I would not admit that Dindiki was dead. I laid him on my lap, breathed on him, rubbed him, and while Outhman fanned him, gave him, with Marc’s aid, the artificial respiration with which one resuscitates the drowned. Marc had the idea of an injection of caffeine. Adoum, our other boy, ran after the porters, going along up ahead with the canteens, and brought back our pharmacy chest. At the end of an hour of treatment, his heart began to beat again. He vomited, which seemed a good sign to us and appeared to mark the refunctioning of his organs. Death had at last released its grip.
Dindiki took a long time to recover. The heat continued to be overpowering. Around his coop I put a damp cloth over which a big sponge slowly dripped water. For six days he refused any other food or drink except the saliva he came to gather from my lip, like Lesbia’s sparrow. He showed himself extraordinarily eager for it, by appetite, greediness … or tenderness; for since his asphyxia, he had become still more affectionate, as if he understood I had snatched him from death. Alas! I did not succeed in fighting effectively against the constipation that finally took him away from me two months later. Those periods of stoppage were followed by collapses that forced me to exile him for a time in a basket. He came out of it terribly embarrassed, for there was no-one cleaner or more careful of his person than that little being. Certainly something was lacking in his diet, grass, bark, that I could not get for him. I even persuaded myself that in the latter days, it was to hunt for it, that he was so anxious to run about. He seemed to say to me: “Why no! I don’t want to escape. Only let me find that. I will come back.” That, what was it? I thought I had found it when I saw him throw himself greedily on a tree gum Outhman had brought me. But only the next day, he didn’t want any more. He showed himself more and more difficult, as if he had understood that the food I was offering him, and with which he was satisfied at first, was not exactly what suited him. I saw him with anxiety and despair refuse, turn about, bread, rice and semolina. When I was going across the brush, he hung himself from one of my fingers, by a paw, and stayed head down, brushing against the grass; and I walked very slowly, lingering in the hope of seeing him snatch at a blade suddenly. Nevertheless, up to the next to the last day, he stayed in a charming mood, as affectionate as ever. He begged for my caress, raising his little arms up very high to invite me to scratch his armpit; and he even crossed his two hands above his head with the gesture of a ballerina.… Then, suddenly he began to hate me; two different times, he bit me cruelly; without reasoning exactly, he persuaded himself, I am sure, that I was what prevented him from taking care of himself in his own way, what had taken him away, what had kept him far from his blessed forest. He understood that I could not cure him.
The last day, Dindiki couldn’t walk any more except painfully, leaning over on one side; I felt him suffer. I did not take my eyes from him. It was between my hands that he died, without a moan, like a little child who falls asleep.
1 The n is pronounced.
1 Oken, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte.
1 Centigrade. Translator’s note.
7 JOSEPH CONRAD
“I WONDER if it is the end,” I read in a letter dated the 30th of May, the last I received from him; as cordial as usual, and pierced like the others by a sort of harsh playfulness, by a somewhat grumpy charm, which gave a rather briny savor to the outbursts of his sympathy; but already imprinted with the mysterious gravity and presentiment of death.
That letter cut me to the heart like a farewell. I felt myself in arrears with him. I had remained too long a time without seeing him again or writing him. Had I ever been able to tell him, what I wrote him immediately, of all the affection, the admiration and veneration that, in spite of so much absence and silence, I had never ceased to devote to him? Of my elders, I loved and knew only him.
“It is four years since I have done anything worth while. On the other hand, I have asthma. It’s pretty annoying. What consoles me is the success (moderate, I agree) of the French translations.”
Conrad loved France much too deeply not to attach the greatest value to the opinion of the French about his work. This was not yet known except to a small number of admirers. The announcement of his death was needed before the press would finally consent to be moved. They seemed suddenly to understand whom we were losing.
It was Claudel who made Conrad known to me. I remain indebted to him for it. After a lunch we had had together, as some one of the other guests was speaking with enthusiasm of Kipling, Claudel smiled a little disdainfully and threw in the name of Conrad. Not one of us knew it yet.
“What should I read of his?” asked someone.
“Everything,” answered Claudel. And he quoted The Nigger of the Narcissus, Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim.… None of these books had yet been translated. I immediately made a note of their titles, and was won over from the very first contact with them.
A short time after, while traveling in England, I had the opportunity of coming directly in contact with their author. Valéry Larbaud was accompanying me (if my memory does not betray me). Miss Tobin, a charming young Englishwoman whom Larbaud knew, was to introduce us to him. Conrad was then living in Kent, at Capel House, a little country house in the neighborhood of Ashford; that is where he received us. I lingered several days with him; I returned to Capel House the following year, and there was soon established between us the warmest and most lively friendship.
Conrad did not like to speak of his past life; a sort of modesty or ill-will toward himself restrained him, prevented his making confidences. His seafaring memories appeared nothing more to him than matter to make up; and, a certain artistic exigency mingling with it, forcing him to transpose it, to depersonalize and push away from him by means of fiction everything that concerned him personally, in his books as well as in his conversation, he was remarkably unskillful in direct narration; it was only in fiction that he felt at ease.
The sea was for him like a deserted former mistress, and, in the waiting-room of Capel House, only an engraving of it, the picture of a superb sailboat, evoked nostalgic memories.
“Don’t look at that,” he said to me, leading me into the reception-room while I was contemplating the symbol of his first love. “Let’s talk about literature.”
Conrad had married, “settled down”; he lived with his wife and children, by and for his books. How well he knew our authors! He admired Flaubert and Maupassant, whose praises he gladly sang. He had a particular taste for our critics, especially Jules Lemâitte. He esteemed Barrès only moderately; you can imagine what he would think of the theories of expatriation, perfect expatriot that he was. As he never expressed an opinion on anything except with unfailing competence, his judgments were sure; but as they agreed with mine, the conversation continued for a long time without a clash. On one point only, we were unable to come to an understanding; the very name of Dostoyefsky made him pale. I think some journalists, by inept comparisons, had heated the exasperation of the Pole against the great Russian; with whom, notwithstanding, he did not fail to present certain resemblances, but whom he detested cordially and of whom one could not speak in front of him without renewing his vehement indignation. I should have liked to understand what he reproached in his books, but I never obtained anything from him except vague imprecations.