transportation.  I call to mind,
for instance, a specially awkward turn of the Congo between
Kinchassa and Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to
take it at night in a big canoe with only half the proper number
of paddlers.  I failed in being the second white man on record
drowned at that interesting spot through the upsetting of a
canoe.  The first was a young Belgian officer, but the accident
happened some months before my time, and he, too, I believe, was
going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still he was
going home.  I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with
"Almayer's Folly" amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at
that delectable capital Boma, where before the departure of the
steamer which was to take me home I had the time to wish myself
dead over and over again with perfect sincerity.  At that date
there were in existence only seven chapters of "Almayer's Folly,"
but the chapter in my history which followed was that of a long,
long illness and very dismal convalescence.  Geneva, or more
precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is rendered
for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in the
history of Almayer's decline and fall.  The events of the ninth
are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper
management of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm
whose name does not matter.  But that work, undertaken to
accustom myself again to the activities of a healthy existence,
soon came to an end.  The earth had nothing to hold me with for
very long.  And then that memorable story, like a cask of choice
Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the sea.
Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of course I
would not like to say.  As far as appearance is concerned it
certainly did nothing of the kind.  The whole MS. acquired a
faded look and an ancient, yellowish complexion.  It became at
last unreasonable to suppose that anything in the world would
ever happen to Almayer and Nina.  And yet something most unlikely
to happen on the high seas was to wake them up from their state
of suspended animation.

What is it that Novalis says?  "It is certain my conviction gains
infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it."  And what
is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence
strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer
than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected
episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo rapids brought it to
the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open sea.  It
would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young
Cambridge man (he was a "passenger for his health" on board the
good ship Torrens outward bound to Australia) who was the first
reader of "Almayer's Folly"--the very first reader I ever had.
"Would it bore you very much reading a MS. in a handwriting like
mine?" I asked him one evening on a sudden impulse at the end of
a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History.
Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy
dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his own
travelling store.

"Not at all," he answered with his courteous intonation and a
faint smile.  As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused
curiosity gave him a watchful expression.  I wonder what he
expected to see.  A poem, maybe.  All that's beyond guessing now.
He was not a cold but a calm man, still more subdued by disease--
a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general
intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our
sixty passengers.  His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look.
In his attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic
voice he asked:

"What is this?"  "It is a sort of tale," I answered with an
effort.  "It is not even finished yet.  Nevertheless I would like
to know what you think of it."  He put the MS. in the breast-
pocket of his jacket; I remember perfectly his thin brown fingers
folding it lengthwise.  "I will read it tomorrow," he remarked,
seizing the door-handle, and then, watching the roll of the ship
for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone.  In the
moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the
swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens, and the subdued,
as if distant, roar of the rising sea.  I noted the growing
disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in
another half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails
would have to come off the ship.

Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered
my cabin.  He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and
the MS. was in his hand.  He tendered it to me with a steady look
but without a word.  I took it in silence.  He sat down on the
couch and still said nothing.  I opened and shut a drawer under
my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide open in its
wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book I
was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book.  I turned
my back squarely on the desk.  And even then Jacques never
offered a word.  "Well, what do you say?" I asked at last.  "Is
it worth finishing?"  This question expressed exactly the whole
of my thoughts.

"Distinctly," he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then
coughed a little.

"Were you interested?" I inquired further almost in a whisper.

"Very much!"

In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of
the ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch.  The curtain
of my bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the
bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin
door rattled slightly in the gusts of wind.  It was in latitude
40 south, and nearly in the longitude of Greenwich, as far as I
can remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's and Nina's
resurrection were taking place.  In the prolonged silence it
occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
writing in the story as far as it went.  Was it intelligible in
its action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were
being born into the body of a seaman.  But I heard on deck the
whistle of the officer of the watch and remained on the alert to
catch the order that was to follow this call to attention.  It
reached me as a faint, fierce shout to "Square the yards."
"Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly blow coming on."  Then I
turned to my very first reader who, alas! was not to live long
enough to know the end of the tale.

"Now let me ask you one more thing:  is the story quite clear to
you as it stands?"

He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.

"Yes!  Perfectly."

This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
"Almayer's Folly."  We never spoke together of the book again.  A
long period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but
for my duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to
keep close in his cabin.  When we arrived in Adelaide the first
reader of my prose went at once up-country, and died rather
suddenly in the end, either in Australia or it may be on the
passage while going home through the Suez Canal.  I am not sure
which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard precisely;
though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
passengers who, wandering about to "see the country" during the
ship's stay in port, had come upon him here and there.  At last
we sailed, homeward bound, and still not one line was added to
the careless scrawl of the many pages which poor Jacques had had
the patience to read with the very shadows of Eternity gathering
already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes.

The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final
"Distinctly" remained dormant, yet alive to await its
opportunity.  I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled,
now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was
compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage.  Leaves must follow
upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on
and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One--
one for all men and for all occupations.

I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more
mysterious and more wonderful to me.  Still, in writing, as in
going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity.  Let me confess here
that I was never one of those wonderful fellows that would go
afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, and if I may pride
myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the same with my
writing.  Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages, and
could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line; but
I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not consent to
write without something at least resembling a chair.  Line by
line, rather than page by page, was the growth of "Almayer's
Folly."

And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now
to the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse
railway station (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to
Poland, or more precisely to Ukraine.  On an early, sleepy
morning changing trains in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a
refreshment-room.  A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager rescued
it.  Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the MS. but of all
the other things that were packed in the bag.

In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were
never exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while
the bag lay open on a chair.  I was dressing hurriedly to dine at
a sporting club.  A friend of my childhood (he had been in the
Diplomatic Service, but had turned to growing wheat on paternal
acres, and we had not seen each other for over twenty years) was
sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off there.

"You might tell me something of your life while you are
dressing," he suggested kindly.

I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or
later.  The talk of the select little party with which he made me
dine was extremely animated and embraced most subjects under
heaven, from big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem
published in a very modernist review, edited by the very young
and patronised by the highest society.  But it never touched upon
"Almayer's Folly," and next morning, in uninterrupted obscurity,
this inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the south-
east direction towards the Government of Kiev.

At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from
the railway station to the country house which was my
destination.

"Dear boy" (these words were always written in English), so ran
the last letter from that house received in London,--"Get
yourself driven to the only inn in the place, dine as well as you
can, and some time in the evening my own confidential servant,
factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S. (I warn you he is of noble
extraction), will present himself before you, reporting the
arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next
day.  I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on
the road."

Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an
enormous barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door
opened and, in a travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin
cap and a short coat girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of
noble extraction), a man of about thirty-five, appeared with an
air of perplexity on his open and moustachioed countenance.  I
got up from the table and greeted him in Polish, with, I hope,
the right shade of consideration demanded by his noble blood and
his confidential position.  His face cleared up in a wonderful
way.  It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our
understanding each other.  He imagined I would talk to him in
some foreign language.  I was told that his last words on getting
into the sledge to come to meet me shaped an anxious exclamation:

"Well!  Well!  Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to
make myself understood to our master's nephew."

We understood each other very well from the first.  He took
charge of me as if I were not quite of age.  I had a delightful
boyish feeling of coming home from school when he muffled me up
next morning in an enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and took
his seat protectively by my side.  The sledge was a very small
one and it looked utterly insignificant, almost like a toy behind
the four big bays harnessed two and two.  We three, counting the
coachman, filled it completely.  He was a young fellow with clear
blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur coat framed his
cheery countenance and stood all round level with the top of his
head.

"Now, Joseph," my companion addressed him, "do you think we shall
manage to get home before six?"  His answer was that we would
surely, with God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts
in the long stretch between certain villages whose names came
with an extremely familiar sound to my ears.  He turned out an
excellent coachman with an instinct for keeping the road amongst
the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of getting the best
out of his horses.

"He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain
remembers.  He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother
of holy memory," remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my
feet.

I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
grandmother.  Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the
first time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-
in-hand whip outside the doors of the coach-house.

"What became of him?" I asked.  "He is no longer serving, I
suppose."

"He served our master," was the reply.  "But he died of cholera
ten years ago now--that great epidemic we had.  And his wife died
at the same time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the
only boy that was left."

The MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was reposing in the bag under our
feet.

I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the
travels of my childhood.  It set, clear and red, dipping into the
snow in full view as if it were setting on the sea.  It was
twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land;
and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid
expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining
a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees
about a village of the Ukrainian plain.  A cottage or two glided
by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking
through a screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.

That very evening the wandering MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was
unpacked and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my
room, the guest-room which had been, I was informed in an
affectedly careless tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or
so.  It attracted no attention from the affectionate presence
hovering round the son of the favourite sister.

"You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with
me, brother," he said--this form of address borrowed from the
speech of our peasants being the usual expression of the highest
good humour in a moment of affectionate elation.  "I shall be
always coming in for a chat."

As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
everlastingly intruding upon each other.  I invaded the
retirement of his study where the principal feature was a
colossal silver inkstand presented to him on his fiftieth year by
a subscription of all his wards then living.  He had been
guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from the three
southern provinces--ever since the year 1860.  Some of them had
been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls
or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel.  One or two
were older than myself--considerably older, too.  One of them, a
visitor I remember in my early years, was the man who first put
me on horseback, and his four-horse bachelor turn-out, his
perfect horsemanship and general skill in manly exercises was one
of my earliest admirations.  I seem to remember my mother looking
on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as I was
lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know, by the very Joseph--
the groom attached specially to my grandmother's service--who
died of cholera.  It was certainly a young man in a dark blue,
tail-less coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery
of the men about the stables.  It must have been in 1864, but
reckoning by another mode of calculating time, it was certainly
in the year in which my mother obtained permission to travel
south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had
followed my father.  For that, too, she had had to ask
permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that favour
was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile
herself.  Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest
brother who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts
of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St.
Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this
permission--it was officially called the "Highest Grace"--of a
three months' leave from exile.

This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my
mother with more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed,
silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding
sweetness; and I also remember the great gathering of all the
relations from near and far, and the grey heads of the family
friends paying her the homage of respect and love in the house of
her favourite brother who, a few years later, was to take the
place for me of both my parents.

I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the
time, though indeed I remember that doctors also came.  There
were no signs of invalidism about her--but I think that already
they had pronounced her doom unless perhaps the change to a
southern climate could re-establish her declining strength.  For
me it seems the very happiest period of my existence.  There was
my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl, some months
younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as if she
were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and
not a few whose very names I have forgotten.  Over all this hung
the oppressive shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow
lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered
by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the
ill-omened rising of 1863.

This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the
public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of
an uneasy egotism.  These, too, are things human, already distant
in their appeal.  It is meet that something more should be left
for the novelist's children than the colours and figures of his
own hard-won creation.  That which in their grown-up years may
appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of
their natures and perhaps must remain for ever obscure even to
themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
personalities are remotely derived.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence.  Imagination, not invention, is the supreme
master of art as of life.  An imaginative and exact rendering of
authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety
towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a
writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own
experience.



Chapter II.

As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from
London into Ukraine.  The MS. of "Almayer's Folly"--my companion
already for some three years or more, and then in the ninth
chapter of its age--was deposited unostentatiously on the
writing-table placed between two windows.  It didn't occur to me
to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my
eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass
handles.  Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up
festally the room which had waited so many years for the
wandering nephew. The blinds were down.

Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the
first peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal
grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession
of a member of the family; and beyond the village in the
limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great
unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread-
giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
patches of timber nestling in the hollows.  The road by which I
had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the
gates closing the short drive.  Somebody was abroad on the deep
snowtrack; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the
stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper.

My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to
help me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but
unnecessary at the door of the room.  I did not want him in the
least, but I did not like to tell him to go away.  He was a young
fellow, certainly more than ten years younger than myself; I had
not been--I won't say in that place but within sixty miles of it,
ever since the year '67; yet his guileless physiognomy of the
open peasant type seemed strangely familiar.  It was quite
possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a
grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar
to me in my early childhood.  As a matter of fact he had no such
claim on my consideration.  He was the product of some village
near by and was there on his promotion, having learned the
service in one or two houses as pantry-boy.  I know this because
I asked the worthy V-- next day.  I might well have spared the
question.  I discovered before long that all the faces about the
house and all the faces in the village:  the grave faces with
long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the
handsome, tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the
doors of the huts were as familiar to me as though I had known
them all from childhood, and my childhood were a matter of the
day before yesterday.

The tinkle of the traveller's bels, after growing louder, had
faded away quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village
had calmed down at last.  My uncle, lounging in the corner of a
small couch, smoked his long Turkish chibouk in silence.

"This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my
room," I remarked.

"It is really your property," he said, keeping his eyes on me,
with an interested and wistful expression as he had done ever
since I had entered the house.  "Forty years ago your mother used
to write at this very table. In our house in Oratow it stood in
the little sitting-room which, by a tacit arrangement, was given
up to the girls--I mean to your mother and her sister who died so
young.  It was a present to them jointly from our uncle Nicholas
B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two years
younger.  She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of
yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.
She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated
mind, in which your mother was far superior.  It was her good
sense, the admirable sweetness of her nature, her exceptional
facility and ease in daily relations that endeared her to
everybody.  Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral
loss for us all.  Had she lived she would have brought the
greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot to
enter, as wife, mother and mistress of a household.  She would
have created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content
which only those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke.
Your mother--of far greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished
in person, manner and intellect--had a less easy disposition.
Being more brilliantly gifted she also expected more from life.
At that trying time especially, we were greatly concerned about
her state.  Suffering in her health from the shock of her
father's death (she was alone in the house with him when he died
suddenly), she was torn by the inward struggle between her love
for the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of
her dead father's declared objection to that match.  Unable to
bring herself to disregard that cherished memory and that
judgment she had always respected and trusted, and, on the other
hand, feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and
so true, she could not have been expected to preserve her mental
and moral balance.  At war with herself, she could not give to
others that feeling of peace which was not her own.  It was only
later, when united at last with the man of her choice that she
developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which compelled
the respect and admiration even of our foes.  Meeting with calm
fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national
and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest
conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing
the exile of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of
Polish womanhood.  Our Uncle Nicholas was not a man very
accessible to feelings of affection.  Apart from his worship for
Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only three people
in the world:  his mother--your great-grandmother, whom you have
seen but cannot possibly remember; his brother, our father, in
whose house he lived for so many years; and of all of us, his
nephews and nieces grown up round him, your mother alone.  The
modest, lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem
able to see.  It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected
stroke of death falling upon the family less than a year after I
had become its head.  It was terribly unexpected.  Driving home
one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our empty house, where
I had to remain permanently administering the estate and
attending to the complicated affairs--(the girls took it in turn
week and week about)--driving, as I said, from the house of the
Countess Tekla Potochka, where our invalid mother was staying
then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a
snowdrift.  She was alone with the coachman and old Valery, the
personal servant of our late father.  Impatient of delay while
they were trying to dig themselves out, she jumped out of the
sledge and went to look for the road herself.  All this happened
in '51, not ten miles from the house in which we are sitting now.
The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly
again, and they were four more hours getting home.  Both the men
took off their sheepskin-lined great-coats and used all their own
rugs to wrap her up against the cold, notwithstanding her
protests, positive orders and even struggles, as Valery
afterwards related to me.  'How could I,' he remonstrated with
her, 'go to meet the blessed soul of my late master if I let any
harm come to you while there's a spark of life left in my body?'
When they reached home at last the poor old man was stiff and
speechless from exposure, and the coachman was in not much better
plight, though he had the strength to drive round to the stables
himself.  To my reproaches for venturing out at all in such
weather, she answered characteristically that she could not bear
the thought of abandoning me to my cheerless solitude.  It is
incomprehensible how it was that she was allowed to start.  I
suppose it had to be!  She made light of the cough which came on
next day, but shortly afterwards inflammation of the lungs set
in, and in three weeks she was no more!  She was the first to be
taken away of the young generation under my care.  Behold the
vanity of all hopes and fears!  I was the most frail at birth of
all the children.  For years I remained so delicate that my
parents had but little hope of bringing me up; and yet I have
survived five brothers and two sisters, and many of my
contemporaries; I have outlived my wife and daughter too--and
from all those who have had some knowledge at least of these old
times you alone are left.  It has been my lot to lay in an early
grave many honest hearts, many brilliant promises, many hopes
full of life."

He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me, saying:  "We will dine
in half an hour."  Without moving I listened to his quick steps
resounding on the waxed floor of the next room, traversing the
ante-room lined with bookshelves, where he paused to put his
chibouk in the pipe-stand before passing into the drawing-room
(these were all en suite), where he became inaudible on the thick
carpet.  But I heard the door of his study-bedroom close.  He was
then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of a century
the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians,
extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support
which I seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts
of the earth.

As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813
in the French Army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of
Marshal Marmont; afterwards Captain in the 2nd Regiment of
Mounted Rifles in the Polish Army--such as it existed up to 1830
in the reduced kingdom established by the Congress of Vienna--I
must say that from all that more distant past, known to me
traditionally and a little de visu, and called out by the words
of the man just gone away, he remains the most incomplete figure.
It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for it is certain
that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my mother
for what he must have known would be the last time.  From my
early boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort
of mist rises before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely
only a neatly brushed head of white hair (which is exceptional in
the case of the B. family, where it is the rule for men to go
bald in a becoming manner, before thirty) and a thin, curved,
dignified nose, a feature in strict accordance with the physical
tradition of the B. family.  But it is not by these fragmentary
remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my memory.  I
knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was a
Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish
Cross for valour Virtuti Militari.  The knowledge of these
glorious facts inspired in me an admiring veneration; yet it is
not that sentiment, strong as it was, which resumes for me the
force and the significance of his personality.  It is overborne
by another and complex impression of awe, compassion and horror.
Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the unfortunate and miserable (but
heroic) being who once upon a time had eaten a dog.

It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect
has not worn off yet.  I believe this is the very first, say,
realistic, story I heard in my life; but all the same I don't
know why I should have been so frightfully impressed.  Of course
I know what our village dogs look like--but still. . .No!  At
this very day, recalling the horror and compassion of my
childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in disclosing to a
cold and fastidious world that awful episode in the family
history.  I ask myself--is it right?--especially as the B. family
had always been honourably known in a wide country-side for the
delicacy of their tastes in the matter of eating and drinking.
But upon the whole, and considering that this gastronomical
degradation overtaking a gallant young officer lies really at the
door of the Great Napoleon, I think that to cover it up by
silence would be an exaggeration of literary restraint.  Let the
truth stand here.  The responsibility rests with the Man of St.
Helena in view of his deplorable levity in the conduct of the
Russian campaign.  It was during the memorable retreat from
Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of two brother officers--
as to whose morality and natural refinement I know nothing--
bagged a dog on the outskirts of a village and subsequently
devoured him.  As far as I can remember the weapon used was a
cavalry sabre, and the issue of the sporting episode was rather
more of a matter of life and death than if it had been an
encounter with a tiger.  A picket of Cossacks was sleeping in
that village lost in the depths of the great Lithuanian forest.
The three sportsmen had observed them from a hiding-place making
themselves very much at home amongst the huts just before the
early winter darkness set in at four o'clock.  They had observed
them with disgust and perhaps with despair.  Late in the night
the rash counsels of hunger overcame the dictates of prudence.
Crawling through the snow they crept up to the fence of dry
branches which generally encloses a village in that part of
Lithuania.  What they expected to get and in what manner, and
whether this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only knows.
However, these Cossack parties, in most cases wandering without
an officer, were known to guard themselves badly and often not at
all.  In addition, the village lying at a great distance from the
line of French retreat, they could not suspect the presence of
stragglers from the Grand Army.  The three officers had strayed
away in a blizzard from the main column and had been lost for
days in the woods, which explains sufficiently the terrible
straits to which they were reduced.  Their plan was to try and
attract the attention of the peasants in that one of the huts
which was nearest to the enclosure; but as they were preparing to
venture into the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is
mighty strange that there was but one), a creature quite as
formidable under the circumstances as a lion, began to bark on
the other side of the fence. . .

At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by
request) from the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my
grandmother, I used to tremble with excitement.

The dog barked.  And if he had done no more than bark three
officers of the Great Napoleon's army would have perished
honourably on the points of Cossack's lances, or perchance
escaping the chase would have died decently of starvation.  But
before they had time to think of running away, that fatal and
revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of his zeal,
dashed out through a gap in the fence.  He dashed out and died.
His head, I understand, was severed at one blow from his body.  I
understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been
lit by the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to
be distinctly unsatisfactory.  It was not thin--on the contrary,
it seemed unhealthily obese; its skin showed bare patches of an
unpleasant character.  However, they had not killed that dog for
the sake of the pelt.  He was large. . .He was eaten. . .The rest
is silence. . .

A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:

"I could not have eaten that dog."

And his grandmother remarks with a smile:

"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."

I have learned something of it since.  Not that I have been
reduced to eat dog.  I have fed on the emblematical animal,
which, in the language of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache
enragee; I have lived on ancient salt junk, I know the taste of
shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript dishes containing
things without a name--but of the Lithuanian village dog--never!
I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is not I but my
grand-uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier de
la Legion d'Honneur, &c. &c., who, in his young days, had eaten
the Lithuanian dog.

I wish he had not.  The childish horror of the deed clings
absurdly to the grizzled man.  I am perfectly helpless against
it.  Still if he really had to, let us charitably remember that
he had eaten him on active service, while bearing up bravely
against the greatest military disaster of modern history, and, in
a manner, for the sake of his country.  He had eaten him to
appease his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of an
unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith
that lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled
like a false beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a
brave nation.

Pro patria!

Looked at in that light it appears a sweet and decorous meal.

And looked at in the same light my own diet of la vache enragee
appears a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for
why should I, the son of a land which such men as these have
turned up with their ploughshares and bedewed with their blood,
undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of salt junk and hard
tack upon the wide seas?  On the kindest view it seems an
unanswerable question.  Alas! I have the conviction that there
are men of unstained rectitude who are ready to murmur scornfully
the word desertion.  Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be
made bitter to the palate.  The part of the inexplicable should
be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where
no explanation is final.  No charge of faithlessness ought to be
lightly uttered.  The appearances of this perishable life are
deceptive like everything that falls under the judgment of our
imperfect senses.  The inner voice may remain true enough in its
secret counsel.  The fidelity to a special tradition may last
through the events of an unrelated existence, following
faithfully too the traced way of an inexplicable impulse.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of
contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at
times the desperate shape of betrayal.  And perhaps there is no
possible explanation.  Indulgence--as somebody said--is the most
intelligent of all the virtues.  I venture to think that it is
one of the least common, if not the most uncommon of all.  I
would not imply by this that men are foolish--or even most men.
Far from it.  The barber and the priest, backed by the whole
opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the
ingenious hidalgo who, sallying forth from his native place,
broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of
inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a
certain stable.  God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape
merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the
sublime caballero.  His was a very noble, a very unselfish
fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser
mortals.  But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that
exalted and dangerous figure.  He, too, had his frailties.  After
reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his
very body from the intolerable reality of things.  He wished to
meet eye to eye the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of
Arabia, whose armour is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose
shield, strapped to his arm, is the gate of a fortified city.  O
amiable and natural weakness!  O blessed simplicity of a gentle
heart without guile!  Who would not succumb to such a consoling
temptation?  Nevertheless it was a form of self-indulgence, and
the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a good citizen.  The
priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their strictures.
Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who used to
say in his exile, "The people are never in fault"--one may admit
that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole
village.  Mad!  Mad!  He who kept in pious meditation the ritual
vigil-of-arms by the well of an inn and knelt reverently to be
knighted at daybreak by the fat, sly rogue of a landlord, has
come very near perfection.  He rides forth, his head encircled by
a halo--the patron saint of all lives spoiled or saved by the
irresistible grace of imagination.  But he was not a good
citizen.

Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered
exclamation of my tutor.

It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have
had a jolly holiday.  There have been idle years afterwards,
jolly enough in a way and not altogether without their lesson,
but this year of which I speak was the year of my last schoolboy
holiday.  There are other reasons why I should remember that
year, but they are too long to state formally in this place.
Moreover they have nothing to do with that holiday.  What has to
do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark
was made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls
of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance--in fact it was a memorable
holiday of travel.  Of late we had been tramping slowly up the
Valley of the Reuss.  It was a delightful time.  It was much more
like a stroll than a tramp.  Landing from a Lake of Lucerne
steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves at the end of the second
day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little
way beyond Hospenthal.  This is not the day on which the remark
was made:  in the shadows of the deep valley and with the
habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not
upon the ethics of conduct but upon the simpler human problem of
shelter and food.  There did not seem anything of the kind in
sight, and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly at a
bend of the road we came upon a building, ghostly in the
twilight.

At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and
that magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible
for the unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very
roots of the mountains.  It was long though not big at all; it
was low; it was built of boards, without ornamentation, in
barrack-hut style, with the white window-frames quite flush with
the yellow face of its plain front.  And yet it was an hotel; it
had even a name which I have forgotten.  But there was no gold-
laced door-keeper at its humble door.  A plain but vigorous
servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who
owned the place appeared.  It was clear that no travellers were
expected, or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostelry,
which in its severe style resembled the house which surmounts the
unseaworthy-looking hulls of the toy Noah's Arks, the universal
possession of European childhood.  However, its roof was not
hinged and it was not full to the brim of slabsided and painted
animals of wood.  Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in
evidence.  We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one
end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to
my sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw
plank, since there was no one at the other end to balance it
against our two dusty and travel-stained figures.  Then we
hastened upstairs to bed in a room smelling of pine planks, and I
was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.

In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow
University) woke me up early, and as we were dressing remarked:
"There seems to be a lot of people staying in this hotel.  I have
heard a noise of talking up till 11 o'clock?"  This statement
surprised me; I had heard no noise whatever, having slept like a
top.

We went downstairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its
long and narrow table.  There were two rows of plates on it.  At
one of the many uncurtained windows stood a tall bony man with a
bald head set off by a bunch of black hair above each ear and
with a long black beard.  He glanced up from the paper he was
reading and seemed genuinely astonished at our intrusion.  By-
and-by more men came in.  Not one of them looked like a tourist.
Not a single woman appeared.  These men seemed to know each other
with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very talkative
lot.  The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the
table.  It all had the air of a family party.  By-and-by, from
one of the vigorous servant-girls in national costume, we
discovered that the place was really a boarding-house for some
English engineers engaged at the works of the St. Gothard Tunnel;
and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language,
as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not
believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life.

This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the
tourist kind seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne--the kind
which has no real existence in a workaday world.  I know now that
the bald-headed man spoke with a strong Scotch accent.  I have
met many of his kind since, both ashore and afloat.  The second
engineer of the steamer "Mavis", for instance, ought to have been
his twin brother.  I cannot help thinking that he really was,
though for some reasons of his own he assured me that he never
had a twin brother.  Anyway the deliberate bald-headed Scot with
the coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic
and mysterious person.

We slipped out unnoticed.  Our mapped-out route led over the
Furca Pass towards the Rhone Glacier, with the further intention
of following down the trend of the Hasli Valley.  The sun was
already declining when we found ourselves on the top of the pass,
and the remark alluded to was presently uttered.

We sat down by the side of the road to continue the argument
begun half a mile or so before.  I am certain it was an argument
because I remember perfectly how my tutor argued and how without
the power of reply I listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on
the ground.  A stir on the road made me look up--and then I saw
my unforgettable Englishman.  There are acquaintances of later
years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember less clearly.  He
marched rapidly towards the east (attended by a hang-dog Swiss
guide) with the mien of an ardent and fearless traveller.  He was
clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore
short socks under his laced boots, for reasons which whether
hygienic or conscientious were surely imaginative, his calves
exposed to the public gaze and to the tonic air of high
altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-
like condition and their rich tone of young ivory.  He was the
leader of a small caravan.  The light of a headlong, exalted
satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains
illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white
whiskers, his innocently eager and triumphant eyes.  In passing
he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big,
sound, shiny teeth towards the man and the boy sitting like dusty
tramps by the roadside, with a modest knapsack lying at their
feet.  His white calves twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss
guide with a surly mouth stalked like an unwilling bear at his
elbow; a small train of three mules followed in single file the
lead of this inspiring enthusiast.  Two ladies rode past one
behind the other, but from the way they sat I saw only their
calm, uniform backs, and the long ends of blue veils hanging
behind far down over their identical hat-brims.  His two
daughters surely.  An industrious luggage-mule, with unstarched
ears and guarded by a slouching, sallow driver, brought up the
rear.  My tutor, after pausing for a look and a faint smile,
resumed his earnest argument.

I tell you it was a memorable year!  One does not meet such an
Englishman twice in a lifetime.  Was he in the mystic ordering of
common events the ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the
scale at a critical moment on the top of an Alpine pass, with the
peaks of the Bernese Oberland for mute and solemn witnesses?  His
glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and comic ardour of his
striving-forward appearance helped me to pull myself together.
It must be stated that on that day and in the exhilarating
atmosphere of that elevated spot I had been feeling utterly
crushed.  It was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my
desire to go to sea.  At first like those sounds that, ranging
outside the scale to which men's ears are attuned, remain
inaudible to our sense of hearing, this declaration passed
unperceived.  It was as if it had not been.  Later on, by trying
various tones I managed to arouse here and there a surprised
momentary attention--the "What was that funny noise?" sort of
inquiry.  Later on it was--"Did you hear what that boy said?
What an extraordinary outbreak!"  Presently a wave of scandalised
astonishment (it could not have been greater if I had announced
the intention of entering a Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of
the educational and academical town of Cracow spread itself over
several provinces.  It spread itself shallow but far-reaching.
It stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying
wonder, bitter irony and downright chaff.  I could hardly breathe
under its weight, and certainly had no words for an answer.
People wondered what Mr. T.B. would do now with his worrying
nephew and, I dare say, hoped kindly that he would make short
work of my nonsense.

What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine to have it
out with me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial and
just, taking his stand on the ground of wisdom and affection.  As
far as is possible for a boy whose power of expression is still
unformed I opened the secret of my thoughts to him and he in
return allowed me a glimpse into his mind and heart; the first
glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble treasure of clear thought
and warm feeling, which through life was to be mine to draw upon
with a never-deceived love and confidence.  Practically, after
several exhaustive conversations, he concluded that he would not
have me later on reproach him for having spoiled my life by an
unconditional opposition.  But I must take time for serious
reflection.  And I must not only think of myself but of others;
weigh the claims of affection and conscience against my own
sincerity of purpose.  "Think well what it all means in the
larger issues, my boy," he exhorted me finally with special
friendliness.  "And meantime try to get the best place you can at
the yearly examinations."

The scholastic year came to an end.  I took a fairly good place
at the exams., which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be
a more difficult task than for other boys.  In that respect I
could enter with a good conscience upon that holiday which was
like a long visit pour prendre conge of the mainland of old
Europe I was to see so little of for the next four and twenty
years.  Such, however, was not the avowed purpose of that tour.
It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to distract and occupy
my thoughts in other directions.  Nothing had been said for
months of my going to sea.  But my attachment to my young tutor
and his influence over me were so well known that he must have
received a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic
folly.  It was an excellently appropriate arrangement, as neither
he nor I had ever had a single glimpse of the sea in our lives.
That was to come by-and-by for both of us in Venice, from the
outer shore of Lido.  Meantime he had taken his mission to heart
so well that I began to feel crushed before we reached Zurich.
He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he had argued
away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove!  Of his
devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt.  He had
proved it already by two years of unremitting and arduous care.
I could not hate him.  But he had been crushing me slowly, and
when he started to argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was
perhaps nearer a success than either he or I imagined.  I
listened to him in despairing silence, feeling that ghostly,
unrealised and desired sea of my dreams escape from the unnerved
grip of my will.

The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed--and the argument went
on.  What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my
years, either in ambition, honour or conscience?  An unanswerable
question.  But I felt no longer crushed.  Then our eyes met and a
genuine emotion was visible in his as well as in mine.  The end
came all at once.  He picked up the knapsack suddenly and got on
to his feet.

"You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote.  That's what you
are."

I was surprised.  I was only fifteen and did not know what he
meant exactly.  But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the
immortal knight turning up in connection with my own folly, as
some people would call it to my face.  Alas! I don't think there
was anything to be proud of.  Mine was not the stuff the
protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of this world's
wrongs are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that best.
Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and
the priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.

I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking
back he stopped.  The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening
over the Furca Pass.  When I came up to him he turned to me and
in full view of the Finster-Aarhorn, with his band of giant
brothers rearing their monstrous heads against a brilliant sky,
put his hand on my shoulder affectionately.

"Well!  That's enough.  We will have no more of it."

And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation
between us.  There was to be no more question of it at all,
nowhere or with any one.  We began the descent of the Furca Pass
conversing merrily.  Eleven years later, month for month, I stood
on Tower Hill on the steps of the St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a
master in the British Merchant Service.  But the man who put his
hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was no longer
living.

That very year of our travels he took his degree of the
Philosophical Faculty--and only then his true vocation declared
itself.  Obedient to the call he entered at once upon the four-
year course of the Medical Schools. A day came when, on the deck
of a ship moored in Calcutta, I opened a letter telling me of the
end of an enviable existence.  He had made for himself a practice
in some obscure little town of Austrian Galicia.  And the letter
went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of the district,
Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's coffin
with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.

How short his years and how clear his vision!  What greater
reward in ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to
win for himself when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me
look well to the end of my opening life.



Chapter III.

The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by
my grand-uncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and
famished scarecrows, symbolised, to my childish imagination, the
whole horror of the retreat from Moscow and the immorality of a
conqueror's ambition.  An extreme distaste for that objectionable
episode has tinged the views I hold as to the character and
achievements of Napoleon the Great.  I need not say that these
are unfavourable.  It was morally reprehensible for that great
captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by
raising in his breast a false hope of national independence.  It
has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards
of a hundred years on a diet of false hopes and--well--dog.  It
is, when one thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen.  Some
pride in the national constitution which has survived a long
course of such dishes is really excusable.  But enough of
generalising.  Returning to particulars, Mr. Nicholas B. confided
to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his misanthropically
laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been nearly "the
death of him."  This is not surprising.  What surprises me is
that the story was ever heard of; for grand-uncle Nicholas
differed in this from the generality of military men of
Napoleon's time (and perhaps of all time), that he did not like
to talk of his campaigns, which began at Friedland and ended
somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc.  His admiration of
the great Emperor was unreserved in everything but expression.
Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a sentiment
to be displayed before a world of little faith.  Apart from that
he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he
had hardly ever seen a soldier in his life.  Proud of his
decorations earned before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear
the ribbons at the buttonhole in the manner practised to this day
in Europe and even was unwilling to display the insignia on
festive occasions, as though he wished to conceal them in the
fear of appearing boastful.  "It is enough that I have them," he
used to mutter.  In the course of thirty years they were seen on
his breast only twice--at an auspicious marriage in the family
and at the funeral of an old friend.  That the wedding which was
thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only
late in life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas B.,
who made amends at my birth by a long letter of congratulation
containing the following prophecy:  "He will see better times."
Even in his embittered heart there lived a hope.  But he was not
a true prophet.

He was a man of strange contradictions.  Living for many years in
his brother's house, the home of many children, a house full of
life, of animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of
many guests, he kept his habits of solitude and silence.
Considered as obstinately secretive in all his purposes, he was
in reality the victim of a most painful irresolution in all
matters of civil life.  Under his taciturn, phlegmatic behaviour
was hidden a faculty of short-lived passionate anger.  I suspect
he had no talent for narrative; but it seemed to afford him
sombre satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride
over the bridge of the river Elster after the battle of Leipsic.
Lest some construction favourable to his valour should be put on
the fact he condescended to explain how it came to pass.  It
seems that shortly after the retreat began he was sent back to
the town where some divisions of the French Army (and amongst
them the Polish corps of Prince Joseph Poniatowski), jammed
hopelessly in the streets, were being simply exterminated by the
troops of the Allied Powers.  When asked what it was like in
there Mr. Nicholas B. muttered the only word "Shambles."  Having
delivered his message to the Prince he hastened away at once to
render an account of his mission to the superior who had sent
him.  By that time the advance of the enemy had enveloped the
town, and he was shot at from houses and chased all the way to
the river bank by a disorderly mob of Austrian Dragoons and
Prussian Hussars.  The bridge had been mined early in the morning
and his opinion was that the sight of the horsemen converging
from many sides in the pursuit of his person alarmed the officer
in command of the sappers and caused the premature firing of the
charges.  He had not gone more than 200 yards on the other side
when he heard the sound of the fatal explosions.  Mr. Nicholas B.
concluded his bald narrative with the word "Imbecile" uttered
with the utmost deliberation.  It testified to his indignation at
the loss of so many thousands of lives.  But his phlegmatic
physiognomy lighted up when he spoke of his only wound, with
something resembling satisfaction.  You will see that there was
some reason for it when you learn that he was wounded in the
heel.  "Like his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon himself," he
reminded his hearers with assumed indifference.  There can be no
doubt that the indifference was assumed, if one thinks what very
distinguished sort of wound it was.  In all the history of
warfare there are, I believe, only three warriors publicly known
to have been wounded in the heel--Achilles and Napoleon--demi-
gods indeed--to whom the familial piety of an unworthy descendant
adds the name of the simple mortal, Nicholas B.

The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B. staying with a distant
relative of ours, owner of a small estate in Galicia.  How he got
there across the breadth of an armed Europe and after what
adventures I am afraid will never be known now.  All his papers
were destroyed shortly before his death; but if there was amongst
them, as he affirmed, a concise record of his life, then I am
pretty sure it did not take up more than a half-sheet of foolscap
or so.  This relative of ours happened to be an Austrian officer,
who had left the service after the battle of Austerlitz.  Unlike
Mr. Nicholas B., who concealed his decorations, he liked to
display his honourable discharge in which he was mentioned as
unschreckbar (fearless) before the enemy.  No conjunction could
seem more unpromising, yet it stands in the family tradition that
these two got on very well together in their rural solitude.

When asked whether he had not been sorely tempted during the
Hundred Days to make his way again to France and join the service
of his beloved Emperor, Mr. Nicholas B. used to mutter:  "No
money.  No horse.  Too far to walk."

The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of national hopes affected
adversely the character of Mr. Nicholas B.  He shrank from
returning to his province.  But for that there was also another
reason.  Mr. Nicholas B. and his brother--my maternal
grandfather--had lost their father early, while they were quite
children.  Their mother, young still and left very well off,
married again a man of great charm and of an amiable disposition
but without a penny.  He turned out an affectionate and careful
stepfather; it was unfortunate though that while directing the
boys' education and forming their character by wise counsel he
did his best to get hold of the fortune by buying and selling
land in his own name and investing capital in such a manner as to
cover up the traces of the real ownership.  It seems that such
practices can be successful if one is charming enough to dazzle
one's own wife permanently and brave enough to defy the vain
terrors of public opinion.  The critical time came when the elder
of the boys on attaining his majority in the year 1811 asked for
the accounts and some part at least of the inheritance to begin
life upon.  It was then that the stepfather declared with calm
finality that there were no accounts to render and no property to
inherit.  The whole fortune was his very own.  He was very good-
natured about the young man's misapprehension of the true state
of affairs, but of course felt obliged to maintain his position
firmly.  Old friends came and went busily, voluntary mediators
appeared travelling on most horrible roads from the most distant
corners of the three provinces; and the Marshal of the Nobility
(ex-officio guardian of all well-born orphans) called a meeting
of landowners to "ascertain in a friendly way how the
misunderstanding between X and his stepsons had arisen and devise
proper measures to remove the same."  A deputation to that effect
visited X, who treated them to excellent wines, but absolutely
refused his ear to their remonstrances.  As to the proposals for
arbitration he simply laughed at them; yet the whole province
must have been aware that fourteen years before, when he married
the widow, all his visible fortune consisted (apart from his
social qualities) in a smart four-horse turn-out with two
servants, with whom he went about visiting from house to house;
and as to any funds he might have possessed at that time their
existence could only be inferred from the fact that he was very
punctual in settling his modest losses at cards.  But by the
magic power of stubborn and constant assertion, there were found
presently, here and there, people who mumbled that surely "there
must be something in it."  However, on his next name-day (which
he used to celebrate by a great three-days' shooting-party), of
all the invited crowd only two guests turned up, distant
neighbours of no importance; one notoriously a fool, and the
other a very pious and honest person but such a passionate lover
of the gun that on his own confession he could not have refused
an invitation to a shooting-party from the devil himself.  X met
this manifestation of public opinion with the serenity of an
unstained conscience.  He refused to be crushed.  Yet he must
have been a man of deep feeling, because, when his wife took
openly the part of her children, he lost his beautiful
tranquillity, proclaimed himself heart-broken and drove her out
of the house, neglecting in his grief to give her enough time to
pack her trunks.

This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an abominable marvel of
chicane, which by the use of every legal subterfuge was made to
last for many years.  It was also the occasion for a display of
much kindness and sympathy.  All the neighbouring houses flew
open for the reception of the homeless.  Neither legal aid nor
material assistance in the prosecution of the suit was ever
wanting.  X, on his side, went about shedding tears publicly over
his stepchildren's ingratitude and his wife's blind infatuation;
but as at the same time he displayed great cleverness in the art
of concealing material documents (he was even suspected of having
burnt a lot of historically interesting family papers), this
scandalous litigation had to be ended by a compromise lest worse
should befall.  It was settled finally by a surrender, out of the
disputed estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, of two
villages with the names of which I do not intend to trouble my
readers.  After this lame and impotent conclusion neither the
wife nor the stepsons had anything to say to the man who had
presented the world with such a successful example of self-help
based on character, determination and industry; and my great-
grandmother, her health completely broken down, died a couple of
years later in Carlsbad.  Legally secured by a decree in the
possession of his plunder, X regained his wonted serenity and
went on living in the neighbourhood in a comfortable style and in
apparent peace of mind.  His big shoots were fairly well attended
again.  He was never tired of assuring people that he bore no
grudge for what was past; he protested loudly of his constant
affection for his wife and stepchildren.  It was true he said
that they had tried their best to strip him as naked as a Turkish
saint in the decline of his days; and because he had defended
himself from spoliation, as anybody else in his place would have
done, they had abandoned him now to the horrors of a solitary old
age.  Nevertheless, his love for them survived these cruel blows.
And there might have been some truth in his protestations.  Very
soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his eldest
stepson, my maternal grandfather; and when these were
peremptorily rejected he went on renewing them again and again
with characteristic obstinacy.  For years he persisted in his
efforts at reconciliation, promising my grandfather to execute a
will in his favour if he only would be friends again to the
extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close neighbourhood
for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in an
appearance for the great shoot on the name-day.  My grandfather
was an ardent lover of every sport.  His temperament was as free
from hardness and animosity as can be imagined.  Pupil of the
liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the only public school
of some standing then in the south, he had also read deeply the
authors of the eighteenth century.  In him Christian charity was
joined to a philosophical indulgence for the failings of human
nature.  But the memory of these miserably anxious early years,
his young man's years robbed of all generous illusions by the
cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the way of forgiveness.
He never succumbed to the fascination of the great shoot; and X,
his heart set to the last on reconciliation with the draft of the
will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died intestate.
The fortune thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful
management passed to some distant relatives whom he had never
seen and who even did not bear his name.

Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe.
Mr. Nicholas B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the
"fearless" Austrian officer, departed from Galicia, and without
going near his native place, where the odious lawsuit was still
going on, proceeded straight to Warsaw and entered the army of
the newly constituted Polish kingdom under the sceptre of
Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.

This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgment
to a nation of its former independent existence, included only
the central provinces of the old Polish patrimony.  A brother of
the Emperor, the Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its Viceroy
and Commander-in-Chief, married morganatically to a Polish lady
to whom he was fiercely attached, extended this affection to what
he called "My Poles" in a capricious and savage manner.  Sallow
in complexion, with a Tartar physiognomy and fierce little eyes,
he walked with his fists clenched, his body bent forward, darting
suspicious glances from under an enormous cocked hat.  His
intelligence was limited and his sanity itself was doubtful.  The
hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by mystic
leanings as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in their
various ways, for one was mystically liberal and the other
mystically autocratic), but by the fury of an uncontrollable
temper which generally broke out in disgusting abuse on the
parade ground.  He was a passionate militarist and an amazing
drill-master.  He treated his Polish Army as a spoiled child
treats a favourite toy, except that he did not take it to bed
with him at night.  It was not small enough for that.  But he
played with it all day and every day, delighting in the variety
of pretty uniforms and in the fun of incessant drilling.  This
childish passion, not for war but for mere militarism, achieved a
desirable result.  The Polish Army, in its equipment, in its
armament and in its battlefield efficiency, as then understood,
became, by the end of the year 1830, a first-rate tactical
instrument.  Polish peasantry (not serfs) served in the ranks by
enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly to the smaller
nobility.  Mr. Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had no
difficulty in obtaining a lieutenancy, but the promotion in the
Polish Army was slow, because, being a separate organisation, it
took no part in the wars of the Russian Empire against Persia or
Turkey.  Its first campaign, against Russia itself, was to be its
last.  In 1831, on the outbreak of the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas
B. was the senior captain of his regiment.  Some time before he
had been made head of the remount establishment quartered outside
the kingdom in our southern provinces, whence almost all the
horses for the Polish cavalry were drawn.  For the first time
since he went away from home at the age of eighteen to begin his
military life by the battle of Friedland, Mr. Nicholas B.
breathed the air of the "Border," his native air.  Unkind fate
was lying in wait for him amongst the scenes of his youth.  At
the first news of the rising in Warsaw all the remount
establishment, officers, vets., and the very troopers, were put
promptly under arrest and hurried off in a body beyond the
Dnieper to the nearest town in Russia proper.  From there they
were dispersed to the distant parts of the Empire.  On this
occasion poor Mr. Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much farther
than he ever did in the times of Napoleonic invasion, if much
less willingly.  Astrakhan was his destination.  He remained
there three years, allowed to live at large in the town but
having to report himself every day at noon to the military
commandant, who used to detain him frequently for a pipe and a
chat.  It is difficult to form a just idea of what a chat with
Mr. Nicholas B. could have been like.  There must have been much
compressed rage under his taciturnity, for the commandant
communicated to him the news from the theatre of war and this
news was such as it could be, that is, very bad for the Poles.
Mr. Nicholas B. received these communications with outward
phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm sympathy for his prisoner.
"As a soldier myself I understand your feelings.  You, of course,
would like to be in the thick of it.  By heavens! I am fond of
you.  If it were not for the terms of the military oath I would
let you go on my own responsibility.  What difference could it
make to us, one more or less of you?"

At other times he wondered with simplicity.

"Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch"--(my great-grandfather's name
was Stephen and the commandant used the Russian form of polite
address)--"tell me why is it that you Poles are always looking
for trouble?  What else could you expect from running up against
Russia?"

He was capable, too, of philosophical reflections.

"Look at your Napoleon now.  A great man.  There is no denying it
that he was a great man as long as he was content to thrash those
Germans and Austrians and all those nations.  But no!  He must go
to Russia looking for trouble, and what's the consequence?  Such
as you see me, I have rattled this sabre of mine on the pavements
of Paris."

After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B. described him as a
"worthy man but stupid," whenever he could be induced to speak of
the conditions of his exile.  Declining the option offered him to
enter the Russian Army he was retired with only half the pension
of his rank.  His nephew (my uncle and guardian) told me that the
first lasting impression on his memory as a child of four was the
glad excitement reigning in his parents' house on the day when
Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home from his detention in Russia.

Every generation has its memories.  The first memories of Mr.
Nicholas B. might have been shaped by the events of the last
partition of Poland, and he lived long enough to suffer from the
last armed rising in 1863, an event which affected the future of
all my generation and has coloured my earliest impressions.  His
brother, in whose house he had sheltered for some seventeen years
his misanthropical timidity before the commonest problems of
life, having died in the early fifties, Mr. Nicholas B. had to
screw his courage up to the sticking-point and come to some
decision as to the future.  After a long and agonising hesitation
he was persuaded at last to become the tenant of some fifteen
hundred acres out of the estate of a friend in the neighbourhood.
The terms of the lease were very advantageous, but the retired
situation of the village and a plain comfortable house in good
repair were, I fancy, the greatest inducements. He lived there
quietly for about ten years, seeing very few people and taking no
part in the public life of the province, such as it could be
under an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny.  His character and his
patriotism were above suspicion; but the organisers of the rising
in their frequent journeys up and down the province scrupulously
avoided coming near his house.  It was generally felt that the
repose of the old man's last years ought not to be disturbed.
Even such intimates as my paternal grandfather, a comrade-in-arms
during Napoleon's Moscow campaign and later on a fellow-officer
in the Polish Army, refrained from visiting his crony as the date
of the outbreak approached.  My paternal grandfather's two sons
and his only daughter were all deeply involved in the
revolutionary work; he himself was of that type of Polish squire
whose only ideal of patriotic action was to "get into the saddle
and drive them out."  But even he agreed that "dear Nicholas must
not be worried."  All this considerate caution on the part of
friends, both conspirators and others, did not prevent Mr.
Nicholas B. being made to feel the misfortunes of that ill-omened
year.

Less than forty-eight hours after the beginning of the rebellion
in that part of the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks
passed through the village and invaded the homestead.  Most of
them remained formed between the house and the stables, while
several, dismounting, ransacked the various outbuildings.  The
officer in command, accompanied by two men, walked up to the
front door.  All the blinds on that side were down.  The officer
told the servant who received him that he wanted to see his
master.  He was answered that the master was away from home,
which was perfectly true.

I follow here the tale as told afterwards by the servant to my
grand-uncle's friends and relatives, and as I have heard it
repeated.

On receiving this answer the Cossack officer, who had been
standing in the porch, stepped into the house.

"Where is the master gone, then?"

"Our master went to J--" (the government town some fifty miles
off), "the day before yesterday."

"There are only two horses in the stables.  Where are the
others?"

"Our master always travels with his own horses" (meaning:  not by
post).  "He will be away a week or more.  He was pleased to
mention to me that he had to attend to some business in the Civil
Court."

While the servant was speaking the officer looked about the hall.
There was a door facing him, a door to the right and a door to
the left.  The officer chose to enter the room on the left and
ordered the blinds to be pulled up.  It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s
study with a couple of tall bookcases, some pictures on the
walls, and so on.  Besides the big centre table, with books and
papers, there was a quite small writing-table with several
drawers, standing between the door and the window in a good
light; and at this table my grand-uncle usually sat either to
read or write.

On pulling up the blind the servant was startled by the discovery
that the whole male population of the village was massed in
front, trampling down the flower-beds.  There were also a few
women amongst them.  He was glad to observe the village priest
(of the Orthodox Church) coming up the drive.  The good man in
his haste had tucked up his cassock as high as the top of his
boots.

The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the
bookcases. Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre-
table and remarked easily:

"Your master did not take you to town with him, then."

"I am the head servant and he leaves me in charge of the house.
It's a strong, young chap that travels with our master.  If--God
forbid--there was some accident on the road he would be of much
more use than I."

Glancing through the window he saw the priest arguing vehemently
in the thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his
interference.  Three or four men, however, were talking with the
Cossacks at the door.

"And you don't think your master has gone to join the rebels
maybe--eh?" asked the officer.

"Our master would be too old for that surely.  He's well over
seventy and he's getting feeble too.  It's some years now since
he's been on horseback and he can't walk much either now."

The officer sat there swinging his leg, very quiet and
indifferent.  By that time the peasants who had been talking with
the Cossack troopers at the door had been permitted to get into
the hall.  One or two more left the crowd and followed them in.
They were seven in all and amongst them the blacksmith, an ex-
soldier.  The servant appealed deferentially to the officer.

"Won't your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to
their homes?  What do they want to push themselves into the house
like this for? It's not proper for them to behave like this while
our master's away and I am responsible for everything here."

The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired:

"Have you any arms in the house?"

"Yes.  We have.  Some old things."

"Bring them all, here, on to this table."

The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.

"Won't your honour tell these chaps. . .?"

But the officer looked at him in silence in such a way that he
gave it up at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help
him collect the arms.  Meantime the officer walked slowly through
all the rooms in the house, examining them attentively but
touching nothing.  The peasants in the hall fell back and took
off their caps when he passed through.  He said nothing whatever
to them.  When he came back to the study all the arms to be found
in the house were lying on the table.  There was a pair of big
flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry
swords, one of the French the other of the Polish Army pattern,
with a fowling-piece or two.

The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords and
guns, one after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up.
The peasants in the hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen
after him into the study.  He gave not the slightest sign of
being conscious of their existence and, his business being
apparently concluded, strode out of the house without a word.
Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps and
began to smile at each other.

The Cossacks rode away, passing through the yards of the home
farm straight into the fields.  The priest, still arguing with
the peasants, moved gradually down the drive and his earnest
eloquence was drawing the silent mob after him, away from the
house.  This justice must be rendered to the parish priests of
the Greek Church that, strangers to the country as they were
(being all drawn from the interior of Russia), the majority of
them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the
cause of peace and humanity.  True to the spirit of their
calling, they tried to soothe the passions of the excited
peasantry and opposed rapine and violence whenever they could,
with all their might.  And this conduct they pursued against the
express wishes of the authorities.  Later on some of them were
made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed abruptly to
the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.

The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had
got into the house.  What sort of conduct was that, he asked
them, towards a man who was only a tenant, had been invariably
good and considerate to the villagers for years; and only the
other day had agreed to give up two meadows for the use of the
village herd?  He reminded them, too, of Mr. Nicholas B.'s
devotion to the sick in the time of cholera.  Every word of this
was true and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch
their heads and look irresolute.  The speaker then pointed at the
window, exclaiming:  "Look! there's all your crowd going away
quietly and you silly chaps had better go after them and pray God
to forgive you your evil thoughts."

This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.  In crowding clumsily to
the window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows
overturned the little writing-table.  As it fell over a chink of
loose coin was heard.  "There's money in that thing," cried the
blacksmith.  In a moment the top of the delicate piece of
furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in a drawer eighty
half-imperials.  Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia even at
that time; it put the peasants beside themselves.  "There must be
more of that in the house and we shall have it," yelled the ex-
soldier blacksmith.  "This is war time."  The others were already
shouting out of the window urging the crowd to come back and
help.  The priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms
up and hurried away so as not to see what was going to happen.

In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in
the house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that,
as the servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding
together left in the whole house.  They broke some very fine
mirrors, all the windows and every piece of glass and china.
They threw the books and papers out on the lawn and set fire to
the heap for the mere fun of the thing apparently.  Absolutely
the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small
ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked
bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany and splintered
boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead.  Detecting the
servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned tin box, they
tore it from him, and because he resisted they threw him out of
the dining-room window.  The house was on one floor but raised
well above the ground, and the fall was so serious that the man
remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable-boy ventured
forth at dusk from their hiding-places and picked him up.  By
that time the mob had departed carrying off the tin box, which
they supposed to be full of paper money.  Some distance from the
house in the middle of a field they broke it open.  They found
inside documents engrossed on parchment and the two crosses of
the Legion of Honour and For Valour.  At the sight of these
objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour
given only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what
they had done.  They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and
dispersed hastily.

On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down
completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect
him much.  While he was still in bed from the shock the two
crosses were found and returned to him.  It helped somewhat his
slow convalescence, but the tin box and the parchments, though
searched for in all the ditches around, never turned up again.
He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent,
whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to
the very letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to
recite, tears standing in his eyes the while.  Its terms haunted
him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an
extent that he used to repeat them to himself.  This is confirmed
by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more
intimate friends.  "What makes my heart heavy is to hear our
master in his room at night walking up and down and praying aloud
in the French language."

It must have been somewhat over a year afterwards that I saw Mr.
Nicholas B., or, more correctly, that he saw me, for the last
time.  It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother
had a three months' leave from exile, which she was spending in
the house of her brother, and friends and relations were coming
from far and near to do her honour.  It is inconceivable that Mr.
Nicholas B. should not have been of the number.  The little child
a few months old he had taken up in his arms on the day of his
home-coming after years of war and exile was confessing her faith
in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn.  I do not
know whether he was present on the very day of our departure.  I
have already admitted that for me he is more especially the man
who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy
forest of snow-loaded pines.  My memory cannot place him in any
remembered scene.  A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an
unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure
militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on
earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the
memory of his grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I
suppose, of all those he had seen in the course of his taciturn
life.

But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile.  The
elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-
horses, standing before the long front of the house with its
eight columns, four on each side of the broad flight of stairs.
On the steps, groups of servants, a few relations, one or two
friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on all
the faces an air of sober concentration; my grandmother all in
black gazing stoically, my uncle giving his arm to my mother down
to the carriage in which I had been placed already; at the top of
the flight my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan pattern
with a deal of red in it, and like a small princess attended by
the women of her own household:  the head gourvernante, our dear,
corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty years in the service
of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor attendant, a
handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression, and the
good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown
paper.  Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-
natured eyes only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing
voice alone that broke the silence with an appeal to me:
"N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri."  In three months, simply
by playing with us, she had taught me not only to speak French
but to read it as well.  She was indeed an excellent playmate.
In the distance, half way down to the great gates, a light, open
trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn
up on one side with the police-captain of the district sitting in
it, the vizor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over
his eyes.

It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our
going so carefully.  Without wishing to treat with levity the
just timidities of Imperialists all the world over, I may allow
myself the reflection that a woman, practically condemned by the
doctors, and a small boy not quite six years old could not be
regarded as seriously dangerous even for the largest of
conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of
responsibilities.  And this good man, I believe, did not think so
either.

I learned afterwards why he was present on that day.  I don't
remember any outward signs, but it seems that, about a month
before, my mother became so unwell that there was a doubt whether
she could be made fit to travel in the time.  In this uncertainty
the Governor-General in Kiev was petitioned to grant her a
fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's house.  No answer
whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at dusk the
police-captain of the district drove up to the house and told my
uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak
with the master in private, at once.  Very much impressed (he
thought it was going to be an arrest) the servant, "more dead
than alive with fright," as he related afterwards, smuggled him
through the big drawing-room, which was dark (that room was not
lighted every evening), on tiptoe, so as not to attract the
attention of the ladies in the house, and led him by way of the
orangery to my uncle's private apartments.

The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my
uncle's hands.

"There.  Pray read this.  I have no business to show this paper
to you.  It is wrong of me.  But I can't either eat or sleep with
such a job hanging over me."

That police-captain, a native of Great Russia, had been for many
years serving in the district.

My uncle unfolded and read the document.  It was a service order
issued from the Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with the
matter of the petition and directing the police-captain to
disregard all remonstrances and explanations in regard to that
illness either from medical men or others, "and if she has not
left her brother's house"--it went on to say--"on the morning of
the day specified on her permit, you are to despatch her at once
under escort, direct" (underlined) "to the prison-hospital in
Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands."

"For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your sister goes away
punctually on that day.  Don't give me this work to do with a
woman--and with one of your family too.  I simply cannot bear to
think of it."

He was absolutely wringing his hands.  My uncle looked at him in
silence.

"Thank you for this warning.  I assure you that even if she were
dying she would be carried out to the carriage."

"Yes--indeed--and what difference would it make--travel to Kiev
or back to her husband.  For she would have to go--death or no
death.  And mind, Mr. B., I will be here on the day, not that I
doubt your promise, but because I must.  I have got to.  Duty.
All the same my trade is not fit for a dog since some of you
Poles will persist in rebelling, and all of you have got to
suffer for it."

This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap
pulled up between the house and the great gates.  I regret not
being able to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in
the rights of conquest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of
Imperial greatness.  On the other hand, I am in a position to
state the name of the Governor-General who signed the order with
the marginal note "to be carried out to the letter" in his own
handwriting.  The gentleman's name was Bezak.  A high dignitary,
an energetic official, the idol for a time of the Russian
Patriotic Press.

Each generation has its memories.



Chapter IV.

It must not be supposed that in setting forth the memories of
this half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we
met again at dinner, I am losing sight of "Almayer's Folly."
Having confessed that my first novel was begun in idleness--a
holiday task--I think I have also given the impression that it
was a much-delayed book.  It was never dismissed from my mind,
even when the hope of ever finishing it was very faint.  Many
things came in its way:  daily duties, new impressions, old
memories.  It was not the outcome of a need--the famous need of
self-expression which artists find in their search for motives.
The necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity,
a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon.  Or perhaps
some idle and frivolous magician (there must be magicians in
London) had cast a spell over me through his parlour window as I
explored the maze of streets east and west in solitary leisurely
walks without chart and compass.  Till I began to write that
novel I had written nothing but letters and not very many these.
I never made a note of a fact, of an impression or of an anecdote
in my life.  The conception of a planned book was entirely
outside my mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of
being an author had never turned up amongst these gracious
imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in
the stillness and immobility of a day-dream:  yet it stands clear
as the sun at noonday that from the moment I had done blackening
over the first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly" (it contained
about two hundred words and this proportion of words to a page
has remained with me through the fifteen years of my writing
life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of my heart and
the amazing ignorance of my mind, written that page the die was
cast.  Never had Rubicon been more blindly forded, without
invocation to the gods, without fear of men.

That morning I got up from my breakfast, pushing the chair back,
and rang the bell violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely,
or perhaps I should say eagerly, I do not know.  But manifestly
it must have been a special ring of the bell, a common sound made
impressive, like the ringing of a bell for the raising of the
curtain upon a new scene.  It was an unusual thing for me to do.
Generally, I dawdled over my breakfast and I solemn took the
trouble to ring the bell for the table to be cleared away; but on
that morning for some reason hidden in the general mysteriousness
of the event I did not dawdle.  And yet I was not in a hurry.  I
pulled the cord casually and while the faint tinkling somewhere
down in the basement went on, I charged my pipe in the usual way
and I looked for the matchbox with glances distraught indeed but
exhibiting, I am ready to swear, no signs of a fine frenzy.  I
was composed enough to perceive after some considerable time the
matchbox lying there on the mantelpiece right under my nose.  And
all this was beautifully and safely usual.  Before I had thrown
down the match my landlady's daughter appeared with her calm,
pale face and an inquisitive look, in the doorway.  Of late it
was the landlady's daughter who answered my bell.  I mention this
little fact with pride, because it proves that during the thirty
or forty days of my tenancy I had produced a favourable
impression.  For a fortnight past I had been spared the
unattractive sight of the domestic slave.  The girls in that
Bessborough Gardens house were often changed, but whether short
or long, fair or dark, they were always untidy and particularly
bedraggled as if in a sordid version of the fairy tale the ashbin
cat had been changed into a maid.  I was infinitely sensible of
the privilege of being waited on by my landlady's daughter.  She
was neat if anaemic.

"Will you please clear away all this at once?" I addressed her in
convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting my
pipe to draw.  This, I admit, was an unusual request.  Generally
on getting up from breakfast I would sit down in the window with
a book and let them clear the table when they liked; but if you
think that on that morning I was in the least impatient, you are
mistaken.  I remember that I was perfectly calm.  As a matter of
fact I was not at all certain that I wanted to write, or that I
meant to write, or that I had anything to write about.  No, I was
not impatient.  I lounged between the mantelpiece and the window,
not even consciously waiting for the table to be cleared.  It was
ten to one that before my landlady's daughter was done I would
pick up a book and sit down with it all the morning in a spirit
of enjoyable indolence.  I affirm it with assurance, and I don't
even know now what were the books then lying about the room.
Whatever they were they were not the works of great masters,
where the secret of clear thought and exact expression can be
found.  Since the age of five I have been a great reader, as is
not perhaps wonderful in a child who was never aware of learning
to read.  At ten years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and
other romantics.  I had read in Polish and in French, history,
voyages, novels; I knew "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote" in abridged
editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some
French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before
I began to write myself.  I believe it was a novel and it is
quite possible that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels.  It
is very likely.  My acquaintance with him was then very recent.
He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the
first time in English.  With men of European reputation, with
Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise.  My
first introduction to English imaginative literature was
"Nicholas Nickleby."  It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby
could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph
rage in that language.  As to the Crummles family and the family
of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their
native speech.  It was, I have no doubt, an excellent
translation.  This must have been in the year '70.  But I really
believe that I am wrong.  That book was not my first introduction
to English literature.  My first acquaintance was (or were) the
"Two Gentlemen of Verona," and that in the very MS. of my
father's translation.  It was during our exile in Russia, and it
must have been less than a year after my mother's death, because
I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border of my
heavy mourning.  We were living together, quite alone, in a small
house on the outskirts of the town of T--.  That afternoon,
instead of going out to play in the large yard which we shared
with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in which my father
generally wrote.  What emboldened me to clamber into his chair I
am sure I don't know, but a couple of hours afterwards he
discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my
head held in both hands over the MS. of loose pages.  I was
greatly confused, expecting to get into trouble.  He stood in the
doorway looking at me with some surprise, but the only thing he
said after a moment of silence was:

"Read the page aloud."

Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with
erasures and corrections, and my father's handwriting was
otherwise extremely legible. When I got to the end he nodded and
I flew out of doors thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof
for that piece of impulsive audacity.  I have tried to discover
since the reason of this mildness, and I imagine that all unknown
to myself I had earned, in my father's mind, the right to some
latitude in my relations with his writing-table.  It was only a
month before, or perhaps it was only a week before, that I had
read to him aloud from beginning to end, and to his perfect
satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very well at the
time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of
the Sea."  Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and
also my first introduction to the sea in literature.  If I do not
remember where, how and when I learned to read, I am not likely
to forget the process of being trained in the art of reading
aloud.  My poor father, an admirable reader himself, was the most
exacting of masters.  I reflect proudly that I must have read
that page of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" tolerably well at the age
of eight.  The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume
edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in
Falmouth, at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment
of caulkers' mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship
in dry dock. We had run in, in a sinking condition and with the
crew refusing duty after a month of weary battling with the gales
of the North Atlantic.  Books are an integral part of one's life
and my Shakespearean associations are with that first year of our
bereavement, the last I spent with my father in exile (he sent me
away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he could brace
himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard gales,
the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water
and then by fire.

Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my
writing life began I have forgotten.  I have only a vague notion
that it might have been one of Trollope's political novels.  And
I remember, too, the character of the day.  It was an autumn day
with an opaline atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day,
with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and
windows opposite, while the trees of the square with all their
leaves gone were like tracings of indian ink on a sheet of tissue
paper.  It was one of those London days that have the charm of
mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.  The effect of
opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on account
of the nearness to the river.

There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that
day than on any other day, except that I stood for a long time
looking out of the window after the landlady's daughter was gone
with her spoil of cups and saucers.  I heard her put the tray
down in the passage and finally shut the door; and still I
remained smoking with my back to the room.  It is very clear that
I was in no haste to take the plunge into my writing life, if as
plunge this first attempt may be described.  My whole being was
steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the sea, the
scene of never-ending labour and of unceasing duty.  For utter
surrender to indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that
mood is on him, the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to
the full.  It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but
this is an impression which is hardly to be believed at this
distance of years.  What I am certain of is, that I was very far
from thinking of writing a story, though it is possible and even
likely that I was thinking of the man Almayer.

I had seen him for the first time some four years before from the
bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles
up, more or less, a Bornean river.  It was very early morning and
a slight mist, an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only
without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of
the red London sun, promised to turn presently into a woolly fog.
Barring a small dug-out canoe on the river there was nothing
moving within sight.  I had just come up yawning from my cabin.
The serang and the Malay crew were overhauling the cargo chains
and trying the winches; their voices sounded subdued on the deck
below and their movements were languid.  That tropical daybreak
was chilly.  The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something
from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly.  The forests
above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank;
wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck
awnings, and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I
caught sight of Almayer.  He was moving across a patch of burnt
grass, a blurred shadowy shape with the blurred bulk of a house
behind him, a low house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves with a
high-pitched roof of grass.

He stepped upon the jetty.  He was clad simply in flapping
pyjamas of cretonne pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals
on a disagreeable blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with
short sleeves.  His arms, bare to the elbow, were crossed on his
chest.  His black hair looked as if it had not been cut for a
very long time and a curly wisp of it strayed across his
forehead.  I had heard of him at Singapore; I had heard of him on
board; I had heard of him early in the morning and late at night;
I had heard of him at tiffin and at dinner; I had heard of him in
a place called Pulo Laut from a half-caste gentleman there, who
described himself as the manager of a coal-mine; which sounded
civilised and progressive till you heard that the mine could not
be worked at present because it was haunted by some particulary
atrocious ghosts.  I had heard of him in a place called Dongola,
in the Island of Celebes, when the Rajah of that little-known
seaport (you can get no anchorage there in less than fifteen
fathom, which is extremely inconvenient) came on board in a
friendly way with only two attendants, and drank bottle after
bottle of soda-water on the after-skylight with my good friend
and commander, Captain C--.  At least I heard his name distinctly
pronounced several times in a lot of talk in Malay language.  Oh
yes, I heard it quite distinctly--Almayer, Almayer--and saw
Captain C-- smile while the fat dingy Rajah laughed audibly.  To
hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright is a rare experience I can
assure you.  And I overhead more of Almayer's name amongst our
deck passengers (mostly wandering traders of good repute) as they
sat all over the ship--each man fenced round with bundles and
boxes--on mats, on pillows, on quilts, on billets of wood,
conversing of Island affairs.  Upon my word, I heard the mutter
of Almayer's name faintly at midnight, while making my way aft
from the bridge to look at the patent taffrail-log tinkling its
quarter-miles in the great silence of the sea.  I don't mean to
say that our passengers dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is
indubitable that two of them at least, who could not sleep
apparently and were trying to charm away the trouble of insomnia
by a little whispered talk at that ghostly hour, were referring
in some way or other to Almayer.  It was really impossible on
board that ship to get away definitely from Almayer; and a very
small pony tied up forward and whisking its tail inside the
galley, to the great embarrassment of our Chinaman cook, was
destined for Almayer.  What he wanted with a pony goodness only
knows, since I am perfectly certain he could not ride it; but
here you have the man, ambitious, aiming at the grandiose,
importing a pony, whereas in the whole settlement at which he
used to shake daily his impotent fist, there was only one path
that was practicable for a pony:  a quarter of a mile at most,
hedged in by hundreds of square leagues of virgin forest.  But
who knows?  The importation of that Bali Pony might have been
part of some deep scheme, of some diplomatic plan, of some
hopeful intrigue.  With Almayer one could never tell.  He
governed his conduct by considerations removed from the obvious,
by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic impenetrable
to any reasonable person.  I learned all this later.  That
morning seeing the figure in pyjamas moving in the mist I said to
myself:  "That's the man."

He came quite close to the ship's side and raised a harassed
countenance, round and flat, with that curl of black hair over
the forehead and a heavy, pained glance.

"Good morning."

"Good morning."

He looked hard at me:  I was a new face, having just replaced
the chief mate he was accustomed to see; and I think that this
novelty inspired him, as things generally did, with deep-seated
mistrust.

"Didn't expect you in till this evening," he remarked
suspiciously.

I don't know why he should have been aggrieved, but he seemed to
be.  I took pains to explain to him that having picked up the
beacon at the mouth of the river just before dark and the tide
serving, Captain C-- was enabled to cross the bar and there was
nothing to prevent him going up river at night.

"Captain C-- knows this river like his own pocket," I concluded
discursively, trying to get on terms.

"Better," said Almayer.

Leaning over the rail of the bridge I looked at Almayer, who
looked down at the wharf in aggrieved thought.  He shuffled his
feet a little; he wore straw slippers with thick soles.  The
morning fog had thickened considerably.  Everything round us
dripped:  the derricks, the rails, every single rope in the ship-
-as if a fit of crying had come upon the universe.

Almayer again raised his head and in the accents of a man
accustomed to the buffets of evil fortune asked hardly audibly:

"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a pony on board?"

I told him almost in a whisper, for he attuned my communications
to his minor key, that we had such a thing as a pony, and I
hinted, as gently as I could, that he was confoundedly in the way
too.  I was very anxious to have him landed before I began to
handle the cargo.  Almayer remained looking up at me for a long
while with incredulous and melancholy eyes as though it were not
a safe thing to believe my statement.  This pathetic mistrust in
the favourable issue of any sort of affair touched me deeply, and
I added:

"He doesn't seem a bit the worse for the passage.  He's a nice
pony too."

Almayer was not to be cheered up; for all answer he cleared his
throat and looked down again at his feet.  I tried to close with
him on another tack.

"By Jove!" I said.  "Aren't you afraid of catching pneumonia or
bronchitis or something, walking about in a singlet in such a wet
fog?"

He was not to be propitiated by a show of interest in his health.
His answer was a sinister "No fear," as much as to say that even
that way of escape from inclement fortune was closed to him.

"I just came down. . ." he mumbled after a while.

"Well then, now you're here I will land that pony for you at once
and you can lead him home.  I really don't want him on deck.
He's in the way."

Almayer seemed doubtful.  I insisted:

"Why, I will just swing him out and land him on the wharf right
in front of you.  I'd much rather do it before the hatches are
off.  The little devil may jump down the hold or do some other
deadly thing."

"There's a halter?" postulated Almayer.

"Yes, of course there's a halter."  And without waiting any more
I leaned over the bridge rail.

"Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony."

The cook hastened to shut the door of the galley and a moment
later a great scuffle began on deck.  The pony kicked with
extreme energy, the kalashes skipped out of the way, the serang
issued many orders in a cracked voice.  Suddenly the pony leaped
upon the fore-hatch.  His little hoofs thundered tremendously; he
plunged and reared.  He had tossed his mane and his forelock into
a state of amazing wildness, he dilated his nostrils, bits of
foam flecked his broad little chest, his eyes blazed.  He was
something under eleven hands; he was fierce, terrible, angry,
warlike, he said ha! ha! distinctly, he raged and thumped--and
sixteen able-bodied kalashes stood round him like disconcerted
nurses round a spoilt and passionate child.  He whisked his tail
incessantly; he arched his pretty neck; he was perfectly
delightful; he was charmingly naughty.  There was not an atom of
vice in that performance; no savage baring of teeth and lying
back of ears.  On the contrary, he pricked them forward in a
comically aggressive manner.  He was totally unmoral and lovable;
I would have liked to give him bread, sugar, carrots.  But life
is a stern thing and the sense of duty the only safe guide.  So I
steeled my heart and from my elevated position on the bridge I
ordered the men to fling themselves upon him in a body.

The elderly serang, emitting a strange inarticulate cry, gave the
example. He was an excellent petty officer--very competent
indeed, and a moderate opium smoker.  The rest of them in one
great rush smothered that pony. They hung on to his ears, to his
mane, to his tail; they lay in piles across his back, seventeen
in all.  The carpenter, seizing the hook of the cargo-chain,
flung himself on top of them.  A very satisfactory petty officer
too, but he stuttered.  Have you ever heard a light-yellow, lean,
sad, earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English?  It's very weird
indeed. He made the eighteenth.  I could not see the pony at all;
but from the swaying and heaving of that heap of men I knew that
there was something alive inside.

From the wharf Almayer hailed in quavering tones:

"Oh, I say!"

Where he stood he could not see what was going on on deck unless
perhaps the tops of the men's heads; he could only hear the
scuffle, the mighty thuds, as if the ship were being knocked to
pieces.  I looked over:  "What is it?"

"Don't let them break his legs," he entreated me plaintively.

"Oh, nonsense!  He's all right now.  He can't move."

By that time the cargo-chain had been hooked to the broad canvas
belt round the pony's body, the kalashes sprang off
simultaneously in all directions, rolling over each other, and
the worthy serang, making a dash behind the winch, turned the
steam on.

"Steady!" I yelled, in great apprehension of seeing the animal
snatched up to the very head of the derrick.

On the wharf Almayer shuffled his straw slippers uneasily.  The
rattle of the winch stopped, and in a tense, impressive silence
that pony began to swing across the deck.

How limp he was!  Directly he felt himself in the air he relaxed
every muscle in a most wonderful manner.  His four hoofs knocked
together in a bunch, his head hung down, and his tail remained
pendent in a nerveless and absolute immobility.  He reminded me
vividly of the pathetic little sheep which hangs on the collar of
the Order of the Golden Fleece.  I had no idea that anything in
the shape of a horse could be so limp as that, either living or
dead.  His wild mane hung down lumpily, a mere mass of inanimate
horsehair; his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went
swaying slowly across the front of the bridge I noticed an astute
gleam in his dreamy, half-closed eye.  A trustworthy
quartermaster, his glance anxious and his mouth on the broad
grin, was easing over the derrick watchfully.  I superintended,
greatly interested.

"So!  That will do."

The derrick-head stopped.  The kalashes lined the rail.  The rope
of the halter hung perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull
in front of Almayer.  Everything was very still.  I suggested
amicably that he should catch hold of the rope and mind what he
was about.  He extended a provokingly casual and superior hand.

"Look out then!  Lower away!"

Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently enough, but when the
pony's hoofs touched the wharf he gave way all at once to a most
foolish optimism.  Without pausing, without thinking, almost
without looking, he disengaged the hook suddenly from the sling,
and the cargo-chain, after hitting the pony's quarters, swung
back against the ship's side with a noisy, rattling slap.  I
suppose I must have blinked.  I know I missed something, because
the next thing I saw was Almayer lying flat on his back on the
jetty.  He was alone.

Astonishment deprived me of speech long enough to give Almayer
time to pick himself up in a leisurely and painful manner.  The
kalashes lining the rail had all their mouths open.  The mist
flew in the light breeze, and it had come over quite thick enough
to hide the shore completely.

"How on earth did you manage to let him get away?" I asked
scandalised.

Almayer looked into the smarting palm of his right hand, but did
not answer my inquiry.

"Where do you think he will get to?" I cried.  "Are there any
fences anywhere in this fog?  Can he bolt into the forest?
What's to be done now?"

Almayer shrugged his shoulders.

"Some of my men are sure to be about.  They will get hold of him
sooner or later."

"Sooner or later!  That's all very fine, but what about my canvas
sling--he's carried it off.  I want it now, at once, to land two
Celebes cows."

Since Dongola we had on board a pair of the pretty little island
cattle in addition to the pony.  Tied up on the other side of the
fore deck they had been whisking their tails into the other door
of the galley.  These cows were not for Almayer, however; they
were invoiced to Abdullah bin Selim, his enemy.  Almayer's
disregard of my requisites was complete.

"If I were you I would try to find out where he's gone," I
insisted.  "Hadn't you better call your men together or
something?  He will throw himself down and cut his knees.  He may
even break a leg, you know."

But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, did not seem to want
that pony any more.  Amazed at this sudden indifference I turned
all hands out on shore to hunt for him on my own account, or, at
any rate, to hunt for the canvas sling which he had round his
body.  The whole crew of the steamer, with the exception of
firemen and engineers, rushed up the jetty past the thoughtful
Almayer and vanished from my sight.  The white fog swallowed them
up; and again there was a deep silence that seemed to extend for
miles up and down the stream.  Still taciturn, Almayer started to
climb on board, and I went down from the bridge to meet him on
the after deck.

"Would you mind telling the captain that I want to see him very
particularly?" he asked me in a low tone, letting his eyes stray
all over the place.

"Very well.  I will go and see."

With the door of his cabin wide open Captain C--, just back from
the bathroom, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick,
damp, iron-grey hair with two large brushes.

"Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see you very particularly,
sir."

Saying these words I smiled.  I don't know why I smiled except
that it seemed absolutely impossible to mention Almayer's name
without a smile of a sort.  It had not to be necessarily a
mirthful smile.  Turning his head towards me Captain C-- smiled
too, rather joylessly.

"The pony got away from him--eh?"

"Yes sir.  He did."

"Where is he?"

"Goodness only knows."

"No.  I mean Almayer.  Let him come along."

The captain's stateroom opening straight on deck under the
bridge, I had only to beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who had
remained aft, with downcast eyes, on the very spot where I had
left him.  He strolled up moodily, shook hands and at once asked
permission to shut the cabin door.

"I have a pretty story to tell you," were the last words I heard.
The bitterness of tone was remarkable.

I went away from the door, of course.  For the moment I had no
crew on board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag
hung round his neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the
empty decks knocking out the wedges of the hatches and dropping
them into the bag conscientiously.  Having nothing to do I joined
our two engineers at the door of the engine-room.  It was near
breakfast time.

"He's turned up early, hasn't he?" commented the second engineer,
and smiled indifferently.  He was an abstemious man with a good
digestion and a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.

"Yes," I said.  "Shut up with the old man.  Some very particular
business."

"He will spin him a damned endless yarn," observed the chief
engineer.

He smiled rather sourly.  He was dyspeptic and suffered from
gnawing hunger in the morning.  The second smiled broadly, a
smile that made two vertical folds on his shaven cheeks.  And I
smiled too, but I was not exactly amused.  In that man, whose
name apparently could not be uttered anywhere in the Malay
Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing amusing whatever.
That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking mostly into
his cup.  I informed him that my men came upon his pony capering
in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which
he kept his store of guttah.  The cover was off with no one near
by, and the whole of my crew just missed going heels over head
into that beastly hole.  Jurumudi Itam, our best quartermaster,
deft at fine needlework, he who mended the ship's flags and sewed
buttons on our coats, was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.

Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer's character.
He mumbled:

"Do you mean that pirate fellow?"

"What pirate fellow?  The man has been in the ship eleven years,"
I said indignantly.

"It's his looks," Almayer muttered for all apology.

The sun had eaten up the fog.  From where we sat under the after
awning we could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of
Almayer's house, to a post of the verandah.  We were silent for a
long time.  All at once Almayer, alluding evidently to the
subject of his conversation in the captain's cabin, exclaimed
anxiously across the table:

"I really don't know what I can do now!"

Captain C-- only raised his eyebrows at him, and got up from his
chair.  We dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half dressed as
he was in his cretonne pyjamas and the thin cotton singlet,
remained on board, lingering near the gangway as though he could
not make up his mind whether to go home or stay with us for good.
Our Chinamen boys gave him side glances as they went to and fro;
and Ah Sing, our young chief steward, the handsomest and most
sympathetic of Chinamen, catching my eye, nodded knowingly at his
burly back.  In the course of the morning I approached him for a
moment.

"Well, Mr. Almayer," I addressed him easily, "you haven't started
on your letters yet."

We had brought him his mail and he had held the bundle in his
hand ever since we got up from breakfast.  He glanced at it when
I spoke and, for a moment, it looked as if he were on the point
of opening his fingers and letting the whole lot fall overboard.
I believe he was tempted to do so. I shall never forget that man
afraid of his letters.

"Have you been long out from Europe?" he asked me.

"Not very.  Not quite eight months," I told him.  "I left a ship
in Samarang with a hurt back and have been in the hospital in
Singapore some weeks."

He sighed.

"Trade is very bad here."

"Indeed!"

"Hopeless!. . .See these geese?"

With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what
resembled a patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant
part of his compound.  It disappeared behind some bushes.

"The only geese on the East Coast," Almayer informed me in a
perfunctory mutter without a spark of faith, hope or pride.
Thereupon, with the same absence of any sort of sustaining spirit
he declared his intention to silence a fat bird and send him on
board for us not later than next day.

I had heard of these largesses before.  He conferred a goose as
if it were a sort of Court decoration given only to the tried
friends of the house.  I had expected more pomp in the ceremony.
The gift had surely its special quality, multiple and rare.  From
the only flock on the East Coast!  He did not make half enough of
it.  That man did not understand his opportunities.  However, I
thanked him at some length.

"You see," he interrupted abruptly in a very peculiar tone, "the
worst of this country is that one is not able to realise. . .it's
impossible to realise. . ."  His voice sank into a languid
mutter.  "And when one has very large interests. . .very
important interests. . ." he finished faintly. . ."up the river."

We looked at each other.  He astonished me by giving a start and
making a very queer grimace.

"Well, I must be off," he burst out hurriedly.  "So long!"

At the moment of stepping over the gangway he checked himself
though, to give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that
evening with my captain, an invitation which I accepted.  I don't
think it could have been possible for me to refuse.

I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of
free will "at any rate for practical purposes."  Free, is it?
For practical purposes!  Bosh!  How could I have refused to dine
with that man?  I did not refuse simply because I could not
refuse.  Curiosity, a healthy desire for a change of cooking,
common civility, the talk and the smiles of the previous twenty
days, every condition of my existence at that moment and place
made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all that, there
was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want of
foreknowledge to counter-balance these imperative conditions of
the problem.  A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane.
Nobody unless a surly lunatic would have refused.  But if I had
not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there
would never have been a line of mine in print.

I accepted then--and I am paying yet the price of my sanity.  The
possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is
responsible for the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far.
The number of geese he had called into being under adverse
climatic conditions was considerably more than fourteen.  The
tale of volumes will never overtake the counting of heads, I am
safe to say; but my ambitions point not exactly that way, and
whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me I have always
thought kindly of Almayer.

I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would
have been?  This is something not to be discovered in this world.
But if we ever meet in the Elysian Fields--where I cannot depict
him to myself otherwise than attended in the distance by his
flock of geese (birds sacred to Jupiter)--and he addresses me in
the stillness of that passionless region, neither light nor
darkness, neither sound nor silence, and heaving endlessly with
billowy mists from the impalpable multitudes of the swarming
dead, I think I know what answer to make.

I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone
of his measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of
course, the solemn eternity of stillness in the least--I would
say something like this:

"It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted
your name to my own uses.  But that is a very small larceny.
What's in a name, O Shade?  If so much of your old mortal
weakness clings to you yet as to make you feel aggrieved (it was
the note of your earthly voice, Almayer), then, I entreat you,
seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade--with him
who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the
smell of the rose.  He will comfort you.  You came to me stripped
of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful
chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands.  Your name was
the common property of the winds:  it, as it were, floated naked
over the waters about the Equator.  I wrapped round its
unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics and have essayed
to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity--feats
which you did not demand from me--but remember that all the toil
and all the pain were mine.  In your earthly life you haunted me,
Almayer.  Consider that this was taking a great liberty.  Since
you were always complaining of being lost to the world, you
should remember that if I had not believed enough in your
existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens, you
would have been much more lost.  You affirm that had I been
capable of looking at you with a more perfect detachment and a
greater simplicity, I might have perceived better the inward
marvellousness which, you insist, attended your career upon that
tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible far, far below us, where
both our graves lie.  No doubt!  But reflect, O complaining
Shade! that this was not so much my fault as your crowning
misfortune.  I believed in you in the only way it was possible
for me to believe.  It was not worthy of your merits?  So be it.
But you were always an unlucky man, Almayer.  Nothing was ever
quite worthy of you.  What made you so real to me was that you
held this lofty theory with some force of conviction and with an
admirable consistency."

It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy
expressions that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian
Abode of Shades, since it has come to pass that having parted
many years ago, we are never to meet again in this world.



Chapter V.

In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense
that literary ambition had never entered the world of his
imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite
an inexplicable event.  In my own case I cannot trace it back to
any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and
hold to.  The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity
for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational
stimulus for taking up a pen.  The pen at any rate was there, and
there is nothing wonderful in that.  Everybody keeps a pen (the
cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of
penny stamps and halfpenny postcards.  In fact, this was the
epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made
the reputation of a novel or two.  And I too had a pen rolling
about somewhere--the seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of
a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned
attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency permitted, of
letters begun with infinite reluctance and put off suddenly till
next day--tell next week as likely as not!  The neglected,
uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and
under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm,
in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the
beastly thing gone to?" ungracious spirit.  Where indeed!  It
might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so.  My
landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed
it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner of
approaching her domestic duties.  Or it might even be resting
delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and
when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which would have
discouraged any man of literary instincts.  But not me!  "Never
mind.  This will do."

O days without guile!  If anybody had told me then that a devoted
household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the
fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had
touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never
deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief.  There are
imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice, too wild for
indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile.  Perhaps, had that
seer of the future been a friend, I should have been secretly
saddened.  "Alas!" I would have thought, looking at him with an
unmoved face, "the poor fellow is going mad."

I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world
where the journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of
heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does so under the
prophetical management of the Meteorological Office, but where
the secret of human hearts cannot be captured either by prying or
praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my
friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I
should turn into a writer of tales.

To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a
fascinating pursuit for idle hours.  The field is so wide, the
surprises so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable but
curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not
weary easily of it.  I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who
rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who
really never rest in this world, and when out of it go on
fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last
habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality.  Neither
am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking
forward to some aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a
detached, impersonal glance upon themselves.

And that's a pity.  They are unlucky.  These two kinds, together
with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those
unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great
French writer has put it) "the whole universe vanishes into blank
nothingness," miss, perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is
short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions.  The
ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel
and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith,
hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish,
that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be
ethical at all.  I would fondly believe that its object is purely
spectacular:  a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if
you like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for
despair!  Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end
in themselves.  The rest is our affair--the laughter, the tears,
the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a
steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that's
our affair!  And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every
phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may
be our appointed task on this earth.  A task in which fate has
perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with
a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder,
the haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable
serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the
sublime spectacle.

Chi lo sa?  It may be true.  In this view there is room for every
religion except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and
cloak of arid despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every
fair dream, for every charitable hope.  The great aim is to
remain true to the emotions called out of the deep encircled by
the firmament of stars, whose infinite numbers and awful
distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or
the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities of
sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter
nothing at all.

The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem
full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a
purely spectacular universe, where inspiration of every sort has
a rational existence, the artist of every kind finds a natural
place; and amongst them the poet as the seer par excellence.
Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome
task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy of a
place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps
laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry.  Yes!  Even
he, the prose artist of fiction, which after all is but truth
often dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of
imaged phrases--even he has his place amongst kings, demagogues,
priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, Cabinet Ministers, Fabians,
bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, Kaffirs, soldiers,
sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and constellations
of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself.

Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a
subtle expression, as if the cat were out of the bag.  I take the
novelist's freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the
exclamation, "That's it!  The fellow talks pro domo."

Indeed it was not the intention!  When I shouldered the bag I was
not aware of the cat inside.  But, after all, why not?  The fair
courtyards of the House of Art are thronged by many humble
retainers.  And there is no retainer so devoted as he who is
allowed to sit on the doorstep.  The fellows who have got inside
are apt to think too much of themselves.  This last remark, I beg
to state, is not malicious within the definition of the law of
libel.  It's fair comment on a matter of public interest.  But
never mind.  Pro domo.  So be it.  For his house tant que vous
voudrez.  And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify
my existence.  The attempt would have been not only needless and
absurd, but almost inconceivable, in a purely spectacular
universe, where no such disagreeable necessity can possibly
arise.  It is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at
some length in these pages):  "J'ai vecu."  I have existed,
obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe
Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to
exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of
the French Revolution.  "J'ai vecu", as I apprehend most of us
manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms of
destruction by a hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear,
and perhaps my soul also, but not without some damage here and
there to the fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the
ages, of the race, of the group, of the family, colourable and
plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, and even by
the silences and abstentions surrounding one's childhood; tinged
in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the
inherited traditions, beliefs, or prejudices--unaccountable,
despotic, persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.

And often romantic!. . .The matter in hand, however, is to keep
these reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of
literary activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account
of the extreme thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying
his own existence; for that such was his purpose is palpably,
even grossly, visible to an unprejudiced eye.  But then, you see,
the man was not a writer of fiction.  He was an artless moralist,
as is clearly demonstrated by his anniversaries being celebrated
with marked emphasis by the heirs of the French Revolution, which
was not a political movement at all, but a great outburst of
morality.  He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of
"Emile" will prove.  He was no novelist, whose first virtue is
the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of
his time to the play of his invention.  Inspiration comes from
the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the
cold and immutable heaven.  A writer of imaginative prose (even
more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his
works.  His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful and
unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world.  Indeed, every
one who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers (unless a
moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the
one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of
nothing else.  It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and
just of French prose writers, who says that we must recognise at
last that, "failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only
talk of ourselves."

This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a
sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the
principles and rules of literary criticism.  As was fitting for a
man to whom we owe the memorable saying, "The good critic is he
who relates the adventures of his soul amongst masterpieces," M.
Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no
principles.  And that may be very true.  Rules, principles and
standards die and vanish every day.  Perhaps they are all dead
and vanished by this time.  These, if ever, are the brave, free
days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy
inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to
think, will be set up presently in the old places.  But what is
interesting to a writer is the possession of an inward certitude
that literary criticism will never die, for man (so variously
defined) is, before everything else, a critical animal.  And, as
long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit
of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal to us with all
the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience.

For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task,
any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit
of romance.  But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an
adventurous spirit.  They take risks, of course--one can hardly
live without that.  The daily bread is served out to us (however
sparingly) with a pinch of salt.  Otherwise one would get sick of
the diet one prays for, and that would be not only improper, but
impious.  From impiety of that or any other kind--save us!  An
ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense of proprieties,
from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness,
induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes
a mere "notice," as it were the relation of a journey where
nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should
be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood
and field, the hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh,
the sufferings too!  I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the
traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful
plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance
looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen
running in a desert.  A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure.  "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I
should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to
the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."
Neither is the writing of novels.  It isn't really.  Je vous
donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not.  Not all.  I am thus
emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a
general. . .

Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and
then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle
Ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations
of the world's superficial judgment, shocking to the souls
concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of
sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say, or of
art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute.  And
thus this general's daughter came to me--or I should say one of
the general's daughters did.  There were three of these bachelor
ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation.  The
eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village
children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers
for the conquest of curtseys.  It sounds futile, but it was
really a war for an idea.  The second skirmished and scouted all
over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance
right to my very table--I mean the one who wore stand-up collars.
She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of
afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination.
She marched into my room swinging her stick. . .but no--I mustn't
exaggerate.  It is not my speciality.  I am not a humoristic
writer.  In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she
had a stick to swing.

No ditch or wall encompassed my abode.  The window was open; the
door too stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm,
still sunshine of the wide fields.  They lay around me infinitely
helpful, but truth to say I had not known for weeks whether the
sun shone upon the earth and whether the stars above still moved
on their appointed courses.  I was just then giving up some days
of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel "Nostromo,"
a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still
mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction
with the word "astonishing."  I have no opinion on this
discrepancy.  It's the sort of difference that can never be
settled.  All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the
common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this
earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with the Lord"
for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness
of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the
sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the
shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile.
These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to
characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative
effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the
full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to
the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle--
something for which a material parallel can only be found in the
everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round
Cape Horn.  For that too is the wrestling of men with the might
of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without
the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a
sense of over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be
adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude.  Yet a certain
longitude, once won, cannot be disputed.  The sun and the stars
and the shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain;
whereas a handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them
your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil.
Here they are.  "Failure"--"Astonishing":  take your choice; or
perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of
paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the
sunshine.

"How do you do?"

It was the greeting of the general's daughter.  I had heard
nothing--no rustle, no footsteps.  I had felt only a moment
before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an
inauspicious presence--just that much warning and no more; and
then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible
fall from a great height--a fall, let us say, from the highest of
the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the
faint westerly air of that July afternoon.  I picked myself up
quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair
stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being
uprooted out of one world and flung down into another--perfectly
civil.

"Oh!  How do you do?  Won't you sit down?"

That's what I said.  This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly
true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of
confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do.  Observe!  I
didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself
on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other way
at the appalling magnitude of the disaster.  The whole world of
Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my seaboard tale),
men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was
not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not
placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's
silver-mine, and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de
Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham
heard it pass over his head--in Linda Viola's voice), dominated
even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of
treasure and love--all that had come down crashing about my ears.
I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in that very moment
I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"

The sea is strong medicine.  Behold what the quarter-deck
training even in a merchant ship will do!  This episode should
give you a new view of the English and Scots seamen (a much-
caricatured folk) who had the last say in the formation of my
character.  One is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster I
think I have done some honour to their simple teaching.  "Won't
you sit down?"  Very fair; very fair indeed.  She sat down.  Her
amused glance strayed all over the room.  There were pages of MS.
on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a
chair, single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners;
there were there living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead
pages that would be burnt at the end of the day--the litter of a
cruel battlefield, of a long, long and desperate fray.  Long!  I
suppose I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of
times.  Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the food put before me,
and talked connectedly to my household on suitable occasions.
But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily life, made
easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
affection.  Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at
that table surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days
and nights on end.  It seemed so, because of the intense
weariness of which that interruption had made me aware--the awful
disenchantment of a mind realising suddenly the futility of an
enormous task, joined to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary
amount of fairly heavy physical labour could ever account for.  I
have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a
ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the
evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to
know.

And I love letters.  I am jealous of their honour and concerned
for the dignity and comeliness of their service.  I was, most
likely, the only writer that neat lady had ever caught in the
exercise of his craft, and it distressed me not to be able to
remember when it was that I dressed myself last, and how.  No
doubt that would be all right in essentials.  The fortune of the
house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes that would see
to that.  But I felt somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and
dishevelled down to my very heels.  And I am afraid I blinked
stupidly.  All this was bad for the honour of letters and the
dignity of their service.  Seen indistinctly through the dust of
my collapsed universe, the good lady glanced about the room with
a slightly amused serenity.  And she was smiling.  What on earth
was she smiling at?  She remarked casually:

"I am afraid I interrupted you."

"Not at all."

She accepted the denial in perfect good faith.  And it was
strictly true. Interrupted--indeed!  She had robbed me of at
least twenty lives, each infinitely more poignant and real than
her own, because informed with passion, possessed of convictions,
involved in great affairs created out of my own substance for an
anxiously meditated end.

She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all
round at the litter of the fray:

"And you sit like this here writing your--your. . ."

"I--what?  Oh, yes, I sit here all day."

"It must be perfectly delightful."

I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on
the verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the
porch, and my boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had
espied him from afar.  He came on straight and swift like a
cannon-ball, and the noise of the fight, which burst suddenly
upon our ears, was more than enough to scare away a fit of
apoplexy.  We went out hastily and separated the gallant animals.
Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife--just
round the corner, under the trees.  She nodded and went off with
her dog, leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she
had lightly made--and with the awfully instructive sound of the
word "delightful" lingering in my ears.

Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate.  I
wanted to be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere
novel that one should be rude to a lady on their account?), but
mainly, to adopt the good sound Ollendorffian style, because I
did not want the dog of the general's daughter to fight again
(encore) with the faithful dog of my infant son (mon petit
garcon).--Was I afraid that the dog of the general's daughter
would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my child?--No, I
was not afraid. . .But away with the Ollendorff method.  However
appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything
appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin,
character and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the
child from a man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian
value, a man almost childlike in the impulsive movements of his
untutored genius, the most single-minded of verbal
impressionists, using his great gifts of straight feeling and
right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong if, perhaps,
not fully conscious conviction.  His art did not obtain, I fear,
all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved.  I am
alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of "The Red Badge
of Courage," a work of imagination which found its short moment
of celebrity in the last decade of the departed century.  Other
books followed.  Not many.  He had not the time.  It was an
individual and complete talent, which obtained but a grudging,
somewhat supercilious recognition from the world at large.  For
himself one hesitates to regret his early death.  Like one of the
men in his "Open Boat," one felt that he was of those whom fate
seldom allows to make a safe landing after much toil and
bitterness at the oar.  I confess to an abiding affection for
that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient
figure.  He liked me even before we met on the strength of a page
or two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he
liked me still.  He used to point out to me with great
earnestness, and even with some severity, that "a boy ought to
have a dog."  I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect of
parental duties.  Ultimately it was he who provided the dog.
Shortly afterwards, one day, after playing with the child on the
rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he raised
his head and declared firmly:  "I shall teach your boy to ride."
That was not to be.  He was not given the time.

But here is the dog--an old dog now.  Broad and low on his bandy
paws, with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black
spot at the other end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad,
smiles not altogether unkind.  Grotesque and engaging in the
whole of his appearance, his usual attitudes are meek, but his
temperament discloses itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the
presence of his kind.  As he lies in the firelight, his head well
up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed at the shadows of the
room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in the calm
consciousness of an unstained life.  He has brought up one baby,
and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is
bringing up another with the same conscientious devotion, but
with a more deliberate gravity of manner, the sign of greater
wisdom and riper experience, but also of rheumatism, I fear.
From the morning bath to the evening ceremonies of the cot you
attend, old friend, the little two-legged creature of your
adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of your duties
with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by every
person in the house--even as I myself am treated; only you
deserve it more.  The general's daughter would tell you that it
must be "perfectly delightful."

Aha! old dog.  She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it's
that poor left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you
preserve a rigid immobility for fear of overturning the little
two-legged creature.  She has never seen your resigned smile when
the little two-legged creature, interrogated sternly, "What are
you doing to the good dog?" answers with a wide, innocent stare:
"Nothing.  Only loving him, mamma dear!"

The general's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-
imposed tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very
rewards of rigid self-command.  But we have lived together many
years.  We have grown older, too; and though our work is not
quite done yet we may indulge now and then in a little
introspection before the fire--meditate on the art of bringing up
babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where so many
lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly
away.


Chapter VI.

In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary
stage of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments,
and even two distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its
successive scenes, a certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable.
I am conscious of it in these pages.  This remark is put forward
in no apologetic spirit.  As years go by and the number of pages
grows steadily, the feeling grows upon one too that one can write
only for friends.  Then why should one put them to the necessity
of protesting (as a friend would do) that no apology is
necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of one's
discretion?  So much as to the care due to those friends whom a
word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the
right place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety,
has drawn from the great multitude of fellow-beings even as a
fish is drawn from the depths of the sea.  Fishing is notoriously
(I am talking now of the deep sea) a matter of luck.  As to one's
enemies, those will take care of themselves.

There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking,
jumps upon me with both feet.  This image has no grace, but it is
exceedingly apt to the occasion--to the several occasions.  I
don't know precisely how long he had been indulging in that
intermittent exercise, whose seasons are ruled by the custom of
the publishing trade.  Somebody pointed him out (in printed
shape, of course) to my attention some time ago, and straightway
I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man.
He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden:  for the
writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain
shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds.  Not a shred!
Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or
perversity.  It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more
estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness.  It
is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given (reluctantly) for
a consideration, for several considerations.  There is that
robustness, for instance, so often the sign of good moral
balance.  That's a consideration.  It is not, indeed, pleasant to
be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation,
implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into
work whose qualities and defects, whatever they may be, are not
so much on the surface, is something to be thankful for in view
of the fact that it may happen to one's work to be condemned
without being read at all.  This is the most fatuous adventure
that can well happen to a writer venturing his soul amongst
criticisms.  It can do one no harm, of course, but it is
disagreeable.  It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering
a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot of folk in a third-
class compartment.  The open impudence of the whole transaction,
appealing insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the
brazen, shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while
insisting on the fairness of the game, give one a feeling of
sickening disgust.  The honest violence of a plain man playing a
fair game fairly--even if he means to knock you over--may appear
shocking, but it remains within the pale of decency.  Damaging as
it may be, it is in no sense offensive.  One may well feel some
regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's own vile body.
But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not be
stayed by explanations or placated by apologies.  Were I to
advance the plea of youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found
in these pages, he would be likely to say "Bosh!" in a column and
a half of fierce print.  Yet a writer is no older than his first
published book, and, notwithstanding the vain appearances of
decay which attend us in this transitory life, I stand here with
the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.

With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of
feeling and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that,
upon the whole, my previous state of existence was not a good
equipment for a literary life. Perhaps I should not have used the
word literary.  That word presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance
with letters, a turn of mind and a manner of feeling to which I
dare lay no claim.  I only love letters; but the love of letters
does not make a literary man, any more than the love of the sea
makes a seaman.  And it is very possible, too, that I love the
letters in the same way a literary man may love the sea he looks
at from the shore--a scene of great endeavour and of great
achievements changing the face of the world, the great open way
to all sorts of undiscovered countries.  No, perhaps I had better
say that the life at sea--and I don't mean a mere taste of it,
but a good broad span of years, something that really counts as
real service--is not, upon the whole, a good equipment for a
writing life.  God forbid, though, that I should be thought of as
denying my masters of the quarter-deck.  I am not capable of that
sort of apostasy.  I have confessed my attitude of piety towards
their shades in three or four tales, and if any man on earth more
than another needs to be true to himself as he hopes to be saved,
it is certainly the writer of fiction.

What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training
does not prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary
criticism.  Only that, and no more.  But this defect is not
without gravity.  If it be permissible to twist, invert, adapt
(and spoil) M. Anatole France's definition of a good critic, then
let us say that the good author is he who contemplates without
marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst
criticisms.  Far be from me the intention to mislead an attentive
public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea.  That
would be dishonest, and even impolite.  Everything can be found
at sea, according to the spirit of your quest--strife, peace,
romance, naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom,
disgust, inspiration--and every conceivable opportunity,
including the opportunity to make a fool of yourself--exactly as
in the pursuit of literature.  But the quarter-deck criticism is
somewhat different from literary criticism.  This much they have
in common, that before the one and the other the answering back,
as a general rule, does not pay.

Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation--I tell you
everything is to be found on salt water--criticism generally
impromptu, and always viva voce, which is the outward, obvious
difference from the literary operation of that kind, with
consequent freshness and vigour which may be lacking in the
printed word.  With appreciation, which comes at the end, when
the critic and the criticised are about to part, it is otherwise.
The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the permanency
of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal in
its phrasing.  There the literary master has the superiority,
though he, too, can in effect but say--and often says it in the
very phrase--"I can highly recommend."  Only usually he uses the
word "We," there being some occult virtue in the first person
plural, which makes it specially fit for critical and royal
declarations.  I have a small handful of these sea appreciations,
signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my writing-table's
left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a
handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree
of knowledge.  Strange!  It seems that it is for these few bits
of paper, headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the
names of a few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced
the astonished indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of
a sort hard to bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been
charged with the want of patriotism, the want of sense, and the
want of heart too; that I went through agonies of self-conflict
and shed secret tears not a few, and had the beauties of the
Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called an "incorrigible
Don Quixote," in allusion to the book-born madness of the knight.
For that spoil!  They rustle, those bits of paper--some dozen of
them in all.  In that faint, ghostly sound there live the
memories of twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more,
the strong voice of the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a
mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea, which must have
somehow reached my inland cradle and entered my unconscious ear,
like that formula of Mohammedan faith the Mussulman father
whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making him one of
the faithful almost with his first breath.  I do not know whether
I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful
one.  And after all there is that handful of "characters" from
various ships to prove that all these years have not been
altogether a dream.  There they are, brief, and monotonous in
tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me as any inspired
page to be found in literature.  But then, you see, I have been
called romantic.  Well, that can't be helped.  But stay.  I seem
to remember that I have been called a realist also.  And as that
charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at
whatever cost, for a change.  With this end in view, I will
confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to
see my blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these
suggestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain
the words "strictly sober."

Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's very gratifying, to be
sure"?  Well, yes, it is gratifying--thank you.  It is at least
as gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified romantic,
though such certificates would not qualify one for the
secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of
official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as
the London County Council, for instance.  The above prosaic
reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general
sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs.  I make a point of it
because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine
being published in a French translation, a Parisian critic--I am
almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn in the "Gil-Blas"--giving
me a short notice, summed up his rapid impression of the writer's
quality in the words un puissant reveur.  So be it!  Who would
cavil at the words of a friendly reader?  Yet perhaps not such an
unconditional dreamer as all that.  I will make bold to say that
neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of
responsibility.  There is more than one sort of intoxication.
Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful
of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment,
in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it,
such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame.  It is but a
maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength
of wine.  I have tried to be a sober worker all my life--all my
two lives.  I did so from taste, no doubt, having an instinctive
horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also from
artistic conviction.  Yet there are so many pitfalls on each side
of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a little
battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the mere
daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept
always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power,
and truth, and peace.

As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the
sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing
in their time.  I seem to hear your polite murmur that "Surely
this might have been taken for granted."  Well, no.  It might not
have been.  That august academical body the Marine Department of
the Board of Trade takes nothing for granted in the granting of
its learned degrees.  By its regulations issued under the first
Merchant Shipping Act, the very word SOBER must be written, or a
whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the most enthusiastic
appreciation will avail you nothing.  The door of the examination
rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.  The most
fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly
fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board
of Trade.  As I have been face to face at various times with all
the examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can
be no doubt as to the force and the continuity of my
abstemiousness.  Three of them were examiners in seamanship, and
it was my fate to be delivered into the hands of each of them at
proper intervals of sea service.  The first of all, tall, spare,
with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet, kindly
manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced to
conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my
appearance.  His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his
crossed legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice,
and went on, went on. . .It lasted for hours, for hours.  Had I
been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to
the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more
microscopic examination.  Greatly reassured by his apparent
benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers.  But
at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me.
And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold
ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries.  Then I got
frightened.  I was not frightened of being plucked; that
eventuality did not even present itself to my mind.  It was
something much more serious, and weird.  "This ancient person," I
said to myself, terrified, "is so near his grave that he must
have lost all notion of time.  He is considering this examination
in terms of eternity.  It is all very well for him.  His race is
run.  But I may find myself coming out of this room into the
world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to
remember the way to my hired home."  This statement is not so
much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed.  Some very
queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my
answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor
yet with anything reasonable known to this earth.  I verily
believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of languid way.
At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for
ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen.  He extended the scrap of
paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my
parting bow. . .

When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed
lemon, and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to
get my hat and tip him a shilling, said:

"Well! I thought you were never coming out."

"How long have I been in there?" I asked faintly.

He pulled out his watch.

"He kept you, sir, just under three hours.  I don't think this
ever happened with any of the gentlemen before."

It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk
on air.  And the human animal being averse from change and timid
before the unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really
being examined by the same man on a future occasion.  But when
the time of ordeal came round again the doorkeeper let me into
another room, with the now familiar paraphernalia of models of
ships and tackle, a board for signals on the wall, a big long
table covered with official forms, and having an unrigged mast
fixed to the edge.  The solitary tenant was unknown to me by
sight, though not by reputation, which was simply execrable.
Short and sturdy as far as I could judge, clad in an old, brown,
morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his
eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the
other side of the table.  He was motionless, mysterious, remote,
enigmatical, with something mournful too in the pose, like that
statue of Giuliano (I think) de' Medici shading his face on the
tomb by Michael Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far from
being beautiful.  He began by trying to make me talk nonsense.
But I had been warned of that fiendish trait, and contradicted
him with great assurance. After a while he left off.  So far
good.  But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the
abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face grew more and
more impressive.  He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and
then, placing me in a ship of a certain size, at sea, under
certain conditions of weather, season, locality, &c. &c.--all
very clear and precise--ordered me to execute a certain
manoeuvre.  Before I was half through with it he did some
material damage to the ship.  Directly I had grappled with the
difficulty he caused another to present itself, and when that too
was met he stuck another ship before me, creating a very
dangerous situation.  I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity
in piling up trouble upon a man.

"I wouldn't have got into that mess," I suggested mildly.  "I
could have seen that ship before."

He never stirred the least bit.

"No, you couldn't.  The weather's thick."

"Oh!  I didn't know," I apologised blankly.

I suppose that after all I managed to stave off the smash with
sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business
went on.  You must understand that the scheme of the test he was
applying to me was, I gathered, a homeward passage--the sort of
passage I would not wish to my bitterest enemy.  That imaginary
ship seemed to labour under a most comprehensive curse.  It's no
use enlarging on these never-ending misfortunes; suffice it to
say that long before the end I would have welcomed with gratitude
an opportunity to exchange into the "Flying Dutchman."  Finally
he shoved me into the North Sea (I suppose) and provided me with
a lee-shore with outlying sandbanks--the Dutch coast presumably.
Distance, eight miles.  The evidence of such implacable animosity
deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.

"Well," he said--for our pace had been very smart indeed till
then.

"I will have to think a little, sir."

"Doesn't look as if there were much time to think," he muttered
sardonically from under his hand.

"No, sir," I said with some warmth.  "Not on board a ship I could
see.  But so many accidents have happened that I really can't
remember what there's left for me to work with."

Still half averted, and with his eyes concealed, he made
unexpectedly a grunting remark.

"You've done very well."

"Have I the two anchors at the bow, sir?" I asked.

"Yes."

I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them
both go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of
testing resourcefulness came into play again.

"But there's only one cable.  You've lost the other."

It was exasperating.

"Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser
on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she
parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing.
She would have to go."

"Nothing more to do, eh?"

"No, sir.  I could do no more."

He gave a bitter half-laugh.

"You could always say your prayers."

He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly.  It was a
sallow, strong, unamiable face.  He put me in a surly, bored
fashion through the usual questions as to lights and signals, and
I escaped from the room thankfully--passed!  Forty minutes!  And
again I walked on air along Tower Hill, where so many good men
had lost their heads, because, I suppose, they were not
resourceful enough to save them.  And in my heart of hearts I had
no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third
and last ordeal became due in another year or so.  I even hoped I
should.  I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an
unreasonable time.  Yes, I distinctly hoped. . .

But not a bit of it.  When I presented myself to be examined for
Master the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a
round, soft face in grey, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious
lips.

He commenced operations with an easy-going "Let's see.  H'm.
Suppose you tell me all you know of charter-parties."  He kept it
up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of
comment into bits out of his own life, then pulling himself up
short and returning to the business in hand. It was very
interesting.  "What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?" he queried
suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a
point of stowage.

I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea,
and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-
book.  In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had
invented himself years before, when in command of a 3000-ton
steamer.  It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance
imaginable.  "May be of use to you some day," he concluded.  "You
will go into steam presently.  Everybody goes into steam."

There he was wrong.  I never went into steam--not really.  If I
only live long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead
barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the
dark ages who had never gone into steam--not really.

Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few
interesting details of the transport service in the time of the
Crimean War.

"The use of wire rigging became general about that time too," he
observed. "I was a very young master then.  That was before you
were born."

"Yes, sir.  I am of the year 1857."

"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if to himself, adding in a
louder tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of
Bengal, employed under a Government charter.

Clearly the transport service had been the making of this
examiner, who so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his
existence, awakening in me the sense of the continuity of that
sea-life into which I had stepped from outside; giving a touch of
human intimacy to the machinery of official relations.  I felt
adopted.  His experience was for me, too, as though he had been
an ancestor.

Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care
on the slip of blue paper, he remarked:

"You are of Polish extraction."

"Born there, sir."

He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for
the first time.

"Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think.  I
never remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea.
Don't remember ever hearing of one.  An inland people, aren't
you?"

I said yes--very much so.  We were remote from the sea not only
by situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect
association, not being a commercial nation at all, but purely
agricultural.  He made then the quaint reflection that it was "a
long way for me to come out to begin a sea-life"; as if sea-life
were not precisely a life in which one goes a long way from home.

I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could have found a ship much
nearer my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was
to be a seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other.  It
was a matter of deliberate choice.

He nodded slightly at that; and as he kept on looking at me
interrogatively, I enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent
a little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West
Indies.  I did not want to present myself to the British Merchant
Service in an altogether green state.  It was no use telling him
that my mysterious vocation was so strong that my very wild oats
had to be sown at sea.  It was the exact truth, but he would not
have understood the somewhat exceptional psychology of my sea-
going, I fear.

"I suppose you've never come across one of your countrymen at
sea.  Have you now?"

I admitted I never had.  The examiner had given himself up to the
spirit of gossiping idleness.  For myself, I was in no haste to
leave that room.  Not in the least.  The era of examinations was
over.  I would never again see that friendly man who was a
professional ancestor, a sort of grandfather in the craft.
Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me, and of that there
was no sign.  As he remained silent, looking at me, I added:

"But I have heard of one, some years ago.  He seems to have been
a boy serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not
mistaken."

"What was his name?"

I told him.

"How did you say that?" he asked, puckering up his eyes at the
uncouth sound.

I repeated the name very distinctly.

"How do you spell it?"

I told him.  He moved his head at the impracticable nature of
that name, and observed:

"It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?"

There was no hurry.  I had passed for Master, and I had all the
rest of my life before me to make the best of it.  That seemed a
long time.  I went leisurely through a small mental calculation,
and said:

"Not quite.  Shorter by two letters, sir."

"Is it?"  The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the
table to me, and rose from his chair.  Somehow this seemed a very
abrupt ending of our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part
from that excellent man, who was master of a ship before the
whisper of the sea had reached my cradle. He offered me his hand
and wished me well.  He even made a few steps towards the door
with me, and ended with good-natured advice.

"I don't know what may be your plans but you ought to go into
steam.  When a man has got his master's certificate it's the
proper time.  If I were you I would go into steam."

I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era
of examinations.  But that time I did not walk on air, as on the
first two occasions.  I walked across the Hill of many beheadings
with measured steps.  It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was
now a British master mariner beyond a doubt.  It was not that I
had an exaggerated sense of that very modest achievement, with
which, however, luck, opportunity, or any extraneous influence
could have had nothing to do.  That fact, satisfactory and
obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal significance.  It
was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism, and even to some
not very kind aspersions.  I had vindicated myself from what had
been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice.  I
don't mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my
desire to go to sea.  But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen,
sensitive enough, in all conscience, the commotion of his little
world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed.  So
considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to
this day.  I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect
meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed
boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of
his impulses to himself.  I understood no more than the people
who called upon me to explain myself.  There was no precedent.  I
verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality
and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his
racial surroundings and associations.  For you must understand
that there was no idea of any sort of "career" in my call.  Of
Russia or Germany there could be no question.  The nationality,
the antecedents, made it impossible.  The feeling against the
Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there would
have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School
at Pola.  It would have meant six months' extra grinding at
German, perhaps, but I was not past the age of admission, and in
other respects I was well qualified.  This expedient to palliate
my folly was thought of--but not by me.  I must admit that in
that respect my negative was accepted at once.  That order of
feeling was comprehensible enough to the most inimical of my
critics.  I was not called upon to offer explanations; the truth
is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but the sea.
There seemed no way open to it but through France.  I had the
language at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is
with France that Poland has most connection.  There were some
facilities for having me a little looked after, at first.
Letters were being written, answers were being received,
arrangements were being made for my departure for Marseilles,
where an excellent fellow called Solary, got at in a roundabout
fashion through various French channels, had promised good-
naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a decent
ship for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier
de chien.

I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own
counsel.  But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly
true.  Already the determined resolve, that "if a seaman, then an
English seaman," was formulated in my head though, of course, in
the Polish language.  I did not know six words of English, and I
was astute enough to understand that it was much better to say
nothing of my purpose.  As it was I was already looked upon as
partly insane, at least by the more distant acquaintances. The
principal thing was to get away.  I put my trust in the good-
natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.

This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned
out a quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black,
short beard, a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes.  He
was as jovial and good-natured as any boy could desire.  I was
still asleep in my room in a modest hotel near the quays of the
old port, after the fatigues of the journey via Vienna, Zurich,
Lyons, when he burst in flinging the shutters open to the sun of
Provence and chiding me boisterously for lying abed.  How
pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to be up and
off instantly for a "three years' campaign in the South Seas."  O
magic words!  Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud"--
that is the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.

He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was
unwearied; but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship
for me in a very solemn spirit.  He had been at sea himself, but
had left off at the age of twenty-five, finding he could earn his
living on shore in a much more agreeable manner.  He was related
to an incredible number of Marseilles well-to-do families of a
certain class.  One of his uncles was a ship-broker of good
standing, with a large connection amongst English ships; other
relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts, sold
chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, caulkers,
shipwrights.  His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a
kind, the Syndic of the Pilots.  I made acquaintances amongst
these people, but mainly amongst the pilots.  The very first
whole day I ever spent on salt water was by invitation, in a big
half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs on the look-
out, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and the
smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall
Planier lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon
with a white perpendicular stroke.  They were hospitable souls,
these sturdy Provencal seamen.  Under the general designation of
le petit ami de Baptistin I was made the guest of the Corporation
of Pilots, and had the freedom of their boats night or day.  And
many a day and a night too did I spend cruising with these rough,
kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy with the sea began.
Many a time "the little friend of Baptistin" had the hooded cloak
of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest hands
while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'If on the watch
for the lights of ships.  Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or
shaved, lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the
pilot-breed, and here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a
hairy ear, bent over my sea-infancy.  The first operation of
seamanship I had an opportunity of observing was the boarding of
ships at sea, at all times, in all states of the weather.  They
gave it to me to the full.  And I have been invited to sit in
more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick
plate by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses
of black hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and
dazzlingly white teeth.

I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort.  One of
them, Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a
statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front
seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable
airing.  She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in
the south.  In her haughty weariness she used to make me think of
Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the master for
which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and
unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of
other men's work.  I have read it innumerable times, both in
Polish and in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by
a not very surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book
reminded me strongly of the belle Madame Delestang.

Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin bony nose,
and a perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as
it were by short formal side-whiskers, had nothing of Sir
Leicester Dedlock's "grand air" and courtly solemnity.  He
belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was a banker, with
whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs. He was such an
ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he used in
current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should say,
with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money matters
reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of post-
Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were
still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles,
and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime
affairs.  You must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth
century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.  Luckily in the counting-
house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the Delestang town
residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts were kept in
modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my
wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist (I
suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty
ceilings with heavily moulded cornices.  I always felt on going
out as though I had been in the temple of some very dignified but
completely temporal religion.  And it was generally on these
occasions that under the great carriage gateway Lady Ded-- I mean
Madame Delestang, catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon
me with an amiable imperiousness to the side of the carriage, and
suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, "Venez donc faire un
tour avec nous," to which the husband would add an encouraging
"C'est ca.  Allons, montez, jeune homme."  He questioned me
sometimes, significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as
to the way I employed my time, and never failed to express the
hope that I wrote regularly to my "honoured uncle."  I made no
secret of the way I employed my time, and I rather fancy that my
artless tales of the pilots and so on entertained Madame
Delestang, so far as that ineffable woman could be entertained by
the prattle of a youngster very full of his new experience
amongst strange men and strange sensations.  She expressed no
opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in
the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and
fleeting episode.  One day, after putting me down at the corner
of a street, she offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight
pressure, for a moment.  While the husband sat motionless and
looking straight before him, she leaned forward in the carriage
to say, with just a shade of warning in her leisurely tone:  "Il
faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater sa vie."  I had
never seen her face so close to mine before.  She made my heart
beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life.
But she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that
danger seemed to me.


Chapter VII.

Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on
Political Economy?  I ask--is it conceivable?  Is it possible?
Would it be right?  With my feet on the very shores of the sea
and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a good-
natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my youthful
passion?  It was the most unexpected and the last too of the many
warnings I had received.  It sounded to me very bizarre--and,
uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress, like
the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance.  But I was not so
callous or so stupid as not to recognise there also the voice of
kindness.  And then the vagueness of the warning--because what
can be the meaning of the phrase:  to spoil one's life?--arrested
one's attention by its air of wise profundity.  At any rate, as I
have said before, the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me
thoughtful for a whole evening.  I tried to understand and tried
in vain, not having any notion of life as an enterprise that
could be mismanaged.  But I left off being thoughtful shortly
before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts of the past
and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of the
Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of my friends.  I knew where
she would be waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a canal
behind the Fort at the entrance of the harbour.  The deserted
quays looked very white and dry in the moonlight and as if frost-
bound in the sharp air of that December night.  A prowler or two
slunk by noiselessly; a custom-house guard, soldier-like, a sword
by his side, paced close under the bowsprits of the long row of
ships moored bows on opposite the long, slightly curved,
continuous flat wall of the tall houses that seemed to be one
immense abandoned building with innumerable windows shuttered
closely.  Only here and there a small dingy cafe for sailors cast
a yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones.  Passing
by, one heard a deep murmur of voices inside--nothing more.  How
quiet everything was at the end of the quays on the last night on
which I went out for a service cruise as a guest of the
Marseilles pilots!  Not a footstep, except my own, not a sigh,
not a whispering echo of the usual revelry going on in the narrow
unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my ear--and suddenly,
with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass, the omnibus of
the Jolliette on its last journey swung round the corner of the
dead wall which faces across the paved road the characteristic
angular mass of the Fort St. Jean.  Three horses trotted abreast
with the clatter of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow,
uproarious machine jolted violently behind them, fantastic,
lighted up, perfectly empty and with the driver apparently asleep
on his swaying perch above that amazing racket.  I flattened
myself against the wall and gasped.  It was a stunning
experience.  Then after staggering on a few paces in the shadow
of the Fort casting a darkness more intense than that of a
clouded night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern
standing on the quay, and became aware of muffled figures making
towards it from various directions.  Pilots of the Third Company
hastening to embark.  Too sleepy to be talkative they step on
board in silence.  But a few low grunts and an enormous yawn are
heard.  Somebody even ejaculates:  "Ah!  Coquin de sort!" and
sighs wearily at his hard fate.

The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of
pilots at that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my
friend Solary (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep-chested man
of forty, with a keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes.
He greets me by a low, hearty,  "He, l'ami.  Comment va?"  With
his clipped moustache and massive open face, energetic and at the
same time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen of the
southerner of the calm type.  For there is such a type in which
the volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid force.  He
is fair, but no one could mistake him for a man of the north even
by the dim gleam of the lantern standing on the quay.  He is
worth a dozen of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but then, in
the whole immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, you could
not find half a dozen men of his stamp.

Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick
jacket and bends his head over it in the light cast into the
boat.  Time's up.  His pleasant voice commands in a quiet
undertone "Larguez."  A suddenly projected arm snatches the
lantern off the quay--and, warped along by a line at first, then
with the regular tug of four heavy sweeps in the bow, the big
half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black breathless
shadow of the Fort.  The open water of the avant-port glitters
under the moon as if sown over with millions of sequins, and the
long white breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid silver.
With a quick rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the
sail is filled by a little breeze keen enough to have come
straight down from the frozen moon, and the boat, after the
clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at rest,
surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and unearthly that
it may be the rustling of the brilliant, over-powering moonrays
breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless
sea.

I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the
Third Company.  I have known the spell of moonlight since, on
various seas and coasts--coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand
dunes--but no magic so perfect in its revelation of unsuspected
character, as though one were allowed to look upon the mystic
nature of material things.  For hours I suppose no word was
spoken in that boat.  The pilots seated in two rows facing each
other dozed with their arms folded and their chins resting upon
their breasts.  They displayed a great variety of caps:  cloth,
wool, leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque
round beret or two pulled down over the brows; and one
grandfather, with a shaved, bony face and a great beak of a nose,
had a cloak with a hood which made him look in our midst like a
cowled monk being carried off goodness knows where by that silent
company of seamen--quiet enough to be dead.

My fingers itched for the tiller and in due course my friend, the
patron, surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the
family coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road.
There was a great solitude around us; the islets ahead, Monte
Cristo and the Chateau d'If in full light, seemed to float
towards us--so steady, so imperceptible was the progress of our
boat.  "Keep her in the furrow of the moon," the patron directed
me in a quiet murmur, sitting down ponderously in the stern-
sheets and reaching for his pipe.

The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to
the westward of the islets; and presently, as we approached the
spot, the boat we were going to relieve swam into our view
suddenly, on her way home, cutting black and sinister into the
wake of the moon under a sable wing, while to them our sail must
have been a vision of white and dazzling radiance.  Without
altering the course a hair's-breadth we slipped by each other
within an oar's-length.  A drawling sardonic hail came out of
her.  Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their
feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst
out, a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter, which lasted till
the boats were stern to stern, theirs all bright now and with a
shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black to their vision,
and drawing away from them under a sable wing.  That
extraordinary uproar died away almost as suddenly as it had
begun; first one had enough of it and sat down, then another,
then three or four together, and when all had left off with
mutters and growling half-laughs the sound of hearty chuckling
became audible, persistent, unnoticed.  The cowled grandfather
was very much entertained somewhere within his hood.

He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved
the least bit.  He had remained quietly in his place against the
foot of the mast.  I had been given to understand long before
that he had the rating of a second-class able seaman (matelot
leger) in the fleet which sailed from Toulon for the conquest of
Algeria in the year of grace 1830.  And, indeed, I had seen and
examined one of the buttons of his old brown patched coat, the
only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin, with
the words Equipages de ligne engraved on it.  That sort of
button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons.
"I preserved it from the time of my Navy Service," he explained,
nodding rapidly his frail, vulture-like head.  It was not very
likely that he had picked up that relic in the street.  He looked
certainly old enough to have fought at Trafalgar--or at any rate
to have played his little part there as a powder-monkey.  Shortly
after we had been introduced he had informed me in a Franco-
Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless jaws,
that when he was a "shaver no higher than that" he had seen the
Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba.  It was at night, he
narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and
Antibes in the open country.  A big fire had been lit at the side
of the cross-roads.  The population from several villages had
collected there, old and young--down to the very children in
arms, because the women had refused to stay at home.  Tall
soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood in a circle facing the
people silently, and their stern eyes and big moustaches were
enough to make everybody keep at a distance.  He, "being an
impudent little shaver," wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on
his hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs,
and peeping through discovered standing perfectly still in the
light of the fire "a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat,
buttoned up in a long straight coat, with a big pale face,
inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest.  His
hands were clasped behind his back. . .It appears that this was
the Emperor," the Ancient commented with a faint sigh.  He was
staring from the ground with all his might, when "my poor
father," who had been searching for his boy frantically
everywhere, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.

The tale seems an authentic recollection.  He related it to me
many times, using the very same words.  The grandfather honoured
me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection.  Extremes
touch.  He was the oldest member by a long way in that Company,
and I was, if I may say so, its temporarily adopted baby.  He had
been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember;
thirty--forty years.  He did not seem certain himself, but it
could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the Pilot-
office.  He had been pensioned off years before, but he went out
from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the Company
once confided to me in a whisper, "the old chap did no harm.  He
was not in the way."  They treated him with rough deference.  One
and another would address some insignificant remark to him now
and again, but nobody really took any notice of what he had to
say.  He had survived his strength, his usefulness, his very
wisdom.  He wore long, green, worsted stockings, pulled up above
the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen nightcap on his
hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet.  Without his
hooded cloak he looked like a peasant.  Half a dozen hands would
be extended to help him on board, but afterwards he was left
pretty much to his own thoughts.  Of course he never did any
work, except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed:  "He,
l'Ancien! let go the halyards there, at your hand"--or some such
request of an easy kind.

No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow
of the hood.  He kept it up for a long time with intense
enjoyment.  Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of
mind which is easily amused.  But when his hilarity had exhausted
itself, he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but
quavering voice:

"Can't expect much work on a night like this."

No one took it up.  It was a mere truism.  Nothing under canvas
could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy
splendour and spiritual stillness.  We would have to glide idly
to and fro, keeping our station within the appointed bearings,
and, unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the dawn, we would land
before sunrise on a small islet that, within two miles of us,
shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to "break a crust and take
a pull at the wine bottle."  I was familiar with the procedure.
The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth
amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood.  The crust
broken, and the mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no
more than that with this abstemious race--the pilots would pass
the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and
blowing into their nipped fingers.  One or two misanthropists
would sit apart perched on boulders like man-like sea-fowl of
solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip scandalously
in little gesticulating knots; and there would be perpetually one
or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with the
long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
brandishing and levelling movements.  Then about noon (it was a
short turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours)
another boatful of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer
for the old Phoenician port, dominated, watched over from the
ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by the red-and-white-striped pile
of the Notre Dame de la Garde.

All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my
very recent experience.  But also something not foreseen by me
did happen, something which causes me to remember my last outing
with the pilots.  It was on this occasion that my hand touched,
for the first time, the side of an English ship.

No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little
draught got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became
bright and glassy with a clean, colourless light.  It was while
we were all ashore on the islet that a steamer was picked up by
the telescope, a black speck like an insect posed on the hard
edge of the offing.  She emerged rapidly to her water-line and
came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke
slanting away from the rising sun.  We embarked in a hurry, and
headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles
an hour.

She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be
met on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super-
structures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards
on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear
was not a matter of course in these days--and with them on the
bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced,
muffled up, with peaked caps--I suppose all her officers.  There
are ships I have met more than once and known well by sight whose
names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once so
many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I have
not forgotten.  How could I--the first English ship on whose side
I ever laid my hand!  The name--I read it letter by letter on the
bow--was "James Westoll."  Not very romantic you will say.  The
name of a very considerable, well-known and universally respected
North-country shipowner, I believe.  James Westoll!  What better
name could an honourable hard-working ship have?  To me the very
grouping of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her
reality as I saw her floating motionless, and borrowing an ideal
grace from the austere purity of the light.

We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I
volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to
put the pilot on board while our boat, fanned by the faint air
which had attended us all through the night, went on gliding
gently past the black glistening length of the ship.  A few
strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very
first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English--the
speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of
the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and
of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of
remembered emotions--of my very dreams!  And if (after being thus
fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not
claim it aloud as my own, then, at any rate the speech of my
children.  Thus small events grow memorable by the passage of
time.  As to the quality of the address itself I cannot say it
was very striking.  Too short for eloquence and devoid of all
charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the three words "Look
out there," growled out huskily above my head.

It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy
double chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up
very high, even to the level of his breast-bone, by a pair of
braces quite exposed to public view.  As where he stood there was
no bulwark but only a rail and stanchions I was able to take in
at a glance the whole of his voluminous person from his feet to
the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat like an absurd
flanged cone on his big head.  The grotesque and massive space of
that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the lamp-
trimmer) surprised me very much.  My course of reading, of
dreaming and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea-
brother of that sort.  I never met again a figure in the least
like his except in the illustrations to Mr. W.W. Jacobs' most
entertaining tales of barges and coasters; but the inspired
talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun at poor, innocent
sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its felicitous
invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth, was
not yet.  Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet.  I fancy that,
at most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had
achieved at that early date.

Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have
been prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise.  The
object of his concise address was to call my attention to a rope
which he incontinently flung down for me to catch.  I caught it,
though it was not really necessary, the ship having no way on her
by that time.  Then everything went on very swiftly.  The dinghy
came with a slight bump against the steamer's side, the pilot,
grabbing the rope ladder, had scrambled halfway up before I knew
that our task of boarding was done; the harsh, muffled clanging
of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear through the iron
plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to "shove off--
push hard"; and when I bore against the smooth flank of the first
English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already
throbbing under my open palm.

Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the
miniature lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there,
hardly distinguishable against the land.  The dinghy danced a
squashy, splashy jig in the wash of the wake and turning in my
seat I followed the "James Westoll" with my eyes.  Before she had
gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag as the harbour
regulations prescribe for arriving and departing ships.  I saw it
suddenly flicker and stream out on the flagstaff.  The Red
Ensign!  In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing the drab
and grey masses of that southern land, the livid islets, the sea
of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that cold
sunrise, it was as far as the eye could reach the only spot of
ardent colour--flame-like, intense, and presently as minute as
the tiny red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire
kindles in the clear heart of a globe of crystal.  The Red
Ensign--the symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide
upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof
over my head.