"Conrad, Joseph - Some Reminiscences" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

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."

It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a
tin under the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that
water will leak where steam will not. I am not aware of what my
young friend had been doing on deck all that morning, but the
hands he rubbed together vigorously were very red and imparted to
me a chilly feeling by their mere aspect. He has remained the
only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of
a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange
aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to
this sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the
strings under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:

"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"

It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and
simply turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive
secrecy: I could not have told him he had put to flight the
psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening speech of the tenth
chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which were to
follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night. I could not
have told him that Nina had said: "It has set at last." He
would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my
sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing
the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not
know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared,
though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with more