Generally,on getting up from breakfast I would sit down in the window with a book and let them clear the table when they liked;but if you think that on that morning I was in the least impatient,you are mistaken.I remember that I was perfectly calm.As a matter of fact I was not at all certain that I wanted to write,or that I meant to write,or that I had anything to write about.No,I was not impatient.I lounged between the mantelpiece and the window,not even consciously waiting for the table to be cleared.It was ten to one that before my landlady's daughter was done I would pick up a book and sit down with it all the morning in a spirit of enjoyable indolence.I affirm it with assurance,and I don't even know now what were the books then lying about the room.What ever they were,they were not the works of great masters,where the secret of clear thought and exact expression can be found.Since the age of five I have been a great reader,as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was never aware of learning to read.At ten years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and other romantics.I had read in Polish and in French,history,voyages,novels;I knew "Gil Blas"and "Don Quixote"in abridged editions;I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some French poets,but I cannot say what I read on the evening before I began to write myself.I believe it was a novel,and it is quite possible that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels.It is very likely.My acquaintance with him was then very recent.He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English.With men of European reputation,with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray,it was otherwise.My first introduction to English imaginative literature was "Nicholas Nickleby."It is extraordinary how well Mrs.Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that language.As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their native speech.It was,I have no doubt,an excellent translation.This must have been in the year '70.But I really believe that I am wrong.That book was not my first introduction to English literature.My first acquaintance was (or were)the "Two Gentlemen of Verona,"and that in the very MS.
of my father's translation.It was during our exile in Russia,and it must have been less than a year after my mother's death,because I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning.We were living together,quite alone,in a small house on the outskirts of the town of T----.That afternoon,instead of going out to play in the large yard which we shared with our landlord,I had lingered in the room in which my father generally wrote.What emboldened me to clamber into his chair I am sure I don't know,but a couple of hours afterward he discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over the MS.of loose pages.I was greatly confused,expecting to get into trouble.He stood in the doorway looking at me with some surprise,but the only thing he said after a moment of silence was:
"Read the page aloud."
Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with erasures and corrections,and my father's handwriting was otherwise extremely legible.When I got to the end he nodded,and I flew out-of-doors,thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof for that piece of impulsive audacity.I have tried to discover since the reason for this mildness,and I imagine that all unknown to myself I had earned,in my father's mind,the right to some latitude in my relations with his writing-table.
It was only a month before--or perhaps it was only a week before--that I had read to him aloud from beginning to end,and to his perfect satisfaction,as he lay on his bed,not being very well at the time,the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea."Such was my title to consideration,I believe,and also my first introduction to the sea in literature.
If I do not remember where,how,and when I learned to read,I am not likely to forget the process of being trained in the art of reading aloud.My poor father,an admirable reader himself,was the most exacting of masters.I reflect proudly that I must have read that page of "Two Gentlemen of Verona"tolerably well at the age of eight.The next time I met them was in a 5s.one-volume edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare,read in Falmouth,at odd moments of the day,to the noisy accompaniment of calkers'mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship in dry-dock.We had run in,in a sinking condition and with the crew refusing duty after a month of weary battling with the gales of the North Atlantic.Books are an integral part of one's life,and my Shakespearian associations are with that first year of our bereavement,the last I spent with my father in exile (he sent me away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he could brace himself up for the separation),and with the year of hard gales,the year in which I came nearest to death at sea,first by water and then by fire.
Those things I remember,but what I was reading the day before my writing life began I have forgotten.I have only a vague notion that it might have been one of Trollope's political novels.And I remember,too,the character of the day.It was an autumn day with an opaline atmosphere,a veiled,semi-opaque,lustrous day,with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite,while the trees of the square,with all their leaves gone,were like the tracings of India ink on a sheet of tissue-paper.It was one of those London days that have the charm of mysterious amenity,of fascinating softness.The effect of opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on account of the nearness to the river.
