第8章

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 '89and 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 '68was 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.