第26章

It must not be supposed that,in setting forth the memories of this half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we met again at dinner,I am losing sight of "Almayer's Folly."

Having confessed that my first novel was begun in idleness--a holiday task--I think I have also given the impression that it was a much-delayed book.It was never dismissed from my mind,even when the hope of ever finishing it was very faint.Many things came in its way:daily duties,new impressions,old memories.It was not the outcome of a need--the famous need of self-expression which artists find in their search for motives.

The necessity which impelled me was a hidden,obscure necessity,a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon.Or perhaps some idle and frivolous magician (there must be magicians in London)had cast a spell over me through his parlour window as I explored the maze of streets east and west in solitary leisurely walks without chart and compass.Till I began to write that novel I had written nothing but letters,and not very many of these.I never made a note of a fact,of an impression,or of an anecdote in my life.The conception of a planned book was entirely outside my mental range when I sat down to write;the ambition of being an author had never turned up among those gracious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and immobility of a day-dream:yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday that from the moment I had done blackening over the first manu 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 amazing ignorance 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 sordid version 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.