Some Reminiscences | Page 7

begin with the sacramental words, 'I was born on such a date in such a
place'? The remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement
of all interest. I haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be
related seriatim. I haven't known distinguished men on whom I could
pass fatuous remarks. I haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous
affairs. This is but a bit of psychological document, and even so, I
haven't written it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my
own."
But my objector was not placated. These were good reasons for not
writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already, he said.
I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a
good reason for not writing at all. But since I have written them, all I
want to say in their defence is that these memories put down without
any regard for established conventions have not been thrown off
without system and purpose. They have their hope and their aim. The
hope that from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the
vision of a personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally
dissimilar as, for instance, "Almayer's Folly" and "The Secret

Agent"--and yet a coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and
in its action. This is the hope. The immediate aim, closely associated
with the hope, is to give the record of personal memories by presenting
faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my
first book and with my first contact with the sea.
In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here
and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.
J.C.K.

Chapter I.
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the
middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly on
humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade of old
Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (amongst other things) a
descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
the decks of a 2000-ton steamer called the "Adowa," on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of "Almayer's Folly" was begun. With interest, I say, for was
not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering
voice the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?
"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills behind
which the sun had sunk.". . .These words of Almayer's romantic
daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on
the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic
town of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of
visions and words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and
casual youth, coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation:
"You've made it jolly warm in here."
It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tin under
the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak

where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance,
and being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr.
Kipling, by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to
me to have been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he
did not play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to
this sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the strings
under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"
It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
opening speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical
night. I could not have told him that Nina had said: "It has set at last."
He would have been extremely