THE ROVER & SUSPENSE (Napoleonic Novels). Джозеф Конрад

       Joseph Conrad

      The Rover & Suspense (Napoleonic Novels)

      Historical Novels

      Published by

      Books

      - Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -

       [email protected]

      2017 OK Publishing

      ISBN 978-80-7583-989-3

      Table of Contents

       Novels

       The Rover (1923)

       Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (1925)

       Memoirs & Letters

       A Personal Record; or Some Reminiscences

       The Mirror of the Sea

       Notes on Life & Letters

       Biography and Critical Essays

       Joseph Conrad (A Biography) by Hugh Walpole

       Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance by Ford Madox Ford

       Joseph Conrad by John Albert Macy

       A Conrad Miscellany by John Albert Macy

       Joseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf

      NOVELS

       Table of Contents

      THE ROVER

       (1923)

       Table of Contents

       `Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.'

      Spenser

Table of Contents

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

      To

       G. Jean Aubry

       in friendship

       this tale of the last days of a

       French brother of the Coast

      Chapter 1

       Table of Contents

      After entering at break of day the inner roadstead of the Port of Toulon, exchanging several loud hails with one of the guardboats of the Fleet, which directed him where he was to take up his berth, Master-Gunner Peyrol let go the anchor of the sea-worn and battered ship in his charge, between the arsenal and the town, in full view of the principal quay. The course of his life, which in the opinion of any ordinary person might have been regarded as full of marvellous incidents (only he himself had never marvelled at them), had rendered him undemonstrative to such a degree that he did not even let out a sigh of relief at the rumble of the cable. And yet it ended a most anxious six months of knocking about at sea with valuable merchandise in a damaged hull, most of the time on short rations, always on the lookout for English cruisers, once or twice on the verge of shipwreck and more than once on the verge of capture. But as to that, old Peyrol had made up his mind from the first to blow up his valuable charge — unemotionally, for such was his character, formed under the sun of the Indian Seas in lawless contests with his kind for a little loot that vanished as soon as grasped, but mainly for bare life almost as precarious to hold through its ups and downs, and which now had lasted for fifty-eight years.

      While his crew of half-starved scarecrows, hard as nails and ravenous as so many wolves for the delights of the shore, swarmed aloft to furl the sails nearly as thin and as patched as the grimy shirts on their backs, Peyrol took a survey of the quay. Groups were forming along its whole stretch to gaze at the new arrival. Peyrol noted particularly a good many men in red caps and said to himself — “Here they are.” Amongst the crews of ships that had brought the tricolour into the seas of the East, there were hundreds professing sans-culotte principles; boastful and declamatory beggars he had thought them. But now he was beholding the shore breed. Those who had made the Revolution safe. The real thing. Peyrol, after taking a good long look, went below into his cabin to make himself ready to go ashore.

      He shaved his big cheeks with a real English razor, looted years ago