As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London
into Ukraine. The MS. of “Almayer's Folly”—my companion already for
some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age—was
deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two
windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table was
fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same
drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra, with four candles each, lighted up
festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew.
The blinds were down.
Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
peasant hut of the village—part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
lay the great unfenced fields—not a flat and severe plain, but a
kindly bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the
black patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had
come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing
the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snow track; a quick
tinkle of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a
tuneful whisper.
My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help me,
and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary at the
door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not like to
tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than ten years
younger than myself; I had not been—I won't say in that place, but
within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless
physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was
quite possible that he might have been a descendant, a son, or even a
grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar to me in
my early childhood. As a matter of fact he had no such claim on my
consideration. He was the product of some village nearby and was there on
his promotion, having learned the service in one or two houses as pantry
boy. I know this because I asked the worthy V—— next day. I
might well have spared the question. I discovered before long that all the
faces about the house and all the faces in the village: the grave faces
with long mustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the young
men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the handsome, tanned,
wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts, were as
familiar to me as though I had known them all from childhood and my
childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday.
The tinkle of the traveller's bells, after growing louder, had faded away
quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed down at
last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a small couch, smoked his long
Turkish chibouk in silence.
“This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my room,” I
remarked.
“It is really your property,” he said, keeping his eyes on me, with an
interested and wistful expression, as he had done ever since I had entered
the house. “Forty years ago your mother used to write at this very table.
In our house in Oratow, it stood in the little sitting-room which, by a
tacit arrangement, was given up to the girls—I mean to your mother
and her sister who died so young. It was a present to them jointly from
your uncle Nicholas B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two
years younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of yours,
of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name. She did not shine
so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind in which your mother was
far superior. It was her good sense, the admirable sweetness of her
nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily relations, that
endeared her to everybody. Her death was a terrible grief and a serious
moral loss for us all. Had she lived she would have brought the greatest
blessings to the house it would have been her lot to enter, as wife,
mother, and mistress of a household. She would have created round herself
an atmosphere of peace and content which only those who can love
unselfishly are able to evoke. Your mother—of far greater beauty,
exceptionally distinguished in person, manner, and intellect—had a
less easy disposition. Being more brilliantly gifted, she also expected
more from life. At that trying time especially, we were greatly concerned
about her state. Suffering in her health from the shock of her father's
death (she was alone in the house with him when he died suddenly), she was
torn by the inward struggle between her love for the man whom she was to
marry in the end and her knowledge of her dead father's declared objection
to that match. Unable to bring herself to disregard that cherished memory
and that judgment she had always respected and trusted, and, on the other
hand, feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and so true,
she could not have been expected to preserve her mental and moral balance.
At war with herself, she could not give to others that feeling of peace
which was not her own. It was only later, when united at last with the man
of her choice, that she developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart
which compelled the respect and admiration even of our foes. Meeting with
calm fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national and
social misfortunes of the community, she realized the highest conceptions
of duty as a wife, a mother, and a patriot, sharing the exile of her
husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our uncle
Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection. Apart
from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only
three people in the world: his mother—your great-grandmother, whom
you have seen but cannot possibly remember; his brother, our father, in
whose house he lived for so many years; and of all of us, his nephews and
nieces grown up around him, your mother alone. The modest, lovable
qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem able to see. It was I who
felt most profoundly this unexpected stroke of death falling upon the
family less than a year after I had become its head. It was terribly
unexpected. Driving home one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our
empty house, where I had to remain permanently administering the estate
and at tending to the complicated affairs—(the girls took it in turn
week and week about)—driving, as I said, from the house of the
Countess Tekla Potocka, where our invalid mother was staying then to be
near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a snow drift. She was
alone with the coachman and old Valery, the personal servant of our late
father. Impatient of delay while they were trying to dig themselves out,
she jumped out of the sledge and went to look for the road herself. All
this happened in '51, not ten miles from the house in which we are sitting
now.
“The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly again, and
they were four more hours getting home. Both the men took off their
sheepskin lined greatcoats and used all their own rugs to wrap her up
against the cold, notwithstanding her protests, positive orders, and even
struggles, as Valery afterward related to me. 'How could I,' he
remonstrated with her, 'go to meet the blessed soul of my late master if I
let any harm come to you while there's a spark of life left in my body?'
When they reached home at last the poor old man was stiff and speechless
from exposure, and the coachman was in not much better plight, though he
had the strength to drive round to the stables himself. To my reproaches
for venturing out at all in such weather, she answered,
characteristically, that she could not bear the thought of abandoning me
to my cheerless solitude. It is incomprehensible how it was that she was
allowed to start. I suppose it had to be! She made light of the cough
which came on next day, but shortly afterward inflammation of the lungs
set in, and in three weeks she was no more! She was the first to be taken
away of the young generation under my care. Behold the vanity of all hopes
and fears! I was the most frail at birth of all the children. For years I
remained so delicate that my parents had but little hope of bringing me
up; and yet I have survived five brothers and two sisters, and many of my
contemporaries; I have outlived my wife and daughter, too—and from
all those who have had some knowledge at least of these old times you
alone are left. It has been my lot to lay in an early grave many honest
hearts, many brilliant promises, many hopes full of life.”
He got up briskly, sighed, and left me saying, “We will dine in half an
hour.”
Without moving, I listened to his quick steps resounding on the waxed
floor of the next room, traversing the anteroom lined with bookshelves,
where he paused to put his chibouk in the pipe-stand before passing into
the drawing-room (these were all en suite), where he became inaudible on
the thick carpet. But I heard the door of his study-bedroom close. He was
then sixty-two years old and had been for a quarter of a century the
wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians, extending over me a
paternal care and affection, a moral support which I seemed to feel always
near me in the most distant parts of the earth.
As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in the
French army, and for a short time Officier d'Ordonnance of Marshal
Marmont; afterward captain in the 2d Regiment of Mounted Rifles in the
Polish army—such as it existed up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom
established by the Congress of Vienna—I must say that from all that
more distant past, known to me traditionally and a little de visu,
and called out by the words of the man just gone away, he remains the most
incomplete figure. It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for it
is certain that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my
mother for what he must have known would be the last time. From my early
boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of mist rises
before my eyes, mist in which I perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed
head of white hair (which is exceptional in the case of the B. family,
where it is the rule for men to go bald in a becoming manner before
thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified nose, a feature in strict accordance
with the physical tradition of the B. family. But it is not by these
fragmentary remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my memory. I
knew, at a very early age, that my granduncle Nicholas B. was a Knight of
the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish Cross for valour
Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these glorious facts inspired in me
an admiring veneration; yet it is not that sentiment, strong as it was,
which resumes for me the force and the significance of his personality. It
is overborne by another and complex impression of awe, compassion, and
horror. Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the unfortunate and miserable (but
heroic) being who once upon a time had eaten a dog.
It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect has not
worn off yet. I believe this is the very first, say, realistic, story I
heard in my life; but all the same I don't know why I should have been so
frightfully impressed. Of course I know what our village dogs look like—but
still. . . . No! At this very day, recalling the horror and compassion of
my childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in disclosing to a cold and
fastidious world that awful episode in the family history. I ask myself—is
it right?—especially as the B. family had always been honourably
known in a wide countryside for the delicacy of their tastes in the matter
of eating and drinking. But upon the whole, and considering that this
gastronomical degradation overtaking a gallant young officer lies really
at the door of the Great Napoleon, I think that to cover it up by silence
would be an exaggeration of literary restraint. Let the truth stand here.
The responsibility rests with the Man of St. Helena in view of his
deplorable levity in the conduct of the Russian campaign. It was during
the memorable retreat from Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B., in company of two
brother officers—as to whose morality and natural refinement I know
nothing—bagged a dog on the outskirts of a village and subsequently
devoured him. As far as I can remember the weapon used was a cavalry
sabre, and the issue of the sporting episode was rather more of a matter
of life and death than if it had been an encounter with a tiger. A picket
of Cossacks was sleeping in that village lost in the depths of the great
Lithuanian forest. The three sportsmen had observed them from a
hiding-place making themselves very much at home among the huts just
before the early winter darkness set in at four o'clock. They had observed
them with disgust and, perhaps, with despair. Late in the night the rash
counsels of hunger overcame the dictates of prudence. Crawling through the
snow they crept up to the fence of dry branches which generally encloses a
village in that part of Lithuania. What they expected to get and in what
manner, and whether this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only
knows.
However, these Cossack parties, in most cases wandering without an
officer, were known to guard themselves badly and often not at all. In
addition, the village lying at a great distance from the line of French
retreat, they could not suspect the presence of stragglers from the Grand
Army. The three officers had strayed away in a blizzard from the main
column and had been lost for days in the woods, which explains
sufficiently the terrible straits to which they were reduced. Their plan
was to try and attract the attention of the peasants in that one of the
huts which was nearest to the enclosure; but as they were preparing to
venture into the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is mighty
strange that there was but one), a creature quite as formidable under the
circumstances as a lion, began to bark on the other side of the fence. . .
.
At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by request) from
the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my grandmother, I used to
tremble with excitement.
The dog barked. And if he had done no more than bark, three officers of
the Great Napoleon's army would have perished honourably on the points of
Cossacks' lances, or perchance escaping the chase would have died decently
of starvation. But before they had time to think of running away that
fatal and revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of the zeal,
dashed out through a gap in the fence. He dashed out and died. His head, I
understand, was severed at one blow from his body. I understand also that
later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the snow-laden woods, when, in a
sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit by the party, the condition of the
quarry was discovered to be distinctly unsatisfactory. It was not thin—on
the contrary, it seemed unhealthily obese; its skin showed bare patches of
an unpleasant character. However, they had not killed that dog for the
sake of the pelt. He was large. . . . He was eaten. . . . The rest is
silence. . . .
A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
“I could not have eaten that dog.”
And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
“Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry.”
I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to eat
dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language of the
volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on ancient salt
junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript
dishes containing things without a name—but of the Lithuanian
village dog—never! I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is
not I, but my granduncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier
de la Legion d'Honneur, etc., who in his young days, had eaten the
Lithuanian dog.
I wish he had not. The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly to the
grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still, if he really had
to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on active service,
while bearing up bravely against the greatest military disaster of modern
history, and, in a manner, for the sake of his country. He had eaten him
to appease his hunger, no doubt, but also for the sake of an unappeasable
and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith that lives still, and
in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled like a false beacon by a great
man to lead astray the effort of a brave nation.
Pro patria!
Looked at in that light, it appears a sweet and decorous meal.
And looked at in the same light, my own diet of la vache enragee appears a
fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for why should I, the son
of a land which such men as these have turned up with their plowshares and
bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of salt
junk and hardtack upon the wide seas? On the kindest view it seems an
unanswerable question. Alas! I have the conviction that there are men of
unstained rectitude who are ready to murmur scornfully the word desertion.
Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be made bitter to the palate. The
part of the inexplicable should be allowed for in appraising the conduct
of men in a world where no explanation is final. No charge of
faithlessness ought to be lightly uttered. The appearances of this
perishable life are deceptive, like everything that falls under the
judgment of our imperfect senses. The inner voice may remain true enough
in its secret counsel. The fidelity to a special tradition may last
through the events of an unrelated existence, following faithfully, too,
the traced way of an inexplicable impulse.
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions
in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape
of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation. Indulgence—as
somebody said—is the most intelligent of all the virtues. I venture
to think that it is one of the least common, if not the most uncommon of
all. I would not imply by this that men are foolish—or even most
men. Far from it. The barber and the priest, backed by the whole opinion
of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the ingenious hidalgo,
who, sallying forth from his native place, broke the head of the muleteer,
put to death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful
experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should
escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime
caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing
except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one
aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his
frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape
with his very body from the intolerable reality of things. He wished to
meet, eye to eye, the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose
armour is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his
arm, is the gate of a fortified city. Oh, amiable and natural weakness!
Oh, blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! Who would not
succumb to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless, it was a form of
self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a good
citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their
strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who used
to say in his exile, “The people are never in fault”—one may admit
that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole village.
Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by the
well of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by the fat,
sly rogue of a landlord has come very near perfection. He rides forth, his
head encircled by a halo—the patron saint of all lives spoiled or
saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was not a good
citizen.
Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered exclamation
of my tutor.
It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have had a
jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterward, jolly enough in a way
and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which I speak
was the year of my last school-boy holiday. There are other reasons why I
should remember that year, but they are too long to state formally in this
place. Moreover, they have nothing to do with that holiday. What has to do
with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark was made we
had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls of the Rhine, the
Lake of Constance,—in fact, it was a memorable holiday of travel. Of
late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of the Reuss. It was a
delightful time. It was much more like a stroll than a tramp. Landing from
a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluelen, we found ourselves at the end of the
second day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little way
beyond Hospenthal. This is not the day on which the remark was made: in
the shadows of the deep valley and with the habitations of men left some
way behind, our thoughts ran not upon the ethics of conduct, but upon the
simpler human problem of shelter and food. There did not seem anything of
the kind in sight, and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly, at
a bend of the road, we came upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.
At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and that
magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the
unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the
mountains. It was long, though not big at all; it was low; it was built of
boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with the white
window-frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front. And yet
it was a hotel; it had even a name, which I have forgotten. But there was
no gold laced doorkeeper at its humble door. A plain but vigorous
servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who owned the
place appeared. It was clear that no travellers were expected, or perhaps
even desired, in this strange hostelry, which in its severe style
resembled the house which sur mounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the
toy Noah's Arks, the universal possession of European childhood. However,
its roof was not hinged and it was not full to the brim of slab-sided and
painted animals of wood. Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in
evidence. We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one end of a
long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to my sleepy eyes,
seemed as if it would tilt up like a see saw plank, since there was no one
at the other end to balance it against our two dusty and travel-stained
figures. Then we hastened up stairs to bed in a room smelling of pine
planks, and I was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.
In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow University) woke
me up early, and as we were dressing remarked: “There seems to be a lot of
people staying in this hotel. I have heard a noise of talking up till
eleven o'clock.” This statement surprised me; I had heard no noise
whatever, having slept like a top.
We went down-stairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its long and
narrow table. There were two rows of plates on it. At one of the many
curtained windows stood a tall, bony man with a bald head set off by a
bunch of black hair above each ear, and with a long, black beard. He
glanced up from the paper he was reading and seemed genuinely astonished
at our intrusion. By and by more men came in. Not one of them looked like
a tourist. Not a single woman appeared. These men seemed to know each
other with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very talkative lot.
The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the table. It all had
the air of a family party. By and by, from one of the vigorous
servant-girls in national costume, we discovered that the place was really
a boarding house for some English engineers engaged at the works of the
St. Gothard Tunnel; and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the
English language, as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do
not believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life.
This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the tourist kind
seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne—the kind which has no real
existence in a workaday world. I know now that the bald-headed man spoke
with a strong Scotch accent. I have met many of his kind ashore and
afloat. The second engineer of the steamer Mavis, for instance, ought to
have been his twin brother. I cannot help thinking that he really was,
though for some reason of his own he assured me that he never had a twin
brother. Anyway, the deliberate, bald-headed Scot with the coal-black
beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic and mysterious person.
We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped-out route led over the Furca Pass
toward the Rhone Glacier, with the further intention of following down the
trend of the Hasli Valley. The sun was already declining when we found
ourselves on the top of the pass, and the remark alluded to was presently
uttered.
We sat down by the side of the road to continue the argument begun half a
mile or so before. I am certain it was an argument, because I remember
perfectly how my tutor argued and how without the power of reply I
listened, with my eyes fixed obstinately on the ground. A stir on the road
made me look up—and then I saw my unforgettable Englishman. There
are acquaintances of later years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember
less clearly. He marched rapidly toward the east (attended by a hang-dog
Swiss guide), with the mien of an ardent and fearless traveller. He was
clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore short socks
under his laced boots, for reasons which, whether hygienic or
conscientious, were surely imaginative, his calves, exposed to the public
gaze and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the
splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young
ivory. He was the leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong,
exalted satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains
illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white whiskers,
his innocently eager and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of
kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth toward
the man and the boy sitting like dusty tramps by the roadside, with a
modest knapsack lying at their feet. His white calves twinkled sturdily,
the uncouth Swiss guide with a surly mouth stalked like an unwilling bear
at his elbow; a small train of three mules followed in single file the
lead of this inspiring enthusiast. Two ladies rode past, one behind the
other, but from the way they sat I saw only their calm, uniform backs, and
the long ends of blue veils hanging behind far down over their identical
hat-brims. His two daughters, surely. An industrious luggage-mule, with
unstarched ears and guarded by a slouching, sallow driver, brought up the
rear. My tutor, after pausing for a look and a faint smile, resumed his
earnest argument.
I tell you it was a memorable year! One does not meet such an Englishman
twice in a lifetime. Was he in the mystic ordering of common events the
ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment
on the top of an Alpine pass, with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for
mute and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and
comic ardour of his striving-forward appearance, helped me to pull myself
together. It must be stated that on that day and in the exhilarating
atmosphere of that elevated spot I had been feeling utterly crushed. It
was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my desire to go to sea.
At first like those sounds that, ranging outside the scale to which men's
ears are attuned, remain inaudible to our sense of hearing, this
declaration passed unperceived. It was as if it had not been. Later on, by
trying various tones, I managed to arouse here and there a surprised
momentary attention—the “What was that funny noise?”—sort of
inquiry. Later on it was: “Did you hear what that boy said? What an
extraordinary outbreak!” Presently a wave of scandalized astonishment (it
could not have been greater if I had announced the intention of entering a
Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of the educational and academical town of
Cracow spread itself over several provinces. It spread itself shallow but
far-reaching. It stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying
wonder, bitter irony, and downright chaff. I could hardly breathe under
its weight, and certainly had no words for an answer. People wondered what
Mr. T. B. would do now with his worrying nephew and, I dare say, hoped
kindly that he would make short work of my nonsense.
What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine to have it out with
me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial, and just, taking his
stand on the ground of wisdom and affection. As far as is possible for a
boy whose power of expression is still unformed I opened the secret of my
thoughts to him, and he in return allowed me a glimpse into his mind and
heart; the first glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble treasure of clear
thought and warm feeling, which through life was to be mine to draw upon
with a never-deceived love and confidence. Practically, after several
exhaustive conversations, he concluded that he would not have me later on
reproach him for having spoiled my life by an unconditional opposition.
But I must take time for serious reflection. And I must think not only of
myself but of others; weigh the claims of affection and conscience against
my own sincerity of purpose. “Think well what it all means in the larger
issues—my boy,” he exhorted me, finally, with special friendliness.
“And meantime try to get the best place you can at the yearly
examinations.”
The scholastic year came to an end. I took a fairly good place at the
exams, which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be a more difficult
task than for other boys. In that respect I could enter with a good
conscience upon that holiday which was like a long visit pour prendre
conge of the mainland of old Europe I was to see so little of for the
next four-and-twenty years. Such, however, was not the avowed purpose of
that tour. It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to distract and
occupy my thoughts in other directions. Nothing had been said for months
of my going to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor and his influence
over me were so well known that he must have received a confidential
mission to talk me out of my romantic folly. It was an excellently
appropriate arrangement, as neither he nor I had ever had a single glimpse
of the sea in our lives. That was to come by and by for both of us in
Venice, from the outer shore of Lido. Meantime he had taken his mission to
heart so well that I began to feel crushed before we reached Zurich. He
argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he had argued away for me
the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove! Of his devotion to his
unworthy pupil there can be no doubt. He had proved it already by two
years of unremitting and arduous care. I could not hate him. But he had
been crushing me slowly, and when he started to argue on the top of the
Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer a success than either he or I imagined. I
listened to him in despairing silence, feeling that ghostly, unrealized,
and desired sea of my dreams escape from the unnerved grip of my will.
The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed—and the argument went on.
What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years, either
in ambition, honour, or conscience? An unanswerable question. But I felt
no longer crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion was visible in
his as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked up the
knapsack suddenly and got onto his feet.
“You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That's what you are.”
I was surprised. I was only fifteen and did not know what he meant
exactly. But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the immortal knight
turning up in connection with my own folly, as some people would call it
to my face. Alas! I don't think there was anything to be proud of. Mine
was not the stuff of protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of this
world's wrong are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that best.
Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and the priest
when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.
I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking back he
stopped. The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over the Furca
Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me and in full view of the
Finster Aarhorn, with his band of giant brothers rearing their monstrous
heads against a brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder affectionately.
“Well! That's enough. We will have no more of it.”
And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between
us. There was to be no more question of it at all, no where or with any
one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily.
Eleven years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of
the St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant Service.
But the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass
was no longer living.
That very year of our travels he took his degree of the Philosophical
Faculty—and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to
the call, he entered at once upon the four-year course of the Medical
Schools. A day came when, on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I
opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had
made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian
Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of
the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.
How short his years and how clear his vision! What greater reward in
ambition, honour, and conscience could he have hoped to win for himself
when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the end of my
opening life?
