"Conrad, Joseph - Almayer's Folly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

languid interest. The tree swung slowly round, amid the hiss and
foam of the water, and soon getting free of the obstruction began
to move down stream again, rolling slowly over, raising upwards a
long, denuded branch, like a hand lifted in mute appeal to heaven
against the river's brutal and unnecessary violence. Almayer's
interest in the fate of that tree increased rapidly. He leaned
over to see if it would clear the low point below. It did; then
he drew back, thinking that now its course was free down to the
sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now growing
small and indistinct in the deepening darkness. As he lost sight
of it altogether he began to wonder how far out to sea it would
drift. Would the current carry it north or south? South,
probably, till it drifted in sight of Celebes, as far as
Macassar, perhaps!

Macassar! Almayer's quickened fancy distanced the tree on its
imaginary voyage, but his memory lagging behind some twenty years
or more in point of time saw a young and slim Almayer, clad all
in white and modest-looking, landing from the Dutch mail-boat on
the dusty jetty of Macassar, coming to woo fortune in the godowns
of old Hudig. It was an important epoch in his life, the
beginning of a new existence for him. His father, a subordinate
official employed in the Botanical Gardens of Buitenzorg, was no
doubt delighted to place his son in such a firm. The young man
himself too was nothing loth to leave the poisonous shores of
Java, and the meagre comforts of the parental bungalow, where the
father grumbled all day at the stupidity of native gardeners, and
the mother from the depths of her long easy-chair bewailed the
lost glories of Amsterdam, where she had been brought up, and of
her position as the daughter of a cigar dealer there.

Almayer had left his home with a light heart and a lighter
pocket, speaking English well, and strong in arithmetic; ready to
conquer the world, never doubting that he would.

After those twenty years, standing in the close and stifling heat
of a Bornean evening, he recalled with pleasurable regret the
image of Hudig's lofty and cool warehouses with their long and
straight avenues of gin cases and bales of Manchester goods; the
big door swinging noiselessly; the dim light of the place, so
delightful after the glare of the streets; the little railed-off
spaces amongst piles of merchandise where the Chinese clerks,
neat, cool, and sad-eyed, wrote rapidly and in silence amidst the
din of the working gangs rolling casks or shifting cases to a
muttered song, ending with a desperate yell. At the upper end,
facing the great door, there was a larger space railed off, well
lighted; there the noise was subdued by distance, and above it
rose the soft and continuous clink of silver guilders which other
discreet Chinamen were counting and piling up under the
supervision of Mr. Vinck, the cashier, the genius presiding in