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.

There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that day
than on any other day, except that I stood for a long time looking out
of the window after the landlady's daughter was gone with her spoil
of cups and saucers. I heard her put the tray down in the passage and
finally shut the door; and still I remained smoking, with my back to the
room. It is very clear that I was in no haste to take the plunge into my
writing life, if as plunge this first attempt may be described. My whole
being was steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the
sea, the scene of never-ending labour and