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 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 amongst these 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 solemn 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 matchbox 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 matchbox
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 ashbin 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 anaemic.
“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. Whatever 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 afterwards 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 of 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 caulkers'
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 Shakespearean 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 tracings of
indian 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 burnt 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 pyjamas 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 civilised
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-skylight 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 overhead more of Almayer's
name amongst 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 pyjamas 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 in till this evening,” he remarked suspiciously.
I don'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 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 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 something, 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
spoilt 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 lying 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 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 had all 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 scandalised.
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 requisites 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
bathroom, big and broad-chested, was brushing his thick, damp, iron-grey
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 towards 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 verandah. 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 pyjamas 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 young 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
silence 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 realise . . . it's impossible
to realise . . .” 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 foreknowledge to counter-balance 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.