A Personal Record, by Joseph Conrad

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Title: A Personal Record

Author: Joseph Conrad

Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #687]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger





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.
Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction, these two by
their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry,
hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There's "virtue"
for you if you like! . . . Of course the accent must be attended to. The
right accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the thundering
or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever.

He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination.
Mathematics 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 plaints and all the exultations poured out
aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. It
may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But
it's no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a
pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such luck.
And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted,
and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, 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 am quoting from memory--I remember
this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose
advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic;
and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.

Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
humiliating for my self esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
sincerity. That complete, praise worthy 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 a being so hard up for something to do
as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the
mark. Most, almost all, friend ships 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 reputation who by showing themselves destroy the
opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author of
fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.

While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print
till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession
of his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
three years ago, when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
they 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 toward that form of my past; for its
impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
great distances from such natural affections as were still left to
me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder, then,
that in my two exclusively sea books--"The Nigger of the Narcissus," and
"The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "Youth"
and "Typhoon")--I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
hands and the objects of their care.

One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to
write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
things, and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.

It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts--of
what the French would call _secheresse du coeur_. Fifteen years of
unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that
I feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.

My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only
express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom an
open display of sentiment is repugnant.

I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely
temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride.
There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's
emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more
humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed,
should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish
unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No artist can be reproached for
shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare
confront with impunity. In a task which mainly consists in laying one's
soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at
the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity which is
inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.

And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion
as the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass
into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
of life as mysterious as an over shadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.

Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for
love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence
can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound
to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea
training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the
one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of
losing even for one moving moment that full possession of my self which
is the first condition of good service. And I have carried my notion of
good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never
sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have
become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of
pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not
lovable or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some general
principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough, perhaps, and
of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however
humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where
his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which
climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual
and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit
of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so
much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such
ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to
believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for
other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work?
To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. A historian of hearts is
not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he
may be, since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears.
The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are
worthy of respect, too. And he is not insensible who pays them the
undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but
resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one
of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
will what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain what their will
is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
How. As the Frenchman said, "_Il y a toujours la maniere_." Very true.
Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.

Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world,
rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as
the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity. At
a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can
expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my
writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that
it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute
optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but,
imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.

All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and danger
from which a philosophical mind should be free. . . .

I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly
discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of
conversation--that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now.
My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have
been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them
were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet
this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with
unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely
that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of
my recollections. "Alas!" I protested, mildly. "Could I begin with the
sacramental words, 'I was born on such a date in such a place'? The
remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement of all
interest. I haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be related
seriatim. I haven't known distinguished men on whom I could pass fatuous
remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs. This
is but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I haven't written
it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own."

But my objector was not placated. These were good reasons for not
writing at all--not a defense of what stood written already, he said.

I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a
good reason for not writing at all. But since I have written them, all I
want to say in their defense is that these memories put down without
any regard for established conventions have not been thrown off without
system and purpose. They have their hope and their aim. The hope that
from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of
a personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar
as, for instance, "Almayer's Folly" and "The Secret Agent," and yet a
coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its action.
This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely associated with the hope,
is to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the
feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and
with my first contact with the sea.

In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here
and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.

J. C. K.




A PERSONAL RECORD

I

Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in
the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly
on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade
of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (among other things) a
descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
the docks of a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of "Almayer's Folly" was begun. With interest, I say, for was
not the kind Norman giant with enormous mustaches and a thundering voice
the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic,
devotion to his art, a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?

"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
behind which the sun had sunk." . . . These words of Almayer's romantic
daughter I remember tracing on the gray paper of a pad which rested on
the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town
of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,
coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation: "You've made it
jolly warm in here."

It was warm. I had turned on the steam heater after placing a tin under
the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak
where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and
being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling,
by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have
been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this
sentimental inspection, and after meditating a while over the strings
under my silent scrutiny inquired, airily:

"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"

It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
opening speech of the tenth chapter, and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.
I could not have told him that Nina had said, "It has set at last."
He would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
sea-going was setting, too, even as I wrote the words expressing the
impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not know this
myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an
excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our
relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.

He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo, and I went on looking through the
port-hole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tail end
of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen night-cap
leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom house guard, belted
over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a
wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring
was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with
curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding
with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had
been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the
Opera House, where that same port-hole gave me a view of quite another
soft of cafe--the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where
the worthy Bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere
Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an
opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of
light music.

I could recall no more the hallucination of the Eastern Archipelago
which I certainly hoped to see again. The story of "Almayer's Folly"
got put away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any
occupation to keep me away from it; the truth of the matter is that on
board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life. I
will not say anything of my privileged position. I was there "just to
oblige," as an actor of standing may take a small part in the benefit
performance of a friend.

As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that
steamer at that time and in those circumstances. And perhaps I was not
even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship "wants" an
officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea life when I served
ship-owners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I
do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which
had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral
Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind,
but there was never anything tangible left from the F. C. T. C. It
flourished no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed
in the dead of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure, and
died before spring set in. But indubitably it was a company, it had even
a house-flag, all white with the letters F. C. T. C. artfully tangled
up in a complicated monogram. We flew it at our mainmast head, and now
I have come to the conclusion that it was the only flag of its kind in
existence. All the same we on board, for many days, had the impression
of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly departures for
Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which
came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we
started for Rouen, France. And in the shadowy life of the F. C. T. C.
lies the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a
remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina Almayer's
story.

The then secretary of the London Shipmasters' Society, with its modest
rooms in Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the
greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last
association with a ship. I call it that be cause it can hardly be called
a sea-going experience. Dear Captain Froud--it is impossible not to
pay him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of
years--had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and
status for the whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He
organized for us courses of professional lectures, St. John ambulance
classes, corresponded industriously with public bodies and members of
Parliament on subjects touching the interests of the service; and as to
the oncoming of some inquiry or commission relating to matters of the
sea and to the work of seamen, it was a perfect godsend to his need of
exerting himself on our corporate behalf. Together with this high sense
of his official duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a
strong disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of
that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent master. And
what greater kindness can one do to a seaman than to put him in the way
of employment? Captain Froud did not see why the Shipmasters' Society,
besides its general guardianship of our interests, should not be
unofficially an employment agency of the very highest class.

"I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to
us for their men. There is nothing of a trade-union spirit about our
society, and I really don't see why they should not," he said once
to me. "I am always telling the captains, too, that, all things being
equal, they ought to give preference to the members of the society.
In my position I can generally find for them what they want among our
members or our associate members."

In my wanderings about London from west to east and back again (I was
very idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort
of resting-place where my spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel
itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice--nearer
there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting-place used
to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco
smoke, but Captain Froud had the smaller room to himself and there
he granted private interviews, whose principal motive was to render
service. Thus, one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a
crooked finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles which is
perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man.

"I have had in here a shipmaster, this morning," he said, getting back
to his desk and motioning me to a chair, "who is in want of an officer.
It's for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be
asked, but, unfortunately, I do not quite see my way . . ."

As the outer room was full of men I cast a wondering glance at the
closed door; but he shook his head.

"Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them.
But the fact of the matter is, the captain of that ship wants an officer
who can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do
not know anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth and, of
course, you would not care . . . would you now? I know that it isn't
what you are looking for."

It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who
looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit
that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second
officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign
of being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical
forests; and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak
character) had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years
he and the world of his story had been the companions of my imagination
without, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of
sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my
return from the eastern waters--some four years before the day of which
I speak.

It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
square that they first began to live again with a vividness and
poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been
treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of
occupying my mornings Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the
rescue.

Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round
my table, and then the rest of that Pantai band came full of words
and gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice
directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays,
Arabs, and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my attention.
They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the appeal, I
affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems now to have
had a moral character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen
in their obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the
shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship
which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this
earth?

I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers
of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book
before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to pity
which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care
the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.

But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
disappointing ship owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few hours' notice the
unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a
regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French
emigrants to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest
me very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping
up the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society I would consider it. But
the consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed
the captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other.
He explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect
and that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the
higher position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I
would be given certain special advantages--and so on.

I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.

"I am sure," he insisted, "you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor."

I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in
those circumstances that what was to be my last connection with a ship
began. And after all there was not even one single trip. It may be
that it was simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that written word on my
forehead which apparently for bade me, through all my sea wanderings,
ever to achieve the crossing of the Western Ocean--using the words in
that special sense in which sailors speak of Western Ocean trade,
of Western Ocean packets, of Western Ocean hard cases. The new life
attended closely upon the old, and the nine chapters of "Almayer's
Folly" went with me to the Victoria Dock, whence in a few days we
started for Rouen. I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a
man fated never to cross the Western Ocean was the absolute cause of
the Franco-Canadian Transport Company's failure to achieve even a single
passage. It might have been that of course; but the obvious, gross
obstacle was clearly the want of money. Four hundred and sixty bunks
for emigrants were put together in the 'tween decks by industrious
carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant
turned up in Rouen--of which, being a humane person, I confess I was
glad. Some gentlemen from Paris--I think there were three of them, and
one was said to be the chairman--turned up, indeed, and went from end
to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the deck
beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it that the
interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though, obviously,
they had never seen anything of the sort before. Their faces as they
went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression. Notwithstanding
that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to
immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I
received the inward monition that no sailing within the meaning of our
charter party would ever take place.

It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When
we first arrived we had been taken up with much ceremony well toward the
centre of the town, and, all the street corners being placarded with
the tricolor posters announcing the birth of our company, the petit
bourgeois with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the
inspection of the ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to
give information as though I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter,
while our quartermasters reaped a harvest of small change from
personally conducted parties. But when the move was made--that move
which carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to
an altogether muddier and shabbier quay--then indeed the desolation of
solitude became our lot. It was a complete and soundless stagnation; for
as we had the ship ready for sea to the smallest detail, as the frost
was hard and the days short, we were absolutely idle--idle to the point
of blushing with shame when the thought struck us that all the time our
salaries went on. Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, we could
not enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like this all
day; even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to prevent
his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The good Paramor--he
was really a most excellent fellow--became unhappy as far as was
possible to his cheery nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out of
sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the crew
in hauling both cables up on deck and turning them end for end.

For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant. "Excellent idea!" but directly
his face fell. "Why . . . Yes! But we can't make that job last more
than three days," he muttered, discontentedly. I don't know how long he
expected us to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know
that the cables got hauled up and turned end for end according to my
satanic suggestion, put down again, and their very existence utterly
forgotten, I believe, before a French river pilot came on board to take
our ship down, empty as she came, into the Havre roads. You may think
that this state of forced idleness favoured some advance in the fortunes
of Almayer and his daughter. Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort
of evil spell, my banjoist cabin mate's interruption, as related above,
had arrested them short at the point of that fateful sunset for many
weeks together. It was always thus with this book, begun in '89 and
finished in '94--with that shortest of all the novels which it was to be
my lot to write. Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his
dinner in his wife's voice and Abdullah's (his enemy) mental reference
to the God of Islam--"The Merciful, the Compassionate"--which closes the
book, there were to come several long sea passages, a visit (to use the
elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion) to the scenes (some of
them) of my childhood and the realization of childhood's vain words,
expressing a light-hearted and romantic whim.

It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking
at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space
then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to
myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no
longer in my character now:

"When I grow up I shall go _there_."

And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a
century or so an opportunity offered to go there--as if the sin of
childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go
there: _there_ being the region of Stanley Falls, which in '68 was the
blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the MS.
of "Almayer's Folly," carried about me as if it were a talisman or a
treasure, went _there_, too. That it ever came out of _there_ seems
a special dispensation of Providence, because a good many of my other
properties, infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remained behind
through unfortunate accidents of transportation. I call to mind, for
instance, a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinchassa and
Leopoldsville--more particularly when one had to take it at night in
a big canoe with only half the proper number of paddlers. I failed in
being the second white man on record drowned at that interesting spot
through the upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer,
but the accident happened some months before my time, and he, too, I
believe, was going home; not perhaps quite so ill as myself--but still
he was going home. I got round the turn more or less alive, though I
was too sick to care whether I did or not, and, always with "Almayer's
Folly" among my diminishing baggage, I arrived at that delectable
capital, Boma, where, before the departure of the steamer which was to
take me home, I had the time to wish myself dead over and over again
with perfect sincerity. At that date there were in existence only seven
chapters of "Almayer's Folly," but the chapter in my history which
followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal convalescence.
Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is
rendered forever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in
the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth are
inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management of a
waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not
matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the
activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had
nothing to hold me with for very long. And then that memorable story,
like a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro
upon the sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavour or not, of
course I would not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned it
certainly did nothing of the kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look
and an ancient, yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable
to suppose that anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and
Nina. And yet something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to
wake them up from their state of suspended animation.

What is it that Novalis says: "It is certain my conviction gains
infinitely the moment an other soul will believe in it." And what is a
novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose
accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride
of documentary history. Providence which saved my MS. from the Congo
rapids brought it to the knowledge of a helpful soul far out on the open
sea. It would be on my part the greatest ingratitude ever to forget the
sallow, sunken face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young Cambridge
man (he was a "passenger for his health" on board the good ship Torrens
outward bound to Australia) who was the first reader of "Almayer's
Folly"--the very first reader I ever had.

"Would it bore you very much in reading a MS. in a handwriting like
mine?" I asked him one evening, on a sudden impulse at the end of a
longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History.

Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy dog-watch
below, after bring me a book to read from his own travelling store.

"Not at all," he answered, with his courteous intonation and a faint
smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him
a watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe.
All that's beyond guessing now.

He was not a cold, but a calm man, still more subdued by disease--a man
of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general intercourse, but
with something uncommon in the whole of his person which set him apart
from the undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers. His eyes had a
thoughtful, introspective look. In his attractive reserved manner and in
a veiled sympathetic voice he asked:

"What is this?" "It is a sort of tale," I answered, with an effort. "It
is not even finished yet. Nevertheless, I would like to know what you
think of it." He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I
remember perfectly his thin, brown fingers folding it lengthwise. "I
will read it to-morrow," he remarked, seizing the door handle; and then
watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the
door and was gone. In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained
booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens,
and the subdued, as if distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the
growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in another
half hour or so at the farthest, the topgallant sails would have to come
off the ship.

Next day, but this time in the first dog watch, Jacques entered my
cabin. He had a thick woollen muffler round his throat, and the MS.
was in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look, but without
a word. I took it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said
nothing. I opened and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up
log-slate lay wide open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly
into the sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's
log-book. I turned my back squarely on the desk. And even then Jacques
never offered a word. "Well, what do you say?" I asked at last. "Is
it worth finishing?" This question expressed exactly the whole of my
thoughts.

"Distinctly," he answered, in his sedate, veiled voice, and then coughed
a little.

"Were you interested?" I inquired further, almost in a whisper.

"Very much!"

In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the
ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my
bed-place swung to and fro as if it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp
circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly
in the gusts of wind. It was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the
longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites
of Almayer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged
silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its
action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were being
born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the
officer of the watch and remained on the alert to catch the order that
was to follow this call to attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce
shout to "Square the yards." "Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly
blow coming on." Then I turned to my very first reader, who, alas! was
not to live long enough to know the end of the tale.

"Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as
it stands?"

He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.

"Yes! Perfectly."

This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
"Almayer's Folly." We never spoke together of the book again. A long
period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my
duties, while poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in
his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose
went at once up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in
Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez
Canal. I am not sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard
precisely; though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
passengers who, wandering about to "see the country" during the ship's
stay in port, had come upon him here and there. At last we sailed,
homeward bound, and still not one line was added to the careless scrawl
of the many pages which poor Jacques had had the patience to read with
the very shadows of Eternity gathering already in the hollows of his
kind, steadfast eyes.

The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final "Distinctly"
remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I dare say I am
compelled--unconsciously compelled--now to write volume after volume, as
in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves
must follow upon one an other as leagues used to follow in the days
gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is
One--one for all men and for all occupations.

I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and
more wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to
wait my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those
wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the
fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just
the same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway
carriages, and could do it, perhaps, sitting crossed-legged on a
clothes-line; but I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not
consent to write without something at least resembling a chair. Line by
line, rather than page by page, was the growth of "Almayer's Folly."

And so it happened that I very nearly lost the MS., advanced now to the
first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse Poland, or
more precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning changing trains
in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy
and intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not
thinking of the MS., but of all the other things that were packed in the
bag.

In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never
exposed to the light, except once to candle-light, while the bag lay
open on the chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club.
A friend of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but
had turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each
other for over twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to
carry me off there.

"You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing," he
suggested, kindly.

I do not think I told him much of my life story either then or later.
The talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was
extremely animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from
big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem published in a very
modernist review, edited by the very young and patronized by the highest
society. But it never touched upon "Almayer's Folly," and next morning,
in uninterrupted obscurity, this inseparable companion went on rolling
with me in the southeast direction toward the government of Kiev.

At that time there was an eight hours' drive, if not more, from the
railway station to the country-house which was my destination.

"Dear boy" (these words were always written in English), so ran the last
letter from that house received in London--"Get yourself driven to the
only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the
evening my own confidential servant, factotum and majordomo, a Mr. V. S.
(I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you,
reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on
the next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the
road."

Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous
barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened and, in
a travelling costume of long boots, big sheepskin cap, and a short coat
girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V. S. (of noble extraction), a man of
about thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open
and mustached countenance. I got up from the table and greeted him in
Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his
noble blood and his confidential position. His face cleared up in a
wonderful way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our understanding
each other. He imagined I would talk to him in some foreign language.

I was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come to
meet me shaped an anxious exclamation:

"Well! Well! Here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself
understood to our master's nephew."

We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of
me as if I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling
of coming home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an
enormous bearskin travelling-coat and took his seat protectively by
my side. The sledge was a very small one, and it looked utterly
insignificant, almost like a toy behind the four big bays harnessed two
and two. We three, counting the coachman, filled it completely. He was
a young fellow with clear blue eyes; the high collar of his livery fur
coat framed his cheery countenance and stood all round level with the
top of his head.

"Now, Joseph," my companion addressed him, "do you think we shall manage
to get home before six?" His answer was that we would surely, with
God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch
between certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar
sound to my ears. He turned out an excellent coachman, with an instinct
for keeping the road among the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of
getting the best out of his horses.

"He is the son of that Joseph that I suppose the Captain remembers.
He who used to drive the Captain's late grandmother of holy memory,"
remarked V. S., busy tucking fur rugs about my feet.

I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph who used to drive my
grandmother. Why! he it was who let me hold the reins for the first
time in my life and allowed me to play with the great four-in-hand whip
outside the doors of the coach-house.

"What became of him?" I asked. "He is no longer serving, I suppose."

"He served our master," was the reply. "But he died of cholera ten years
ago now--that great epidemic that we had. And his wife died at the same
time--the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that was
left."

The MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was reposing in the bag under our feet.

I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of
my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view
as if it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had
seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which
fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a
white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps
of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
by, a low interminable wall, and then, glimmering and winking through a
screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.

That very evening the wandering MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was unpacked
and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the
guest-room which had been, I was informed in an affectionately careless
tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no
attention from the affectionate presence hovering round the son of the
favourite sister.

"You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me,
brother," he said--this form of address borrowed from the speech of
our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in
a moment of affectionate elation. "I shall be always coming in for a
chat."

As a matter of fact, we had the whole house to chat in, and were
everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of
his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand
presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his
wards then living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning
families from the three southern provinces--ever since the year 1860.
Some of them had been my school fellows and playmates, but not one of
them, girls or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two
were older than myself--considerably older, too. One of them, a visitor
I remember in my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback,
and his four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and
general skill in manly exercises, was one of my earliest admirations. I
seem to remember my mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the
dining-room windows as I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know,
by the very Joseph--the groom attached specially to my grandmother's
service--who died of cholera. It was certainly a young man in a
dark-blue, tailless coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the
livery of the men about the stables. It must have been in 1864, but
reckoning by another mode of calculating time, it was certainly in the
year in which my mother obtained permission to travel south and visit
her family, from the exile into which she had followed my father. For
that, too, she had had to ask permission, and I know that one of the
conditions of that favour was that she should be treated exactly as a
condemned exile herself. Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her
eldest brother, who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts
of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg,
some influential personages procured for her this permission--it was
officially called the "Highest Grace"--of a four months' leave from
exile.

This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
the gray heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect
and love in the house of her favourite brother, who, a few years later,
was to take the place for me of both my parents.

I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
though, indeed, I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs
of invalidism about her--but I think that already they had pronounced
her doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could
re-establish her declining strength. For me it seems the very
happiest period of my existence. There was my cousin, a delightful,
quick-tempered little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life,
lovingly watched over as if she were a royal princess, came to an end
with her fifteenth year. There were other children, too, many of whom
are dead now, and not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all
this hung the oppressive shadow of the great Russian empire--the shadow
lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered by
the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened
rising of 1863.

This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the public
record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal.
It is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's
children than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That
which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the
most enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain forever
obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the
still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and
their personalities are remotely derived.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master
of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic
memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety toward all things human
which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions
of the man reviewing his own experience.


II

As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London
into Ukraine. The MS. of "Almayer'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 ridges, 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 '67; 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 servants 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 near by
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, wide-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 traveller's 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 chibouk 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 Oratow, 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 every body. 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 a 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 judgment 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 realized 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 at tending to the complicated
affairs--(the girls took it in turn 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 Valery,
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 ten miles
from the house in which we are sitting now.

"The road was soon found, but snow had begun to fall thickly again, and
they 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 Valery afterward 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 that 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 lungs 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 anteroom lined with bookshelves,
where he paused to put his chibouk 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 seemed to feel
always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.

As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in
the French army, and for a short time _Officier d'Ordonnance_ of Marshal
Marmont; afterward captain in the 2d 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 '64, 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 granduncle Nicholas B. was
a Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish Cross
for _valour Virtuti 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 the significance of
his personality. It is over borne 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 our village dogs look
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 counsels 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 and 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 in a blizzard from the
main column and had been lost for days in the woods, which explains
sufficiently the terrible straits to which they were reduced. Their plan
was to try and attract the attention of the peasants in that 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 Cossacks' lances, or perchance 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 the 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
eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language
of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; 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 granduncle 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 deed 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 enragee 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 hardtack 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 al lowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where
no explanation is final. No charge of faithlessness ought to be lightly
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, too, 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 hidalgo, who, 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 on to 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 to 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 Brandabarbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose armour
is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his arm,
is the gate of a fortified city. Oh, amiable and natural weakness!
Oh, blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! Who would not
succumb to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless, it was a form of
self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo 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 assent 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 lives
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 school-boy 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. 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
Falls 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 Fluelen, we found
ourselves at the end of the second day, with the dusk overtaking our
leisurely footsteps, a little way beyond Hospenthal. 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 a bend of the road, we came
upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.

At that time the work on the St. Gothard 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 hostelry, which in its severe
style resembled the house which sur mounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls
of the toy Noah's Arks, 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 see saw plank, since
there was no one at the other end to balance it against our two dusty
and travel-stained figures. Then we hastened up stairs 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 the Cracow 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 down-stairs 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. Gothard 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 have 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 Furca Pass
toward the Rhone 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 toward the east (attended by a hang-dog
Swiss guide), with the mien 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 toward 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 unextinguishable
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 utterly
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 scandalized
astonishment (it could not have been greater if I had announced
the intention of entering a Carthusian monastery) ebbing out of the
educational and academical town of Cracow 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 Mr. T. B. 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. "And 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 conge_ 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 Righi, 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 Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer a success
than either he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing silence,
feeling that ghostly, unrealized, 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 Quixote. 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 redressers of
this world's 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 full five minutes; then without looking back he
stopped. The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over the Furca
Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me and in full view of the
Finster Aarhorn, 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, no where or with any
one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily.

Eleven years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps
of the St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant
Service. But the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the
Furca 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 poor 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 Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the end of
my opening life?


III

The devouring in a dismal forest of a luckless Lithuanian dog by my
granduncle Nicholas B. in company of two other military and famished
scarecrows, symbolized, to my childish imagination, the whole horror of
the retreat from Moscow, and the immorality of a conqueror's ambition.
An 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 dishes is really
excusable.

But enough of generalizing. 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 granduncle 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 some where in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc. 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. Considered 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 Leipsic. Lest some
construction favourable to his valour 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 horsemen
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 bald 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 small estate 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 foolscap 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 honourable discharge in which he was mentioned as
un schreckbar (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 grand father--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 an amiable
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 own wife 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 stepsons had arisen and
devise 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 the widow, 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 some thing
in it." However, on his next name-day (which he used to celebrate by
a great three days' 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. X 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. X, 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 stepsons 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;
and 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 wonted 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
stepchildren. 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 stepson, 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 only would be friends again to the
extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close neighbourhood for
these parts, forty miles or so), or 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 illusions 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 draft of the will ready for signature kept
by his bedside, died intestate.

The fortune thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful management
passed to some distant relatives whom he had never seen and who even did
not 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 going on, proceeded
straight to Warsaw and entered the army of the newly constituted Polish
kingdom under the sceptre of Alexander I, Autocrat of all the Russias.

This kingdom, created by the Vienna Congress as an acknowledgment to a
nation of its former independent existence, included only the central
provinces of the old Polish patrimony. A brother of the Emperor, the
Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch), its Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief,
married morganatically 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 drill-master. 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 battle-field
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 lieutenancy, but the promotion in the Polish army was
slow, because, being a separate organization, 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. Some time before he had been made head of the remount
establishment quartered outside the kingdom in our 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 eighteen 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 the Dnieper 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. Astrakan 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
be--that is, very bad for the Poles. Mr. Nicholas B. received these
communications with outward 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 Stepanovitch" (my great-grandfather's name
was Stephen, and the commandant used the Russian form of polite
address)--"tell me why is it that you Poles are always looking for
trouble? What else could you expect from running up against Russia?"

He was capable, too, of philosophical reflections.

"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 reigning 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 misanthropical timidity 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 agonizing 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 organizers 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 friends, both conspirators and others, did not
prevent Mr. Nicholas B. being made to feel the misfortunes of that
ill-omened 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 house and the stables, while several, dismounting, 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 afterward by the servant to my
granduncle'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 is the master gone, then?"

"Our master went to J----" (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 walls, 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 granduncle 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. They 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, flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry
swords, one of the French, the other of the Polish army pattern, with a
fowling-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 priest, 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 Church that, strangers to the 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, whenever 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, toward 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.
Nicholas 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 chaps had better go after them and pray God to forgive you 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
war-time." 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
servant 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 only 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 japanned 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 in side 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, though searched for in all the
ditches around, 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 months' 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 home-coming, after years of war and exile, was co