Some Reminiscences | Page 9

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 amongst 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