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• 01 - A Familiar Preface

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  A Familiar Preface to a Personal Record. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Peter Dan. A Personal Record 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. Shattered 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, all the tender vocal cords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes lever.

  He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands 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 among the wreckage of all the plaits 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 pot of hay at the first try. For myself, I've 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,

  until 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. Among other sayings, I'm 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'm thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the working truths of 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 among either my enemies or my friends are 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, among 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 reputations, 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 word 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 possessions 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 recommend. 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,

• 02 - Chapter I

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  CHAPTER I Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the birth 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 benignly on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade of old Flaubert, who imagined himself to be, among other things,

  a descendant of Vikings, might have hovered with amused interest over the docks of a two-thousand-ton steamer called the Adauer, on board of which, gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter of all Mayer's folly was begun. With interest, I say, for was not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering voice the lust 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 beyond which the sun had sunk. These words of all Mayer'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 have 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 the mere aspect. He has remained the only banjo-bust 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 eerily, "'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 Allmire, her opening speech of the tenth chapter, and the words of Mrs Allmire'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 keys, with a row of casks

  ranged on the frozen ground and the tail-end of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woolen nightcap leant 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 key brown with frozen mud. The colouring was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little café 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 café, the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of au pair Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di Lamamore 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 Allmire's folly got put away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any occupation to keep me away from it. The truth of the matter is that on board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life.

  I will not say anything of my privileged position. I was there just to oblige, as an actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit performance of a friend. As far as my feelings were concerned, I did not wish to be in that steamer at that time and in those circumstances.

  And perhaps I was not even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship wants an officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea-life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the well-known firm of London Shipbrokers 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 FCTC. 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 FCTC, 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 from 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 FCTC lies the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina Ormer's story.

  The then-Secretary of the London Shipmasters Society with its modest rooms in Venture Street was a man of indefatigable activity and the greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called a sea-going experience. Dear Captain Froud, it is impossible not to pay him the tribute of affectionate familiarity

  at this distance of years, had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the whole body of the officers of the Mercantile Marine. He 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

• 03 - Chapter II

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  CHAPTER II As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London into Ukraine. The manuscript of Allmayer's Folly, my companion already for some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age, was deposited unostentatiously on the writing table placed between two windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the

  table was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew. The blinds were down. Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first peasant hut of the village, part of my maternal grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family. And beyond the village,

  in the limitless blackness of a winter's night, there lay the great unfenced fields, not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread-giving land of low-rounded hedges, all white now, with the black patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snow track. A quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the stillness of

  the room like a tuneful whisper. My unpacking had been watched over by the servant, who had come to help me and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary at the door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not like to tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than ten years younger than myself. I had not been, I won't say in that place, but within sixty miles of it, ever since the year sixty-seven. Yet his guileless physiognomy

  of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was quite possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a grandson of the servant whose friendly faces had been familiar to me in my early childhood. As a matter of fact, he had no such claim on my consideration. He was the product of some village nearby and was there on his promotion, having learned the service in one or two houses as pantry boy. I know this

  because I asked the worthy V next day. I might well have spared the question. I discovered before long that all the faces about the house and all the faces in the village, the grave faces with long mustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the handsome tanned, white-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts, were as familiar to me as though

  I had known them all from childhood, and my childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday. The tinkle of the travellers' bells, after growing louder, had faded away quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed down at last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a small couch, smoked his long Turkish shabuk in silence. This is an extremely nice writing table you have got for my room, I remarked.

  It is really your property, he said, keeping his eyes on me with an interested and wistful expression, as he had done ever since I had entered the house. Forty years ago your mother used to write at this very table. In our house in Oro Tower it stood in the little sitting-room which, by a tacit arrangement, was given up to the girls, I mean to your mother and her sister who died so young. It was a present to them jointly from your

  uncle Nicholas B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two years younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name. She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind in which your mother was far superior. It was her good sense, the admirable sweetness of her nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily relations that endeared her to everybody. Her death was a terrible grief and a

  serious moral loss for us all. Had she lived she would have brought the greatest blessings to the house. It would have been her lot to enter as wife, mother and mistress of her household. She would have created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content which only those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke. Your mother, of far greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished in person, manner and intellect, had a less easy disposition. Being more brilliantly gifted,

  she also expected more from life. At that trying time especially we were greatly concerned about her state. Suffering in her health from the shock of her father's death, she was alone in the house with him when he died suddenly. She was torn by the inward struggle between her love for the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of her dead father's declared objection to that match. Unable to bring herself to disregard that cherished memory and that judgement she had always

  respected and trusted, and on the other hand feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and so true, she could not have been expected to preserve her mental and moral balance. At war with herself she could not give to others that feeling of peace which was not her own. It was only later, when united at last with the man of her choice, that she developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which compelled the respect and admiration even of our foes.

  Meeting with calm fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing the exile of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our Uncle Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection. Apart from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved, really, I believe, only three people in the

  world, his mother, your great-grandmother, whom you have seen but cannot possibly remember, his brother, our father in whose house he lived for so many years, and of all of us, his nephews and nieces grown up around him, your mother alone, the modest lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem able to see. It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected stroke of death falling upon the family less than a year after I had become its head.

  It was terribly unexpected. Driving home one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our empty house, where I had to remain permanently administering the estate and attending to the complicated affairs the girls took it in turns week and week about, driving, as I said, from the house of the Countess Tekla Potocka where our invalid mother was staying then to be near a doctor, they lost the road and got stuck in a snow drift. She was alone with the coachman and old Valeri, the personal servant of

  our late father. Impatient of delay while they were trying to dig themselves out, she jumped out of the sledge and went to look for the road herself. All this happened in 51, not 10 miles from the house in which we are sitting now. The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly again and there were four more hours getting home. Both the men took off their sheepskin lined greatcoats and used all their own rugs to wrap her up against the cold, notwithstanding her protests,

  positive orders and even struggles, as Valeri afterwards related to me. How could I, he remonstrated with her, go to meet the blessed soul of my late master if I let any harm come to you while there's a spark of life left in my body? When they reached home at last, the poor old man was stiff and speechless from exposure and the coachman was in not much better plight, though he had the strength to drive round to the stables himself. To my reproaches for

  venturing out at all in such weather, she answered characteristically that she could not bear the thought of abandoning me to my cheerless solitude. It is incomprehensible how it was she was allowed to start. I suppose it had to be. She made light of the cough which came on next day, but shortly afterward inflammation of the lung set in and in three weeks she was no more. She was the first to be taken away of the young generation under my care. Behold the vanity of

  all hopes and fears. I was the most frail at birth of all the children. For years I remained so delicate that my parents had but little hope of bringing me up, and yet I have survived five brothers and two sisters and many of my contemporaries. I have outlived my wife and daughter too, and from all those who have had some knowledge at least of these old times, you alone are left. It has been my lot to lay in an early grave many honest hearts,

  many brilliant promises, many hopes full of life. He got up briskly, sighed, and left me saying, We will dine in half an hour. Without moving I listened to his quick steps, resounding on the waxed floor of the next room, traversing the ante room lined with bookshelves, where he paused to put his shabuk in the pipe stand before passing into the drawing room. These were all en suite, where he became inaudible on the thick carpet.

  But I heard the door of his study bedroom close. He was then sixty-two years old and had been, for a quarter of a century, the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians, extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I seem to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth. As to Mr Nicholas B., sub-leftenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in the French army, and for a short time officier d'ordonnance of

  Marshal Marmont, afterward captain in the second regiment of mounted rifles in the Polish army, such as it existed up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom established by the Congress of Vienna, I must say that from all that more distant past, known to me traditionally and a little de visu, and called out by the words of the man just gone away, he remains the most incomplete figure. It is obvious that I must have seen him in sixty-four, for it is certain that he would

  not have missed the opportunity of seeing my mother, for what he must have known would be the last time. From my early boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort of mist rises before my eyes, mist in which I perceive vaguely only a neatly brushed head of white hair, which is exceptional in the case of the B family, where it is the rule for men to go bald in a becoming manner before thirty, and a thin curved dignified nose, a feature in strict accordance with

  the physical tradition of the B family. But it is not by these fragmentary remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my memory. I knew at a very early age that my grand-uncle Nicholas B was a knight of the Legion of Honour, and that he had also the Polish cross for Vala Vertuti Militari, the knowledge of these glorious facts inspired in me an admiring veneration. Yet it is not that sentiment, strong as it was, which resumes for me the force and significance of his personality.

  It is over-born by another and complex impression of awe, compassion and horror. Mr Nicholas B remains for me the unfortunate and miserable, but heroic being, who once upon a time had eaten a dog. It is a good forty years since I heard the tale, and the effect has not worn off yet. I believe this is the very first, say, realistic story I heard in my life, but all the same I don't know why I should have been so frightfully impressed. Of course I know what

  a village dog looks like, but still. No, at this very day, recalling the horror and compassion of my childhood, I ask myself whether I am right in disclosing to a cold and fastidious world that awful episode in the family history. I ask myself, is it right? Especially as the B family had always been honourably known in a wide countryside for the delicacy of their tastes in the matter of eating and drinking. But upon the whole, and considering that this gastronomical

  degradation overtaking a gallant young officer lies really at the door of the great Napoleon, I think that to cover it up by silence would be an exaggeration of literary restraint. Let the truth stand here. The responsibility rests with the man of St Helena in view of his deplorable levity in the conduct of the Russian campaign. It was during the memorable retreat from Moscow that Mr Nicholas B, in company of two brother officers, as to whose morality and natural

  refinement I know nothing, bagged a dog on the outskirts of a village and subsequently devoured him. As far as I can remember, the weapon used was a cavalry sabre, and the issue of the sporting episode was rather more of a matter of life and death than if it had been an encounter with a tiger. A picket of Cossacks was sleeping in that village lost in the depths of the great Lithuanian forest. The three sportsmen had observed them from a hiding place, making themselves very much at

  home among the huts just before the early winter darkness set in at four o'clock. They had observed them with disgust and perhaps with despair. Late in the night the rash councils of hunger overcame the dictates of prudence. Crawling through the snow, they crept up to the fence of dry branches which generally encloses a village in that part of Lithuania. What they expected to get, in what manner, and whether this expectation was worth the risk, goodness only knows. However, these Cossack

  parties, in most cases wandering without an officer, were known to guard themselves badly, and often not at all. In addition, the village, lying at a great distance from the line of French retreat, they could not suspect the presence of stragglers from the Grand Army. The three officers had strayed away and a blizzard from the main column, and had been lost for days in the woods, which explained sufficiently the terrible straits to which they were reduced. Their plan was to try

  and attract the attention of the peasants in one of the huts which was nearest to the enclosure, but as they were preparing to venture into the very jaws of the lion, so to speak, a dog, it is mighty strange that there was but one, a creature quite as formidable under the circumstances as a lion, began to bark on the other side of the fence. At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times, by request, from the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law,

  my grandmother, I used to tremble with excitement. The dog barked, and if he had done no more than bark, three officers of the Great Napoleon's Army would have perished honourably on the points of Cossack lances, or perhaps escaping the chase would have died decently of starvation. But, before they had time to think of running away, that fatal and revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of the zeal, dashed out through a gap in the fence. He dashed out and died. His head,

  I understand, was severed at one blow from his body. I understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the snow-laden woods, when in a sheltering hollow a fire had been lit by the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to be distinctly unsatisfactory. It was not thin. On the contrary, it seemed unhealthily obese. Its skin showed bare patches of an unpleasant character. However, they had not killed that dog for the sake of pelt. He was large. He was eaten.

  The rest is silence. A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly, I could not have eaten that dog. And his grandmother remarks with a smile, Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry. I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to eating dog. I have fed on the emblematic animal which in the language of the volatile Gauls is called la vache en rage.

  I have lived on ancient salt junk. I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript dishes containing things without a name. But of the Lithuanian village dog, never. I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is not I but my grand uncle Nicholas of the Polish landed gentry Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur etc. who in his young days had eaten the Lithuanian dog. I wish he had not. The childish horror of the dead clings absurdly

  to the grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still, if he really had to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on active service while bearing up bravely against the greatest military disaster of modern history and in a manner for the sake of his country. He had eaten him to appease his hunger, no doubt, but also for the sake of an unappeasable and patriotic desire in the glow of a great faith that lives still and in the pursuit of a great illusion

  kindled like a false beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a brave nation. Pro patria. Looked at in that light, it appears a sweet and decorous meal. And looked at in the same light, my own diet of la vache enragée appears a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence. For why should I, the son of a land which such men as these have turned up with their plowshares and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals

  of salt, junk and hard tack upon the wide seas? On the kindest view, it seems an unanswerable question. Alas, I have the conviction that there are men of unstained rectitude who are ready to murmur scornfully the word desertion. Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be made bitter to the palate. The part of the inexplicable should be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where no explanation is final. No charge of faithlessness ought to be likely

  uttered. The appearances of this perishable life are deceptive, like everything that falls under the judgment of our imperfect senses. The inner voice may remain true enough in its secret counsel. The fidelity to a special tradition may last through the events of an unrelated existence, following faithfully to the traced way of an inexplicable impulse. It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which

  makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation. Indulgence, as somebody said, is the most intelligent of all the virtues. I venture to think that it is one of the least common, if not the most uncommon, of all. I would not imply by this that men are foolish, or even most men, far from it. The barber and the priest, backed by the whole opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the

  ingenious Yidalgo, whose sallying forth from his native place broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging onto the stirrup leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect of the charm of

  that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances, he desired naively to escape with his very body from the intolerable reality of things. He wished to meet, eye to eye, the valorous giant Brandebarberen, lord of Arabia, whose armor is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his arm, is the gate of a fortified city. O amiable and natural weakness! O blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without

  a guile! Who would not succumb to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless, it was a form of self-indulgence, and the ingenious Yidalgo of La Mancha was not a good citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who used to say in his exile, the people are never in fault. One may admit that there must be some righteousness in the ascent of a whole village. Mad, mad! He who kept

  in pious meditation the ritual vigil of arms by the well of an inn, and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by the fat sly rogue of a landlord, has come very near perfection. He rides forth, his head encircled by a halo, the patron saint of all life, spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was not a good citizen. Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered exclamation of my tutor. It was in the jolly year 1873,

  the very last year in which I have had a jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterward, jolly enough in a way, and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which I speak was the year of my last schoolboy holiday. There are other reasons why I should remember that year, but they are too long to state formally in this place. Moreover, they have nothing to do with that holiday. But what has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark was

  made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Halls of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance. In fact, it was a memorable holiday of travel. Of late we had been tramping slowly up the valley of the Reuss. It was a delightful time. It was much more like a stroll than a tramp. Landing from a lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluellen, we found ourselves at the end of the second day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little way beyond hospen t'art.

  This is not the day on which the remark was made. In the shadows of the deep valley and with the habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not upon the ethics of conduct, but upon the simpler human problem of shelter and food. There did not seem anything of the kind in sight, and we were thinking of turning back, when suddenly at the bend of the road we came upon a building, ghostly in the twilight. At that time the work on the St. Gotthard tunnel was going on,

  and that magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the mountains. It was long, though not big at all. It was low. It was built of boards, without ornamentation, in barrack hut style, with the white window frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front. And yet it was a hotel. It had even a name, which I have forgotten. But there was no gold-laced doorkeeper at its humble

  door. A plain but vigorous servant girl answered our inquiries. Then a man and woman who owned the place appeared. It was clear that no travellers were expected, or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostlery, which in its severe style resembled the house which surmounts the unseeworthy looking hulls of the Toy Noah's Arcs, the universal possession of European childhood. However, its roof was not hinged, and it was not full to the brim of slab-sided and painted animals

  of wood. Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in evidence. We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to my sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a seesaw plank, since there was no one at the other end to balance it against our two dusty and travel-stained figures. Then we hastened upstairs to bed in a room smelling of pine planks, and I was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.

  In the morning my tutor, he was a student of Krakow University, woke me up early, and as we were dressing, remarked, there seems to be a lot of people staying in this hotel. I have heard a noise of talking up till eleven o'clock. This statement surprised me. I had heard no noise whatever, having slept like a top. We went downstairs into the long and narrow dining room with its long and narrow table. There were two rows of plates on it. At one of the many

  curtained windows stood a tall, bony man with a bald head, set off by a bunch of black hair above each ear and with a long black beard. He glanced up from the paper he was reading and seemed genuinely astonished at our intrusion. By and by more men came in. Not one of them looked like a tourist. Not a single woman appeared. These men seemed to know each other with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very talkative lot. The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head

  of the table. It all had the air of a family party. By and by, from one of the vigorous servant girls in national costume, we discovered that the place was, really, a boarding house for some English engineers engaged at the works of the St Gotthard Tunnel, and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language as far as it is used at a breakfast table by men who do not believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life. This was my first contact

  with British mankind apart from the tourist kind seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne, the kind which has no real existence in a workaday world. I know now that the bald-headed man spoke with a strong Scotch accent. I've met many of his kind ashore and afloat. The second engineer of the steamer Mavis, for instance, ought to have been his twin brother. I cannot help thinking that he really was, though for some reason of his own he assured me that he never had

  a twin brother. Anyway, the deliberate bald-headed Scot with the coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic and mysterious person. We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped-out route led over the Furka Pass towards the Rhône Glacier with the further intention of following down the trend of the Hasli Valley. The sun was already declining when we found ourselves on the top of the pass and the remark alluded to was presently uttered. We sat down by the side of the road to

  continue the argument begun half a mile or so before. I am certain it was an argument because I remember perfectly how my tutor argued and how without the power of reply I listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on the ground. A stir on the road made me look up and then I saw my unforgettable Englishman. There are acquaintances of later years, familiars, shipmates, whom I remember less clearly. He marched rapidly towards the east, attended by a hang-dog Swiss guide with

  the mean of an ardent and fearless traveller. He was clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore short socks under his laced boots for reasons which, whether hygienic or conscientious, were surely imaginative, his calves, exposed to the public gaze and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. He was the leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong,

  exalted satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short silver-white whiskers, his innocently eager and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth towards the man and the boy sitting like dusty tramps by the roadside, with a modest knapsack lying at their feet. His white calves twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss

  guide with a surly mouth stalked like an unwilling bear at his elbow. A small train of three mules followed in single file the lead of this inspiring enthusiast. Two ladies rode past, one behind the other, but from the way they sat I saw only their calm, uniform backs and the long ends of blue veils hanging behind far down over their identical hat-brims. His two daughters, surely. An industrious luggage mule with unstarched ears and guarded by a slouching, sallow driver brought up the rear.

  My tutor, after pausing for a look and a faint smile, resumed his earnest argument. I tell you, it was a memorable year. One does not meet such an Englishman twice in a lifetime. Was he, in the mystic ordering of common events, the ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment on the top of an alpine pass with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for mute and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, the un-extinguishable and

  comic ardour of his striving-forward appearance helped me to pull myself together. It must be stated that on that day, and in the exhilarating atmosphere of that elevated spot, I had been feeling pretty crushed. It was the year in which I had first spoken aloud of my desire to go to sea. At first, like those sounds that, ranging outside the scale to which men's ears are attuned, remain inaudible to our sense of hearing, this declaration passed unperceived. It was as if

  it had not been. Later on, by trying various tones, I managed to arouse here and there a surprised momentary attention, the what-was-that-funny-noise sort of inquiry. Later on, it was did you hear what that boy said? What an extraordinary outbreak! Presently a wave of scandalised astonishment. It could not have been greater if I had announced the intention of entering a Carthusian monastery, ebbing out of the educational and academic town of Krakow,

  spread itself over several provinces. It spread itself shallow but far-reaching. It stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying wonder, bitter irony and downright chaff. I could hardly breathe under its weight and certainly had no words for an answer. People wondered what a Mr TB would do now with his worrying nephew, and I dare say hoped kindly that he would make short work of my nonsense. What he did was to come down all the way from Ukraine

  to have it out with me and to judge by himself, unprejudiced, impartial and just, taking his stand on the ground of wisdom and affection. As far as is possible for a boy whose power of expression is still unformed, I opened the secret of my thoughts to him, and he in return allowed me a glimpse into his mind and heart. The first glimpse of an inexhaustible and noble treasure of clear thought and warm feeling, which through life was to be mine to draw upon with a never deceived love and

  confidence. Practically, after several exhaustive conversations, he concluded that he would not have me later on reproach him for having spoiled my life by an unconditional opposition. But I must take time for serious reflection, and I must think not only of myself but of others, weigh the claims of affection and conscience against my own sincerity of purpose. Think well what it all means in the larger issues, my boy, he exhorted me finally with special friendliness. In meantime, try to get the

  best place you can at the yearly examinations. The scholastic year came to an end. I took a fairly good place at the exams, which for me, for certain reasons, happened to be a more difficult task than for other boys. In that respect, I could enter with a good conscience upon that holiday which was like a long visit pour prendre congé of the mainland of old Europe I was to see so little of for the next four and twenty years. Such however was not the avowed purpose of that tour. It was,

  rather, I suspect planned in order to distract and occupy my thoughts in other directions. Nothing had been said for months of my going to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor and his influence over me were so well known that he must have received a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic folly. It was an excellently appropriate arrangement as neither he nor I had ever had a single glimpse of the sea in our lives. That was to come by and by for both of us in Venice

  from the outer shore of Lido. Meantime, he had taken his mission to heart so well that I began to feel crushed before we reached Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he had argued away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Rigi by Jove. Of his devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt. He had proved it already by two years of unremitting and arduous care. I could not hate him. But he had been crushing me slowly, and when he started to

  argue on the top of the Furka Pass he was perhaps nearer a success than either he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing silence, feeling that ghostly, unrealised and desired sea of my dreams escape from the unnerved grip of my will. The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed and the argument went on. What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years, either in ambition, honour or conscience? An unanswerable question. But I felt no longer crushed. Then our

  eyes met and a genuine emotion was visible in his as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked up the knapsack suddenly and got onto his feet. You are an incorrigible, hopeless don, Chioti, that's what you are. I was surprised. I was only fifteen and did not know what he meant exactly. But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the immortal knight turning up in connection with

  my own folly, as some people would call it to my face. Alas, I don't think there was anything to be proud of. Mine was not the stuff of protectors of forlorn damsels, the redresses of this world's follies wrong are made of, and my tutor was the man to know that best. Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and the priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach. I walked behind him for four or five minutes, then without looking back he stopped. The shadows of

  distant peaks were lengthening over the Furka Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me, and in full view of the Finster Ahrhorn with his band of giant brothers rearing their monstrous heads against a brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder affectionately. Well, that's enough. We will have no more of it. And indeed, there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between us. There was to be no more question of it at all, nowhere or with

  anyone. We began the descent of the Furka Pass, conversing merrily. Eleven years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of St Catherine's Dock House, a master in the British merchant's service. But the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furka Pass was no longer living. That very year of our travels he took his degree of the philosophical faculty, and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to the call, he entered at once upon the

  four-year course of the medical schools. A day came when on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta I opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved souls of the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery. How short his years and how clear

  his vision! What greater reward in ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to win for himself when, on the top of the Furka Pass, he bet me look well to the end of my opening life? End of chapter 2

• 04 - Chapter III

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  CHAPTER III The devouring and abysmal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by my grand-uncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and famished scarecrows symbolised to my childish imagination the whole horror of the retreat from Moscow and the immorality of a conqueror's ambition. That extreme distaste for that objectionable episode has tinged the views I hold as to

  the character and achievements of Napoleon the Great. I need not say that these are unfavourable. It was morally reprehensible for that great captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by raising in his breast a false hope of national independence. It has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upward of a hundred years on

  a diet of false hopes and, well, dog. It is, when one thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen. Some pride in the national constitution, which has survived a long course of such dislike, is really excusable. But enough of generalising.

  Returning to particulars, Mr Nicholas B confided to his sister-in-law, my grandmother, in his misanthropically laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been nearly the death of him. This is not surprising. What surprises me is that the story was ever heard of, for Grand Uncle Nicholas differed

  in this from the generality of military men of Napoleon's time and perhaps of all time, that he did not like to talk of his campaigns, which began at Friedland and ended somewhere in the neighbourhood of Baaluduc. His admiration of the great emperor was unreserved in everything but expression. Like the religion of earnest men, it was too profound a sentiment to be displayed before

  a world of little faith. Apart from that, he seemed as completely devoid of military anecdotes as though he had hardly ever seen a soldier in his life. Proud of his decorations earned before he was twenty-five, he refused to wear the ribbons at the buttonhole in the manner practised to this day in Europe, and even was unwilling

  to display the insignia on festive occasions, as though he wished to conceal them in the fear of appearing boastful. "'It is enough that I have them,' he used to mutter. In the course of thirty years they were seen on his breast only twice, at an auspicious marriage in the family and at the funeral of an old friend.

  That the wedding which was thus honoured was not the wedding of my mother I learned only late in life, too late to bear a grudge against Mr Nicholas B., who made amends at my birth by a long letter of congratulation containing the following prophecy. He will see better times.' Even in his embittered heart there lived a hope, but he was not a true prophet.

  He was a man of strange contradictions. Living for many years in his brother's house, the home of many children, a house full of life, of animation, noisy with a constant coming and going of many guests, he kept his habits of solitude and silence. As obstinately secretive in all his purposes, he was, in reality, the victim of a most painful

  irresolution in all matters of civil life. Under his taciturn, phlegmatic behaviour was hidden a faculty of short-lived, passionate anger. I suspect he had no talent for narrative, but it seemed to afford him sombre satisfaction to declare that he was the last man to ride over the bridge of the river Elster after

  the Battle of Leipzig. Lest some construction favourable to his valor should be put on the fact, he condescended to explain how it came to pass. It seems that, shortly after the retreat began, he was sent back to the town where some divisions of the French army, and among them the Polish corps of Prince Joseph Poniatowski, jammed

  hopelessly in the streets, were being simply exterminated by the troops of the Allied powers. When asked what it was like in there, Mr Nicholas B muttered only the word, shambles. Having delivered his message to the Prince, he hastened away at once to render an account of his mission to the superior who had sent him. By that time the advance of the enemy had enveloped the town, and he was shot at from

  houses and chased all the way to the river bank by a disorderly mob of Austrian dragoons and Prussian hussars. The bridge had been mined early in the morning, and his opinion was that the sight of the horseman converging from many sides in the pursuit of his person alarmed the officer in command of the sappers and caused the premature firing of the charges.

  He had not gone more than two hundred yards on the other side when he heard the sound of the fatal explosions. Mr Nicholas B concluded his bold narrative with the word imbecile, uttered with the utmost deliberation. It testified to his indignation at the loss of so many thousands of lives.

  But his phlegmatic physiognomy lighted up when he spoke of his only wound with something resembling satisfaction. You will see that there was some reason for it when you learn that he was wounded in the heel. Like His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon himself, he reminded his hearers with assumed indifference.

  There can be no doubt that the indifference was assumed, if one thinks what a very distinguished sort of wound it was. In all the history of warfare there are, I believe, only three warriors publicly known to have been wounded in the heel. Achilles and Napoleon, demigods indeed, to whom the familial piety of an unworthy descendant

  adds the name of the simple mortal Nicholas B. The hundred days found Mr Nicholas B staying with a distant relative of ours, owner of a smaller state in Galicia. How he got there across the breadth of an armed Europe, and after what adventures, I am afraid, will never be known now.

  All his papers were destroyed shortly before his death. But if there was among them, as he affirmed, a concise record of his life, then I am pretty sure it did not take up more than a half sheet of fool's cap or so. This relative of ours happened to be an Austrian officer who had left the service after the Battle of Austerlitz.

  Unlike Mr Nicholas B, who concealed his decorations, he liked to display his honorable discharge in which he was mentioned as unschreckbar, fearless, before the enemy. No conjunction could seem more unpromising, yet it stands in the family tradition that these two got on very well together in their rural solitude. When asked whether he had not been sorely tempted during the hundred days to make his

  way again to France and join the service of his beloved emperor, Mr Nicholas B used to mutter, No money, no horse, too far to walk. The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of national hopes affected adversely the character of Mr Nicholas B. He shrank from returning to his province. But for that there was also another reason.

  Mr Nicholas B and his brother, my maternal grandfather, had lost their father early while they were quite children. Their mother, young, still, and left very well off, married again a man of great charm and of unamiable disposition, but without a penny. He turned out an affectionate and careful stepfather.

  It was unfortunate, though, that while directing the boys' education and forming their character by wise counsel, he did his best to get hold of the fortune by buying and selling land in his own name and investing capital in such a manner as to cover up the traces of the real ownership. It seems that such practices can be successful if one is charming enough to dazzle one's

  permanently and brave enough to defy the vain terrors of public opinion. The critical time came when the elder of the boys, on attaining his majority in the year 1811, asked for the accounts, and some part at least, of the inheritance to begin life upon. It was then that the stepfather declared, with calm finality, that there were no accounts

  to render and no property to inherit. The whole fortune was his very own. He was very good-natured about the young man's misapprehension of the true state of affairs, but of course felt obliged to maintain his position firmly. Old friends came and went busily, voluntary mediators appeared travelling on most horrible

  roads from the most distant corners of the three provinces, and the marshal of the nobility, ex officio guardian of all well-born orphans, called a meeting of landowners to ascertain in a friendly way how the misunderstanding between X and his step-sons had arisen and devised proper measures to remove the same. A deputation to that effect visited X, who treated them to excellent wines, but absolutely

  refused his ear to their remonstrances. As to the proposals for arbitration, he simply laughed at them. Yet the whole province must have been aware that fourteen years before, when he married all his visible fortune consisted, apart from his social qualities, in a smart four-horse turnout with two servants with whom he went about visiting from house to house.

  And as to any funds he might have possessed at that time, their existence could only be inferred from the fact that he was very punctual in settling his modest losses at cards. But by the magic power of stubborn and constant assertion, there were found presently here and there people who mumbled that surely there must be something in it. However, on his next name-day, which he used to celebrate by a great three-day shooting

  party, of all the invited crowd only two guests turned up, distant neighbours of no importance, one notoriously a fool and the other a very pious and honest person, but such a passionate lover of the gun that on his own confession he could not have refused an invitation to a shooting party from the devil himself. But Marx met this manifestation of public opinion with the serenity of an unstained

  conscience. He refused to be crushed. Yet he must have been a man of deep feeling, because when his wife took openly the part of her children, he lost his beautiful tranquillity, proclaimed himself heartbroken and drove her out of the house, neglecting in his grief to give her enough time to pack her trunks.

  This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an abominable marvel of chicane, which, by the use of every legal subterfuge, was made to last for many years. It was also the occasion for a display of much kindness and sympathy. All the neighbouring houses flew open for the reception of the homeless. Neither legal aid nor material assistance in the prosecution of the suit was ever wanting.

  Marx, on his side, went about shedding tears publicly over his stepchildren's ingratitude and his wife's blind infatuation, but as at the same time he displayed great cleverness in the art of concealing material documents—he was even suspected of having burned a lot of historically interesting family papers—this scandalous litigation had to be ended by a compromise, lest worse should befall.

  It was settled finally by a surrender, out of the disputed estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, of two villages, with the names of which I do not intend to trouble my readers. After this lame and impotent conclusion, neither the wife nor the step-sons had anything to say to the man who had presented the world with such a successful example of self-help based on character, determination and industry.

  But my great-grandmother, her health completely broken down, died a couple of years later in Carlsbad. Legally secured by a decree in the possession of his plunder, X regained his wanted serenity and went on living in the neighbourhood in a comfortable style and in apparent peace of mind.

  His big shoots were fairly well attended again. He was never tired of assuring people that he bore no grudge for what was past. He protested loudly of his constant affection for his wife and step-children. It was true, he said, that they had tried to strip him as naked as a Turkish saint in the decline of his days, and because he had defended himself from spoliation as anybody

  else in his place would have done, they had abandoned him now to the horrors of a solitary old age. Nevertheless, his love for them survived these cruel blows. And there might have been some truth in his protestations. Very soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his eldest step-son, my maternal grandfather.

  And when these were peremptorily rejected, he went on renewing them again and again with characteristic obstinacy. For years he persisted in his efforts at reconciliation, promising my grandfather to execute a will in his favour if he would only be friends again to the extent of calling now and then. It was fairly close neighbourhood, for those parts forty miles or so, and even of putting

  in an appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My grandfather was an ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as free from hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the only public school of some standing then in the South, he had also read deeply the authors of the eighteenth century.

  In him Christian charity was joined to a philosophical indulgence for the failings of human nature. But the memory of those miserably anxious early years, his young man's years robbed of all generous allusions by the cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the way of forgiveness. He never succumbed to the fascination of the great shoot.

  And X, his heart set to the last on reconciliation, with the draught of the will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died in testate. The fortune, thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful management, passed to some distant relative whom he had never seen and who did not even bear his name. Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe.

  Mr Nicholas B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the fearless Austrian officer, departed from Galicia, and without going near his native place, where the odious lawsuit was still on, proceeded straight to Warsaw and entered the army of the newly constituted Polish kingdom under the scepter of Alexander I, autocrat of all the Russians. This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgement to a nation of its former

  independent existed, included only the central province of the old Polish patrimony. A brother of the emperor, the Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, its viceroy and commander-in-chief, married, Morganitically, to a Polish lady to whom he was fiercely attached, extended this affection to what he called my poles, in a capricious and savage manner. Sallow in complexion, with a tartar physiognomy and fierce little eyes, he walked with his

  fists clenched, his body bent forward, darting suspicious glances from under an enormous cocked hat. His intelligence was limited, and his sanity itself was doubtful. The hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by mystic leanings, as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas, in their various ways, for one was mystically liberal

  and the other mystically autocratic, but by the fury of an uncontrollable temper which generally broke out in disgusting abuse on the parade ground. He was a passionate militarist and an amazing drillmaster. He treated his Polish army as a spoiled child treats a favourite toy, except that he did not take it to bed with him at night.

  It was not small enough for that. But he played with it all day and every day, delighting in the variety of pretty uniforms and in the fun of incessant drilling. This childish passion, not for war but for mere militarism, achieved a desirable result. The Polish army, in its equipment, in its armament and in its battlefield efficiency,

  as then understood, became by the end of the year 1830 a first-rate tactical instrument. Polish peasantry, not serfs, served in the ranks by enlistment, and the officers belonged mainly to the smaller nobility. Mr Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record, had no difficulty in obtaining a left-tenancy, but the promotion in the Polish army was slow, because, being a separate organisation,

  it took no part in the wars of the Russian Empire against either Persia or Turkey. Its first campaign against Russia itself was to be its last. In 1831, on the outbreak of the Revolution, Mr Nicholas B. was the senior captain of his regiment. Sometime before he had been made head of the remount establishment quartered outside the

  southern provinces, whence almost all the horses for the Polish cavalry were drawn. For the first time since he went away from home at the age of 18 to begin his military life by the Battle of Friedland, Mr Nicholas B. breathed the air of the border, his native air. Unkind fate was lying in wait for him among the scenes of his youth.

  At the first news of the rising in Warsaw, all the remount establishment, officers, vets and the very troopers, were put promptly under arrest, and hurried off in a body beyond them deeper to the nearest town in Russia proper. From there they were dispersed to the distant parts of the Empire. On this occasion, poor Mr Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much farther than he ever did

  in the times of Napoleonic invasion, if much less willingly. Astrakhan was his destination. He remained there three years, allowed to live at large in the town, but having to report himself every day at noon to the military commandant, who used to detain him frequently for a pipe and a chat.

  It is difficult to form a just idea of what a chat with Mr Nicholas B. could have been like. There must have been much compressed rage under his taciturnity, for the commandant communicated to him the news from the theatre of war, and this news was such as it could that is, very bad for the polls.

  Mr Nicholas B. received these communications withoutward phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm sympathy for his prisoner. As a soldier myself I understand your feelings. You of course would like to be in the thick of it. By heavens, I am fond of you.

  If it were not for the terms of the military oath I would let you go on my own responsibility. What difference could it make to us, one more or less of you? At other times he wondered with simplicity, Tell me Nicholas Stepanovich, My great-grandfather's name was Stephen,

  and the commandant used the Russian form of polite address. Tell me, why is it that you polls are always looking for trouble? What else could you expect from running up against Russia? He was capable too of philosophical reflection. Look at your Napoleon now, a great man.

  There is no denying it that he was a great man as long as he was content to thrash those Germans and Austrians and all those nations. But no, he must go to Russia looking for trouble, and what's the consequence? Such as you see me, I have rattled this sabre of mine on the pavements of Paris. After his return to Poland Mr Nicholas B. described him as a worthy man, but stupid,

  whenever he could be induced to speak of the conditions of his exile. Declining the option offered him to enter the Russian army, he was retired with only half the pension of his rank. His nephew, my uncle and guardian, told me that the first lasting impression on his memory as a child of four was the glad excitement raining in his parents' house on the day

  when Mr Nicholas B. arrived home from his detention in Russia. Every generation has its memories. The first memories of Mr Nicholas B. might have been shaped by the events of the last partition of Poland, and he lived long enough to suffer from the last armed rising in 1863, an event which affected the future of all my generation and has coloured my earliest

  impressions. His brother, in whose house he had sheltered for some seventeen years his misanthropic imptimidity before the commonest problems of life having died in the early fifties, Mr Nicholas B. had to screw his courage up to the sticking point and come to some decision as to the future.

  After a long and agonising hesitation, he was persuaded at last to become the tenant of some fifteen hundred acres out of the estate of a friend in the neighbourhood. The terms of the lease were very advantageous, but the retired situation of the village and a plain comfortable house in good repair were, I fancy, the greatest inducements. He lived there quietly for about ten years, seeing very few people and taking no part

  in the public life of the province, such as it could be under an arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny. His character and his patriotism were above suspicion, but the organisers of the rising in their frequent journeys up and down the province scrupulously avoided coming near his house.

  It was generally felt that the repose of the old man's last years ought not to be disturbed. Even such intimates as my paternal grandfather, comrade in arms during Napoleon's Moscow campaign, and later on a fellow officer in the Polish army, refrained from visiting his crony as the date of the outbreak approached. My paternal grandfather's two sons and his only daughter were all deeply involved in

  the revolutionary work. He himself was of that type of Polish squire whose only ideal of patriotic action was to get into the saddle and drive them out. But even he agreed that dear Nicholas must not be worried. All this considerate caution on the part of his friends, both conspirators and others,

  did not prevent Mr Nicholas B being made to feel the misfortune of that ill-omined year. Less than forty-eight hours after the beginning of the rebellion in that part of the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks passed through the village and invaded the homestead. Most of them remained, formed between the houses and the stables, while several, it is mounting, ransacked the various outbuildings.

  The officer in command, accompanied by two men, walked up to the front door. All the blinds on that side were down. The officer told the servant who received him that he wanted to see his master. He was answered that the master was away from home, which was perfectly true. I follow here the tale as told afterwards by the servant to my grand-uncle's friends

  and relatives, and as I have heard it repeated. On receiving this answer, the Cossack officer, who had been standing in the porch, stepped into the house. Where has the master gone then? Our master went to Jay, the government town some fifty miles off, the day before yesterday.

  There are only two horses in the stables. Where are the others? Our master always travels with his own horses, meaning not by post. He will be away a week or more. He was pleased to mention to me that he had to attend to some business in the civil court.

  While the servant was speaking, the officer looked about the hall. There was a door facing him, a door to the right and a door to the left. The officer chose to enter the room on the left, and ordered the blinds to be pulled up. It was Mr Nicholas B's study, with a couple of tall bookcases, some pictures on the wall,

  and so on. Besides the big centre table with books and papers, there was a quite small writing table, with several drawers standing between the door and the window in a good light, and at this table my grand-uncle usually sat, either to read or write. On pulling up the blind, the servant was startled by the discovery that the whole male population

  of the village was massed in front, trampling down the flower beds. There were also a few women among them. He was glad to observe the village priest of the Orthodox Church coming up the drive. The good man in his haste had tucked up his cassock as high as the top of his boots. The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the bookcases.

  Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre table, and remarked easily, "'Your master did not take you to town with him, then?' I am the head servant, and he leaves me in charge of the house. It's a strong young chap that travels with our master. If, God forbid, there was some accident on the road, he would be of much more use than

  I.' Glancing through the window, he saw the priest, arguing vehemently in the thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his interference. Three or four men, however, were talking with the cossacks at the door. "'And you don't think your master has gone to join the rebels, maybe, eh?' asked the

  officer. "'Our master would be too old for that, surely. He's well over seventy, and he's getting feeble, too. It's some years now since he's been on horseback, and he can't walk much either now.' The officer sat there, swinging his leg, very quiet and indifferent.

  By that time, the peasants who had been talking with the cossack troopers at the door had been permitted to get into the hall. One or two more left the crowd and followed them in. There were seven in all, and among them the blacksmith, an ex-soldier. The servant appealed deferentially to the officer.

  "'Won't your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to their homes? What do they want to push themselves into the house like this for? It's not proper for them to behave like this while our master's away, and I am responsible for everything here.' The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired,

  "'Have you any arms in the house?' "'Yes, we have. Some old things.' "'Bring them all here, onto this table.' The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.

  "'Won't your honour tell these chaps?' But the officer looked at him in silence, in such a way that he gave it up at once, and hurried off to call the pantry boy to help him collect the arms. Meantime the officer walked slowly through all the rooms in the house, examining them attentively, but touching nothing.

  The peasants in the hall fell back and took off their caps when he passed through. He said nothing whatever to them. When he came back to the study, all the arms to be found in the house were lying on the table. There was a pair of big flintlock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry swords, one of the French, the other of the Polish army pattern,

  with a fouling piece or two. The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords and guns, one after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up. The peasants in the hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen after him into the study. He gave not the slightest sign of being conscious of their existence,

  and, his business being apparently concluded, strode out of the house without a word. Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps and began to smile at each other. The Cossacks rode away, passing through the yards of the home farm straight into the fields. The priests still arguing with the peasants moved gradually down the drive, and his earnest eloquence was drawing the silent mob after him, away from the house.

  This justice must be rendered to the parish priests of the Greek Orthodox, that, strangers to their country as they were, being all drawn from the interior of Russia, the majority of them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the cause of peace and humanity. True to the spirit of their calling, they tried to soothe the passions of the excited peasantry,

  and opposed rapine and violence wherever they could, with all their might. And this conduct they pursued against the express wishes of the authorities. Later on, some of them were made to suffer for this disobedience, by being removed abruptly to the far north, or sent away to Siberian parishes. The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had got into the house.

  What sort of conduct was that, he asked them, towards a man who was only a tenant, had been invariably good and considerate to the villagers for years, and only the other day had agreed to give up two meadows for the use of the village herd. He reminded them, too, of Mr. B's devotion to the sick in time of cholera. Every word of this was true, and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch their heads and look irresolute.

  The speaker then pointed at the window, exclaiming, Look, there's all your crowd going away quietly, and you silly chap should better go after them, and pray God to forgive you for your evil thoughts. This appeal was an unlucky inspiration. In crowding clumsily to the window to see whether he was speaking the truth,

  the fellows overturned the little writing table. As it fell over, a chink of loose coin was heard. There's money in that thing, cried the blacksmith. In a moment the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed, and there lay, exposed in a drawer, eighty half-imperials.

  Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia. Even at that time it put the peasants beside themselves. There must be more of that in the house, and we shall have it, yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith. This is wartime. The others were already shouting out of the window, urging the crowd to come back and help.

  The priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms up and hurried away, so as not to see what was going to happen. In their search for money, that bucolic mob smashed everything in the house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets. So that, as the servants said, there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in the whole house.

  They broke some very fine mirrors, all the windows, and every piece of glass and china. They threw the books and papers out on the lawn, and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing, apparently. Absolutely the one solitary thing which they left whole was a small ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked bedroom, above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany, and splintered boards, which had been Mr Nicholas B.'s bedstead.

  Detecting the servant in the act of stealing away with a japan-tin box, they tore it from him, and because he resisted, they threw him out of the dining-room window. The house was on one floor, but raised well above the ground, and the fall was so serious that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable boy ventured forth at dusk from their hiding places and picked him up.

  But by that time the mob had departed, carrying off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money. Some distance from the house, in the middle of a field, they broke it open. They found inside documents engrossed on parchment, and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour and for Valour. At the sight of these objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour given only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what they had done.

  They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily. On learning of this particular loss, Mr Nicholas B. broke down completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him much. While he was still in bed from the shock, the two crosses were found and returned to him. It helped somewhat, his slow convalescence, but the tin box and the parchments,

  those searched for in all the ditches round, never turned up again. He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour patent, whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to the very letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to recite, tears standing in his eyes the while. Its terms haunted him apparently during the last two years of his life,

  to such an extent that he used to repeat them to himself. This is confirmed by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more intimate friends, What makes my heart heavy is to hear our Master in his room at night, walking up and down and praying aloud in the French language. It must have been somewhat over a year afterward that I saw Mr Nicholas B.

  or more correctly that he saw me for the last time. It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother had a three-month's leave from exile, which she was spending in the house of her brother, and friends and relations were coming from far and near to do her honour. It is inconceivable that Mr Nicholas B. should not have been of the number.

  The little child, a few months old, he had taken up in his arms on the day of his homecoming, after years of war and exile, was confessing her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn. I do not know whether he was present on the very day of our departure. I have already admitted that for me he is more especially the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines.

  My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated, evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure, militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr Nicholas B. Only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those he had seen in the course of his taciturn life.

  But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling carriage with four post-horses, standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns, four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence. On all the faces, an air of sober concentration.

  My grandmother, all in black, gazing stoically. My grandfather giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been placed already. At the top of the flight, my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan pattern, with a deal of red in it, and like a small princess, attended by the women of her own household. The head gubernante, our dear corpulent Francesca, who had been for thirty years in the service of the B family.

  The former nurse, now outdoor attendant, a handsome peasant face, wearing a compassionate expression. And the good ugly mademoiselle Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows meeting over a short thick nose, and a complexion like pale brown paper. Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the silence with an appeal to me. N'oublie pas ton français, mon chéri!

  In three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only to speak French, but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent playmate. In the distance, half-way down to the great gates, a light open trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn up on one side, with the police captain of the district sitting in it, the visor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over his eyes.

  It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our going so carefully. Without wishing to treat with levity the just timidities of imperialists all the world over, I may allow myself the reflection that a woman practically condemned by the doctors, and a small boy not quite six years old, could not be regarded as seriously dangerous, even for the largest of conceivable empires, saddled with the most sacred of responsibilities.

  And this good man, I believe, did not think so either. I learned afterwards why he was present on that day. I don't remember any outward signs, but it seems that, about a month before, my mother became so unwell that there was a doubt whether she could be made fit to travel in the time. In this uncertainty, the Governor-General in Kiev was petitioned to grant her a fortnight's extension of stay in her brother's house.

  No answer, whatever, was returned to this prayer. But one day, at dusk, the police captain of the district drove up to the house and told my uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak with the master in private, at once. Very much impressed, he thought it was going to be an arrest. The servant, more dead than alive, with fright, as he related afterwards,

  smuggled him through the big drawing-room, which was dark, that room was not lighted every evening, on tiptoe, so as not to attract the attention of the ladies in the house, and led him by way of the orangerie to my uncle's private apartments. The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my uncle's hands. There, pray read this. I have no business to show this paper to you, it is wrong of me.

  But I can't either eat or sleep with such a job hanging over me. That police captain, a native of great Russia, had been for many years serving in the district. My uncle unfolded and read the document. It was a service order issued from the Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with the matter of the petition, and directing the police captain to disregard all remonstrances and explanations in regard to that illness,

  either from medical men or others, and if she has not left her brother's house, it went on to say, on the morning of the day specified on her permit, you are to dispatch her at once under escort, direct, underlined, to the prison hospital in Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands. For God's sake, Mr B, see that your sister goes away punctually on that day.

  Don't give me this work to do with a woman, and with one of your family too. I simply cannot bear to think of it. He was absolutely wringing his hands. My uncle looked at him in silence. Thank you for this warning.

  I assure you that even if she were dying, she would be carried out to the carriage. Yes, indeed, and what difference would it make, travel to Kiev or back to her husband? For she would have to go, death or no death. And mind, Mr B, I will be here on the day, not that I doubt your promise, but because I must. I have got to. Duty.

  All the same, my trade is not fit for a dog, since some of you Poles will persist in rebelling, and all of you have got to suffer for it. This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap pulled up between the house and the great gates. I regret not being able to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in the Rite of Conquest as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial greatness.

  On the other hand, I am in a position to state the name of the Governor-General who signed the order with the marginal note to be carried out to the letter in his own handwriting. The gentleman's name was Bazak, a high dignitary, an energetic official, the idol for a time of the Russian patriotic press. Each generation has its memories.

  End of chapter 3

• 05 - Chapter IV

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• 06 - Chapter V

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  CHAPTER V. In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event. In my own case, I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity

  for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as irrational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen at any rate was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps a pen, the cold steel of our days, in his rooms, in this enlightened age of penny stamps and heapny postcards. In fact, this was the epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr Gladstone had made the reputation of a novel or two. And I too had a pen rolling about somewhere, the seldom used, the reluctantly taken

  up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency permitted, of letters begun with infinite reluctance and put off suddenly till next day, till next week as like as not. The neglected, uncared for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation and under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm in a perfunctory grumpy worry in the Where the Devil is the Beastly Thing Gone to ungracious Spirit.

  Where indeed it might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so. My landlady's anemic daughter, as Ollendorf would have expressed it, though commendably neat, had a lordly careless manner of approaching her domestic duties. Where it might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side of the table leg and when picked up, show a gaping inefficient beak which would have discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me. Never mind, this will do. Oh, days without

  guile. If anybody had told me then that a devoted household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief. There are imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice, too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile. Perhaps

  had that seer of the future being a friend, I should have been secretly saddened. Alas, I would have thought, looking at him with an unmoved face, the poor fellow is going mad. I would have been without doubt saddened. For in this world where the journalists read the signs of the sky and the wind of heaven itself blowing where it listeth does so under the prophetical management of the meteorological office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot be captured by

  prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I should turn into a writer of tales. To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of unseen forces that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs

  who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit, who really never rest in this world and when out of it go on fretting and fuming on the straightened circumstances of their last habitation where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some aim of aggrandizement, can spare no time for a detached impersonal glance upon themselves. And that's a pity, they are unlucky. These two kinds, together

  with a much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze, as a great French writer has put it, the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness, miss perhaps the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions. The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity and even of reason itself seem ready

  to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular, a spectacle for awe, love, adoration or hate if you like, but in this view, and in this view alone, never for despair. Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair, the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled

  heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind. That's our affair. And the unwaryed self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth, a task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable serenity, to the supreme law

  and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle. Qu'il ose? It may be true. In this view, there is room for every religion except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and cloak of arid despair, for every joy and every sorrow, for every fair dream, for every charitable hope. The great aim is to remain true to the emotions called out of the deep, encircled by the firmament of stars, whose infinite numbers and awful distances may move us to laughter or tears.

  Was it the walrus or the carpenter in the palm who wept to see such quantities of sand? Or again to a properly steeled heart may matter nothing at all. The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a purely spectacular universe, where inspiration of every sort has a rational existence, the artist of every kind finds a natural place, and among them the poet is the

  seer par excellence. Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome task should be a man with a steeled heart, is worthy of a place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry? Yes, even he, the prose artist of fiction, which after all is but truth, often dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of imagined phrases, even he has his place among kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes,

  giraffes, cabinet ministers, fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, carphiers, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself. Here I perceive, without speaking offence, the reader assuming a subtle expression, as if the cat were out of the bag. I take the novelist's freedom to observe the reader's mind, formulating the exclamation, That's it! The fellow talks pro domo. Indeed,

  it was not the intention. When I shoddled the bag, I was not aware of the cat inside. But after all, why not? The fair courtyards of the House of Art are thronged by many humble retainers, and there is no retainer so devoted as he who is allowed to sit on the doorstep. The fellows who have got inside are apt to think too much of themselves. This last remark, I beg to state, is not malicious within the definition of the law of libel,

  its fair comment on a matter of public interest. But never mind, pro domo, so be it. For his house thonk of a voodhrey. And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify my existence. The attempt would have been not only needless and absurd, but almost inconceivable in a purely spectacular universe where no such disagreeable necessity can possibly arise. It is sufficient for me to say, and I am saying it at some length in these pages, je vais-sû. I have existed,

  obscure among the wonders and terrors of my time, as the abbé ciais, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to exist through the violences, the crimes and the enthusiasms of the French Revolution. Je vais-sû, as I apprehend, most of us manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms of destruction by a hair's breadth, saving my body, that's clear, and perhaps my soul but not without some damage here and there to the fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the

  ages, of the race, of the group, of the family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, and even by the silences and abstentions surrounding one's childhood, tinged in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the inherited traditions, beliefs or prejudices, unaccountable, despotic, persuasive, and often in its texture. Romantic. And often romantic. The matter in hand, however, is to keep these reminiscences from

  turning into confessions, a form of literary activity discredited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence, for that such was his purpose as palpably, even grossly visible to an unprejudiced eye. But then you see the man was not a writer of fiction. He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of the French

  Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but a great outburst of morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of a mere will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time to the play of his invention. Inspiration comes from the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven. A writer of imaginative prose, even more than any other

  sort of artist, stands confessed in his works. His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world. Indeed, everyone who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers, unless a moralist who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the one he has at pains to produce for the use of others, can speak of nothing else. It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of French prose writers, who says that we

  must recognise at last that, failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only talk of ourselves. This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunet-Hier over the principles and rules of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the memorable saying, the good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. M. Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no

  principles. And that may be very true. Rules, principles and standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all dead and vanished by this time. These, if ever, are the brave free days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the forms of the new beacons, which, it is consoling to think, will be set up presently in the old places. But what is interesting to a writer is the possession of an inward certitude that literary

  criticism will never die, for a man, so variously defined, is, before everything else, a critical animal. And as long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal to us with all the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience. For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit, acquires the merit of romance. But the critics, as a rule, exhibit but

  little of the adventurous spirit. They take risks, of course. One can hardly live without that. The daily bread is served out to us, however sparingly, with a pinch of salt. Otherwise, one would get sick of the diet one prays for, and that would be not only improper, but impious. From impiety to that, or any other kind, save us. An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense of propriety, from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness, induces,

  I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the adventurous side of their calling. And then the criticism becomes a mere notice, as it were, the relation of a journey where nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should be set down. The glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the hairbreadth escapes and the sufferings, oh, the sufferings, too, I have no doubt of the sufferings of the traveller being carefully kept out. No shady spot,

  no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either, so that the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle, a most deplorable adventure. Life, in the words of an immortal thinker of, I should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the worship of posterity. Life is not all beer and skittles. Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous donne ma parole d'honneur that it

  is not. Not all. I am thus emphatic because some years ago I remember the daughter of a general. Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle Ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers. The revelation of the world's superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say,

  or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute. And thus this general's daughter came to me, or I should say one of the general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor ladies of nicely graduated ages who held a neighbouring farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village children and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of courtesies. It sounds

  futile, but it was really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all over the country, and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance right to my very table. I mean the one who wore stand-up collars. She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination. She marched into my room swinging her stick. But no, I mustn't exaggerate, it is not my speciality. I am not a humoristic writer.

  In all soberness then, all I am certain of is that she had a stick to swing. No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open, the door too stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm still sunshine of the wide fields. They lay around me, infinitely helpful. But truth to say, I had not known for weeks whether the sun shone upon the earth, or whether the stars above still moved on their appointed courses. I was just then giving up some

  days of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel Nostromo, a tale of an imaginary, but true, seaboard, which is still mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in connection with the word failure, and sometimes in connection with the word astonishing. I have no opinion on this discrepancy. It's the sort of difference that can never be settled. All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of

  the humblest on this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, wrestled with the Lord for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the placid gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds in the sky, and for the breadth of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are perhaps strong words, but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative effort

  in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle, something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting, sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn. For that, too, is the wrestling of men with the might of their Creator, in a great isolation from

  the world, without the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a sense of overmatched littleness, for no reward that could be adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain longitude, once won, cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars and the shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain, whereas a handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil.

  Here they are. Failure. Astonishing. Take your choice, or perhaps both, or neither, a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of paper settling down in the night and undistinguishable like the snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in sunshine. How do you do? It was the greeting of the General's daughter. I had heard nothing. No rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of premonition of evil. I had the sense of an inauspicious presence, just that much

  warning, and no more. And then came the sound of the voice, and the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height, a fall, let us say, from the highest of the clouds, floating in gentle procession over the fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself up quickly, of course, in other words I jumped up from my chair, stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of one world and flung down into another, perfectly civil. Oh, how do you do?

  Won't you sit down? That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la Jean-Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe. I didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other way at the appalling magnitude of the disaster. The whole world of Costa Guana, the country you may remember of my seaboard tale,

  men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo, there was not a single brickstone or grain of sand of its soil I had not placed in position with my own hands. All the history, geography, politics, finance, the wealth of Charles Gould's silver mine, and the splendours of the magnificent Capitas de Cargadores, whose name cried out in the night, Dr Monigam heard it pass over his head, in Linda Viola's voice, dominated even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of

  treasure and love. All that had come down crashing about my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces, and in that very moment I was saying, won't you sit down? The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarterdeck training, even in a merchant ship, will do. This episode should give you a new view of the English and Scots seamen, a much caricatured folk, who had the last say in the formation of my character. One is nothing if not modest,

  but in this disaster I think I have done some honour to their simple teaching. Won't you sit down? Very fair, very fair indeed. She sat down, her amused glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of manuscript on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a chair. Single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners. There were there living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead pages that would be burned at the end of the day,

  the litter of a cruel battlefield, of a long, long and desperate fray. Long! I suppose I went to bed sometimes and got up the same number of times. Yes, I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me, and talked connectedly to my household on suitable occasions. But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at that table, surrounded by the litter of a

  desperate fray, for days and nights on end. It seemed so because of the intense weariness of which that interruption had made me aware, the awful disenchantment of a mind realising suddenly the futility of an enormous task, joined to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary amount of fairly heavy physical labour could ever account for. I have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a ship's deck beams from six in the morning till six in the evening,

  with an hour and a half off for meals. So I ought to know. And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concern for the dignity and comeliness of their servers. I was, most likely, the only writer that neat lady had ever caught in the exercise of his craft, and it distressed me not to be able to remember when it was that I dressed myself last, and how. No doubt that would be all right in essentials. The fortune of the house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes

  that would see to that. But I felt somehow as grimy as a costeguana lapero after a day's fighting in the streets rumpled all over and dishevelled down to my very heels, and I'm afraid I blinked stupidly. All this was bad for the honour of letters and the dignity of their servers. Seen indistinctly through the dust of my collapsed universe, the good lady glanced about the room with a slightly amused serenity, and she was smiling. What on earth was she smiling at?

  She remarked casually, I'm afraid I interrupted you. Not at all. She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was strictly true. Interrupted, indeed. She had robbed me of at least twenty lives, each infinitely more poignant and real than her own, because informed with passion, possessed of convictions, involved in great

  affairs, created out of my own substance for an anxiously meditated end. She remained silent for a while, then said, with a last glance all round at the litter of the fray, And you sit here like this, writing your, your… I, what? Oh yes, I sit here all day. It must be perfectly delightful.

  I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on the verge of having a stroke, but she had left her dog in the porch, and my boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had espied him from afar. He came on straight and swift like a cannonball, and the noise of the fight, which burst suddenly upon our ears, was more than enough to scare away a fit of apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated the gallant animals. Afterwards I

  told the lady where she would find my wife, just round the corner, under the trees. She nodded and went off with her dog, leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she had lightly made, and with the awfully instructive sound of the word, delightful, lingering in my ears. Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate. I wanted to be civil, of course. What are twenty lives in a mere novel that one should be rude to a lady on their account?

  But mainly to adopt the good, sound, Ollendorfian style, because I did not want the dog of the General's daughter to fight again, encore, with the faithful dog of my infant son, mon petit garçon. Was I afraid that the dog of the General's daughter would be able to overcome, vancre, the dog of my child? No, I was not afraid. But away with the Ollendorf method. However appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when

  I touch upon anything appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin, character and history of the dog. For the dog was the gift to the child from a man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorfian value, a man almost childlike in the impulsive movements of his untutored genius, the most single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of straight feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong, if perhaps not fully

  conscious, conviction. His art did not obtain, I fear, all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, a work of imagination which found its short moment of celebrity in the last decade of the departed century. Other books followed. Not many. He had not the time. It was an individual and complete talent which obtained but a grudging, somewhat supercilious recognition from the world

  at large. For himself one hesitates to regret his early death. Like one of the men in his open boat, one felt that he was of those whom fate seldom allows to make a safe landing after much toil and bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding affection for that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient figure. He liked me even before we met, on the strength of a page or two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he liked me still. He used to point

  out to me, with great earnestness and even with some severity, that a boy ought to have a dog. I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect of parental duties. Ultimately it was he who provided the dog. Shortly afterward, one day, after playing with the child on the rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he raised his head and declared firmly, I shall teach your boy to ride. That was not to be. He was not given the time. But here is the dog,

  an old dog now, broad and low on his bandy paws, with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black spot at the other end of him he provokes when he walks abroad, smiles not altogether unkind. Grotesque and engaging in the whole of his appearance, his usual attributes are meek, but his temperament discloses itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the presence of his kind. As he lies in the firelight, his head well up and a fixed faraway gaze directed at the shadows of

  the room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in the calm consciousness of an unstained life. He has brought up one baby, and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is bringing up another with the same conscientious devotion, but with a more deliberate gravity of manner, the sign of greater wisdom and riper experience, but also of rheumatism, I fear. From the morning bath to the evening ceremonies of the cod, you attend the little

  two-legged creature of your adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of your duties with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by every person in the house, even as I myself am treated, only you deserve it more. The General's daughter would tell you that it must be perfectly delightful. Mahar, old dog, she never heard you yelp with acute pain, it's that poor left ear, the wild, with incredible self-command, you preserve a rigid immobility for

  fear of overturning the little two-legged creature. She has never seen your resigned smile when the little two-legged creature interrogated sternly, what are you doing to the good dog, answers with a wide, innocent stare, nothing, only loving him, mama dear. The General's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-imposed tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very rewards of rigid self-command. But we have lived together many years, we have grown older too, and though

  our work is not quite done yet, we may indulge now and then in a little introspection before the fire, meditate on the art of bringing up babies, and on the perfect delight of writing tales, where so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly away. End of chapter five.

• 07 - Chapter VI

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  CHAPTER VI. In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary stage of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments and even two distinct elements, such as earth and water for its successive scenes, a certain amount of naivety is unavoidable. I am conscious of it in these pages.

  This remark is put forward in no apologetic spirit. As years go by and the number of pages grows steadily, the feeling grows upon one, too, that one can write only for friends. Then why should one put them to the necessity of protesting, as a friend would do, that no apology is necessary, or put perchance into their heads the doubt of one's discretion?

  So much as to the care due to those friends whom a word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the right place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety, has drawn from the great multitude of fellow beings even as a fish is drawn from the depths of the sea. Fishing is notoriously, I am talking now of the deep sea, a matter of luck.

  As to one's enemies, they will take care of themselves. There is a gentleman, for instance, who metaphorically speaking, jumps upon me with both feet. This image has no grace, but it is exceedingly apt to the occasion, to the several occasions. I don't know precisely how long he has been indulging in that intermittent exercise whose seasons are ruled by the custom of the publishing trade.

  Somebody pointed him out, in printed shape, of course, to my attention some time ago, and straightway I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden, for the rightest substance is his writing. The rest of him is but a vain shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred!

  Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has a deeper, and I venture to think a more estimable, origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is indeed lawful in so much that it is given reluctantly for a consideration, for several considerations.

  There is that robustness, for instance, so often the sign of good moral balance. That's a consideration. It is not indeed pleasant to be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation, implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into work whose qualities and whatever they may be, are not so much on the surface, is something to be thankful for in

  view of the fact that it may happen to one's work to be condemned without being read at all. This is the most fatuous adventure that can well happen to a writer venturing his soul among criticisms. It can do one no harm, of course, but it is disagreeable.

  It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering a three-card trick man among a decent lot of folk in a third-class compartment. The open impudence of the whole transaction, appealing insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the brazen, shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while insisting on the fairness of the game, give one a feeling of sickening disgust.

  The honest violence of a plain man playing a fair game fairly, even if he means to knock you over, may appear shocking, but it remains within the pale of decency. Damaging as it may be, it is in no sense offensive. One may well feel some regard for honesty, even if practised upon one's own vile body. But it is very obvious that an enemy of that sort will not be staid by explanations or

  placated by apologies. Were I to advance the plea of youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found in these pages, he would be likely to say, Bosh! in a column and a half of fierce print. Yet a writer is no older than his first published book, and notwithstanding the vain appearances of decay which attend us in this transitory life, I stand here with the wreath of only

  fifteen short summers on my brow. With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of feeling and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that, upon the whole, my previous state of existence was not a good equipment for a literary life. Perhaps I should not have used the word literary.

  That word presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance with letters, a turn of mind and a manner of feeling to which I dare lay no claim. I only love letters, but the love of letters does not make a literary man any more than the love of the sea makes a seaman. And it is very possible, too, that I love the letters in the same way a literary man

  may love the sea he looks at from the shore, a scene of great endeavour and of great achievement, changing the face of the world, the great open way to all sorts of undiscovered countries. No, perhaps I had better say that the life at sea, and I don't mean a mere taste of it, but a good broad span of years, something that really counts as real service, is not, upon the whole, a good equipment for a writing life.

  I cannot forbid, though, that I should be thought of as denying my masters of the quarter-deck. I am not capable of that sort of apostasy. I have confessed my attitude of piety toward their shade in three or four tales, and if any man on earth more than another needs to be true to himself as he hopes to be saved, it is certainly the writer of fiction.

  What I meant to say, simply, is that the quarter-deck training does not prepare one sufficiently for the reception of literary criticism. I say that, and no more. But this defect is not without gravity. If it be permissible to twist, invert, adapt and spoil Mr. Anadol France's definition

  of a good critic, then let us say that the good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul among criticisms. Far be from me the intention to mislead an attentive public into the belief that there is no criticism at sea. That would be dishonest and even impolite.

  Everything can be found at sea, according to the spirit of your quest, strife, peace, romance, naturalism of the most pronounced kind, ideals, boredom, disgust, inspiration, and every conceivable opportunity, including the opportunity to make a fool of yourself, exactly as in the pursuit of literature. But the quarter-deck criticism is somewhat different from literary criticism.

  This much they have in common, that before the one and the other the answering back as a general rule does not pay. Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even appreciation. I tell you everything is to be found on salt water. Criticism generally impromptu and always vive voce, which is the outward obvious difference

  from the literary operation of that kind, with consequent freshness and vigour which may be lacking in the printed word, with appreciation which comes at the end when the critic and the criticised are about to part, it is otherwise. The sea appreciation of one's humble talents has the permanency of the written word, seldom the charm of variety, is formal in its phrasing.

  There the literary master has the superiority, though he too can in effect but say, and often says it in the very phrase, I can highly recommend. And usually he uses the word we, there being some occult virtue in the first person plural, which makes it specially fit for critical and royal declarations. I have a small handful of these sea appreciations, signed by various masters, yellowing slowly

  in my writing-table's left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree of knowledge. Strange. It seems that it is for these few bits of paper, headed by the names of a few Scots and English ship-masters, that I have faced the astonished indignations, the mockeries

  and the reproaches of a sort hard to bear for a boy of fifteen, that I have been charged with the want of patriotism, the want of sense and the want of heart too, that I went through agonies of self-conflict and shed secret tears, not a few, and had the beauties of the Furka past spoiled for me, and have been called an incorrigible donkioti in allusion to the book-born madness of the night.

  For that spoil. They rustle these bits of paper, some dozen of them in all. In that faint ghostly sound there live the memories of twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more, the strong voice of the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea, which must have somehow reached my inland cradle and entered

  my unconscious ear. Like that formula of Muhammadan faith, the Muslim father whispers into the ear of his newborn infant, making him one of the faithful, almost with his first breath. I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one. And after all, there is that handful of characters from various ships to prove that all these

  years have not been altogether a dream. There they are, brief and monotonous in tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me as any inspired page to be found in literature. But then, you see, I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped.

  But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist too. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it at whatever cost for a change. With this end in view, I will confide to you, coyly, and only because there is no one about

  to see my blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these suggestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation, one and all, contain the words, strictly sober. Did I overhear a civil murmur, that's very gratifying, to be sure? Well, yes, it is gratifying. Thank you.

  It is, at least, as gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association, or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution, such as the London County Council, for instance. The above prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general sobriety

  of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published translation, a Parisian critic, I am almost certain it was Monsieur Gustave Caen in the Jou-Bla, giving me a short notice, summed up his rapid impression of the writer's quality in the words, « en puissant revue », so be it.

  Who could cavil at the words of a friendly reader? Yet perhaps not such an unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before the most seductive reveries, I have remained mindful of that sobriety of

  interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried to be a sober worker all my life, all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt, having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession,

  but also from artistic conviction. Yet there are so many pitfalls on each side of the true path that having gone some way and feeling a little battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the mere daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power and truth and peace.

  As to my sea sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the sign manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing in their time. I seem to hear your polite murmur that surely this might have been taken for granted. Well, no, it might not have been. That august academic body, the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, takes nothing for granted

  in the granting of its learned degrees. By its regulations issued under the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very word sober must be written, or a whole sackful, a tonne, a mountain of the most enthusiastic appreciation will avail you nothing. The door of the examination room shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.

  The most fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board of Trade. As I have been face to face at various times with all the examiners of the Port of London in my generation, there can be no doubt as to the force and the continuity of my abstemiousness. Three of them were examiners in seamanship, and it was my fate to be delivered into the

  hands of each of them at proper intervals of sea service. The first of all, tall, spare, with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet, kindly manner and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced to conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my appearance. His old thin hands, loosely clasped, resting on his crossed legs, he began by an elementary

  question in a mild voice, and went on, went on. It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the merchant's service, I could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers.

  But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked.

  That eventuality did not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious and weird. This ancient person, I said to myself, terrified, is so near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is considering this examination in terms of eternity.

  It is all very well for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room into the world of men of stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very landlady, even were I able, after this endless experience, to remember the way to my hired home.

  This statement is not so much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my answers, thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this earth. I verily believe that at times I was light-headed in a sort of languid way.

  At last there fell a silence, and that too seemed to last for ages. While bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my past slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting bow.

  When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon, and the doorkeeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and tip him a shelling, said, Well, I thought you were never coming out. How long have I been in there? I asked faintly.

  He pulled out his watch. He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this ever happened with any of the gentlemen before. It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk on air. And the human animal, being averse from change and timid before the unknown, I said to myself

  that I really would not mind being examined by the same man on a future occasion. But when the time of ordeal came round again, the doorkeeper let me into another room, with the now familiar paraphernalia of models of ships and tackle, a board for signals on the wall, a big long table covered with official forms, and having an unrigged mast fixed to the edge.

  The solitary tenant was unknown to me by sight, though not by reputation, which was simply execrable. Short and sturdy, as far as I could judge, clad in an old brown morning suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the other side of the table.

  He was motionless, mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with something mournful too in the pose, like that statue of Guiliano, I think, de Medici, shading his face on the tomb by Michelangelo, though of course he was far, far from being beautiful. He began by trying to make me talk nonsense. But I had been warned of that fiendish tray, and contradicted him with great assurance.

  After a while he left off. So far, good. But his immobility, the thick elbow on the table, the abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded and averted face, grew more and more impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for a moment, and then, placing me in a ship of a certain size,

  at sea, under conditions of weather, season, locality, etc., all very clear and precise, ordered me to execute a certain manoeuvre. Before I was half way through with it, he did some material damage to the ship. Directly I had grappled with the difficulty, he caused another to present itself, and when that too was met, he stuck another ship before me, creating a very dangerous situation.

  I felt slightly outraged by this ingenuity impaling trouble upon a man. I wouldn't have got into that mess, I suggested mildly. I could have seen that ship before. He never stirred the least bit. No, you couldn't.

  The weather's thick. Oh, I didn't know. I apologised blankly. I supposed that after all I managed to stave off the smash with sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on.

  You must understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me was, I gathered, a sort of passage I would not wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ship seemed to labour under a most comprehensive curse. It's no use enlarging on these never-ending misfortunes. Suffice it to say that long before the end I would have welcomed with gratitude an opportunity

  to exchange into the Flying Dutchman. Finally, he shoved me into the North Sea, I suppose, and provided me with a lee shore banks, the Dutch coast, presumably. Distance eight miles. The evidence of such implacable animosity deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.

  Well, he said, for our pace had been very smart indeed till then. I will have to think a little, sir. Doesn't look as if there were much time to think, he muttered zidonically from under his hand. No, sir, I said with some warmth.

  Not on board a ship, I could see, but so many accidents have happened that I really can't remember what there's left for me to work with. Still half averted and with his eyes concealed, he made unexpectedly a grunting remark. You have done very well. Have either two anchors at the bow, sir?

  I asked. Yes. I prepared myself then as a last hope for the ship, to let them both go in the most effectual manner when his infernal system of testing resourcefulness came into play again.

  But there's only one cable. You've lost the other. It was exasperating. Then I would back them if I could and tail the heaviest whores on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from that, which is quite likely, I would

  just do nothing. She would have to go. Nothing more to do, eh? No, sir, I could do no more. He gave a bitter half-laugh.

  You could always say your prayers. He got up, stretched himself and yawned slightly. It was a sallow, strong, unamiable phase. He put me in a surly, bored fashion through the usual questions as to lights and signals, and I escaped from the room, thankfully.

  Passed. Forty minutes. And again I walked on air along Tower Hill, where so many good men had lost their heads, because I suppose they were not resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of hearts I had no objection to meeting that examiner once more, when the

  third and last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I should. I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an unreasonable time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. But not a bit of it.

  When I presented myself to be examined for master, the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round soft face in grey fluffy whiskers and fresh loquacious lips. He commenced operations with an easygoing, let's see, hmm, suppose you tell me all you know of charter parties. He kept it up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of commenting to bits out

  of his own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in hand. That was very interesting. What's your idea of a jury rudder now? he queried suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a point of stowage. I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave him two classical

  examples of makeshifts out of a textbook. In exchange, he described to me a jury rudder he had invented himself years before, when in command of a three thousand tonne steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance imaginable. Maybe of use to you some day, he concluded.

  You are going to steam presently. Everybody goes into steam. There he was wrong. I never went into steam. Not really.

  If I only live long enough, I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the Dark Ages who had never gone into steam. Not really. Before the examination was over, he imparted to me a few interesting details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.

  The use of wire rigging became general about that time, he observed. I was a very young master then. That was before you were born. Yes, sir, I am of the year 1857. The mutiny year, he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder tone that his ship happened

  then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed under a government charter. Clearly, the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in me the sense of the continuity of that sea life into which I had stepped from outside, giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of official relations.

  I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as though he had been an ancestor. Writing my long name, it has twelve letters, with laborious care on the slip of blue paper, You are of Polish extraction. Born there, sir.

  He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me, as it were for the first time. Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I never remember meeting one, either before or after I left the sea. Don't remember ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren't you?

  I said yes, very much so. We were remote from the sea, not only by situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect association, not being a commercial nation at all, but purely agricultural. He made then the quaint reflection that it was a long way for me to come out to begin a sea life, as if sea life were not precisely a life in which one goes a long way from home.

  I told him smiling that no doubt I could have found a ship much nearer my native place, but I had thought to myself that if I was to be a seaman, then I would be a British seaman and no other. It was a matter of deliberate choice. He nodded slightly at that, and as he kept on looking at me interrogatively, I enlarged

  a little, confessing that I had spent a little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I did not want to present myself to the British merchant surface in an altogether green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious vocation was so strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea.

  It was the exact truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat exceptional psychology of my sea-going, I fear. I suppose you have never come across one of your countrymen at sea, have you not? I admitted I never had. The examiner had given himself up to the spirit of gossiping idleness.

  For myself, I was in no haste to leave that room, not in the least. The era of examinations was over. I would never again see that friendly man who was a professional ancestor, a sort of grandfather in the craft. Moreover, I had to wait till he dismissed me, and of that there was no sign.

  As he remained silent, looking at me, I added, But I have heard of one some years ago. He seems to have been a boy serving his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am not mistaken. What was his name? I told him.

  How did you say that? He asked, puckering up his eyes at the uncouth sound. I repeated the name very distinctly. How do you spell it? I told him.

  He moved his head at the impracticable nature of that name and observed, It's quite as long as your own, isn't it? There was no hurry. I had passed for master and I had all the rest of my life before me to make the best of it.

  That seemed a long time. I went leisurely through a small mental calculation and said, Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir. Is it?

  The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the table to me and rose from his chair. Somehow, this seemed a very abrupt ending of our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part from that excellent man, who was master of a ship before the whisper of the sea had reached my cradle. He offered me his hand and wished me well.

  He even made a few steps towards the door with me and ended with good-natured advice. I don't know what may be your plans, but you ought to go into steam. When a man has got his master's certificate, it's the proper time. If I were you, I would go into steam. I thanked him and shut the door behind me definitely on the era of examinations.

  But that time I did not walk on air, as on the first two occasions. I walked across the hill of many beheadings with measured steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now a British master mariner, beyond a doubt. It was not that I had an exaggerated sense of that very modest achievement, with which, however, luck, opportunity or any extraneous influence could have had nothing to do.

  That fact, satisfactory and obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal significance. It was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism and even to some not very kind aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I don't mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough, in all conscience, the commotion

  of his little world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect, meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by voices now forever still, finding things to say that an assailed boy could not have found simply because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself.

  I understood no more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort of career in my call.

  Of Russia or Germany, there could be no question. The nationality, the antecedents made it impossible. The feeling against the Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there would have been no difficulty in finding my way into the naval school at Polar. It would have meant six months extra grinding at German, perhaps, but I was not past the

  age of admission, and in other respects I was well qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly was thought of, but not by me. I must admit that in that respect my negative was accepted at once. That order of feeling was comprehensible enough to the most inimical of my critics. I was not called upon to offer explanations, but the truth is that what I had in view was

  not a naval career, but the sea. There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the language at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is with France that Poland has most connection. There were some difficulties for having me a little looked after at first.

  Letters were being written, answers were being received, arrangements were being made for my departure for Marseille, where an excellent fellow called Solary got at in a roundabout fashion through various French channels, had promised good-naturedly to put Le Jeune Homme in the way of getting a decent ship for his first start if he really wanted a taste of Cermetier de Chien.

  I watched all these preparations gratefully and kept my own counsel. But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already the determined resolve that if a seaman, then an English seaman was formulated in my head, though of course in the Polish language. I did not know six words of English, and I was astute enough to understand that it was

  much better to say nothing of my purpose. As it was, I was already looked upon as partly insane, at least by the more distant acquaintances. The principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in the good-natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was shocked a little by the phrase about the Métier de Chien.

  This Solary, Baptiste, when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out a quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black short beard, a fresh complexion and soft, merry black eyes. He was as jovial and good-natured as any boy could desire. I was still asleep in my room in a modest hotel near the quays of the old port after

  the fatigues of the journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyon, when he burst in flinging the shutters open to the sun of Provence, and chiding me boisterously for lying abeared. How pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to be up and off instantly for a three-years' campaign in the South Seas. Oh, magic words!

  Un campagne des trois ans dans les murs du Sud. That is the French for a three-years' deep water voyage. He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was unwearied, but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me in a very solemn spirit. He had been at sea himself, but had left off at the age of twenty-five, finding he could

  earn his living on shore in a much more agreeable manner. He was related to an incredible number of Marseilles well-to-do families of a certain class. One of his uncles was a shipbroker of good standing, with a large connection among English ships.

  Other relatives of his dealt in ship stores, owned sail lofts, sold chains and anchors, for master stevedores, corkers, shipwrights. His grandfather, I think, was a dignitary of a kind, the syndic of the pilots. I made acquaintances among these people, but mainly among the pilots. The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by invitation in a big half-decked

  pilot boat, cruising under close reefs, on the lookout in misty blowing weather, for the sails of ships and the smoke of steamers rising out there beyond the slim and tall Planiere lighthouse, cutting the line of the windswept horizon with a white perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provençal seamen.

  Under the general designation of Le Petit Ami de Baptisane, I was made the guest of the corporation of pilots, and had the freedom of their boats night or day. And many a day and a night too did I spend cruising with these rough, kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy with the sea began. Many a time the little friend of Baptisane had the hooded cloak of the Mediterranean

  sailor thrown over him by their honest hands, while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau d'Aft on the watch for the lights of ships. Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or shaven, lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the pilot breed, and here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear bent over my sea-infancy.

  The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states of the weather. They gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited to sit in more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their board, at the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate by their high-voiced, broad-browed

  wives, talk to their daughters, thick-set girls with pure profiles, glorious masses of black hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes and dazzling white teeth. I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them, Madame de Lestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the Prado at the hour of

  fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to make me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens' Bleak House, a work of the master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very weaknesses

  are more precious to me than the strength of other men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and in English. I have read it only the other day, and by a not very surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly of the belle Madame de Lestang. Her husband, as I sat facing them both, with his thin bony nose and a perfectly bloodless,

  narrow physiognomy, clamped together as it were by short formal side whiskers, had nothing of Sir Lester Dedlock's grand air and courtly solemnity. He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs. He was such an ardent, no, such a frozen-up mummified royalist that he used in current

  turns of speech contemporary, I should say, with the good Henri Quatre, and when talking of money matters, reckoned not in francs, like the common godless herd of post-revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten a coup, a coup of all money units in the world, as though Louis XIV were still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs.

  He must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. Luckily, in the counting-house, it occupied part of the ground floor of the de la Stank town residence in a silent, shady street. The accounts were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my once known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, legitimist, I suppose, clerks, sitting in

  the perpetual gloom of heavily barred windows beneath the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with heavily moulded cornices. I always felt on going out as though I had been in the temple of some very dignified but completely temporal religion. And it was generally on these occasions that under the great carriage gateway, Lady de

  la Stang, catching sight of my raised hat, would beckon me with an amiable imperiousness to the side of the carriage and suggest with an air of amused enchanence, Venez donc faire un tour avec nous, to which the husband would add an encouraging, C'est ça, allons montez, jeune homme. He questioned me sometimes, significantly, but with perfect tact and delicacy, as to

  the way I employed my time, and never failed to express the hope that I wrote regularly to my honoured uncle. I made no secret of the way I employed my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots and so on entertained Madame de la Stang so far as that ineffable woman could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of his new experience

  among strange men and strange sensations. She expressed no opinions and talked to me very little, yet her portrait hangs in the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and fleeting episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street, she offered me her hand and detained me by a slight pressure for a moment.

  While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of warning in her leisurely tone, Il faut s'appendant, faire attention, on apagatter sa vie. I had never seen her face so close to mine before. She made my heart beat and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.

  Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life. But she did not know, nobody could know, how impossible that danger seemed to me. End of chapter 6

• 08 - Chapter VII

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  CHAPTER VII Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on political economy? I ask, is it conceivable? Is it possible?

  Would it be right? With my feet on the very shores of the sea, and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected, and the last two of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very bizarre, and uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress,

  like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so callous or so stupid as not to recognise there also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning, because what can be the meaning of the phrase to spoil one's life, arrested one's attention by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of La Belle Madame de la Stang made me thoughtful

  for a whole evening. I tried to understand, and tried in vain, not having any notion of life as an enterprise that could be mismanaged. But I left off being thoughtful shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts of the past and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of the Vue Port to

  join the pilot boat of my friends. I knew where she would be waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a canal behind the fort at the entrance of the harbour. The deserted quays looked very white and dry in the moonlight, and as if frostbound in the sharp air of that December night.

  A prowler or two slunk by noiselessly. A custom house guard, soldier-like, assoured by his side. Paced close under the bowsprits of the long row of ships moored bows on, opposite the long slightly curved continuous flat wall of the tall houses that seemed to be one immense abandoned building with innumerable windows shuttered closely.

  Only here and there a small dingy café for sailors cast a yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones. Passing by one heard a deep murmur of voices inside, nothing more. How quiet everything was at the end of the quays on the last night on which I went out for a service cruise as a guest of the Marseille pilots.

  Not a footstep except my own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo of the usual revelry going on in the narrow unspeakable lanes of the old town reached my ear. And suddenly with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass, the omnibus of the Jolyette on its last journey swung round the corner of the dead wall which faces across the paved road the characteristic angular mass of Fort Saint-Jean.

  Three horses trotted abreast with the clatter of hoofs on the granite sets and the yellow uproarious machine jolted violently behind them, fantastic, lighted up, perfectly empty, and with the driver apparently asleep on his swaying perch above that amazing racket. I flattened myself against the wall and gasped. It was a stunning experience.

  Then after staggering on a few paces in the shadow of the fort, casting a darkness more intense than that of a cloud at night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern standing on the quay and became aware of muffled figures making towards it from various directions, pilots of the Third Company, hastening to embark. Too sleepy to be talkative, they step on board in silence, but a few low grunts and an enormous

  yawn I heard. Somebody even ejaculates, Ah, cock and a thaw, and sighs wearily at his hard fate. The patron of the Third Company, there were five companies of pilots at that time, I believe, is the brother-in-law of my friend Solary Bapdastan, a broad-shouldered, deep-chested

  man of forty, with a keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes. He greets me by a low, hearty, Hey, l'ami, comment va? With his clipped moustache and massive open face, energetic and at the same time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen of the southerner of the calm type, for there is

  such a type in which the volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid force. He is fair, but no one could mistake him for a man of the north, even by the dim gleam of the lantern standing on the quay. He is worth a dozen of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but then, in the whole immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, you could not find half a dozen men of his stamp.

  Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick jacket and bends his head and the light cast into the boat. Times up! His pleasant voice commands in a quiet undertone, La Gué! A sudden projected arm snatches the lantern off the quay, and, warped along by a line

  at first, then with a regular tug of four heavy sweeps in the bow, the big half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black breathless shadow of the fort. The open water of the Avampore glitters under the moon as if sewn over with millions of sequins, and the long white breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid silver. With a quick rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the sail is filled by a little

  breeze keen enough to have come straight down from the frozen moon, and the boat, after the clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at rest, surrounded by a mysterious whispering, so faint and unearthly that it may be the rustling of the brilliant overpowering moon rays breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless sea. I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the third company.

  I have known the spell of moonlight since, on various seas and coasts, of forests, of rocks, of sand dunes, but no magic so perfect in its revelation of unsuspected character as though one were allowed to look upon the mystic nature of material things. For hours, I suppose, no word was spoken in that boat. The pilots, seated in two rows facing each other, dozed, with their arms folded and their

  chins resting upon their breasts. They displayed a great variety of caps, cloth, wool, leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque round beret or two pulled down over the brows, and one grandfather, with a shaved bony face and a great beak of a nose, had a cloak with a hood which made him look in our midst like a cowled monk being carried off goodness knows where by

  that silent company of seamen, quiet enough to be dead. My fingers itched for that teller, and in due course my friend, the patron, surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the family coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road. There was a great solitude around us.

  The islets ahead, Monte Cristo and the chateau daft in the full light, seemed to float towards so steady, so imperceptible as the progress of our boat. Keep her in the furrow of the moon, the patron directed me in a quiet murmur, sitting down ponderously in the stern sheets and reaching for his pipe. The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to the westward of the

  islets, and presently, as we approached the spot, the boat we were going to relieve swam into our view suddenly, on her way home, cutting black and sinister into the wake of the moon under a sable wing, while to them our sail must have been a vision of white and dazzling radiance. Without altering the course a hair's breadth we slipped by each other within an oars length.

  A drawling sardonic hail came out of her. Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst out, a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter which lasted till the boats were stern to stern, theirs all bright now, and with a shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black to their vision, and drew away from them under a sable

  wing. That extraordinary uproar died away almost as suddenly as it had begun. First one had enough of it and sat down, then another, then three or four together, and when all had left off with mutters and growling half- laughs, the sound of hearty chuckling became audible, persistent, unnoticed.

  The cowled grandfather was very much entertained somewhere within his hood. He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved the least bit. He had remained quietly in his place against the foot of the mast. I had been given to understand long before that he had the rating of a second-class able seaman, Matelot Legere, in the fleet which sailed from Toulon for the conquest of Algeria

  in the year of Grace 1830. And indeed I had seen and examined one of the buttons of his old brown patched coat, the only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin, with the words «Equipage de Ligne» engraved on it. That sort of button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons.

  I preserved it from the time of my navy service, he explained, nodding rapidly his frail vulture-like head. It was not very likely that he had picked up that relic in the street. He certainly looked old enough to have fought at Trafalgar, or at any rate to have played his little part there as a powder monkey.

  Shortly after we had been introduced he had informed me in a Franco-Provençal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless jaws, that when he was a shaver no higher than that he had seen the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba. It was at night, he narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Fréjoux and Antibes in the open country.

  A big fire had been lit at the side of the crossroads. The population from several villages had collected there, old and young, down to the very children in arms, because the women had refused to stay at home. Tall soldiers wearing high hairy caps stood in a circle, facing the people silently, and eyes and big mustaches were enough to make everybody keep at a distance.

  He, being an impotent little shaver, wriggled out of the crowd, keeping on his hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs, and peeping through, discovered standing perfectly still in the light of the fire. A little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat, buttoned up in a long straight coat with a big pale face inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest.

  His hands were clasped behind his back. It appears that this was the Emperor, the Ancient commented with a faint sigh. He was staring from the ground with all his might, when my poor father, who had been searching for his boy frantically everywhere, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear. The tale seems an authentic recollection.

  He related it to me many times, using the very same words. The Grandfather honoured me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection. Extremes touch. He was the oldest member by a long way in that company, and I was, if I may say so, its temporarily adopted baby.

  He had been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember. Thirty, forty years. He did not seem certain himself, but it could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the pilot office. He had been pensioned off years before, but he went out from force of habit, and as my

  friend the patron of the company once confided to me in a whisper, the old chap did no harm. He was not in the way. They treated him with rough deference. One and another would address some insignificant remark to him now and again, but nobody really took any notice of what he had to say.

  He had survived his strength, his usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long green worsted stockings pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of woolen nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet. Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen hands would be extended to help him on board, but afterward he was left pretty

  much to his own thoughts. Of course he never did any work, except perhaps to cast off some rope when hailed. Hey, Langshan, let go of the halyards there at your hand, or some such request of an easy kind. No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow of the hood. He kept it up for a long time, with intense enjoyment.

  Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused. But when his hilarity had exhausted itself he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but quavering voice. Can't expect much work on a night like this. No one took it up.

  It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy splendour and spiritual stillness. We would have to glide idly to and fro, keeping our station within the appointed bearings, and unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the dawn we would land before sunrise on a small

  island that within two miles of us shone like a lump of frozen moonlight to break a crust and take a pull at the wine bottle. I was familiar with the procedure. The stout boat, emptied of her crowd, would nestle her buoyant, capable side against the very rock such as the perfectly smooth amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood.

  The crust broken and the mouthful of wine swallowed. It was literally no more than that with this abstemious race. The pilots would pass the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped fingers. One or two misanthropists would sit apart, perched on boulders like man-like sea fowl

  of solitary habits. The socially disposed would gossip scandalously in little gesticulating knots. And there would be perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with a long brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with brandishing and levelling movements.

  Then, about noon, it was a short turn of duty, the long turn lasted twenty-four hours, another boat full of pilots would relieve us, and we would steer for the old Phoenician port, dominated, watched over from the ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by the red and white striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde. All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very recent experience.

  But also something not foreseen by me did happen, something which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots. It was on this occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side of an English ship. No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught got a more keen

  edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy with a keen, colourless light. It was while we were all ashore on the islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to her water line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke slanting away from the rising sun.

  We embarked in a hurry and headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an hour. She was a big, high-class cargo steamer of a type that is to be met on the sea no more, black hull with low white superstructures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore, two hands at her enormous wheel, steam steering gear was not a matter

  of course in these days, and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up with peak caps, I suppose all her officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known well by sight, whose names I have forgotten. But the name of that ship, seen once so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold, pale

  sunrise, I have not forgotten. How could I? The first English ship on whose side I ever laid my hand, the name I read it letter by letter on the bow, was James Westol. Not very romantic, you will say.

  The name of a very considerable, well-known and universally respected North Country ship owner, I believe, James Westol. What better name could an honourable, hard-working ship have? To me, the very grouping of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her floating motionless and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere purity of

  the light. We were then very near her, and on a sudden impulse I volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy, which shoved off at once to put the pilot on board, while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us all through the night, went on gliding gently past the black glistening length of the ship.

  A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English, the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions, of my very dreams.

  And if, after being thus fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay, I dare not claim it aloud as my own, then at any rate the speech of my children. As to the quality of the address itself, I cannot say it was very striking. Too short for eloquence, and devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the three words, Look out there!

  growled out huskily above my head. It proceeded from a big fat fellow. He had an obtrusive hairy double chin, in a blue woolen shirt and roomy breeches, pulled up very high, even to the level of his breastbone, by a pair of braces quite exposed to public view.

  As where he stood there was no bulwark, but only a rail and stanchions, I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his voluminous person, from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat like an absurd flanged cone on his big head. The grotesque and massive aspect of that deckhand, I suppose he was that, very likely the lamp trimmer, surprised me very much.

  My course of reading, of dreaming and longing for the sea, had not prepared me for a sea-brother of that sort. I never met again a figure in the least like his, except in the illustrations to Mr W.W. Jacobs' most entertaining tales of barges and coasters. But the inspired talent of Mr Jacobs for poking endless fun at poor, innocent sailors, in

  a prose which, however extravagant in its felicitous invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth, was not yet. Perhaps Mr Jacobs himself was not yet. I fancy that at most, if he had made his nurse-laugh it was about all he had achieved at that early date.

  Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have been prepared for the sight of that husky old paupers. The object of his concise address was to call my attention to a rope which he incontinently flung down for me to catch. I caught it, though it was not really necessary, the ship having no way on her by that time.

  Then everything went on very swiftly. The dinghy came with a slight bump against the steamer's side. The pilot, grabbing for the rope ladder, had scrambled halfway up before I knew that our task of boarding was done. The harsh, muffled clanging of the engine-rimmed telegraph struck my ear through the iron plate.

  My companion in the dinghy was urging me to shove off, push hard, and when I bore against the smooth flank of the first English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already throbbing under my open palm. Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the miniature lighthouse of the Joliet breakwater far away there, hardly distinguishable against the land.

  The dinghy danced a squashy splashy jig in the wash of the wake, and turning in my seat I followed the James Westall with my eyes. Before she had gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag as the harbour regulations prescribed for arriving and departing ships. I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the flagstaff, the red ensign, in the polluted,

  colourless atmosphere bathing the drab and grey masses of that southern land, the livered islets, the sea of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that cold sunrise. It was, as far as the eye could reach, the only spot of ardent colour, flamelike, intense, and presently as minute as the tiny red spark, the concentrated reflection of a great fire kindles in the clear heart of a globe of crystal.

  The red ensign, the symbolic, protecting, warm bit of bunting, flung wide upon the seas and destined for so many years to be the only roof over my head.