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 solemn 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 matchbox 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

matchbox 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 ashbin

cat had been changed into a maid. I was infinitelysensible of
the privilege of being waited on by my landlady's daughter. She

was neat if anaemic.
"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.

Whatever 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 imaginativeliterature 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 afterwards 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 writing" target="_blank" title="n.笔迹；书法">handwriting was

otherwiseextremely 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 of 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 caulkers' 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 Shakespearean 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,
with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and

windows opposite, while the trees of the square with all their
leaves gone were like tracings of indian ink on a sheet of tissue

paper. It was one of those London days that have the charm of
mysterious amenity, of fascinatingsoftness. The effect of