Complete Works

travels out here, robs his employer, runs away from his wife, and ruins me and my Nina — he ruined me, I tell you — and gets himself shot at last by a poor miserable savage, that knows nothing at all about him really. Where’s the sense of all this? Where’s your Providence? Where’s the good for anybody in all this? The world’s a swindle! A swindle! Why should I suffer? What have I done to be treated so?”
    He howled out his string of questions, and suddenly became silent. The man who ought to have been a professor made a tremendous effort to articulate distinctly —
    “My dear fellow, don’t — don’t you see that the ba-bare fac — the fact of your existence is off — offensive. . . . I — I like you — like . . .”
    He fell forward on the table, and ended his remarks by an unexpected and prolonged snore.
    Almayer shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the balustrade.
    He drank his own trade gin very seldom, but when he did, a ridiculously small quantity of the stuff could induce him to assume a rebellious attitude towards the scheme of the universe. And now, throwing his body over the rail, he shouted impudently into the night, turning his face towards that far-off and invisible slab of imported granite upon which Lingard had thought fit to record God’s mercy and Willems’ escape.
    “Father was wrong — wrong!” he yelled. “I want you to smart for it. You must smart for it! Where are you, Willems? Hey? . . . Hey? . . . Where there is no mercy for you — I hope!”
    “Hope,” repeated in a whispering echo the startled forests, the river and the hills; and Almayer, who stood waiting, with a smile of tipsy attention on his lips, heard no other answer.
     

THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS

     
    A TALE OF THE FORECASTLE
     
    This early novella is well-known for its quality compared to other works, and many critics believe it marks the start of Conrad’s major period.
     

 

    Conrad prior to his first voyage
     

TO
    EDWARD GARNETT
    THIS TALE
    ABOUT MY FRIENDS
    OF THE SEA
     
    TO MY READERS IN AMERICA
    From that evening when James Wait joined the ship — late for the muster of the crew — to the moment when he left us in the open sea, shrouded in sailcloth, through the open port, I had much to do with him. He was in my watch. A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no chums. Yet James Wait, afraid of death and making her his accomplice was an impostor of some character — mastering our compassion, scornful of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions.
    But in the book he is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship’s collective psychology and the pivot of the action. Yet he, who in the family circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the Nigger, remains very precious to me. For the book written round him is not the sort of thing that can be attempted more than once in a life-time. It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea — the moulders of my youth, the companions of the best years of my life.
    After writing the last words of that book, in the revulsion of feeling before the accomplished task, I understood that I had done with the sea, and that henceforth I had to be a writer. And almost without laying down the pen I wrote a preface, trying to express the spirit in which I was entering on the task of my new life. That preface on advice (which I now think was wrong) was never published with the book. But the late W. E. Henley, who had the courage at that time (1897) to serialize my “Nigger” in the New Review judged it worthy to be printed as an afterword at the end of the last instalment of the tale.
    I am glad that this book which means so much to me is coming out again, under its proper title of “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’“ and under the auspices of my good, friends and publishers Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co. into the light of publicity.
    Half the span of a generation has passed since W. E. Henley, after reading two chapters, sent me a verbal message: “Tell Conrad that if the rest is up to the sample it shall certainly come out in the New Review.” The most gratifying recollection of my writer’s life!
    And here is the Suppressed Preface.
    1914.
    JOSEPH CONRAD.
     

PREFACE
     
     
    A