An Outcast of the Islands - Page 2

walked along interminable
streets talking of many things, and I remember that on getting home I
sat down and wrote about half a page of "An Outcast of the Islands"
before I slept. This was committing myself definitely, I won't say to
another life, but to another book. There is apparently something in my
character which will not allow me to abandon for good any piece of work
I have begun. I have laid aside many beginnings. I have laid them aside
with sorrow, with disgust, with rage, with melancholy and even with
self-contempt; but even at the worst I had an uneasy consciousness that
I would have to go back to them.

"An Outcast of the Islands" belongs to those novels of mine that were
never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification of "exotic
writer" I don't think the charge was at all justified. For the life of
me I don't see that there is the slightest exotic spirit in the
conception or style of that novel. It is certainly the most _tropical_
of my eastern tales. The mere scenery got a great hold on me as I went
on, perhaps because (I may just as well confess that) the story itself
was never very near my heart. It engaged my imagination much more than
my affection. As to my feeling for Willems it was but the regard one
cannot help having for one's own creation. Obviously I could not be
indifferent to a man on whose head I had brought so much evil simply by
imagining him such as he appears in the novel--and that, too, on a very
slight foundation.

The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly interesting in
himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent position, his strange,
dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out European living on
the reluctant toleration of that Settlement hidden in the heart of the
forest-land, up that sombre stream which our ship was the only white
men's ship to visit. With his hollow, clean-shaved cheeks, a heavy grey
moustache and eyes without any expression whatever, clad always in a
spotless sleeping suit much befrogged in front, which left his lean neck
wholly uncovered, and with his bare feet in a pair of straw slippers, he
wandered silently amongst the houses in daylight, almost as dumb as an
animal and apparently much more homeless. I don't know what he did with
himself at night. He must have had a place, a hut, a palm-leaf shed,
some sort of hovel where he kept his razor and his change of sleeping
suits. An air of futile mystery hung over him, something not exactly
dark but obviously ugly. The only definite statement I could extract
from anybody was that it was he who had "brought the Arabs into the
river." That must have happened many years before. But how did he bring
them into the river? He