I
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in
the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly
on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade
of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (among other things) a
descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
the docks of a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of “Almayer's Folly” was begun. With interest, I say, for was
not the kind Norman giant with enormous mustaches and a thundering voice
the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic,
devotion to his art, a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
“'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
behind which the sun had sunk.” . . . These words of Almayer's romantic
daughter I remember tracing on the gray paper of a pad which rested on
the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town
of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,
coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation: “You've made it
jolly warm in here.”
It was warm. I had turned on the steam heater after placing a tin under
the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak
where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and
being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling,
by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have
been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this
sentimental inspection, and after meditating a while over the strings
under my silent scrutiny inquired, airily:
“What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?”
It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
opening speech of the tenth chapter, and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.
I could not have told him that Nina had said, “It has set at last.”
He would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
sea-going was setting, too, even as I wrote the words expressing the
impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not know this
myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an
excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our
relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.
He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo, and I went on looking through the
port-hole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tail end
of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen night-cap
leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom house guard, belted
over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a
wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring
was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with
curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding
with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had
been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the
Opera House, where that same port-hole gave me a view of quite another
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.