Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter
the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the
middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly on
humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade of old
Flaubert—who imagined himself to be (among other things) a
descendant of Vikings—might have hovered with amused interest over
the docks of a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of “Almayer's Folly” was begun. With interest, I say, for was not
the kind Norman giant with enormous mustaches and a thundering voice the
last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic,
devotion to his art, a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
“'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
behind which the sun had sunk.” . . . These words of Almayer's romantic
daughter I remember tracing on the gray paper of a pad which rested on the
blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles and
shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests and
rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of
the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and words
was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth, coming in
with a bang of the door and the exclamation: “You've made it jolly warm in
here.”
It was warm. I had turned on the steam heater after placing a tin under
the leaky water-cock—for perhaps you do not know that water will
leak where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had been
doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their mere
aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being
also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a
strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not play the
banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this sentimental
inspection, and after meditating a while over the strings under my silent
scrutiny inquired, airily:
“What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?”
It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply turned
the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not have told
him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening
speech of the tenth chapter, and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which
were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night. I could not
have told him that Nina had said, “It has set at last.” He would have been
extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his precious banjo. Neither
could I have told him that the sun of my sea-going was setting, too, even
as I wrote the words expressing the impatience of passionate youth bent on
its desire. I did not know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not
have cared, though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with
more deference than, in our relative positions, I was strictly entitled
to.
He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo, and I went on looking through the
port-hole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tail end of
a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen night-cap
leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom house guard, belted
over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a wide
stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring was sombre, and
the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with curtained windows and
a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding with the squalor of these
poorer quarters bordering the river. We had been shifted down there from
another berth in the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same
port-hole gave me a view of quite another sort of cafe—the best in
the town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his
wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere Renault, had some refreshment
after the memorable performance of an opera which was the tragic story of
Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of light music.
I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern Archipelago which
I certainly hoped to see again. The story of “Almayer's Folly” got put
away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any
occupation to keep me away from it; the truth of the matter is that on
board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life. I will not
say anything of my privileged position. I was there “just to oblige,” as
an actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit performance of a
friend.
As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that steamer
at that time and in those circumstances. And perhaps I was not even wanted
there in the usual sense in which a ship “wants” an officer. It was the
first and last instance in my sea life when I served ship-owners who have
remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the
well-known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to
the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian Transport
Company. A death leaves something behind, but there was never anything
tangible left from the F. C. T. C. It flourished no longer than roses
live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead of winter, emitted a
sort of faint perfume of adventure, and died before spring set in. But
indubitably it was a company, it had even a house-flag, all white with the
letters F. C. T. C. artfully tangled up in a complicated monogram. We flew
it at our mainmast head, and now I have come to the conclusion that it was
the only flag of its kind in existence. All the same we on board, for many
days, had the impression of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly
departures for Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and
prospectuses which came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock,
London, just before we started for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life
of the F. C. T. C. lies the secret of that, my last employment in my
calling, which in a remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of
Nina Almayer's story.
The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its modest
rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the
greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last
association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called a
sea-going experience. Dear Captain Froud—it is impossible not to pay
him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of years—had
very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the
whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He organized for us
courses of professional lectures, St. John ambulance classes, corresponded
industriously with public bodies and members of Parliament on subjects
touching the interests of the service; and as to the oncoming of some
inquiry or commission relating to matters of the sea and to the work of
seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his need of exerting himself on our
corporate behalf. Together with this high sense of his official duties he
had in him a vein of personal kindness, a strong disposition to do what
good he could to the individual members of that craft of which in his time
he had been a very excellent master. And what greater kindness can one do
to a seaman than to put him in the way of employment? Captain Froud did
not see why the Shipmasters' Society, besides its general guardianship of
our interests, should not be unofficially an employment agency of the very
highest class.
“I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to us for
their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about our society, and
I really don't see why they should not,” he said once to me. “I am always
telling the captains, too, that, all things being equal, they ought to
give preference to the members of the society. In my position I can
generally find for them what they want among our members or our associate
members.”
In my wanderings about London from west to east and back again (I was very
idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort of
resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel itself
nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice—nearer
there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting-place used
to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco
smoke, but Captain Froud had the smaller room to himself and there he
granted private interviews, whose principal motive was to render service.
Thus, one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a crooked finger
and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is perhaps my
strongest physical recollection of the man.
“I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning,” he said, getting back to
his desk and motioning me to a chair, “who is in want of an officer. It's
for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be asked, but,
unfortunately, I do not quite see my way . . .”
As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at the closed
door; but he shook his head.
“Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them. But
the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship wants an officer who
can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do not know
anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth and, of course, you
would not care . . . would you now? I know that it isn't what you are
looking for.”
It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who
looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit
that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second
officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign of
being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical forests;
and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak character)
had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years he and the
world of his story had been the companions of my imagination without, I
hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of sea life. I had
had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my return from the
eastern waters—some four years before the day of which I speak.
It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy
quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been treating myself
to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings
Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue.
Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my
table, and then the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and
gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly
after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs, and
half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my attention. They came with a
silent and irresistible appeal—and the appeal, I affirm here, was
not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems now to have had a moral
character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in their
obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the shape of a
novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in
a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth?
I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers of
any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book before
me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to pity
which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care the
memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.
But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
disappointing ship owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
should fail him in his ambition—to satisfy at a few hours' notice
the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a
regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French
emigrants to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me
very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up
the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society I would consider it. But the
consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed the
captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other. He
explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect and
that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the higher
position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I would be
given certain special advantages—and so on.
I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
“I am sure,” he insisted, “you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor.”
I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in those
circumstances that what was to be my last connection with a ship began.
And after all there was not even one single trip. It may be that it was
simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written word on my forehead which
apparently forbade me, through all my sea wanderings, ever to achieve the
crossing of the Western Ocean—using the words in that special sense
in which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade, of Western Ocean packets,
of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life attended closely upon the old,
and the nine chapters of “Almayer's Folly” went with me to the Victoria
Dock, whence in a few days we started for Rouen. I won't go so far as
saying that the engaging of a man fated never to cross the Western Ocean
was the absolute cause of the Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure
to achieve even a single passage. It might have been that of course; but
the obvious, gross obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four hundred
and sixty bunks for emigrants were put together in the 'tween decks by
industrious carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an
emigrant turned up in Rouen—of which, being a humane person, I
confess I was glad. Some gentlemen from Paris—I think there were
three of them, and one was said to be the chairman—turned up,
indeed, and went from end to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats
cruelly against the deck beams. I attended them personally, and I can
vouch for it that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough,
though, obviously, they had never seen anything of the sort before. Their
faces as they went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression.
Notwithstanding that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a
preliminary to immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our
gangway, that I received the inward monition that no sailing within the
meaning of our charter party would ever take place.
It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When we
first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony well toward the
centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with the
tricolor posters announcing the birth of our company, the petit bourgeois
with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the inspection of the
ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to give information as
though I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter, while our quartermasters
reaped a harvest of small change from personally conducted parties. But
when the move was made—that move which carried us some mile and a
half down the stream to be tied up to an altogether muddier and shabbier
quay—then indeed the desolation of solitude became our lot. It was a
complete and soundless stagnation; for as we had the ship ready for sea to
the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the days short, we were
absolutely idle—idle to the point of blushing with shame when the
thought struck us that all the time our salaries went on. Young Cole was
aggrieved because, as he said, we could not enjoy any sort of fun in the
evening after loafing like this all day; even the banjo lost its charm
since there was nothing to prevent his strumming on it all the time
between the meals. The good Paramor—he was really a most excellent
fellow—became unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature,
till one dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should
employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up on deck
and turning them end for end.
For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. “Excellent idea!” but directly his
face fell. “Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that job last more than three
days,” he muttered, discontentedly. I don't know how long he expected us
to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the
cables got hauled up and turned end for end according to my satanic
suggestion, put down again, and their very existence utterly forgotten, I
believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down,
empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think that this state of
forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of Almayer and his
daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort of evil spell, my
banjoist cabin mate's interruption, as related above, had arrested them
short at the point of that fateful sunset for many weeks together. It was
always thus with this book, begun in '89 and finished in '94—with
that shortest of all the novels which it was to be my lot to write.
Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner in his
wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the God of
Islam—“The Merciful, the Compassionate”—which closes the book,
there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the elevated
phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of them) of my
childhood and the realization of childhood's vain words, expressing a
light-hearted and romantic whim.
It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at
a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then
representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself,
with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my
character now:
“When I grow up I shall go there.”
And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a century
or so an opportunity offered to go there—as if the sin of childish
audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go there: there
being the region of Stanley Falls, which in '68 was the blankest of blank
spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS. of “Almayer's Folly,”
carried about me as if it were a talisman or a treasure, went there,
too. That it ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of
Providence, because a good many of my other properties, infinitely more
valuable and useful to me, remained behind through unfortunate accidents
of transportation. I call to mind, for instance, a specially awkward turn
of the Congo between Kinchassa and Leopoldsville—more particularly
when one had to take it at night in a big canoe with only half the proper
number of paddlers. I failed in being the second white man on record
drowned at that interesting spot through the upsetting of a canoe. The
first was a young Belgian officer, but the accident happened some months
before my time, and he, too, I believe, was going home; not perhaps quite
so ill as myself—but still he was going home. I got round the turn
more or less alive, though I was too sick to care whether I did or not,
and, always with “Almayer's Folly” among my diminishing baggage, I arrived
at that delectable capital, Boma, where, before the departure of the
steamer which was to take me home, I had the time to wish myself dead over
and over again with perfect sincerity. At that date there were in
existence only seven chapters of “Almayer's Folly,” but the chapter in my
history which followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal
convalescence. Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of
Champel, is rendered forever famous by the termination of the eighth
chapter in the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the
ninth are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management
of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not
matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the
activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had
nothing to hold me with for very long. And then that memorable story, like
a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the
sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of course I would
not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it certainly did
nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look and an ancient,
yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable to suppose that
anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and Nina. And yet
something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to wake them up
from their state of suspended animation.
What is it that Novalis says: “It is certain my conviction gains
infinitely the moment an other soul will believe in it.” And what is a
novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose
accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of
documentary history. Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo rapids
brought it to the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open sea. It
would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the sallow,
sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young Cambridge man (he was
a “passenger for his health” on board the good ship Torrens outward bound
to Australia) who was the first reader of “Almayer's Folly”—the very
first reader I ever had.
“Would it bore you very much in reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?”
I asked him one evening, on a sudden impulse at the end of a longish
conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History.
Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy dog-watch
below, after bring me a book to read from his own travelling store.
“Not at all,” he answered, with his courteous intonation and a faint
smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him a
watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe. All
that's beyond guessing now.
He was not a cold, but a calm man, still more subdued by disease—a
man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general intercourse, but
with something uncommon in the whole of his person which set him apart
from the undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers. His eyes had a
thoughtful, introspective look. In his attractive reserved manner and in a
veiled sympathetic voice he asked:
“What is this?” “It is a sort of tale,” I answered, with an effort. “It is
not even finished yet. Nevertheless, I would like to know what you think
of it.” He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I remember
perfectly his thin, brown fingers folding it lengthwise. “I will read it
to-morrow,” he remarked, seizing the door handle; and then watching the
roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone.
In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the
swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens, and the subdued, as if
distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the growing disquiet in the great
restlessness of the ocean, and responded professionally to it with the
thought that at eight o'clock, in another half hour or so at the farthest,
the topgallant sails would have to come off the ship.
Next day, but this time in the first dog watch, Jacques entered my cabin.
He had a thick woollen muffler round his throat, and the MS. was in his
hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look, but without a word. I took
it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said nothing. I opened
and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide
open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book
I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I turned my back
squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques never offered a word. “Well,
what do you say?” I asked at last. “Is it worth finishing?” This question
expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
“Distinctly,” he answered, in his sedate, veiled voice, and then coughed a
little.
“Were you interested?” I inquired further, almost in a whisper.
“Very much!”
In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the ship,
and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my bed-place swung
to and fro as if it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp circled in its
gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly in the gusts of
wind. It was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the longitude of
Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's
and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged silence it
occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective writing in the
story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its action, I asked
myself, as if already the story-teller were being born into the body of a
seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the officer of the watch and
remained on the alert to catch the order that was to follow this call to
attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce shout to “Square the yards.”
“Aha!” I thought to myself, “a westerly blow coming on.” Then I turned to
my very first reader, who, alas! was not to live long enough to know the
end of the tale.
“Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as it
stands?”
He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
“Yes! Perfectly.”
This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
“Almayer's Folly.” We never spoke together of the book again. A long
period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my duties,
while poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in his cabin.
When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose went at once
up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in Australia or it
may be on the passage while going home through the Suez Canal. I am not
sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard precisely; though I
made inquiries about him from some of our return passengers who, wandering
about to “see the country” during the ship's stay in port, had come upon
him here and there. At last we sailed, homeward bound, and still not one
line was added to the careless scrawl of the many pages which poor Jacques
had had the patience to read with the very shadows of Eternity gathering
already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes.
The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final “Distinctly”
remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I am
compelled—unconsciously compelled—now to write volume after
volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage.
Leaves must follow upon one an other as leagues used to follow in the days
gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One—one
for all men and for all occupations.
I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and
more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to wait
my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those
wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the
fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the
same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages,
and could do it, perhaps, sitting crossed-legged on a clothes-line; but I
must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not consent to write
without something at least resembling a chair. Line by line, rather than
page by page, was the growth of “Almayer's Folly.”
And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to the
first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse Poland, or more
precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in a
hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and
intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking
of the MS., but of all the other things that were packed in the bag.
In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never
exposed to the light, except once to candle-light, while the bag lay open
on the chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A
friend of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but had
turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each other
for over twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me
off there.
“You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing,” he
suggested, kindly.
I do not think I told him much of my life story either then or later. The
talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was extremely
animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from big-game shooting
in Africa to the last poem published in a very modernist review, edited by
the very young and patronized by the highest society. But it never touched
upon “Almayer's Folly,” and next morning, in uninterrupted obscurity, this
inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the southeast direction
toward the government of Kiev.
At that time there was an eight hours' drive, if not more, from the
railway station to the country-house which was my destination.
“Dear boy” (these words were always written in English), so ran the last
letter from that house received in London—“Get yourself driven to
the only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the
evening my own confidential servant, factotum and majordomo, a Mr. V. S.
(I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you,
reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the
next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the
road.”
Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous
barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened and, in a
travelling costume of long boots, big sheepskin cap, and a short coat girt
with a leather belt, the Mr. V. S. (of noble extraction), a man of about
thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open and mustached
countenance. I got up from the table and greeted him in Polish, with, I
hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his noble blood and his
confidential position. His face cleared up in a wonderful way. It appeared
that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest assurances, the good fellow had
remained in doubt of our understanding each other. He imagined I would
talk to him in some foreign language.
I was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come to meet
me shaped an anxious exclamation:
“Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself
understood to our master's nephew.”
We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of me as
if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling of coming
home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an enormous
bearskin travelling-coat and took his seat protectively by my side. The
sledge was a very small one, and it looked utterly insignificant, almost
like a toy behind the four big bays harnessed two and two. We three,
counting the coachman, filled it completely. He was a young fellow with
clear blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur coat framed his cheery
countenance and stood all round level with the top of his head.
“Now, Joseph,” my companion addressed him, “do you think we shall manage
to get home before six?” His answer was that we would surely, with God's
help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch between
certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar sound to my
ears. He turned out an excellent coachman, with an instinct for keeping
the road among the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of getting the
best out of his horses.
“He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain remembers. He who
used to drive the Captain's late grandmother of holy memory,” remarked V.
S., busy tucking fur rugs about my feet.
I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my grandmother.
Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the first time in my life and
allowed me to play with the great four-in-hand whip outside the doors of
the coach-house.
“What became of him?” I asked. “He is no longer serving, I suppose.”
“He served our master,” was the reply. “But he died of cholera ten years
ago now—that great epidemic that we had. And his wife died at the
same time—the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that
was left.”
The MS. of “Almayer's Folly” was reposing in the bag under our feet.
I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of my
childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view as if
it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had seen the
sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly
upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth
joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees about
a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided by, a low
interminable wall, and then, glimmering and winking through a screen of
fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
That very evening the wandering MS. of “Almayer's Folly” was unpacked and
unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the guest-room
which had been, I was informed in an affectionately careless tone,
awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no attention from
the affectionate presence hovering round the son of the favourite sister.
“You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me,
brother,” he said—this form of address borrowed from the speech of
our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in a
moment of affectionate elation. “I shall be always coming in for a chat.”
As a matter of fact, we had the whole house to chat in, and were
everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of his
study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand presented
to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his wards then
living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from
the three southern provinces—ever since the year 1860. Some of them
had been my school fellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls or
boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two were older than
myself—considerably older, too. One of them, a visitor I remember in
my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback, and his
four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and general skill in
manly exercises, was one of my earliest admirations. I seem to remember my
mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as
I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know, by the very Joseph—the
groom attached specially to my grandmother's service—who died of
cholera. It was certainly a young man in a dark-blue, tailless coat and
huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery of the men about the stables.
It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by another mode of calculating
time, it was certainly in the year in which my mother obtained permission
to travel south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had
followed my father. For that, too, she had had to ask permission, and I
know that one of the conditions of that favour was that she should be
treated exactly as a condemned exile herself. Yet a couple of years later,
in memory of her eldest brother, who had served in the Guards and dying
early left hosts of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St.
Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this permission—it
was officially called the “Highest Grace”—of a four months' leave
from exile.
This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
the gray heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect and
love in the house of her favourite brother, who, a few years later, was to
take the place for me of both my parents.
I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
though, indeed, I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of
invalidism about her—but I think that already they had pronounced
her doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could
re-establish her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest
period of my existence. There was my cousin, a delightful, quick-tempered
little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched
over as if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth
year. There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a
few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive
shadow of the great Russian empire—the shadow lowering with the
darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of
journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.
This is a far cry back from the MS. of “Almayer's Folly,” but the public
record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal. It
is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's children
than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That which in
their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the most
enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain forever obscure
even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
personalities are remotely derived.
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of
art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories
may serve worthily that spirit of piety toward all things human which
sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions of the
man reviewing his own experience.
