stands clear as the sun at noonday that from the moment I had
done blackening over the first manuscript page of "Almayer's

Folly" (it contained about two hundred words and this proportion
of words to a page has remained with me through the fifteen years

of my writing life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of
my heart and the amazingignorance of my mind, written that page

the die was cast. Never had Rubicon been more blindly forded
without invocation to the gods, without fear of men.

That morning I got up from my breakfast, pushing the chair back,
and rang the bell violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely,

or perhaps I should say eagerly--I do not know. But manifestly
it must have been a special ring of the bell, a common sound made

impressive, like the ringing of a bell for the raising of the
curtain upon a new scene. It was an unusual thing for me to do.

Generally, I dawdled over my breakfast and I seldom took the
trouble to ring the bell for the table to be cleared away; but on

that morning, for some reason hidden in the general
mysteriousness of the event, I did not dawdle. And yet I was not

in a hurry. I pulled the cord casually, and while the faint
tinkling somewhere down in the basement went on, I charged my

pipe in the usual way and I looked for the match-box with glances
distraught indeed, but exhibiting, I am ready to swear, no signs

of a fine frenzy. I was composed enough to perceive after some
considerable time the match-box lying there on the mantelpiece

right under my nose. And all this was beautifully and safely
usual. Before I had thrown down the match my landlady's daughter

appeared with her calm, pale face and an inquisitive look, in the
doorway. Of late it was the landlady's daughter who answered my

bell. I mention this little fact with pride, because it proves
that during the thirty or forty days of my tenancy I had produced

a favourable impression. For a fortnight past I had been spared
the unattractive sight of the domestic slave. The girls in that

Bessborough Gardens house were often changed, but whether short
or long, fair or dark, they were always untidy and particularly

bedraggled, as if in a sordidversion of the fairy tale the
ash-bin cat had been changed into a maid. I was infinitely

sensible of the privilege of being waited on by my landlady's
daughter. She was neat if anemic.

"Will you please clear away all this at once?" I addressed her
in convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting

my pipe to draw. This, I admit, was an unusual request.
Generally, on getting up from breakfast I would sit down in the

window with a book and let them clear the table when they liked;
but if you think that on that morning I was in the least

impatient, you are mistaken. I remember that I was perfectly
calm. As a matter of fact I was not at all certain that I wanted

to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to
write about. No, I was not impatient. I lounged between the

mantelpiece and the window, not even consciously waiting for the
table to be cleared. It was ten to one that before my landlady's

daughter was done I would pick up a book and sit down with it all
the morning in a spirit of enjoyable indolence. I affirm it with

assurance, and I don't even know now what were the books then
lying about the room. What ever they were, they were not the

works of great masters, where the secret of clear thought and
exact expression can be found. Since the age of five I have been

a great reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was
never aware of learning to read. At ten years of age I had read

much of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in Polish
and in French, history, voyages, novels; I knew "Gil Blas" and

"Don Quixote" in abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood
Polish poets and some French poets, but I cannot say what I read

on the evening before I began to write myself. I believe it was
a novel, and it is quite possible that it was one of Anthony

Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My acquaintance with him
was then very recent. He is one of the English novelists whose

works I read for the first time in English. With men of European
reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was

otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative
literature was "Nicholas Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well

Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the
sinister Ralph rage in that language. As to the Crummles family

and the family of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural to
them as their native speech. It was, I have no doubt, an

excellent translation. This must have been in the year '70. But
I really believe that I am wrong. That book was not my first

introduction to English literature. My first acquaintance was
(or were) the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and that in the very MS.

of my father's translation. It was during our exile in Russia,
and it must have been less than a year after my mother's death,

because I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border
of my heavy mourning. We were living together, quite alone, in a

small house on the outskirts of the town of T----. That
afternoon, instead of going out to play in the large yard which

we shared with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in which
my father generally wrote. What emboldened me to clamber into

his chair I am sure I don't know, but a couple of hours afterward
he discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and

my head held in both hands over the MS. of loose pages. I was
greatly confused, expecting to get into trouble. He stood in the

doorway looking at me with some surprise, but the only thing he
said after a moment of silence was:

"Read the page aloud."
Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with

erasures and corrections, and my father's handwriting was
otherwise extremely legible. When I got to the end he nodded,

and I flew out-of-doors, thinking myself lucky to have escaped
reproof for that piece of impulsiveaudacity. I have tried to

discover since the reason for this mildness, and I imagine that
all unknown to myself I had earned, in my father's mind, the

right to some latitude in my relations with his writing-table.
It was only a month before--or perhaps it was only a week

before--that I had read to him aloud from beginning to end, and
to his perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very

well at the time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's
"Toilers of the Sea." Such was my title to consideration, I

believe, and also my first introduction to the sea in literature.
If I do not remember where, how, and when I learned to read, I am

not likely to forget the process of being trained in the art of
reading aloud. My poor father, an admirable reader himself, was

the most exacting of masters. I reflectproudly that I must have
read that page of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" tolerably well at the

age of eight. The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume
edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in

Falmouth, at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment
of calkers' mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship

in dry-dock. We had run in, in a sinking condition and with the
crew refusing duty after a month of weary battling with the gales

of the North Atlantic. Books are an integral part of one's life,
and my Shakespearian associations are with that first year of our

bereavement, the last I spent with my father in exile (he sent me
away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he could brace

himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard gales,
the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water

and then by fire.
Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my

writing life began I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion
that it might have been one of Trollope's political novels. And

I remember, too, the character of the day. It was an autumn day
with an opaline atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day,