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.”