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 of 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 among those 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 seldom 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 match-box 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 match-box

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 ash-bin 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 anemic.

“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. What ever 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 afterward 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 for 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 calkers' 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 Shakespearian 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 the tracings

of India 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 burned 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 pajamas 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 civilized

and progressive till you heard that the mine could not be worked at

present because it was haunted by some particularly 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-sky light 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 overheard

more of Almayer's name among 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 pajamas 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 till this evening,” he remarked, suspiciously.

I didn'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 the 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 in 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 some thing, 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

spoiled 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 laying 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 the 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 all had 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, scandalized.

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 requirements 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 bath-room, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick, damp,

iron-gray 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 toward 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 veranda. 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 pajamas 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 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 select 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 realize . . . it's impossible

to realize. . . .” 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 fore knowledge to counterbalance 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.

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 post-cards. 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--till next week, as like

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 anemic

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 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 aggrandizement, 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 among 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 imagined phrases--even he has

his place among kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes,

cabinet ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,

Kafirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and

constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in

itself.

Here I perceive (without speaking offense) 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 among 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, everyone 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 recognize 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 among 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

hairbreadth 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

farm-house 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

courtesies. 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 specialty. 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 in 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 characterize other wise

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

overmatched 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 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 burned at the end of the day--the litter of a cruel

battle-field, 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 realizing 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 gray-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. Afterward 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 afterward, 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 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.