’TWIXT LAND & SEA
TALES
BY
JOSEPH CONRAD
A SMILE OF FORTUNE
THE SECRET SHARER
FREYA OF THE SEVEN
ISLES
Life is a tragic folly
Let us laugh and be jolly
Away with melancholy
Bring me a branch of holly
Life is a tragic follyA. Symons.
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONSLTD.
ALDINE HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN · 1920
First Edition | October 1912 |
Reprinted | November 1912; January 1913; November1918; December 1920 |
All rights reserved
To
CAPTAIN C. M. MARRIS
LATE MASTER AND OWNER
OF THE
ARABY MAID: ARCHIPELAGO TRADER
IN MEMORY OF THOSE
OLD DAYS OF ADVENTURE
CONTENTS
| PAGE |
A Smile of Fortune | |
The Secret Sharer | |
Freya of the Seven Isles |
p. 1A SMILEOF FORTUNE
HARBOUR STORY
Ever since the sun rose I had beenlooking ahead. The ship glided gently in smoothwater. After a sixty days’ passage I was anxious tomake my landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of thetropics. The more enthusiastic of its inhabitants delightin describing it as the “Pearl of the Ocean.”Well, let us call it the “Pearl.” It’s agood name. A pearl distilling much sweetness upon theworld.
This is only a way of telling you that first-rate sugar-caneis grown there. All the population of the Pearl lives forit and by it. Sugar is their daily bread, as it were.And I was coming to them for a cargo of sugar in the hope of thecrop having been good and of the freights being high.
Mr. Burns, my chief mate, made out the land first; and verysoon I became entranced by this blue, pinnacled apparition,almost transparent against the light of the sky, a mereemanation, the astral body