SOME REMINISCENCES
By Joseph Conrad
A Familiar Preface.
As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion,
and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some
spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted:
“You know, you really must.”
It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must! . . .
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
his trust, not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power
of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't
say this by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be
impressionable than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean,
as affecting a whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the
other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words
as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not
far to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction,
these two by their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and
upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric.
There's “virtue” for you if you like! . . . Of course the accent must
be attended to. The right accent. That's very important. The capacious
lung, the thundering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me
of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a
mathematical imagination. Mathematics command all my respect, but I have
no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I
will move the world.
What a dream--for a writer! Because written words have their accent too.
Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
amongst the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured
out aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on
earth. It may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand.
But it's no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle
in a pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such
luck.
And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted,
and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes downwind leaving the world
unmoved. Once upon a time there lived an Emperor who was a sage and
something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
posterity. Amongst other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
this solemn admonition: “Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
truth.” The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
that it is an easy matter for an austere Emperor to jot down grandiose
advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic:
and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
embroil one with one's friends.
“Embroil” is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine either
amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
as to quarrel with me. “To disappoint one's friends” would be nearer
the mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives
in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world,
amongst imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them,
he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He
remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather
than a seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of
fiction. In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot
help thinking of a passage in the “Imitation of Christ” where the
ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that “there are
persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy
the opinion one had of them.” This is the danger incurred by an author
of fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
sufficiently literary. Indeed a man who never wrote a line for print
till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession
of his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
three years ago, when I published “The Mirror of the Sea,” a volume of
impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
they recommended. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and
its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I
am incorrigible.
Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
sea-life, I have a special piety towards that form of my past; for its
impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
great distances from such natural affections as were still left to
me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder then that
in my two exclusively sea books, “The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'” and
“The Mirror of the Sea” (and in the few short sea stories like “Youth”
and “Typhoon”), I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
hands and the objects of their care.
One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made up one's mind to
write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
things; and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
onwards so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts;
of what the French would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of
unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that
I feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only
express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom an
open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either
of laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason
that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail
to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No
artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run
to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a task which
mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a
regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for
one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's
work.
And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognised with smiling compassion as
the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass into
each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.
Yes! I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's own breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their
souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary
intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the
sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular
wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may
be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive
horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of
myself which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried
my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I,
who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of
the Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks
of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act,
I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
ineffable company of pure esthetes.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not
lovable or hate what was not hateful, out of deference for some general
principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough perhaps and of
necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
giggles.
These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
duty. And least of all you can condemn an artist pursuing, however
humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where
his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those
which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All
intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even
beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are
mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said
to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try
for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. An
historian of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet he penetrates
further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very
fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves
admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect too. And he is not
insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is
not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic,
not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by love,
is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a
sham.
Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
will what the gods will without perhaps being certain what their will
is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
How. As the Frenchman said, “Il y a toujours la maniere.” Very true.
Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world,
rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as
the hills. It rests notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At
a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can
expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my
writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that
it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute
optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things;
but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to
special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a
philosophical mind should be free. . .
I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly
discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of
conversation--that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now.
My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have
been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them
were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet
this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with
unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely
that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of
my recollections. “Alas!” I protested mildly. “Could I begin with the
sacramental words, 'I was born on such a date in such a place'? The
remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement of all
interest. I haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be related
seriatim. I haven't known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous
remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs. This
is but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't written
it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own.”
But my objector was not placated. These were good reasons for not
writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already, he said.
I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a
good reason for not writing at all. But since I have written them, all I
want to say in their defence is that these memories put down without
any regard for established conventions have not been thrown off without
system and purpose. They have their hope and their aim. The hope that
from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of
a personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar
as, for instance, “Almayer's Folly” and “The Secret Agent”--and yet a
coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its action.
This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely associated with the hope,
is to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the
feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and
with my first contact with the sea.
In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here
and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.
J.C.K.
Chapter I.
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in
the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly
on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade
of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (amongst other things) a
descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
the decks of a 2000-ton steamer called the “Adowa,” on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of “Almayer's Folly” was begun. With interest, I say, for was
not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering
voice the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
“'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
behind which the sun had sunk. . . .” These words of Almayer's romantic
daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on
the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town
of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,
coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation: “You've made it
jolly warm in here.”
It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tin under
the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak
where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and
being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling,
by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have
been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this
sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the strings
under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
“What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?”
It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
opening speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.
I could not have told him that Nina had said: “It has set at last.”
He would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing the
impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not know this
myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an
excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our
relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.
He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking through the
porthole. 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 tailend
of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen nightcap
leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom-house guard, belted
over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
houses found a place in the picture framed by my porthole, 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 porthole 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
shipowners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I
do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which
had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral
Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but
there was never anything tangible left from the F.C.T.C. It flourished
no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead
of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure and died
before spring set in. But indubitably it was a company, it had even a
house-flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C. artfully tangled up in
a complicated monogram. We flew it at our main-mast head, and now I
have come to the conclusion that it was the only flag of its kind in
existence. All the same we on board, for many days, had the impression
of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly departures for
Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which
came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we
started for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life of the F.C.T.C. lies
the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a remote
sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina Almayer's story.
The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its modest
rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the
greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last
association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called
a seagoing experience. Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to
pay him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of
years--had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and
status for the whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He
organised for us courses of professional lectures, St. John ambulance
classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies and members of
Parliament on subjects touching the interests of the service; and as to
the oncoming of some inquiry or commission relating to matters of the
sea and to the work of seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his need of
exerting himself on our corporate behalf. Together with this high sense
of his official duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a
strong disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent master. And
what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to put him in the way
of employment? Captain Froud did not see why the Shipmasters' Society,
besides its general guardianship of our interests, should not be
unofficially an employment agency of the very highest class.
“I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to
us for their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about our
society, and I really don't see why they should not,” he said once to
me. “I am always telling the captains, too, that all things being equal
they ought to give preference to the members of the society. In my
position I can generally find for them what they want amongst our
members or our associate members.”
In my wanderings about London from West to East and back again (I was
very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort
of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel
itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice--nearer
there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting-place used
to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco
smoke, but Captain Froud had the smaller room to himself and there
he granted private interviews, whose principal motive was to render
service. Thus, one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a
crooked finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.
“I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning,” he said, getting back
to his desk and motioning me to a chair, “who is in want of an officer.
It's for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be
asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my way. . .”
As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at the
closed door but he shook his head.
“Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them.
But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship wants an officer
who can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do
not know anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth and, of
course, you would not care . . . would you now? I know that it isn't what
you are looking for.”
It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who
looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit
that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second
officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign
of being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical
forests; and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak
character) had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years
he and the world of his story had been the companions of my imagination
without, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of
sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my
return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day of which
I speak.
It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
square that they first began to live again with a vividness and
poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been
treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of
occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the
rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined
him round my table and then the rest of that Pantai band came full
of words and gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my
practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions
of Malays, Arabs and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my
attention. They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the
appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems
now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these
beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express
itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious
fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the
dwellers on this earth?
I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers
of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book
before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety
which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care
the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.
But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few hours' notice the
unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a
regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French
emigrants to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest
me very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping
up the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society, I would consider it. But
the consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed
the Captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other.
He explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect
and that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the
higher position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I
would be given certain special advantages--and so on.
I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.
“I am sure,” he insisted, “you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor.”
I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in
those circumstances that what was to be my last connection with a ship
began. And after all there was not even one single trip. It may be
that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written word on
my forehead which apparently forbade me, through all my sea wanderings,
ever to achieve the crossing of the Western Ocean--using the words in
that special sense in which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade,
of Western Ocean packets, of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life
attended closely upon the old and the nine chapters of “Almayer's Folly”
went with me to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we started for
Rouen. I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man fated
never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of the
Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a single
passage. It might have been that of course; but the obvious, gross
obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four hundred and sixty bunks
for emigrants were put together in the 'tween decks by industrious
carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant
turned up in Rouen--of which, being a humane person, I confess I was
glad. Some gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and
one was said to be the Chairman--turned up indeed and went from end
to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the
deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it that the
interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though, obviously,
they had never seen anything of the sort before. Their faces as they
went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression. Notwithstanding
that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to
immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I
received the inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
charter-party would ever take place.
It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When we
first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony well towards the
centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with
the tricolour posters announcing the birth of our company, the petit
bourgeois with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the
inspection of the ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to
give information as though I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter,
while our quarter-masters reaped a harvest of small change from
personally conducted parties. But when the move was made--that move
which carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the desolation of
solitude became our lot. It was a complete and soundless stagnation;
for, as we had the ship ready for sea to the smallest detail, as the
frost was hard and the days short, we were absolutely idle--idle to the
point of blushing with shame when the thought struck us that all the
time our salaries went on. Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said,
we could not enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like
this all day: even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to
prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The good
Paramor--he was really a most excellent fellow--became unhappy as far as
was possible to his cheery nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out
of sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the
crew in hauling both cables up on deck and turning them end for end.
For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. “Excellent idea!” but directly his
face fell. “Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that job last more than three
days,” he muttered discontentedly. I don't know how long he expected
us to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that
the cables got hauled up and turned end for end according to my satanic
suggestion, put down again, and their very existence utterly forgotten,
I believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship
down, empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think that
this state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes of
Almayer and his daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort of
evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as related above, had
arrested them short at the point of that fateful sunset for many weeks
together. It was always thus with this book, begun in '89 and finished
in '94--with that shortest of all the novels which it was to be my lot
to write. Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner
in his wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference to the
God of Islam--“The Merciful, the Compassionate”--which closes the
book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the
elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of
them) of my childhood and the realisation of childhood's vain words,
expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim.
It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking
at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space
then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to
myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no
longer in my character now:
“When I grow up I shall go there.”
And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a
century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin of
childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go
there: there being the region of Stanley Falls which in '68 was the
blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS.
of “Almayer's Folly,” carried about me as if it were a talisman or a
treasure, went there too. That it ever came out of there seems a special
dispensation of Providence; because a good many of my other properties,
infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind through
unfortunate accidents of transportation. I call to mind, for instance,
a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinchassa and
Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to take it at night in
a big canoe with only half the proper number of paddlers. I failed in
being the second white man on record drowned at that interesting spot
through the upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer,
but the accident happened some months before my time, and he, too, I
believe, was going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still
he was going home. I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with “Almayer's
Folly” amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at that delectable
capital Boma, where before the departure of the steamer which was to
take me home I had the time to wish myself dead over and over again
with perfect sincerity. At that date there were in existence only seven
chapters of “Almayer's Folly,” but the chapter in my history which
followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal convalescence.
Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is
rendered for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in
the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth are
inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management of a
waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not
matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the
activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had
nothing to hold me with for very long. And then that memorable story,
like a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro
upon the sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of
course I would not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it
certainly did nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look
and an ancient, yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable
to suppose that anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and
Nina. And yet something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to
wake them up from their state of suspended animation.
What is it that Novalis says? “It is certain my conviction gains
infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.” And what is a
novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose
accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride
of documentary history? Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo
rapids brought it to the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open
sea. It would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young Cambridge
man (he was a “passenger for his health” on board the good ship Torrens
outward bound to Australia) who was the first reader of “Almayer's
Folly”--the very first reader I ever had. “Would it bore you very much
reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?” I asked him one evening on
a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was
Gibbon's History. Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin
one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his
own travelling store.
“Not at all,” he answered with his courteous intonation and a faint
smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him
a watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe.
All that's beyond guessing now. He was not a cold but a calm man, still
more subdued by disease--a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty
in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty
passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look. In his
attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic voice he asked:
“What is this?” “It is a sort of tale,” I answered with an effort. “It
is not even finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to know what you
think of it.” He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I
remember perfectly his thin brown fingers folding it lengthwise. “I
will read it tomorrow,” he remarked, seizing the door-handle, and then,
watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the
door and was gone. In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained
booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens,
and the subdued, as if distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the
growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in another
half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails would have to
come off the ship.
Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my
cabin. He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and the MS. was
in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look but without a word.
I took it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said nothing.
I opened and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate
lay wide open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the
sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I
turned my back squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques never
offered a word. “Well, what do you say?” I asked at last. “Is it worth
finishing?” This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
“Distinctly,” he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then coughed a
little.
“Were you interested?” I inquired further almost in a whisper.
“Very much!”
In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the
ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my
bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp
circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly
in the gusts of wind. It was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the
longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites
of Almayer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged
silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its
action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were being
born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the
officer of the watch and remained on the alert to catch the order that
was to follow this call to attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce
shout to “Square the yards.” “Aha!” I thought to myself, “a westerly
blow coming on.” Then I turned to my very first reader who, alas! was
not to live long enough to know the end of the tale.
“Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as
it stands?”
He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
“Yes! Perfectly.”
This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
“Almayer's Folly.” We never spoke together of the book again. A long
period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my
duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in
his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose
went at once up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in
Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez
Canal. I am not sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard
precisely; though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
passengers who, wandering about to “see the country” during the ship's
stay in port, had come upon him here and there. At last we sailed,
homeward bound, and still not one line was added to the careless scrawl
of the many pages which poor Jacques had had the patience to read with
the very shadows of Eternity gathering already in the hollows of his
kind, steadfast eyes.
The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final “Distinctly”
remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I am
compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as
in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves
must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days
gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is
One--one for all men and for all occupations.
I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and
more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to
wait my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those
wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the
fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just
the same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway
carriages, and could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a
clothes-line; but I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not
consent to write without something at least resembling a chair. Line by
line, rather than page by page, was the growth of “Almayer's Folly.”
And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to
the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse railway
station (that's in Berlin, you know), on my way to Poland, or more
precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in
a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and
intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not
thinking of the MS. but of all the other things that were packed in the
bag.
In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never
exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while the bag lay
open on a chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A
friend of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but had
turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each
other for over twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to
carry me off there.
“You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing,” he
suggested kindly.
I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or later.
The talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was
extremely animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from
big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem published in a very
modernist review, edited by the very young and patronised by the highest
society. But it never touched upon “Almayer's Folly,” and next morning,
in uninterrupted obscurity, this inseparable companion went on rolling
with me in the south-east direction towards the Government of Kiev.
At that time there was an eight-hours' drive, if not more, from the
railway station to the country house which was my destination.
“Dear boy” (these words were always written in English), so ran the last
letter from that house received in London,--“Get yourself driven to the
only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the
evening my own confidential servant, factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S.
(I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you,
reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on
the next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the
road.”
Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous
barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened and, in
a travelling costume of long boots, big sheep-skin cap and a short coat
girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. (of noble extraction), a man of
about thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open and
moustachioed countenance. I got up from the table and greeted him in
Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his
noble blood and his confidential position. His face cleared up in a
wonderful way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our understanding
each other. He imagined I would talk to him in some foreign language. I
was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come to meet
me shaped an anxious exclamation:
“Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself
understood to our master's nephew.”
We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of
me as if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling
of coming home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an
enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and took his seat protectively by
my side. The sledge was a very small one and it looked utterly
insignificant, almost like a toy behind the four big bays harnessed two
and two. We three, counting the coachman, filled it completely. He was
a young fellow with clear blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur
coat framed his cheery countenance and stood all round level with the
top of his head.
“Now, Joseph,” my companion addressed him, “do you think we shall manage
to get home before six?” His answer was that we would surely, with
God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch
between certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar
sound to my ears. He turned out an excellent coachman with an instinct
for keeping the road amongst the snow-covered fields and a natural gift
of getting the best out of his horses.
“He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain remembers.
He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother of holy memory,”
remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my feet.
I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
grandmother. Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the first
time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-in-hand whip
outside the doors of the coach-house.
“What became of him?” I asked. “He is no longer serving, I suppose.”
“He served our master,” was the reply. “But he died of cholera ten
years ago now--that great epidemic we had. And his wife died at the
same time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that was
left.”
The MS. of “Almayer's Folly” was reposing in the bag under our feet.
I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of
my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view
as if it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had
seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which
fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a
white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps
of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking through a
screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
That very evening the wandering MS. of “Almayer's Folly” was unpacked
and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the
guest-room which had been, I was informed in an affectedly careless
tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no
attention from the affectionate presence hovering round the son of the
favourite sister.
“You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me,
brother,” he said--this form of address borrowed from the speech of
our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in
a moment of affectionate elation. “I shall be always coming in for a
chat.”
As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were
everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of
his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand
presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his
wards then living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning
families from the three southern provinces--ever since the year 1860.
Some of them had been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of
them, girls or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two
were older than myself--considerably older, too. One of them, a visitor
I remember in my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback,
and his four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and
general skill in manly exercises was one of my earliest admirations. I
seem to remember my mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the
dining-room windows as I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know,
by the very Joseph--the groom attached specially to my grandmother's
service--who died of cholera. It was certainly a young man in a dark
blue, tailless coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery of
the men about the stables. It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by
another mode of calculating time, it was certainly in the year in which
my mother obtained permission to travel south and visit her family, from
the exile into which she had followed my father. For that, too, she had
had to ask permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that
favour was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile
herself. Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest brother
who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts of friends and
a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg, some influential
personages procured for her this permission--it was officially called
the “Highest Grace”--of a three months' leave from exile.
This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
the grey heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect
and love in the house of her favourite brother who, a few years later,
was to take the place for me of both my parents.
I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
though indeed I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of
invalidism about her--but I think that already they had pronounced her
doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could re-establish
her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest period of my
existence. There was my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl,
some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as
if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a
few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive
shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow lowering with the
darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of
journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.
This is a far cry back from the MS. of “Almayer's Folly,” but the public
record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal.
It is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's
children than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That
which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the
most enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain for ever
obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the
still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and
their personalities are remotely derived.
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master
of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic
memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things
human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the
emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.