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Title: Joseph Conrad. A Personal Remembrance.
Author: Ford, Ford Madox [Hueffer, Ford Madox] (1873-1939)
Photographer [frontispiece]: Cadby, Will [William A.] (1866-1937)
Sculptor [bust of Conrad]: Epstein, Jacob (1880-1959)
Date of first publication: 1924
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Duckworth, 1924
Date first posted: 19 March 2013
Date last updated: 19 March 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1054

This ebook was produced by
Barbara Watson, Mark Akrigg, Ronald Tolkien
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                            JOSEPH CONRAD




                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  _WITH JOSEPH CONRAD_
      THE NATURE OF A CRIME, A Little Novel, 5_s._ Net.


  _FICTION_
      SOME DO NOT, 7_s._ 6_d._ Net.
      THE MARSDEN CASE, 7_s._ 6_d._ Net.


  _ESSAYS_ (The Readers' Library)
      THE SOUL OF LONDON, 3_s._ 6_d._ Net.
      THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, 3_s._ 6_d._ Net.
      THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE, 3_s._ 6_d._ Net.


  _CRITICISM_
      THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE, 3_s._ 6_d._ Net.
      HOLBEIN (Little Library of Art), 2_s._ 6_d._ Net.
      ROSSETTI, 2_s._ 6_d._ Net.
      THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD, 2_s._ 6_d._ Net.


  _POETRY_
      MISTER BOSPHORUS, With Wood Engravings by Paul
      Nash, 10_s._ 6_d._ Net.




                     Published by DUCKWORTH & CO.
                    Henrietta Street, London, W.C.

[Illustration:

    _Photo_]                [_Will Cadby._
             JOSEPH CONRAD.
                            [_Frontispiece_
]




                            JOSEPH CONRAD

                        A PERSONAL REMEMBRANCE


                                  BY
                           FORD MADOX FORD
                        (_FORD MADOX HUEFFER_)

          JOINT AUTHOR WITH JOSEPH CONRAD OF "ROMANCE," "THE
           INHERITORS," "THE NATURE OF A CRIME," ETC. ETC.

      "For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate,
       earnest and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days."
                                                      JOSEPH CONRAD.

                           DUCKWORTH & CO.
                   3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.




                      _First Published in 1924_

          _By arrangement with the Editor and Proprietors of
                      The Transatlantic Review_

                        _All Rights Reserved_

                _Made and Printed in Great Britain by
         Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._




                               PREFACE


_Nine years ago the writer had occasion to make a hasty will. Since
one of the provisions of this document appointed Conrad the writer's
literary executor we fell to discussing the question of literary
biographies in general and our own in particular. We hit, as we
generally did, very quickly upon a formula, both having a very great
aversion from the usual official biography for men of letters whose
lives are generally uneventful. But we agreed that should a writer's
life have interests beyond the mere writing upon which he had employed
himself this life might well be the subject of a monograph. It should
then be written by an artist and be a work of art. To write:_ "Joseph
Conrad Kurzeniowski was born on such a day of such a year in the town
of 'So and So' in the Government of Kieff" _and so to continue would
not conduce to such a rendering as this great man desired. So, here,
to the measure of the ability vouchsafed, you have a projection of
Joseph Conrad as, little by little, he revealed himself to a human
being during many years of close intimacy. It is so that, by degrees,
Lord Jim appeared to Marlowe, or that every human soul by degrees
appears to every other human soul. For, according to our view of the
thing, a novel should be the biography of a man or of an affair, and a
biography whether of a man or of_ _an affair should be a novel, both
being, if they are efficiently performed, renderings of such affairs
as are our human lives._

_This then is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration:
for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation.
It is conducted exactly along the lines laid down by us, both for the
novel which is biography and for the biography which is a novel. It is
the rendering of an affair intended first of all to make you see the
subject in his scenery. It contains no documentation at all; for it no
dates have been looked up, even all the quotations but two have been
left unverified, coming from the writer's memory. It is the writer's
impression of a writer who avowed himself impressionist. Where the
writer's memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out
of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on
the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole the writer
believes that no man would care--or dare--to impugn it. It was that
that Joseph Conrad asked for: the task has been accomplished with the
most pious scrupulosity._ For something human was to him dearer than
the wealth of the Indies.

  GUERMANTES, SEINE ET MARNE, _August_.
  BRUGES, _October 5th, 1924_.




                               CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE
  PREFACE                                                            5

                                PART I

  _C'EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L'OMBRE, O SACR SOUVENIR_               11

                               PART II

  EXCELLENCY? A FEW GOATS                                          117

                               PART III

  IT IS ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE                                  167

                               PART IV

  THAT, TOO, IS ROMANCE                                            219




                                PART I

         "_C'EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L'OMBRE O SACR SOUVENIR_"

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM JOSEPH CONRAD TO THE AUTHOR.

     _Dear Ford_,

     _Since you wish to quote I have expanded a little the
     passage in my letter. Of course you will use what you find fit._

     I don't think your memory renders me justice as to my
     attitude to the early E. R. The early E. R. is the only
     literary business that, in Bacon's phraseology, "came home
     to my bosom". The mere fact that it was the occasion of you
     putting on me that gentle but persistent pressure which
     extracted from the depths of my then despondency the stuff of
     the "Personal Record" would be enough to make its memory dear.
     Do you care to be reminded that the editing of the first number
     was finished in that farmhouse we occupied near Luton. You
     arrived one evening with your amiable myrmidons and parcels
     of copy. I shall never forget the cold of that night, the
     black grates, the guttering candles, the dimmed lamps--and the
     desperate stillness of that house, where women and children
     were innocently sleeping, when you sought me out at 2 a.m. in
     my dismal study to make me concentrate suddenly on a two-page
     notice of the "Ile des Pinguins". A marvellously successful
     instance of editorial tyranny! I suppose you were justified.
     The Number One of the E. R. could not have come out with two
     blank pages in it. It would have been too sensational. I have
     forgiven you long ago.

     My only grievance against the early E. R. is that it
     didn't last long enough. If I say that I am curious to see
     what you will make of this venture it isn't because I have the
     slightest doubts of your consistency. You have a perfect right
     to say that you are "rather unchangeable". Unlike the Serpent
     (which is wise) you will die in your original skin. So I have
     no doubt that the Review will be truly Fordian--at all costs.
     But for one of your early men it will be interesting to see
     what men you will find now and what you will get out of them in
     these changed times.

     _I am afraid the source of the Personal Record fount is
     dried up. No longer the same man. Thanks to your proposal I'd
     like to do something for his sake or old times--but I daresay I
     am not worth having now. I'll drop you a line in a day or two.
     My mind is a blank at this moment._

                                                  _Yours J. Conrad._
]




                                PART I

                  "C'EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L'OMBRE"




                                  I


He was small rather than large in height; very broad in the shoulder
and long in the arm; dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped
black beard. He had the gestures of a Frenchman who shrugs his
shoulders frequently. When you had really secured his attention he
would insert a monocle into his right eye and scrutinise your face
from very near as a watchmaker looks into the works of a watch. He
entered a room with his head held high, rather stiffly and with a
haughty manner, moving his head once semi-circularly. In this one
movement he had expressed to himself the room and its contents; his
haughtiness was due to his determination to master that room, not to
dominate its occupants, his chief passion being the realisation of
aspects to himself.

In the Pent Farm, beneath the South Downs, there was a great kitchen
with a wavy brick floor. On this floor sat a great many cats: they
were needed to keep down rats and they got some milk of a morning.
Every morning a wild robin with a red breast and greenish-khaki body
would hop, not fly, across the floor of the kitchen between the
waiting cats. The cats would avert their glances, pulsing their
sheathed claws in and out. The robin would hop through the inner
doorway of the kitchen, across an angle of the low dining-room and
so up the bedroom stairs. When the maid with the morning letters and
the tea-tray opened the bedroom door the robin would fly through
the low, dark room and perch on a comb, stuck into a brush on the
dressing-table, against the long, low, leaded windows. It awaited
crumbs of bread and tiny morsels of lump sugar from the tea-tray. It
had never been taught to go on these adventures. This robin attended
at the opening of the first letter that, more than a quarter of a
century ago, the writer received from Joseph Conrad. The robin watched
with its beady eyes the sheet of blue-grey paper with the large rather
ornamental handwriting.... It was afterwards drowned in a cream-jug
which took away from its aspect of a supernatural visitant.

Above the large kitchen was the large Men's Room where the hinds of
the farm had been used to sleep. It was entered by a ladder which
was removed at night so that the hinds should not murder the farmer
or do worse to the farmer's wife. The low windows of this low room
were leaded in diamond shapes, the glass frosted with the green of
great age. One of these windows had inscribed upon it, no doubt by
a diamond, the name _John Kemp_ and the date 1822. Conrad always
objected to _John Kemp_ as a name not sufficiently aristocratic for
the hero of _Romance_ who was the grandson of an earl, but the writer
liked it and it remained so in the book.

Years before that, looking through the pages of Dickens's _All the
Year Round_ for woodcuts contributed by Ford Madox Brown upon whose
biography he had been engaged, the writer had come upon a short
rendering of the official account of the trial of Aaron Smith. This
had been the last trial for piracy that had ever been held at the Old
Bailey and the prisoner was acquitted. The story told by him in the
dock was sufficiently that of _Romance_, as it now stands. It struck
the writer at once after the reading of the first few paragraphs--that
here indeed was what we used to call a _subject_, with a tone of voice
as if the word had been italicised. For certain subjects will grip you
with a force almost supernatural, as if something came from behind the
printed, the written or the spoken word, or from within the aura of
the observed incident in actual life, and caught you by the throat,
really saying: _Treat me_. So in the dusky air of the British Museum
Reading Room whilst that first perusal was being made it was almost as
if the genie of the place exclaimed: Treat this subject. If you do it
will mean fortune; if not, lifelong ill-luck. It brought fortune.

The first treatment of that story by the writer was of an incredible
thinness. It was like the whisper of a nonagenarian and the writer
had tried to make it like the whisper of a nonagenarian. It was
finished just before, in 1898 or so, Conrad first came to see the
writer at Limpsfield.... Why the writer should ever have thought of
writing of pirates, heaven knows, or why, having determined to write
of pirates, it should have been his ambition to treat them as if
in terms of a very faded manuscript of a Greek play! But that was
certainly his ambition and, as it proved, his ambition was certainly
granted to him to achieve. Every sentence had a dying fall and every
paragraph faded out. The last sentences of that original draft ran:
_Above our heads a nightingale_ (did something: _poured out its soul_,
as like as not, or _poured out its melody on the summer air_, the
cadence calling there for eleven syllables). _As it was June it sang a
trifle hoarsely...._ The reader will observe that the writer had then
already read his _Trois Contes_, just as the first words of Conrad's
first book were pencilled on the fly-leaves and margins of _Madame
Bovary_. The last cadences, then, of Herodias run: "Et tous trois,
ayant pris la tte de Jokanaan s'en allaient vers Galil. Comme elle
tait trs lourde, ils la portaient alternativement."... As cadence
the later sentences are an exact pastiche of the former. In each the
first contains nineteen syllables; the concluding one commences with
_As it was_, and is distinguished by the _u_ sounds of '_June_' and
'_lourd_' and the _or_ sounds of '_hoarse_' and '_portaient_.' It was
in that way that, before the writer and Conrad met, they had studied
their Flaubert....

Conrad came round the corner of the house carrying a small child; that
did not impede his slightly stiff gait and the semi-circular motion
of his head as he took in the odd residence, the lettuces protected
by wire-netting from the rabbits, or the immense view that lay before
the cottage. He was conducted by Mr. Edward Garnett. In those days
the writer had been overcome by one of those fits of agricultural
enthusiasm that have overwhelmed him every few years, so that such
descriptive writers as have attended to him have given you his picture
in a startling alternation as a Piccadilly dude in top-hat, morning
coat and spats, and as an extremely dirty agricultural labourer. Mr.
Garnett lived an acre or so up the hill; Mr. Conrad and his family
were staying on Limpsfield Chart. It was in those days Mr. Garnett's
ambition to appear what the French call _lzard_: he might have
been a very, a very long lizard, indistinguishable, save for his
spectacles, from the monstrous stones of his cavernous and troglodytic
residence. From his mansion the writer's two-roomed cottage might have
been a volcanic fragment, thrown off. Mr. Garnett frequently reproved
the writer for wearing dark-grey frieze. It caused, he said, a blot on
the Limpsfield hill-side into whose tones one should sink. The writer
was engrossed in carrying out experiments, suggested by Professor
Gressent of the Sorbonne in Paris. He was trying to make ten lettuces
grow where before had been ten thousand nettles and was writing
articles for the _Outlook_ on the usage of the potato as an extirpator
of thistles, in sand. That is accepted as good farming now.

Upon the writer Conrad made no impression at all. Mr. Conrad was the
author of _Almayer's Folly_, a great book of a romantic fashion, but
written too much in the style of Alphonse Daudet, whom the writer had
outgrown at school, knowing the _Lettres de Mon Moulin_ at eighteen by
heart. A great, new writer then. But as to great writers or artists
this writer even then _en avait soup_, cradled in the proof-sheets of
Rossetti, with Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, Hall Caine (Sir Something Hall
Caine) and all the Pre-Raphaelites for the commonest objects of his
landscape. And Mr. Garnett used to lead the great New, one by one, to
poke up the writer as if he had been a mangy lion. The writer no doubt
roared. In that way Mr. Garnett led up Stephen Crane, Conrad, Lord
Ollivier, now H.B.M. Minister for India, the wife of the Secretary of
the Fabian Society, the Secretary of the Fabian Society.... A whole
procession: precisely as if one had been a mangy lion in a travelling
menagerie. Or perhaps a man at the zoo! And Mr. Garnett would do the
poking up, telling the distinguished that the writer was possessed
of too much individuality ever to find readers.... It was the most
depressing period of a life not lacking in depressing periods.

The writer perhaps roared. Obviously the writer roared on that
occasion, but he certainly rather disliked Conrad as you dislike
those who pass before your cage and get you poked up. We went
afterwards with several children up to the sloping lawn of Mr.
Garnett's residence. It is at that point that a real remembrance of
this beautiful genius comes to the writer.... One of the children
crawled over the sloping grass as weak new-born kittens crawl; another
on the other hand, with an engrossed face, a little older, whilst
Conrad stuck his eyeglass into his eye, progressed for all the world
like a _cul de jatte_ of our Paris streets. Two fists stuck into the
ground, one short leg projected, the other curled underneath, blonde
and determined, it levered itself over the grass with its hands and
between its arms. And Conrad threw back his head and laughed; his
eyeglass fell out; he stuck it in his eye again and gazed at the
child; threw back his head and roared, and uttered odd words in
Marseilles French.... Immediately afterwards Mr. Garnett assured Mr.
Conrad for the third time that the writer was too individual ever to
have a public for his writings. It was of course high praise....

So the writer left Limpsfield and returned to the Pent Farm. A
complete veil dropped between himself and Conrad. And then suddenly
came the letter at whose reading the robin attended. The writer had
indeed roared at Limpsfield. Obviously he had told Conrad the story
of John-Kemp-Aaron-Smith, for Conrad asked him to consider the idea
of a collaboration over that story--which Mr. Garnett had told him
was too individual ever to find even a publisher. It would otherwise
have been an impertinence on the part of Conrad. And Conrad was never
impertinent. His politeness even to his grocer was always Oriental.

The writer's answer was the obvious one that Conrad had better come
and see for himself what he had let himself in for. And Conrad came.
But that time _Conrad_ came.... He was like the Sultan of the True
Believers walking into a slave market. And for the writer that he
remained until his lamentable death. He was a gentleman adventurer who
had sailed with Drake. Elizabethan: it was that that he was. He has
been called Slav; he has been called Oriental; he has been called a
Romantic. He was none of these except on the surface, to his grocer;
a man has to have a surface to present to his grocer or to afternoon
callers. He himself was just Man: _homo europeaus sapiens_, attuned
to the late sixteenth century. In all the world he would have loved
nothing better than to singe the king of Spain's beard if it had not
been to write a good book. Well, he outwitted the Dutch navy in
Malaysia and wrote the greatest books in the world.

He had an extraordinary old mare with such long ears that you took her
for a mule. She was called Nancy. And a black wicker-work chaise. And
he cared for these things with the lively passion of a man: what he
had must be ship-shape: reins, bit, head-stall, feed.... I remember
once in an inn yard at Winchelsea an enormous, fat, six-feet two,
lousy, greyish scoundrel of a stable-man; leaning back against a wall
he was, his face quivering, the colour of billsticker's paste. He
panted: "I've heard tell of the British liaon; but protect me from the
Rooshian bear...." Russian being as near as he could get to Polish.
Conrad had been talking to him: he had been stealing the mare's feed
of oats....

With a hypersensitiveness to impressions the writer, too, remembers
Conrad throwing tea-cups into the fireplace during a discussion over
the divine right of kings--a discussion with a lady who alleged
light-heartedly that Marie Antoinette had been guilty of treason to
France. The whole of the discussion the writer did not hear because he
was discoursing to a very deaf gentleman on the genealogical tree of
the Dering family. Nor indeed can Conrad have thrown the tea-cups into
the fire since on going away the lady said: "What a _charming_ man Mr.
Conrad is! I must see him often."

It was in short the passion of Conrad that you noticed first and
that passion he applied to his writing: his darkness, his wide
gestures, his eyes in which the light was like the glow of a volcano.
This is not over-writing: his personality deserved these tributes.
It was chivalry too. After his discussion with the lady over the
divine right of kings he was pale, exhausted, panting almost. That
was because he remembered Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie, so
ill-clad, so deprived of her children, so pallid and unkempt that
to him she was real and he remembered her. And she was dead and a
cheerfully heartless fine-lady should not make fun--which was what it
amounted to--of dead queens. Dog should not eat dog; fine ladies in
silks should not gnaw the reputations of ladies fine that once wore
finer silks and were now dead. It was the want of imagination in all
humanity, thus in little summed up and presented to him, that aroused
in him such passion and called for such self-control. For it is to
be hoped that it is apparent that it was only to the writer that the
impression remained of tea-cups thrown into the fireplace. The writer
has seen Conrad just so enraged when the Bishop of London, returning
from St. Petersburg after Bloody Monday remarked that Russians would
always have troubles until they were inculcated with the hearty
British love of field games! He detested Russians, his passion was
rather for Bonapartists than for the Bourbons, but that imbecilities
should be uttered as to the lot of the suffering maddened him.

It is characteristic of Conrad: it is most characteristic of
Conrad that when, after five years, he and the writer got to the
last paragraphs of _Romance_ and when the writer had written:
_For suffering is the lot of man_, Conrad should have added: _but
not inevitable failure or worthless despair which is without end:
suffering the mark of manhood which bears within its pain the hope of
felicity, like a jewel set in iron_. He had the mark of manhood!

He came then to the Pent to see what he was in for. He came in for
passion--and suffering. The writer has seldom seen such suffering as
was gone through by Conrad during the reading of that first draft of
_Romance_. Conrad had expected a drama of Cuban pirates, immense and
gloomy, like _Salammbo_, with a reddish illumination, passing as it
were upon a distant stage.... For the first chapter or two--those
passing at the Pent Farm--he was silent. Then he became--silent. For
he seemed to have about him a capacity for as it were degrees of
intensity of his silence. No doubt he listened to the first pages with
a movement or so to light a cigarette, with a relaxing of the limbs
or a change in the position in the chair. These must gradually have
ceased.

The parlour at the Pent was a deep room with a beam across the
middle of the low ceiling; small, pink monthly roses always showed
insignificant blooms that looked over the window sills. An immense
tythe-barn with a great, thatched, black-mossy roof filled in the
whole view if you sat by the fireplace; occasionally you would see
a rat progressing musingly over this surface. If you approached the
window you saw a narrow lawn running to a low brick wall, after which
the level dropped to a great stack-yard floored usually with straw
and not unusually with a bullock or two in it. Conrad and the writer
planted an orange tree, grown from a pip, under the low north wall of
this narrow garden. It was still alive in nineteen-seventeen, growing
just up to the coping of the low wall where its progress was cut off
by the north wind. It was a very quiet, simple room.

The writer sat in the grandfather's chair, his back to the window,
beside the fireplace, reading, his manuscript held up to the light:
Conrad sat forward on a rush-bottomed armchair listening intently.
(For how many years did the writer and Conrad not sit there like that!)

We began that reading after lunch of a shortish day; the lamps were
brought in along with the tea. During that interval Conrad showed
nervous and depressed; sunk in on himself and hardly answering
questions. Conrad being then almost a stranger, this was the writer's
first experience of to what Conrad's depression over an artistic
problem could amount: it was like a strong current that operated
on a whole roomful.... With his back, then, to the lamp, and
Conrad completely in the shadow the writer read on, just having the
impression that his hearer's limbs were all bunched together in his
chair and that they contracted gradually. There were many strong
shadows in the low room where most of the light was on the ceiling.

Conrad began to groan.... It was by then fairly apparent to the writer
that Conrad disapproved of the treatment of the adventures of John
Kemp; at any rate in Cuba; and the writer had a sufficient sense
already of Conrad's temperament to be disinclined to ask whether his
guest were ill. He feels now the sense of as it were dumb obstinacy
with which he read on into those now vocal shadows in the fireside
warmth.... The interruptions grew in length of ejaculation. They
became: "O! O!... O God, my dear Hueffer...."... And towards the end:
"O God, my dear _faller_, how is it possible...." The writer finished
with the statement that, as it was June the nightingale sang a trifle
hoarsely. This zoological observation, in spite of the cadence, gave
the final touch to Conrad's dejection. The writer's voice having
stopped he exclaimed: "What? What? What's that?" When he heard that
that was the end he groaned and said: "Good _God_!"--for the last
time. There are writers--French writers--who can keep the final
revelation of a whole long novel back until the last three words. For
this he had hoped. The writer would rather have died than have so
machined a book.

Conrad was the most unrivalled hatcher of schemes for sudden and
unlimited wealth or for swift and undying glory. To see him go
upon one of these adventures was heartening in itself. His face
lit up, his muscles tautened, he first expatiated on his idea and
then set out. Obviously his training as a master mariner inveigling
unwilling Eastern traders into shipping cargoes that they did not
want to consign, at prices that they did not want to pay, to bottoms
commanded by Conrad, for one reason or another unsuited to their
merchandise--this training helped him with direct human negotiations.
To see him, leaning over a counter, persuading the stolid Mr. Dan
West, grocer of Hythe, to grant him credit unheard of in that market
town, was a singular study in fascination. The bearded, blinking--and
very excellent grocer: I wish I knew his equal elsewhere--understood
possibly the transaction which contained in its essence bills at
three months, mortgages I daresay on life-insurances--Heaven knows
what!--and then a triumphant progress to the White Hart where the
benign, dark, statuesque and really beautiful Miss Cobay presided
in the dimmer recess of that very old tavern.... And there sat the
grocer, benevolent, pleased, blinking a little, a solid, wealthy,
fiftyish man, several times mayor of his ancient town, with great
knowledge of men, quietly indulgent to the romantic visitor who had
descended upon him.... For all the world he might have been the Stein
of _Lord Jim_ contemplating the hero of that wonderful work and saying
within himself: "Romantic!... That's what he is. Romantic!"... And the
beautiful, statuesque, slow moving Miss Cobay, invariably silent. The
writer at least never heard her utter one word, except that, years
after, motoring through that ancient Cinque Port, the writer, for
old sake's sake, took a drink at the bar of the White Hart, and Miss
Cobay with her enigmatic gaze asked after Mr. Conrad, then many years
gone from the Pent, for all the world like one of the silent women
of Conrad's early books: the heroine of _Falk_ who never utters one
word.... The writer, alas, alas, seems to become Marlowe. So be it....

Conrad was Conrad because he was his books. It was not that he made
literature: he was literature, the literature of the Elizabethan
Gentleman Adventurer.... Think of setting out in an old wicker-work
chaise drawn by what appeared to be a mule to persuade a Hythe
grocer to give you three years' credit.... Think of setting out from
Stanford-le-Hope, a safe harbour where at least there was contact
with ships, estuaries, tideways, islands, into an unknown hinterland
of savage and unknown populations, of bare downs, out of sight of
the refuge of the sea to persuade an unknown wielder of the pen,
the finest stylist in England, to surrender his liberty to a sailing
partnership--to surrender too his glamorous 'subject,' for all the
world as if you had adventured into the hinterlands behind Palembang
to ask someone only just known to give up to you for joint working
the secret of one of those mysterious creeks where gold is found. An
adventure like that of _Victory_ itself.... And then to insult the
owner of the creek with groans, sighs, O God's, contortions.... Well,
all we who supported Conrad to his final, so great victory, were the
subordinate characters of his books, putting up with his extortionate
demands for credit, for patience or for subjects.... The Steins, the
Whalleys, the captain MacWhirrs ... and now the Marlowes!

For, for some hours of that distant day of our Romance, the reader
may be assured that the question of the very existence of that work
hung in the balance. It was truly as if Rumpelstiltkin had come to
carry off the Queen's child. (_The dwarf_, Conrad quotes Grimm in his
epigraph, _answered: No, something human is dearer to me than all the
wealth of the Indies!_) The writer, please let the reader be assured,
has always been supremely indifferent to the fate of his books, to the
estimation in which they were held--by any soul but Joseph Conrad; to
such things as career; personal reputation and the rest. Conrad could
hardly have selected a better discoverer of creeks to whom to go. But
the writer was not then ignorant of the vicissitudes of human life and
of literary partnerships. The terrible wrangles between Henley and
the relicts and executors of Stevenson were at that moment filling
the press. Or one might remember the effects on Johnson's fame, of
Boswell. To do what Conrad then imperiously desired, to surrender the
creek to a joint partnership was ... asking for it!

It hung then in the balance. But there gradually appeared after
dinner, through a long farmhouse night until two in the morning: the
magic. It was magic! There had been disclosures. Conrad had artlessly
expounded his desires. Hearing, at Limpsfield, the writer develop his
miraculous 'subject'--of Aaron Smith, last pirate ever to be tried
at the Old Bailey, of the Creek with Rio Media at the bottom of it
and the pirate schooners with Nikola el Escoces in command sailing
out to the sack of brig _Victoria_ with her cargo of log-wood, rum,
raw sugar and dyes--Conrad had imagined a robust book, with every
drop of the subject squeezed out of it. Whereas it was characteristic
of the writer that though in the trial Aaron Smith had deposed to a
lady bearing the glamorous name of Seraphina Riego, daughter of a
_juez de la premiera instancia_, known as the Star of Cuban Law, and
inhabiting the pirate city of Rio Media in Cuba, the writer had very
carefully left out this lady in the first draft of his book, the lady
with whom John Kemp sat under the hoarse nightingale having been a
carefully limned figure with bare shoulders and a handkerchief called
Veronica.... Conrad had expected to hear a reading by the finest
stylist in England of a work, far flung in popularity as _Treasure
Island_ but as 'written' as _Salammbo_, by the addition to which
of a few touches of description, sea-atmosphere, mists, riggings
and the like, in a fortnight, fortune should lie at the feet of the
adventurers.... It was another of those magic enterprises.... Alas,
after five years' work there was _Romance_ with its _succs d'estime_.
Not much of that, even, for the critics of our favoured land do not
believe in collaboration.

Conrad's marvellous play and change of features came now into the
story. Ruffled, the writer, even before dinner had explained the
nature of the _tour de force_ he had attempted. This was the narrative
of a very old man, looking back upon that day of his romance--as
to-day this narrator looks back. You are getting the real first draft
of _Romance_ now. This is how in truth it comes out according to the
technical scheme then laid down by us two.

Before dinner, then, Conrad listened to the writer's apologia with
a certain frigid deference. Of course if that was the way of it, no
doubt.... But why choose such a subject?... A man of sixty-two....
Yes, yes, of course.... He remained however shut up in the depth
of his disappointment and still more in his reprobation of the
criminal who could take hold of such a theme and not, gripping it
by the throat, extract from it every drop of blood and glamour....
He disliked the writer as a criminal, fortune thrown away, a Book
turned into the dry bone of a technical feat. He exclaimed: Let
me look at it. Let me look at the manuscript; shuffled the leaves
distastefully as if they had been the evidence of a crime.... To throw
away fortune--that was not ship-shape: to murder a subject--that was
murder, foul, unnatural.... The dinner bell rang....

At dinner there were ladies; gradually the depressed Conrad became
Conrad. Pepper came under discussion. He declaimed as to how the
greatest wars in the world had been fought for pepper. The Spice
Islands, the East, came into the room for a little while, with Wapping
Old Stairs, the tents of the army over Constantinople at the end of
the Russo-Turkish war with Conrad as a sailor before the mast on the
deck of a Messageries Maritimes transport. There ensued a desperate
wrangle as to whether saffron had any flavour--in the course of the
consumption of curry. Conrad declared that saffron had no flavour; the
writer, that saffron was one of the most strongly flavoured of all
possible herbs. Conrad swore that he had carried whole cargoes of
saffron; he had spent his life in carrying cargoes of saffron; he had
known no other pursuits. The writer on the other hand had given more
saffron to diseased poultry than ever Conrad had carried and had in
addition reproved cooks enough to make ships' crews, for not putting
sufficient saffron into _poule au riz_.... Conrad declared that that
was merely to give the rice an agreeable colour. The writer called it
a most disagreeable, an offensive colour.... Conrad's eyes flashed
dangerously; his teeth white under his drawn-back moustache. We both
contemplated Calais Sands.... Someone changed the conversation to
pearls....

In all our ten thousand conversations down the years we had only these
two themes over which we quarrelled: as to the taste of saffron and as
to whether one sheep is distinguishable from another.

After that first dinner Conrad talked, there being people present
whom he found sympathetic.... When he talked on such occasions he was
like his _Mirror of the Sea_. Indeed a great part of his _Mirror of
the Sea_ was just his talk which the writer took down in a shorthand
of his own extemporising, recalling to Conrad who was then in a
state of great depression, various passages of his own relating....
Alas, three weeks ago, the writer drove in a black, shaken, hooded
contrivance, over a country of commonplace downlands, the continuation
of the Kentish downs, beyond the Channel. He went, jolted behind an
extravagant female quadruped between fields of wheat that small winds
ruffled into cats'-paws. And the parallel was so intimately exact that
the writer found himself saying to himself: "Well, Ford, mon vieux,
how would you render that field of wheat?"... The reader must take
this record of a coincidence as a sincerity....

For the days have been innumerable upon which behind the amiable
mare of Conrad's or a far less amiable Exmoor pony of the writer's
we drove--say between 1898 and 1905--over a country of commonplace
downlands and asked ourselves how we should render a field of ripe
corn, a ten-acre patch of blue-purple cabbage, a hopoast. We would try
the words in French: _sillonn_, _bleu-fonc_, _bleu-du-roi_; we would
try back into English; cast around in the back of our minds for other
French words to which to assimilate our English and thus continue for
quiet hours.

So, three weeks ago to-day--thus does one return to one's old
loves!--the writer drove from just such a ramshackle, commonplace
farm-building in an undistinguished country over slight hills on
a flinty by-road and heard Conrad saying to him: "Well, Ford, mon
vieux, how would you render that field of wheat?"... Unless you have
these details you cannot know how immensely strong an impression this
beautiful genius made on a mind not vastly impressionable or prone to
forming affections.... So the writer continued turning the matter over.

He went on thinking first of French and then of English: "Champs
de bls que les vents faibles sillonnaient.... Corn-fields.... No,
not corn-fields, because that, to Americans signifies maize....
Wheat-fields.... Fields of wheat that the weak ... feeble ... light
... what sort of winds, breezes, airs...." There is no occupation
more agreeable on a still day: it is more restful, really, than
fishing in a pond.... "Fields of wheat that small winds ruffled into
cats'-paws.... That is of course too literary...."

[Illustration: BUST OF JOSEPH CONRAD BY EPSTEIN.]

These considerations remained in the front of his mind as he was
jolted over the abominable granite setts of a small market town,
to the dilapidated station. He continued to think of wheat, dusty,
bronzed, golden, as if running away over a small hill-side--whilst
he purchased tickets of a disagreeable woman behind a grille, whilst
he purchased an English paper of a very agreeable woman in a blue
pinafore. On the railway-platform he said: "Dont les vents faibles
sillonnaient les surfaces rousstres,..." whilst looking at black
capital letters in the paper that his companion held folded. It struck
him at once: This is a bad joke.... That paper is of the sort that
makes bad jokes.... He was speaking to me. Not five, not three...
minutes.... Not three seconds: just now on this platform... the
duskyish voice with the brown accent, rather caressing....

The writer exclaimed: Look! _Look!_... His companion unfolded the
paper. The announcement went across two columns in black, leaded
caps.... =SUDDEN DEATH OF JOSEPH CONRAD=. They were demolishing an
antiquated waiting-room on the opposite platform, three white-dusty
men with pickaxes: a wall was all in broken zigzags. The writer said
to himself: "C'est le mur d'un silence ternel qui descend devant
vous!" There descended across the dusty wall a curtain of moonlight,
thrown across by the black shadows of oak trees. We were on a verandah
that had a glass roof. Under the glass roof climbed passion flowers,
and vine tendrils strangled them. We were sitting in deck chairs. It
was one o'clock in the morning. Conrad was standing in front of us,
talking. Talking on and on in the patches of moonlight and patches of
shadow from the passion flowers and vines! The little town in which we
were dominated the English channel from a low hill-top. He was wearing
a dark reefer coat and white trousers.

He was talking of Malaysia, palm trees, the little wives of rajahs in
coloured sarongs--or perhaps not sarongs?--crouched round him on the
ground; he himself crosslegged on the ground teaching the little wives
of rajahs--to use sewing machines! Moored to a rotting quay--as it
might have been Palembang, but of course it was not Palembang--was his
schooner. His schooner had in its hold half a cargo of rifles under
half a cargo of sewing machines. The rajahs, husbands of the little
wives, did not like their Dutch suzerains and in that country the War
has lasted not five but three hundred and fifty-five years....

That then was Conrad on the occasions when he talked as he did on
that first evening after dinner. His voice was then usually low,
rather intimate and caressing. He began by speaking slowly but later
on he spoke very fast. His accent was precisely, rather dusky, the
accent of dark rather than fair races. He impressed the writer at
first as a pure Marseilles Frenchman: he spoke English with great
fluency and distinction, with correctitude in his syntax, his words
absolutely exact as to meaning but his accentuation so faulty that
he was at times difficult to understand and his use of adverbs as
often as not eccentric. He used 'shall' and 'will' very arbitrarily.
He gesticulated with his hands and shoulders when he wished to be
emphatic, but when he forgot himself in the excitement of talking he
gesticulated with his whole body, throwing himself about in his chair,
moving his chair nearer to yours. Finally he would spring up, go to a
distance, and walk backwards and forwards across the end of the room.
When the writer talked he was a very good listener, sitting rather
curled up whilst the writer walked unceasingly backwards and forwards
along the patterned border of the carpet.

We talked like that from about ten when the ladies had gone to bed
until half-past two in the morning. We talked about Flaubert and
Maupassant--sounding each other, really. Conrad was still then
inclined to have a feeling for Daudet--for such books as _Jack_. This
the writer contemned with the sort of air of the superior person who
tells you that Hermitage is no longer a wine for a gentleman. We
talked of Turgenev--the greatest of all poets: _Byelshin Prairie_ from
the _Letters of a Sportsman_, the greatest of all pieces of writing:
Turgenev wrapped in a cloak lying in the prairie at night, at a little
distance from a great fire beside which the boy horse-tenders talked
desultorily about the Roosalki of the forests with the green hair and
water-nymphs that drag you down to drown in the river.

We agreed that a poem was not that which was written in verse but
that, either prose or verse, that had constructive beauty. We agreed
that the writing of novels was the one thing of importance that
remained to the world and that what the novel needed was the New
Form. We confessed that each of us desired one day to write Absolute
Prose.

But that which really brought us together was a devotion to Flaubert
and Maupassant. We discovered that we both had _Felicite_, _St.-Julien
l'Hospitalier_, immense passages of _Madame Bovary_, _La Nuit_, _Ce
Cochon de Morin_ and immense passages of _Une Vie_ by heart. Or so
nearly by heart that what the one faltered over the other could take
up. And indeed on the last occasion when we met, in May of this year,
agreeing that we had altered very little, surprisingly little--oh
not the least in the world!--the writer began: "La nuit, balanc
par l'ouragan..." and Conrad went on: "tandis que le feu grgeois
ruisselait," right down to: "Et comme il tait trs fort, hardi,
courageux et avis...."

Before we went on that earlier night to bed Conrad confessed to the
writer that previous to suggesting a collaboration he had consulted
a number of men of letters as to its advisability. He said that he
had put before them his difficulties with the language, the slowness
with which he wrote and the increased fluency that he might acquire in
the process of going minutely into words with an acknowledged master
of English. The writer imagines that he had actually consulted Mr.
Edward Garnett, W. E. Henley and Mr. Marriott Watson. Of these the
only one that Conrad mentioned was W. E. Henley. He stated succinctly
and carefully that he had said to Henley--Henley had published the
_Nigger of the Narcissus_ in his Review--"Look here. I write with
such difficulty: my intimate, automatic less expressed thoughts are
in Polish; when I express myself with care I do it in French. When I
write I think in French and then translate the words of my thoughts
into English. This is an impossible process for one desiring to make a
living by writing in the English language...." And Henley, according
to Conrad on that evening, had said: "Why don't you ask H. to
collaborate with you. He is the finest stylist in the English language
of to-day...." The writer, it should be remembered, though by ten or
fifteen years the junior of Conrad was by some years his senior at any
rate as a published author, and was rather the more successful of the
two as far as sales went.

Henley obviously had said nothing of the sort. Indeed, as the writer
has elsewhere related, on the occasion of a verbal duel that he had
later with Henley that violent-mouthed personality remarked to him:
"Who the Hell are you? I never even heard your name!" or words to
that effect. It probably does not very much matter. What had no doubt
happened was that Conrad had mentioned the writer's name to Henley and
Henley had answered: "I daresay he'll do as well, as anyone else." No,
it probably does not matter, except as a light on the character and
methods of Joseph Conrad, and as to his ability to get his own way....

For it was obviously _une motion forte_ that the writer received
in those small hours in a sufficiently dim farmhouse room. In such
affairs Conrad's caressing, rather dragging voice would take on a more
Polish intonation and would drop. His face would light up; it was as
if he whispered: as if we both whispered in a conspiracy against a
sleeping world. And no doubt that was what it was. The world certainly
did not want us: not at that date; and to be reputed the finest
English stylist was enough, nearly, to get you sent to gaol. Something
foreign, that was what it was....

At any rate when, with a flat candle-stick, the writer at last showed
his guest into a shadowy, palely papered, coldish bedroom and closed
the door on him, he felt as if a king were enclosed within those
walls. A king-conspirator: a sovereign-Pretender; Don Carlos of a
world whose subjects are shadows.


                                  II

As for what happened then immediately to the history of _Romance_,
the book, the writer's mind preserves a complete blank! It might be
easy to construct images out of probabilities or by consultation
with one person or another. But that would not be within the spirit
of the bond: this is the record of the impression made by Conrad
the Impressionist upon another writer, impressionist also. It is an
offering In Memoriam constructed solely out of memory.

Some years ago Mr. H. G. Wells took occasion to write to the papers.
He stated that the writer had visited him and informed him that he had
persuaded Conrad to collaborate with himself. Mr. Wells's memory must
almost certainly have betrayed him though the matter is of no great
importance. What does remain in the writer's mind very clearly is
this....

The writer and Conrad made several choppings and changings in their
occupation of the Pent: the writer occupied it for several years;
Conrad then lived in it with the writer's spare furniture, which
was mostly of Pre-Raphaelite origin. It pleased Conrad to write at
a Chippendale bureau on which Christina Rosetti had once written or
at another which had once belonged to Thomas Carlyle: one got in
those days those small, cheerful pleasures out of life. Then Conrad
occupied the Pent altogether, the mournful house under the bare downs
exercising a great fascination over him. When you went out of the
front door--Mr. Walter Crane, who during one of our movings about Kent
and Sussex took the house furnished, had painted a Japanese Crane and
some verses on that door--when you went out then, the narrow garden
giving on to the stack-yard had a short brick path running under the
windows and it was very soothing to see the flattish lines of the
country running away for a great distance, one convolution going
into another. The brick path dried up very quickly in the wettest of
weathers: up and down it, as if on a quarter-deck, Conrad would pace
for hours and hours, the lines of the country soothing him. In that
part of England the words of Charles II are most true; what with the
shelter of the downs and the position near the sea there is there
scarcely any day upon which a man may not go abroad--at any rate to
the extent of a brick path under his windows. The great barn closed
in the scene immediately to the front, but you saw the fields to the
right, so it was a very quiet and private place.... And indeed during
the last of our conversations, this year, Conrad alluded to the fact
that, for the first time in his life, he had, in his vastly more
arranged residence of that day, a study to himself. And he added: "Ah,
but it isn't the _Pent_!" He said too that the great tythe barn had
been burned down during threshing.

We used in our day to take great entertainment out of shooting rats
with a Flobert rifle from the brick path. There were channels made
by these animals in the black-green thatch of the barn and you would
see them proceeding leisurely from end to end of the great expanse in
broad daylight. Then.... Whff, would go the Flobert and the small
bullet pinging into the thatch would send a rat bounding away over the
corrugations in the old straw into some hole, for all the world with
the action of a tiger bounding over water-courses. As far as memory
serves we never hit a rat: but one notable success was scored to the
writer. Fired at from an incredible distance--ninety yards or so,
something gigantic!--a great old grey rat crossing a road collapsed
feebly. We ran forward and dispatched it with the butt. That was ever
afterwards scored to the writer as an immense feat of marksmanship,
often referred to. If anyone talked of shooting Conrad would say: "Ah,
but you should have seen Ford's shot at the rat!..." Actually the
writer, with a little more farm knowledge, was sure that the rat was
dying of old age before it was fired at, the bullet never reaching
it. But he has kept his own counsel to this day of confession.... No,
we were not high-brow there at the Pent. We played dominoes, Conrad
with passion and the skill of a master. Indeed, in how many City
Meccas and Belgian cafs must we not have rattled the black and white
bones over round, white marble table tops! We played cart or, when
very serious, chess, but usually dominoes, at which the writer never
remembers to have won a game. Sometimes the writer knocked a golf ball
about the fields, Conrad, standing on the brick path, regarding the
occupation with the contempt say that his collaborator bestowed on
Daudet. Once the writer seriously sat down to describe in words the
satisfaction you feel when you have brought off a good drive and see
the white ball lyrically against the blue sky. It was a careful piece
of writing, _mots justes_ and all. Conrad looked at it with attention
and then slowly, blankly, raised his shoulders and eyebrows, we
returning to dominoes.


                                 III

On one of those days, then, we drove in state from the Pent to pay a
call on Mr. Wells at Sandgate. There was a curious incident. As we
stood on the doorstep of Mr. Wells's villa, in the hesitant mind of
those paying a state call, behold, the electric bell-push, all of
itself went in and the bell sounded.... Conrad exclaimed: "Tiens!...
The Invisible Man!" and burst into incredible and incredulous
laughter. In the midst of it the door opened before grave faces.

We paid our call. Whether we were taken to be drunk or no only the
owners of those grave faces can say. I suppose that we were. But the
incident of the bell-push was of a nature that had a peculiar appeal
to Conrad's humour. For years after, a translation of Mr. Wells's book
having appeared in Italian, you could never mention that author's
name without Conrad's saying: "Tiens!... L'Uomo Invisible!"...
Indeed during a visit in an interval of our long separation caused
by European vicissitudes and their sequel Conrad asked the writer:
"Do you ever see Wells now?" and added: "L'Uomo Invisible.... Do you
remember?"

But Mr. Wells's _Invisible Man_ made an extremely marked impression
on Conrad, as indeed it did on the writer. So it deserved to. Indeed
as far as memory serves, _The Invisible Man_, the end of the _Sea
Lady_ and some phrases that that book contained, and two short stories
called, the one _The Man who could work Miracles_ and the other
_Fear_, made up at that date all the English writing that, acting
as it were as a junta, we absolutely admired. Later there came the
stories of Mr. Cunninghame Graham, the writing of W. H. Hudson and,
with reservations on the part of Conrad for the later novels--the work
of Henry James.

It was as if when we considered any other English writer's work
we always in the end said: "Ah, but do you remember _Ce Cochon de
Morin_?" or the casquette of Charles Bovary, according to the type
of work undergoing commendation. After reading the passage, say, of
the pavior striking with the spade at the invisibility flying past
him from the _Invisible Man_, or the episode of the turning over of
the lamp and the burning downwards, from the _Man who could work
Miracles_, we recalled no French masterpiece.... These pieces were
authentic, in construction, in language and in the architectural
position occupied by them in the book or story--in the progression of
the effect!

Mr. Wells has recorded that he was aware that at this date there was
a conspiracy going on at the Pent against himself and against British
literature. Against British literature there was, if you choose to
call it so: against Mr. Wells the extent of our machinations is as
recorded above.

Conrad had odd, formal notions of how one should proceed in the life
literary. As far as he was concerned the purpose of our call on Mr.
Wells was to announce to the world of letters that we were engaged
in collaboration. To the writer this was just exactly a matter of
indifference except for a not materially pronounced disinclination
to pay calls anywhere or at any time. But Conrad liked proceedings
of a State nature. He would have liked the driving in a barouche
to pay calls on Academicians such as is practised by candidates
for membership of the French Academy. And exceedingly vivid in the
writer's mind is the feeling he had, as we drove down the sloping
railway bridge above Sandling Junction. He was like a brown paper
parcel on a seat beside a functionary in a green uniform, decorated
with golden palm leaves and a feathered cocked hat....

We were then going over the third draft of the second part of
_Romance_ and had at last finally and psychologically decided that
the book would eventually go on. Of this the writer is certain. He
is certain because the exact image and air of that time came back to
him suddenly whilst making a very minute recension of the text of
the French translation of _Romance_. The writer was in mid-ocean on
the deck of a liner reading very meticulously the translation of an
episode which related how, on a blue night in Kingston Vale, John
Kemp knocked down, in the presence of the Admiral of the Fleet in the
Jamaica waters, a Mr. Topnambo, member of the Governor's council, who
wore white trousers that glimmered in the half-light.... There were
on that upper deck in the sunlight a number of New York Jews playing
pinocle and a number of Washington flappers reading novels. But the
writer heard his own voice as, in the low parlour of the Pent, he read
aloud the passage that concerned Mr. Topnambo, the blue night, the
white trousers, the barouches standing in the moonlight waiting for
Admiral Rowley and his intoxicated following to take the road. And
then Conrad, interrupting.... "By Jove," he said, "it's a third person
who is writing!"

The psychology of that moment is perfectly plain to the writer. Conrad
interrupted with a note of relief in his voice. He had found a formula
to justify collaboration in general and our collaboration. Until then
we had struggled tacitly each for our own note in writing. With the
coming of blue nights, the moon, palms and the brilliant lights of the
inn reflected down the river Conrad saw the possibilities that there
were for his own exotic note in the story. Above all, with the coming
of politics: for John Kemp in coming to blows with Mr. Topnambo,
member of the Governor's council, then and there identified himself
with the party in the island of Jamaica that at that date desired
annexation by the United States.

This at once made our leading character handleable by Conrad. John
Kemp merely kidnapped by pirates and misjudged by the judicial bench
of our country was not so vastly attractive, but a John Kemp who was
in addition a political refugee, suspect of High Treason and victim of
West India merchants.... That was squeezing the last drop of blood out
of the subject....

The differences in our temperaments were sufficiently well marked.
Conrad was brave: he was for inclusion and hang the consequences.
The writer, more circumspect, was for ever on the watch to suppress
the melodramatic incident and the sounding phrase. So, till that
psychological moment, the writer doing most of the first drafting,
Conrad had been perpetually crying: "Give! Give!" The writer was to
give one more, and one more, and again one more turn to the screw that
sent the rather listless John Kemp towards an inevitable gallows.
The actual provision of intrigue in 1820 England and Jamaica was
the writer's business. Conrad contented himself with saying: "You
must invent. You have got to make that fellow live perpetually under
the shadow of the gallows." In the original draft of the book John
Kemp had been the mere second mate of a merchant ship going out to
Jamaica in the ordinary course of his business of following the sea.
But in the second draft he was mixed up with smugglers and fled
from Hythe beach in the moonlight with the Bow Street runners hot
on his trail--already a candidate for the professional attentions
of the hangman. In that second draft, however, he was in Jamaica,
still merely a planter's apprentice--insufficiently hangable. There
had to be more inevitability in the shape of invention. The writer
therefore set to work to read a vast number of Jamaica newspapers
of the 'twenties and, finding that that island was then an ant-heap
of intrigue by what were called Secessionists, it was an easy task
to identify Kemp hangably with those traitors to the British Crown.
Conrad, however, was a Loyalist: a Loyalist to every rgime that
ever existed but passionately a Loyalist to Great Britain. It was
therefore necessary to give the screw one turn more: Kemp had to be
made a misjudged man, betrayed by the stupid cruelty of merchants
and the administration. He thus became exactly a figure for Conrad
to handle. For, if Conrad were the eternal Loyalist, nevertheless
the unimaginative and cruel stupidity of Crown and Government
officials was an essential part of his creed. He was a politician--but
a politician of the impasse. The British Empire was for him the
perfection of human perfections, but _all_ its politicians, all its
public officials, police, military officers of the Crown, gaolers,
pilots, port admirals and policies were of an imbecility that put them
in intelligence below the first lieutenant of the French navy that you
could come across....

So, by that moment, we had worked John Kemp into a position that can
have been occupied by very few unjustly accused heroes of romance.
When he stood in the Old Bailey Dock he had the whole legal, the whole
political, the whole naval forces of the Crown, the whole influence at
once of the City of London, and of the Kingdom of Spain, determined to
hang him. And the writer is bound to confess that reading, after an
interval of twenty years, _Romance_--and in a French translation!--the
hairs really did rise on his scalp over the predicament of John Kemp
on his trial. And he wondered at the melodramatic genius that had been
possessed by that third writer that was neither himself nor Conrad....

For having got hold of that comforting theory Conrad never abandoned
it. At intervals during our readings aloud that lasted for years
he would say, always as if it were a _trouvaille_ that _that_ was
certainly the writing of a third party. It had not been long
before he had given up all hope of swift fortune coming with the
speedy finishing of that book. For the writer the pleasure of
eternal technical discussion with Conrad was a sufficient motive
for continuing our labours. But for Conrad with his stern sense of
the necessity for making a career that was not enough. He had to
find at least an artistic justification for going on. We were both
extremely unaccepted writers, but we could both write. What was the
sense of not writing apart if there were no commercial gain? He
found it in the aesthetically comforting thought that the world of
letters was enriched by yet a third artist. The third artist had
neither his courage nor his gorgeousness; he himself had none of his
collaborator's literary circumspection nor verbal puritanism. So the
combination was at least ... different.

Thus came about our drive to the Lower Sandgate Road. Conrad
considered it appropriate that we should make an official
announcement. The collaboration was determined upon. For the
receiving of this official communication no one could have been more
appropriate than the author of the _Invisible Man_. Conrad had in
those days a very strong sense that those who had taken part in his
launching as a writer had the right to have communicated to them any
crucial determination at which he arrived. It was a fine trait in
his character. He had originally consulted Mr. Henley, Mr. Marriott
Watson, and the writer presumes, Mr. Edward Garnett, these having
been as it were his chief backers behind the scenes. Mr. Wells had
been his chief backer before the public--as Reviewer. All the reviews
that _Almayer_ had received had amounted to a mountain of praise: the
most tremendous and moving commendation had been that contributed by
Mr. Wells to the _Saturday Review_, an organ that was then almost
miraculously regarded, under the editorship of Mr. Frank Harris.
Mr. Wells then, living in our neighbourhood, to whom better could
this junta have proceeded? So at least Conrad thought and the writer
offered no active objection.

Mr. Wells apparently thought the same. Of what happened at that
villa in the Lower Sandgate Road, except that the back garden had,
descending to the sea-beach, a step-ladder up and down which several
charming creatures were disporting themselves with the Channel as
background, the writer carries in his memory now only the conversation
of Bob Stevenson and the remembrance of Conrad, talking to Mrs. Wells
with enormous animation about the great storm in which for the first
time he came up the Channel, passing that point. The writer was
engaged in remembering that great storm. He had been at school at
Folkestone almost perpendicularly on the cliff above where we then
sat. In the morning after the gale had blown itself out we looked
down in sunlight from the edge of the Leas. The whole sickle of
Dungeness bay had a fleet ashore on its beaches--innumerable smacks
and coasting vessels, large international sailing ships and two East
Indiamen, the _Plassy_ and the _Clive_, with their towering black
and white sides, all heeling over, rigging and canvas hanging down
like curtains right round the bay, unforgettable and helpless.... Bob
Stevenson was engaged in telling the writer with animation almost
equal to that of Conrad that Ford Madox Brown could not paint. The
writer was wishing himself with the group round Conrad and Mrs. Wells.
The crossing of the voices of those two brilliant conversationalists
remains still in these ears, and the odd mixture of feelings....

On the next day Mr. Wells bicycled up to Aldington Knoll where at
about seven miles distant from the Pent the writer was once again
leading an agricultural life of the severer type--in a cottage of the
most minute, the Conrads occupying the Pent. The writer was, indeed,
engaging himself on the invention of a new species of potato in the
intervals of contriving the gallows for John Kemp. Mr. Wells came to
persuade the writer not to collaborate with Conrad. With an extreme
earnestness he pleaded with the writer not to spoil Conrad's style:
"The wonderful Oriental style.... It's as delicate as clockwork and
you'll only ruin it by sticking your fingers in it." The writer
answered that Conrad wanted a collaboration and as far as the writer
was concerned Conrad was going to get what he wanted. He can still see
the dispirited action of Mr. Wells as he mounted his bicycle by the
rear step and rode away along that ridge of little hills.... No more
than those two speeches had been exchanged.


                                  IV

Into the still, depressed note of the Pent there had introduced itself
the tremendous panorama of sea and sky that showed from Aldington
with its Knoll. We passed our time driving the amiable mare or the
infamous Exmoor pony between one and the other. We went out of a
sunshiny morning with bits of manuscript; we returned through bitter
rain-storms, the mud splashing up visibly before the dim lanthorns,
the manuscript read aloud, commented on, docketed for alteration....
It comes back as a time of great tranquillity, though the high skies
of Aldington, with the sickle-shaped, painted marsh and the flat
Channel ending with the pink cliffs of Boulogne, seem cracked as the
surface of an old, bright painting will be cracked--with the agonies
of Conrad's poverty, unsuccess, negotiations and misgivings.

Still a time of great tranquillities, and, at intervals, there were
triumphs. Pinker, a blinking Bramah in the shape of Destiny, would
grant an unimaginable advance; William Heinemann--the most generous
and wise of publishers, a Jew at that--would hand out an unexpected
cheque on the top floor of 31 Bedford Street whilst the writer kept
Pawling--a blonde Christian but much more like a publisher than his
Semitic partner--interested as well as he might with a description of
the plot of _The Inheritors_, a thin collaboration with no plot in
particular that Heinemann's eventually published. Then Conrad would
come in, buttoning his overcoat over the cheque: Mr. Pawling would
throw up his hands and exclaim to the writer: "You've let him get at
that ass William again. By God, that is not cricket!"... And the two
conspirators against the peace of mind of No. 31 Bedford Street would
proceed to the famous Bodega just out of the Strand. There, with Sir
Henry Irving and Nellie Farren at adjoining tables, over smoked salmon
and champagne in small tumblers, they would play dominoes until 4.30,
the last train for Sandling Junction, with its quiet lines of scenery,
its fresh breath of air, and the mare in charge of the stable-boy who
would be just lighting the lamps of the trap--that last train leaving
Charing Cross at 4.50 and getting down just at dusk....

There is something conducive to writing in low rooms, in a commonplace
downland country, with nearly level fields that run into quiet
convolutions, away to a distance. Let the direct lighting be modified
by a barn, the illumination coming from the peak of the sky: let
there be a quarter-deck walk up and down which Conrad may turn in
his pyjamas and dressing-gown occasionally, getting relief from his
thoughts in a glance at the quiet fields amongst which the writer
will be practising golf strokes.... Well, in just such a room with
a barn to block the direct light, with a miniature stockyard, in a
commonplace downland country the writer--sits writing! And you dare
to tell him that he cannot go out and, in the rain, catching his
dangerous pony that swings round and kicks the inviting sieve of
corn out of your hand, just missing your chest.... He cannot drive
the seven miles to the Pent to ask Conrad what he thinks of Colonel
Marchand and Fashoda!... You must surely be lying.... Or you mean to
tell him that in half an hour Conrad, in the dilapidated motor hired
from the White Hart at Stanford won't be coming in to ask what we are
to think of Fashoda and Colonel Marchand and what we shall do if there
is really war with France.... We get the London papers only by the
second post at 4.30, and do not as a rule look at them until to-morrow
at breakfast-time. But in these exciting times, with Colonel Marchand
crossing the Sahara and hoisting the French flag in a position which
Kitchener of Khartoum has stated to be the key-point of the British
Empire in Africa and consequently on the road to India.... And the
French with their extraordinary .75 quick-firer field gun.... It all
turns on what the Germans will do, the Russians having their hands
full in the Far East....

It was like that, when we were not discussing the desirability of
the word bleu-fonc as an adjective to apply to cabbages in a field,
or when we were not moved to queer enthusiasms over the use of words
by Christina Rossetti.... But if you tell me that I cannot put in
Tommy and drive through the rain to the candle-lit Pent--no Eau, Gaz,
Electricit in _that_ gentleman's residence--well, if you tell me
that, I suppose you are right.... "C'est le mur d'un silence eternel
qui descend devant vous, mon vieux!"... For the feeling, through a
large part of a century, was for the writer very strong that Conrad
was there who _might_ be consulted about a difficulty--in politics, in
the architecture of a story, over an English word, or about the French
for Romance--for which there is no French!

The irresistible feeling that one had about him was that he was
practical that the last thing that he was was Slav. For the Slav, to
be true Slav, must be as helpless before the vicissitudes of this
world--as helpless as is a new-born kitten, a greyish sprawling
object, mostly jelly. A sort of Dostoieffsky! If you asked Conrad how
to circumvent a banker he would have an expedient. If you asked him
whether women ought to have a vote he would say: No: with decision.
And then, remembering the part played by women in keeping alive the
national feeling of his country, Poland, where all the men took to
drunkenness or lechery or listlessness after the abortive revolution
of 1862, he would say that the only creature that ought to be paid the
compliment of having a vote, a thing always useless, was such a woman
as his mother, Mme Kurzeniowski, or his aunt, Mme Paradowski. Or any
other woman! But, as his private expedient, he said to women in the
words of the Mohammedan ranee of Palembang: "Why should you strive
for domination during the day?... Your power is of the night, during
which, with a whisper, you shall destroy empires!"

The dominant attraction of Conrad's mind was the firmness with which
he held ideas after he had contemplated a sufficient number of facts
or documents. He had had great experience of the life of normal men;
his reading had been amazingly wide and his memory was amazingly
retentive. Amazingly, even to the writer, whose memory is sufficiently
retentive and whose reading wide if desultory. Yet Conrad never
presented any appearance of being a bookish, or even a reading man. He
might have been anything else: you could have taken fifty guesses at
his occupation, from precisely ship's captain to say financier, but
poet or even student would never have been among them and he would
have passed without observation in any crowd. He was frequently taken
for a horse fancier. He liked that.

His ambition was to be taken for--to be!--an English country gentleman
of the time of Lord Palmerston. There might have been worse ambitions.
To understand how a Pole, born in the government of Kiev, infinitely
far from even the sea, should have desired to be that--and should
have desired it with passion--the reader must keep in mind two things
if not three: one of them a vivid picture in the mind of the writer.
During the last century if you went down to Tilbury Dock you would see
families of Jewish-Poland emigrants landing. As soon as they landed
they fell on their hands and knees and kissed the soil of the land
of Freedom. For Conrad there was another side. As a child he lived
in a great house in Poland: a great house with wide avenues and many
lights at night. One night all the lights went out, the avenues were
deserted; a sledge without bells came before the portico. A figure,
cloaked and muffled to the hat rim came up the steps and was closeted
for long with the master of the house. Then drove away over the snow.
Conrad said he could imagine that he heard the voice of _l'or de la
perfide Albion_, jingling in great bags as the sledge went away. For
this was the emissary of Lord Palmerston, sowing gold all over Poland
so that the Polish revolutionary spirit might be kept alive and Russia
embarrassed in her encroachments on Pera or Afghanistan.

For that was England of Conrad's early vision: an immense power
standing for liberty and hospitality for refugees; vigilant over a
pax Britannica that embraced the world. With an all-powerful navy she
had an all-powerful purse. She was stable, reasonable, disciplined,
her hierarchies standing in their orders, her classes settled, her
Services capable and instinct with an adequate tradition. And ready to
face Russia with fleet or purse when or wherever they should meet. The
first English music-hall song that Conrad heard was:

    We don't want to fight but, by Jingo if we do,
    We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.
    We've fought the bear before and so we will again,
    The Russians shall not have Constantinople....

A Pole of last century--and above all things Conrad was a Pole of last
century--could ask nothing better.

And, above all things else, as the writer has somewhere pointed out,
Conrad was a politician. He loved the contemplation of humanity
pulling away at the tangled skeins of parties or of alliances. Until,
suddenly a strand gave, a position cleared up, a ministry was solidly
formed, a dynasty emerged. He was, that is to say a student of
politics, without prescription, without dogma, and, as a Papist, with
a profound disbelief in the perfectibility of human institutions.
The writer never saw Conrad read any book of memoirs except those of
Maxime Ducamp and the Correspondence of Flaubert; those we read daily
together over a space of years. But somewhere in the past Conrad had
read every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians' memoirs,
Mme de Campan, the Duc d'Audiffret Pasquier, Benjamin Constant,
Karoline Bauer, Sir Horace Rumbold, Napoleon the Great, Napoleon III,
Benjamin Franklin, Assheton Smith, Pitt, Chatham, Palmerston, Parnell,
the late Queen Victoria, Dilke, Morley.... There was no memoir of all
these that he had missed or forgotten--down to _Il Principe_ or the
letters of Thomas Cromwell. He could suddenly produce an incident from
the life of Lord Shaftesbury and work it into _Nostromo_: which was
the political history of an imagined South American Republic. That was
one of the secrets of his greatness.

But certainly he had no prescription. Revolutions were to him always
anathema since, he was accustomed to declare, _all_ revolutions
always have been, always must be, nothing more in the end than palace
intrigues: intrigues either for power within, or for the occupancy of,
a palace. The journalists' bar in the palace of the Luxemburg where
sits the present Senate of the Third Republic was once the bedchamber
of Marie de Medicis. That is not to say that Conrad actively desired
the restoration of the Bourbons: he would have preferred the
journalists to remain where they were rather than have any revolution
at all. All revolutions are an interruption of the processes of
thought and of the discovery of a New Form ... for the novel.

Indeed, almost the only revolution that he contemplated with
enthusiasm was one by which a successful adventurer seized the reins
of power. Anywhere! Some King Tom! It was not that his visions were
Napoleonic. His favourite modern ruler was Louis Napoleon, Napoleon
I being too big, too rhetorical, too portentous for any intimacy. We
planned for many years, and even wrote one scene of, a historical
novel dealing with First Empire figures. But the First Empire was
gone; the subject was the attempts made to save Ney from execution;
the chapter showed Louis XVIII a bewildered figure, forced to sleep
and receive petitioners in a corridor between two doors, the Protocol
providing lavish rooms for innumerable peers of France, lackeys and
parasites, but none at all for God's anointed whose handkerchief was
always dangling half-way out of his hip pocket. That was how we--or
rather how Conrad, for the writer never had any political views of any
strength at all--regarded restored Legitimacy. Yet he was fit to throw
the tea-cups into the fire if you derided the doctrine of the divine
right of kings.

No, on the whole his favourite political character was Louis Napoleon
as Adventurer and even Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, roused
some of his admiration. He liked gilt Third Empire furniture, all
other gilding, reviews, uniforms, la Montijo, mirrors, fraudulent
financiers, the Duc de Morny, the Mexican adventurer. He liked the
mournful cynical sovereign surrounded by the crowd of adventurers,
escrocs, rastaqoures and prostitutes in high places that brought down
the Empire. He admired Napoleon III for his dream of a Latin Union,
which Conrad found practicable and to be desired. That was probably
his idea of humanity, a realm in which the solitary, cynical, not
impracticable dreamer is brought down by his womankind, his relations,
his servants, his hangers on, his household. He saw the same microcosm
in the bankruptcy and ruin of a Court perfumer--or of the captain of a
coastwise trading ship. He prized fidelity, especially to adventurers,
above all human virtues and saw very little of it in this world.

His favourite political anecdote, that which he repeated the most
often, was of the Maire of the XIII Arrondissement who sent to Morny,
then his half-brother's Minister and taking the waters at Spa, a
telegram to the effect that the whole rue de la Glacire was in a
state of insurrection. It ended: "Que faire?" and Morny replied....
But we are writing for Anglo-Saxons. This not very edifying anecdote
was Conrad's favourite but it is not to be taken as implying that
Conrad's mind was unedified. It simply showed his contempt for the
way in which human affairs are conducted. It was as if he said: "All
politicians are such fools that you might as well conduct the high
businesses of State in the spirit of Morny. You will only find Maires
of the XIII Arrondissement to carry out your orders."

He desired a stable world in which you could think and develop the New
Form. And because at no phase of the world's history has there seemed
to be a portion of the world more stable than was England under the
ruling classes of Lord Palmerston's time he desired to be of the type
of a member of the ruling classes of England in Lord Palmerston's day.
He lived as such, and as such he died. We are so far from those days:
it seems hardly likely that anyone's withers will be wrung if we say
that he might have had a meaner ideal.

We come thus to Captain Marryat. It would be too much to say that
Marryat had any influence at all on Conrad as writer--though Conrad
was of opinion that Marryat had profoundly influenced his writing--but
the effect of Marryat on Conrad as philosopher _tel quel_, and as
English gentleman could not be too much stated. Indeed, in the course
of our last meeting, the writer reminded Conrad that almost the first
literary opinion Conrad ever uttered at the Pent was in eulogy of
Marryat. Conrad replied that he remained exactly of that opinion:
Marryat was, after Shakespeare, the greatest novelist as delineator
of character, that England has produced. The opinion must be limited
to what it covers, and that strictly. Conrad was not saying that
Marryat was, say, nearly as great a poet as Shakespeare; he was saying
that Marryat observed English character with exactitude and rendered
it without exaggeration, all other English novelists getting their
effects by more or less of caricature.

The books of the author of _Midshipman Easy_ are so relegated to
oblivion, being considered as boys' books, that this pronouncement
may appear strange. It may, however, be recommended to the reader's
serious attention as the measured opinion of no mean critic. What we
are about at the moment is considering the effect of Marryat upon the
character and psychology of Conrad.

_That_ influence at least was profound and lifelong like the undertone
of a song. During all the years of our collaboration it was always
as if Conrad were saying: "Ah: but wait till I get to my Napoleonic
novel, with the frigates in the Mediterranean." That was the golden
age for such English as are held by the sea. And during those years
we planned rather elaborately a collaboration set in late Napoleonic
to Restoration days, the central figures being Ney and an English
_milor_ with the spleen, but the narrator a frigate-Lieutenant,
protg of the _milor_ who, coming from the Mediterranean and gallant
service with the frigates, should introduce--the Marryat touch!...
We spent a great deal of time over memoirs of the period, the writer
occupying himself with Dundonald, English _milors_ and the part taken
by the Tsar in the execution of Ney, Conrad getting his information as
to the Restoration period in a way that was rather mysterious to the
writer, so did Conrad seem to have all those figures in his mind....

We discussed this novel till very late indeed in our association.
On an occasion in July 1916 Conrad said indeed to the writer:
"Well, you'll be able to bring something back for the Ney book,
about campaigning in France, ..." as we shook hands.... Alas! that
which wiped out so many little villages under our eyes wiped out
that book too, the writer abandoning for many years all idea of
writing--losing indeed all ability to write. And Conrad continued
alone.... Thus, in the _Rover_ in the offing, you have the vigilant
and capable frigate-captain!... And on the day of his death Conrad
was occupied--with Napoleon at Elba and the frigate service of the
Mediterranean, seeking to live again the glamour that the English
sea-novelist had cast over his young years in Poland. So tenacious are
the glamours of our youth!

Yes! _That_ influence at least was profound. He looked at the world of
human affairs with the eyes of Jack Easy and affronted difficulties
with the coolness of Percival Keene. At that statement the reader
should not smile. The tradition of the frigate service of Dundonald
and the rest was no mean one: its influence on the British character
was far-reaching, was all-important. And the achievement and tradition
of England during the last century cannot be ignored by those who can
be interested in the achievements and traditions of mankind.

The writer has said too much in other places of the influence of
Marryat on the writer himself and on Conrad to go picturesquely once
more over the matter. But there are those who have read neither
Marryat nor the writer. Marryat concerned himself mainly then with
the frigate warfare of Napoleonic times. And the frigate warfare of
Napoleonic times was, compared with the line of battle warfare for
which stand the names of Nelson and his great captains as something
obscure, anonymous, desperate and very gallant. For thousands who
shall know the names of Nelson, Howe, or St. Vincent there will be
hardly one that has heard tell of Cochrane. Yet this little service
was incessant, pursued under desperate conditions of weather and of
inshore work, the frigates being only upon occasion the mere eyes
of the fleet, the great fleets with the great first-raters rolling
majestically from ocean to ocean, half the world over and then
back again to fight now and then a Trafalgar or an Aboukir. But the
frigates were at it every day in the Mediterranean.

Such a service, without comfort, without advertisement, almost without
the glory of the King's uniform, for its officers dressed like
sweeps, remained midshipmen to the age of forty and were betallowed
to the elbow--was the meaning of England to Conrad, as to the writer
during his younger years. One saw the self-sacrifice, the patience,
the fidelity. And, if Conrad in later years wrote of fidelity as
the key-word of his 'message,' it was of this fidelity that he was
thinking. Of fidelity not to a realm from which they were for so long
absent, and not to a royal countenance which never shone upon them,
but of fidelity to an idea, to a service.

The idea was this: In the first place came the sea, the sea not as a
bitter element, but as an instrument by means of which the frigates
battled against inefficiency, strange customs, the eating of frogs,
wooden shoes. Upon the sea were only the English--and the French; the
English as the representatives of that Almighty which holds the sea in
the hollow of Its hand, the English, blond, hardy, cunning, vigilant,
each one six foot and over, jolly, in the exact image of their Maker,
cordial. The French, the subordinates, representatives of Satan,
perpetually driven off the sea to hide behind the moles of Toulon or
of Cherbourg, perpetually creeping out as do bed bugs from crevices in
walls.... One Englishman was worth one, three, seventeen, twenty-seven
Frenchmen.... There was the sea, then, and that its business, its
function.

Presumably the frigates did succeed in their work, though if you
read French text-books you would hardly think so any more than when
reading the Americans you will hear much about the Shannon and the
Chesapeake. According to the French it was _l'or de la perfide
Albion_ that did the trick. In that way Conrad got it both ways,
since he liked a nation that had both its sea-service and its gold.
Gold also is sterling, incorruptible, and has its fidelities. In the
meantime, there had grown up another service with a tradition almost
identical--that of the British mercantile marine, of ships not too
vast to be impermeable to the weather, making by means of the caprices
and brutalities of the winds, engrossed and perpetual departures and
landfalls round dangerous headlands. Nowadays you will find little
enough difference between the coastwise men of any nation, but in the
seventies and eighties of last century Conrad by dint of experience
found in that service, muted but almost more patient and engrossed,
the tradition of Marryat's frigates. It was fidelity to an ideal, the
ideal of the British merchant service; it was still more a tradition
working efficiently. For in that service, all going to make up the
record of British-owned bottoms, even if they sailed under the flag
of Siam, all going to contribute to the long story of what is the
ship-shape, you had hundreds of Dagoes, Lascars, Swedes, Danes, Finns,
Negroes, Americans, Kruboys.... And one Pole.

Conrad then, in his misty youth that seemed to pass in great houses
or in the prison-yards of the exiled child, and mostly at night or at
nightfall, read with engrossment Marryat and Fenimore Cooper, and so
sowed the seeds of his devotion to England. He had his devotion to his
art and his devotion to his second country. In the end his devotion to
his second country overcame his devotion to his art. The only occasion
on which the writer ever questioned the actions of Conrad--and it
is the truth that this was the only occasion on which any action of
Conrad's known to the writer was ever even questionable!--was when
that writer accepted membership of the British Academy. This as a
writer he should not have done, nor as an artist. The body was without
venerability, committed to courses of propaganda, and of a habit, to
be destructive to the art by which Conrad had made his name, to which
he owed fidelity.

Accordingly on a given occasion the writer remonstrated against this
questionable action. It was during sad times for the nation, in a
gloomy room of the most architecturally lugubrious buildings that
are to be found near the Marble Arch in London. Conrad was depressed:
there was no one that was then not depressed. The writer, the occasion
being one for clearings up of everything that could be cleared up,
put the question as to why Conrad had, how Conrad could have, thus
denied the gods of his manhood. A knighthood, yes! Any sort of Order,
yes! A C.B.; an O.B.E.!... It had not been ten years or much more
since, when talking of the possibilities of such a foundation, Conrad
had said that were he offered its insignia he would wear them on the
seat of his trousers--a gibe which we immediately introduced into the
_Inheritors_.

The reader should understand that this matter is one which divides
for ever--into sheep and goats--the world of the arts. There are
some few artists who will accept Academic honours; to the majority
of those who are really artists the idea is abhorrent, and those who
accept such honours betray their brothers. To this majority Conrad had
enthusiastically belonged. You had Flaubert who refused, you had Zola
who life-long sought, academic distinction. For Conrad there had used
to be no question as to which to follow. Now he had followed Zola.

Conrad answered with mildness. And nothing could have been more unlike
Conrad. Both of us being upholders of the duel, we had always lived
together under a sort of standard of formality. Except upon Belgian
railways when Conrad would refuse with fire to show his ticket to
collectors because he was an Englishman and they some sort of Dagoes
the writer never remembers otherwise to have remonstrated with the
author of _Heart of Darkness_.... But Conrad answered with heavy and
depressed mildness.... Yes, to have accepted that honour might have
the aspect of denying the gods of his youth. That was a thing to be
regarded with depression. On the other hand England had offered him
hospitality; he had been granted fame in England and the opportunity
to live in Kent where the lines of the fields run quietly one into the
other. England was desirous of founding an institution that should,
as a part of its functions, do some sort of honour to the trade of
authorship. The company in which he found himself, admirable as it
was, was not exactly that which could have been expected. But, if it
was a question of his private principles as against any honour he
could show the English State, his private principles must go by the
board.

It was a point of view.


                                  V

The most English of the English, Conrad was the most South French of
the South French. He was born in Beaucaire, beside the Rhone; read
Marryat in the shadow of the castle of the good king Rn, Daudet
on the Cannebire of Marseilles, Gautier in the tufts of lavender
and rosemary of the little forests between Marseilles and Toulon,
Maupassant on the French torpedo-boats on which he served and Flaubert
on the French flagship, _Ville d'Ompteda_. With the Sabran-Penthievres
and other Macmahonists he painted red the port of Marseilles,
intrigued for Napoleon III, hired, since there was nothing else to be
hired, an unpainted four-in-hand from a coachbuilder's yard and drove,
buried in actresses and the opera chorus to the races. So he made the
French navy too hot to hold him. That, however, is also the spirit of
the traditional British navy. The writer is never tired of reciting
the terms of the offence for which his great-uncle, Tristram Madox,
was cashiered: in that, whilst drunk he swam ashore from the flagship
without leave and riotously assaulted Mr. Peter Parker of Valetta,
tobacconist. The one offence is more French, the other more English....

As above, however, Conrad again and again recounted his Marseilles
exploit. No doubt with the fall of Macmahon and the disappearance
of any hope for the Bonapartists the chance of a career for Conrad
in the French navy so diminished as to leave that service with few
attractions. Conrad's influence and attaches in France were all Third
Empire. He would relate the instance of the unvarnished coach with
great energy and fire and then, dropping his hands with mock senility,
exclaim: "Alas, _tel que vous me voyez_... Now I am an extinct
volcano...."

It was not however that. It was merely that diminished circumstances
had reduced the team of four to the old mare or some remplaant.
We would drive down to Hythe or hire a motor that broke down eight
times in eighteen miles and go between the shallow downs up the Elham
valley--at the top of which he died--to Canterbury. And at once Conrad
was the sailor ashore. He _had_ to find a bar and have a drink, the
writer with the prudishness of the Englishman in his own county,
waiting outside. For you must not have a drink in the bar of your own
county town. A lunch at the farmer's ordinary with five pints of beer;
tea in the smoking-room with whiskies brought in on the tray! But in
the bar, never! The point is a fine one. But Conrad, though at home he
was the English country gentleman and other things permitting would
have bred shorthorns and worn leggings, threw, in his Jack-ashore
frame of mind, these considerations to the wind. A drink in the bar
was provided for in King's Regulations. You might not be thirsty: it
had to be.

Conrad's biography as narrated in those days to and in presence of the
writer, might as well here come in.... We have arrived, at any rate
in the writer's mind, at about the time when we dropped, ostensibly
for good, any hope of bringing _Romance_ to a finish and took to
collaborating on the _Inheritors_. By that date the writer had heard
enough of Conrad's autobiography, sufficiently repeated, to have a
rounded image of his past--such an image at any rate as Conrad desired
to convey. For, like every inspired raconteur Conrad modified his
stories subtly, so as to get in sympathy with his listener. He did it
not so much with modifications of fact as with gestures of the hand,
droppings of the voice, droopings of the eyelid and letting fall his
monocle--and of course with some modifications of the facts. So the
story afterwards used in a _Smile of Fortune_ told to the writer
alone was one thing and told to his sprightly, very intelligent aunt,
Mme. Paradowski, was something quite different. It would be thinner,
less underlined, more of a business-like subject for treatment if
told to the writer alone: when told to the French lady--who was also
a novelist--it would be much livelier, much more punctuated with
gestures and laughs--much more _piment_; in fact, the story of a
sailor's _bonne fortune_.

It was the only story of a bonne fortune that the writer ever heard
told by Conrad. And the note may as well here be made that in all our
extreme intimacy, lasting for many years, neither of us ever told what
is called a smoking-room story. We never even discussed the relations
of the sexes.

So, at the turn of the century--for the _Inheritors_ must have been
published about 1901 and, having been written rather fast, must have
been begun in 1900--the history of Conrad appeared much as follows to
the writer. He was born--not, of course, physically in Beaucaire--but
in that part of Poland which lay within the government of Kiev--in
Ukrainia, in the Black Lands where the soil is very fertile. He was
born towards 1858. At any rate he was old enough to remember the
effects of the Polish Revolution of the early sixties--say 1862. The
oldest--the first--memory of his life was of being in a prison yard on
the road to the Russian exile station of the Wologda. "The Kossacks
of the escort," these are Conrad's exact words repeated over and over
again, "were riding slowly up and down under the snowflakes that fell
on women in furs and women in rags. The Russians had put the men into
barracks the windows of which were tallowed. They fed them on red
herrings and gave them no water to drink. My father was among them."

(The implication is of course that Conrad's father died of thirst
behind those windows that were tallowed so that the men should not
look out and see their womenfolk. Actually of course Conrad's father
did not die in these circumstances, but it was not until quite lately
that the writer was aware of his misapprehension.... This, however,
is the exact history of a relationship.)

Conrad remained with his mother in exile until he was nine or ten,
then, his mother being threatened with an immediate death from
tuberculosis they were allowed to return to Poland. Conrad's mother
was a woman of great beauty of physique and of character. Her face was
oval, her black hair braided round it, her eyes intent, her manner
quiet but spirited. His father was less effectual, the prime mover of
an abortive revolution, a fact which Conrad deprecated. His father
was not so dark as his mother; untidy bearded, with high cheek-bones,
he was the proprietor, not professionally but as a revolutionist, of
a famous newspaper in which he wrote a great deal. He was constantly
writing: his style was not very distinguished.

Of his father Conrad spoke always deprecatorily. This was partly
politeness. Whoever you were, his interlocutor, all that pertained to
you--your father and all your ancestors--must be superior to his. It
was his poor little books, his poor little brains, his poor little
exploits set against all your splendours. Partly, too, it really
pained him to think that his father had been a revolutionary--and an
unsuccessful revolutionary at that--as if he had been pre-natally
connected with something not ship-shape! For his mother he had on the
other hand that passionate adoration that is felt by the inhabitants
of Latin and Western Slav countries for their mothers and that seems
so 'foreign' to the Anglo-Saxon. Oddly but comprehensibly when he
spoke of his mother as revolutionary he was full of enthusiasm. For
him the Polish national spirit had been kept alive by such women as
his mother: the men were hopeless. Again not ship-shape. This was not
difficult to understand. The men were prohibited from living a life of
their own. The only career that the Russians allowed them to study for
was that of the law. So they were all either lawyers or babblers--or
both, and without any practical training. This for generations and
generations....

As for class--the Kurzeniowskis were country gentlemen, for all
the world like an English county family, with land lived on and
owned since the darkest ages, untitled, but aristocrats to the
backbone; what is called in England 'good people,' a term which is
untranslatable into any other language and incomprehensible even to
Americans. This made Conrad feel at home in Kent: many times he said
so. The feudal spirit there survived in the territories of the great
land-owners.

Conrad had an uncle--Paradowski--who was a great Pan, guardian to
the children of half the noble families of that Government. He had a
longish, as if squared face, a long nose, meditative hands that were
always pausing in some action and long brownish hair that fell rather
Germanly on to the collar of a velvet coat. It was to his great
country house that the emissary of Palmerston had come. (The writer's
friend Count Potocki tells the writer that the name of this uncle
must have been _Bibrowski_. The name Paradowski remains, however,
very firmly in the writer's mind. Conrad was inordinately proud and
fond of this uncle and fully four-fifths of his conversation when it
referred to his Polish days concerned itself with this relative: there
were, for instance, the Paradowski dragoons, a famous Russian regiment
named after him or his ancestors. Similarly, in early days Conrad
always wrote and pronounced his name as K_u_rzeniowski; the correct
transliteration would appear to be "K_o_rzeniowski." It does not seem
to matter much.)

This uncle stood well with the Russians. Before that abortive
revolution he had been a close friend of one of the Grand Dukes and
had had a part in drafting the constitution that the Tsar had proposed
to grant to Poland. In the revolution he had taken no part, not
because he was indifferent to the interests of Poland but because he
knew it must prove abortive and cause much suffering and persecution
to the Russian Poles. Besides, it brought about the rescinding of the
constitution. After the revolution he busied himself with alleviating
the sufferings of his compatriots; he fed legions of the starving
dispossessed; he secured the return of their patrimonies to the
children of the exiled. Amongst these last was Conrad: his uncle
secured the return to him of half the great confiscated estate of his
father and got him permission to reside in Russian Poland, in his own
great house. (The emissary of Palmerston had by the by been sent away
with a flea in his ear.)

Here for years and years Conrad read Marryat--and Fenimore Cooper. And
it was one of the little ingenuous pleasures of Conrad to remember
that in Paris after Waterloo, as recorded in the Memoirs, more crowds
followed Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper on the boulevards than
ever followed the King of Prussia. It pleased him to find one of
his early heroes thus blessed by Fame of the bronze lungs. To this
information the writer added the other that in that same Paris of that
same date Assheton Smith, the Milor of incredible wealth and _spleen_
was, according to the journals, followed about by crowds even greater
than attached themselves to the Tsar of Russia. Out of a sort of tacit
politeness we never tried to decide whether the King of Prussia or
the Tsar of Russia had the larger following. But Assheton Smith was
to have been the central figure of our novel about the execution of
Ney--the Milor with the spleen intervening nearly successfully to
save the beau sabreur. This, not because he felt any sympathy for Ney
but because he desired to put a spoke in the wheel of Wellington and
Blucher and all the fighting fellows who were beginning to think
themselves of much too much importance, though merely younger sons.
However, he made too much progress in the affections of the Tsar's
Egeria, so Ney was shot by the Tsar's orders, just opposite the
Closerie des Lilas on a spot occupied now by a station of the Seaux
railway ... to spite Assheton Smith.

The writer never understood why it was always night in Poland:
so however it remains for him: a long white house, in the dark,
with silver beeches in an avenue or, ghostly, in groups. Indoors
was Conrad, right through adolescence, for ever reading in the
candle-light of an immense, stately library, with busts on white
plinths and alternate groups of statuary in bronze. His uncle would
be in a rather subterranean study at the other end of the vast
house--writing his memoirs. When these two ever met the writer never
knew: of meals or even of bed he heard nothing: it was a perpetual
reading. As for the uncle's memoirs.... Years after, not so long
ago, the writer found Conrad in a state of extreme perturbation. He
said, "My dear faller, you must go with me to Boulogne! You'll have
to fight the second, of course. It's always done in Polish duelling!"
It is part of what gives vagueness to this narrative that Conrad
always credited the writer with an almost supernatural prescience as
to his, Conrad's, most remote or most immediate past. He would say:
"You remember when I was on the _Flower of Surabaya_, old Corvin,
the supercargo, had that shaving set that I lost on the _Duke of
Sutherland_ ..." naming two ships and a supercargo of whom the writer
had never yet heard.... So on this occasion the writer naturally
agreed to go to Boulogne and pictured an immense, black moustached
opponent in a busby, a frogged dolman, top boots and a cavalry sabre
whose bare blade he caressed with his left hand.... And it was not for
several days during which we made preparations for the journey that
the reason for our journey itself was made clear to the writer. Conrad
was too distressed to talk about it.

It appeared that the uncle Paradowski, almost viceroy of Russian
Poland and guardian to half the sons and daughters of the Polish
nobility of his province, had had unheard-of opportunities of
learning all the matrimonial and family scandals of his neighbours.
All these he had set down in his journal--and this journal had just
been published. It had caused the wildest consternation in Poland
and as Conrad was the legal heir of M. Paradowski the responsibility
for the publication was considered to be his. The son of one of the
most horribly aspersed couples had therefore challenged Conrad and
was coming to Boulogne. Conrad was horrified to the point of madness:
and he was justified. That poor fellow shot himself in despair over
the revelations, in the railway carriage, on the journey. So we never
fought....

Conrad emerges then from the glamorous shadows of Poland, making the
Grand Tour with a lively young tutor. For the first time, in Venice,
from a window, he saw in the Giudecca a ship. A British schooner.

As to biography during the next few years the writer becomes hazy.
Conrad himself perhaps wished to throw a haze over a part of his life
that was for him a period of indecisions. At one time he would say
that he had determined to go to sea, years before, when first reading
Marryat; at another, that a blaze of desire sprang up in him on sight
of that British schooner with the emotional lines of her hull; at one
time that he rushed back to Poland to communicate his decision to his
uncle; at another that he finished the Grand Tour on the conventional
lines, but arguing with his tutor and at last finally breaking very
gradually the news to his uncle. His uncle thought him mad: there need
be no doubt about that: no Pole had ever gone to sea: all Poles had
always been lawyers: Conrad must not go to sea but must study for the
law. At the university of--was it?--Lemberg.

Conrad at any rate went to Marseilles, and entered the French navy. By
the influence of his uncle--the Poles have always had great influence
in the Chancelleries and ministries of Europe--he was granted a
commission in that service. In it he remained an indefinite time,
leaving with the rank--he was specific as to that--of _Lieutenant
de Torpilleurs de la Marine Militaire Franaise_. During that time,
on the French flagship _Ville d'Ompteda_, he had witnessed the
bombardment of a South American town. The town comes back to the
writer as Caracas: but apparently Caracas is inland, so the flagship
can hardly have bombarded it. Perhaps Conrad went with a landing party
inland to that capital. In that way he saw the landscape of the track
to the silver mine of _Nostromo_.

There followed the period of sailor-ashorishness in Marseilles with
the Bonapartist aristocracy. After the episode of the unvarnished
coach loaded with actresses Conrad telegraphed to his uncle to come
and pay his debt and embarked on his Carlist adventure. This is told
sufficiently as Conrad used to tell it by word of mouth, in the
episode of the _Tremolino_ in the _Mirror of the Sea_. When taking
this episode down from Conrad's dictation--as indeed when taking
others of his personal recollections down from dictation at times when
Conrad was too crippled by gout and too depressed to write--the writer
noticed that Conrad sensibly modified aspects and facts of his word
of mouth narrations. The outlines remained much the same, the details
would differ.

As told by Conrad--and the writer must have heard all Conrad's
stories five times and his favourite ones much more often--the
Carlist adventure was as follows: At the date of his leaving the
French service the Carlist War was being desultorily waged in the
North of Spain. (The Carlists were the supporters of Don Carlos, the
legitimist Pretender to the Spanish throne.) The cause of the Carlists
sufficiently appealed to Conrad: it was Legitimist; it was picturesque
and carried on with at least some little efficiency. It offered a
chance of adventure. In company with like-minded friends, then, Conrad
set to work at providing rifles for the army of the Pretender. They
purchased a small, fast sailing ship--the _Tremolino_, beautiful name.
And of all the craft on which Conrad sailed this was the most beloved
by him. In our early days her name was seldom off his tongue and, when
he mentioned her, his face lit up. Nay, it lit up before he mentioned
her, the smile coming, before the name, to his lips.

The writer never heard, in those days, what make of ship she was.
He was expected to know that: Conrad would say: "You know how the
_Tremolino_ used to come round...." So the writer imagined her as
a felucca, with high, bowed, white sails against storm-clouds and
rust-coloured cliffs. She was the beautiful ship--as Turgenev was the
beautiful Russian genius.

Pacing up and down Conrad would relate how they ran those rifles. The
method was this: They would load the _Tremolino_, at Marseilles, with
oranges, bound ostensibly for Bordeaux or any up-channel port. Thus,
"If any Spanish gunboat accosted us we would have a perfectly good
bill of lading. Out in the Channel we would meet a British schooner
and throwing the oranges overboard we would load up with rifles...."
Those particular sentences, with their slightly unusual use of the
word 'would,' Conrad never varied.... He would have begun his story,
unemotionally, with such historic explanations as his hearer seemed to
need. Then he would come to the _Tremolino_ and his face would light
up. This emotion would last him for a minute or two. At, as it were
the angle where Spain turns down from France in the Mediterranean,
as if the _Tremolino_ had got thus far and was just going through
the blue water with her burden of oranges, he would render his voice
dry to say either: "The method was this...." Or: "Our modus operandi
was as follows...." And then, after taking a breath: "Out in the
Channel we...." He would then go on to explain the necessities they
had when making that landfall. "You could bribe any Spanish guarda
costa on land with a few pesetas or a bottle or two of rum...."
but the officers of the gunboats that patrolled the coast were
incorruptible....

So one night the landlord of the inn omitted to show the agreed on
light. He was drunk. In the morning we saw a Spanish gunboat steaming
backwards and forwards in the narrow offing. The bay was a funnel,
like this.... We ran the _Tremolino_ on a rock, set fire to her.
Swam ashore and got country clothes for a disguise and proceeded to
Marseilles as best we could. Penniless. Without a penny.

In telling these stories Conrad would thus occasionally duplicate his
words, trying the effect of them. Then we would debate: What is the
practical, literary difference between: Penniless and Without a penny?
You wish to give the effect, with the severest economy of words, that
the disappearance of the _Tremolino_ had ruined them, permanently, for
many years.... Do you say then, _penniless_, or _without a penny_?...
You say _Sans le sou_: that is fairly permanent. _Un sans le sou_ is
a fellow with no money in the bank, not merely temporarily penniless.
But 'without a penny' almost always carries with it: 'in our pockets.'
If we say then 'without a penny,' that connoting the other: 'We
arrived in Marseilles without a penny in our pockets.'... Well, that
would be rather a joke: as if at the end of a continental tour you
had got back to Town with only enough just to pay your cab-fare home.
Then you would go to the bank. So it had better be 'penniless.' That
indicates more a state than a temporary condition.... Or would it be
better to spend a word or two more on the exposition? That would make
the paragraph rather long and so dull the edge of the story....

It was with these endless discussions as to the exact incidence of
words in the common spoken language--_not_ the literary language--that
Conrad's stories always came over to the writer. Sometimes the story
stopped and the discussion went on all day; sometimes the discussion
was shelved for a day or two. There were words that we discussed for
years. One problem was, as has already been hinted at: How would you
translate _bleu-fonc_ as applied to a field of cattle cabbage: the
large Jersey sort of whose stalks varnished walking sticks are made?
Or _bleu-du-roi_? And again, what are the plurals of those adjectives
in French--as a side issue.... That problem we discussed at intervals
for ten years--the problem of the field of cabbages, not of course the
plurals.... Now, we shall never solve it....

Conrad, then, again telegraphed to his uncle to come and pay his
debts.... The writer used to have a great-uncle whose one expedient in
life was to take a cab. One day this gentleman, walking past Exeter
Hall, met a lion. Exeter Hall in the sixties was a menagerie. When
he was asked: "What _did_ you do?" he would reply in tones of mild
disgust at the questioner's want of _savoir faire_: "_Do?_ Why I took
a cab!"... In the same way Conrad used to telegraph to his uncle to
pay his debts and to come to Marseilles to do it!

He embarked in a French Messageries steamer as a hand before the mast
and, as has been said, made one voyage to Constantinople, seeing tents
on the hills above the European city. He returned to Marseilles.
Perhaps his uncle had not yet arrived to pay his debts or did so only
just after. Or perhaps he came three times to Marseilles. Conrad used
occasionally to let drop that, as the writer knew, he had run through
three fortunes in his life. At any rate the image remaining to the
writer is that, as Conrad sailed away, a ship's boy, in a British
brig bound for Lowestoft, Pan Paradowski stood on the edge of the
Cannebire, like a great land lion, lamenting on the brink of the
water his beloved, ugly duckling of a nephew who should have become a
seal.... A sea lion....


                                  VI

Lowestoft has always seemed to the writer to be a queer, bleak,
whitewashed little old place from which to begin the conquest of a
language, a conspiracy against a literature, a career of fame that
became world-wide. It used at any rate to be all that: queer, bleak,
whitewashed, with flagstaffs, coastguards, high skies and north-east
wind. The writer must have been there first at the age of five or
six, and, by stretching a point or so and ignoring a couple of years,
we used to arrive at the theory that coincidence had brought us
together thus early. That cannot actually have been the case. When
Conrad first heard or spoke an English word the writer cannot have
been much more than three: so we may be said to have learnt grown-up
English in about the same year.... But we used to keep a slight haze
over our respective ages. Conrad was a little sensitive about his
years, towards forty-five, and the writer did not then care.

Besides, Conrad liked coincidences--in our playtime. He liked to amuse
himself with resemblances between himself and other great men--Johnson
collected orange peel and dried it, so at one time Conrad had done.
Or he would find in memoirs accidental traits of resemblance between
himself and Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Theophile Gautier or General
Gallifet. He would look up from his book and read the passage out with
hilarious pleasure. He liked, as has been said, to think that at one
of the Chippendale desks that we had at the Pent Christina Rossetti
had written and at another, given to the writer's father as a wedding
present, Carlyle, who was its donor. He would say that _Heart of
Darkness_ was written on the same wood as:

    Rest, rest, a perfect rest,
    Shed over brow and breast,
    Her face is towards the West,
    The peaceful land.
    She shall not see the grain
    Ripen on hill and plain,
    She shall not feel the rain
    Upon her hand....

--and the _End of the Tether_ before the glass bookshelves that had
seen Carlyle write the _French Revolution_. It did not matter that
Christina wrote most usually on the corner of her washstand or that
Carlyle had bought the desk at a secondhand dealer's in the street
next Tite Street, Chelsea. It made indeed no difference that he
disliked the work of Carlyle or thought Christina the greatest master
of words in verse. The lines just cited were the only English poetry
that the writer ever heard Conrad quote. He had literally no ear for
English verse.... But there _Heart of Darkness_ had to have been
written, and there the poem; here the _End of the Tether_, and here
_The French Revolution_.... It was like building retrospective castles
in Spain, it was squeezing the last drop out of the subject.

So with our coincidental careers. The coincidences had to be there
for moments of elation. The writer, after our visit to Mr. Wells,
happened to ask whether the great storm in which Conrad had come up
channel for the first time had been identical with the great gale
that had wrecked the _Plassy_. And immediately it had to be. It could
not have been by seven years or so. But it _was_.... For the rest of
our lives it had to be. It shall. So with Lowestoft. Conrad could
bring himself to remember there a little boy with long, golden hair,
a bucket and a spade, who used to march up to the young able-seaman
and ask him questions in an unintelligible tongue.... And indeed, in
moments of _great_ effusiveness, patting the writer on the shoulder,
Conrad used to assert that it was one of the writer's books, seen on
the bookstall of Geneva railway station, that had first turned his
thoughts to writing English as a career. That _might_ indeed have
happened. But one detail of Conrad's narration was too much for the
writer's bibliophilic prudishness--though he would connive at any
time at the twisting of manageable years between two friends. But
several times before the discovery of this immense coincidence Conrad
had related how he had stood on Geneva railway platform, looking
at the bookstall and idly wondering what he was going to do next
with his life. He had been recovering from an illness, in the same
hydrotherapie as that in which Maupassant died. Another coincidence.
He had seen a row of small, canary-yellow--remember the canary
yellow--volumes. They were the books of the _Pseudonym Library_ that
Mr. Garnett had fathered--about the colour and not much larger, they
were than a packet of Maryland cigarettes at 1 fr. 50. But they were
famous throughout Europe. There was no railway bookstall on which you
did not find them.... And looking at them Conrad said: "Why should I
not write, too?"... The writer's third book had been published in that
very year, fathered too by Mr. Garnett, issued by the same firm in a
series called the _Independent Library_.... It might very well have
been on the bookstall, the series having been intended for foreign
circulation. There was nothing to make the thing inherently even
improbable.... Alas! The writer's work was bound in a sort of decayed
liver-colour: the most hideous that the writer has ever even imagined.
"So it couldn't be me," as the old mare said. But nothing would have
pleased Conrad's generous and effusive moods better than to claim the
writer as his literary godfather. He was like that.

Years later, the writer having landed in this country at Rouen, if
occurred to him as his heel struck the quay: Conrad began to write
_Almayer's Folly_ in the state-room of a ship moored in this very
port. When he looked up from his desk, through the porthole he used
to see the inn at which Emma Bovary met her lover. Is that then this
very spot? Do I then begin where Conrad began that other battle?...
In an interval the writer asked Conrad whether these spots could be
coincidental. He at once began to be very animated on a drooping
occasion: "Yes, yes," he said. "Opposite the very spot.... Two doors
to the left of the road that goes up to the Poste Centrale.... My dear
Ford.... The very spot." That coincidence the writer will not attempt
to disturb.

Conrad landed, then, at Lowestoft when the writer was about three,
and Conrad himself not much more than twenty: the writer is fairly
certain, in 1877. Here he heard his first English words, to recognise
them. They were: "Eggs and bacon or marmalade?" Sitting in the bar of
a public-house he had been taken to by an old gentleman who eventually
invited him to stay. Every morning at breakfast the old gentleman
uttered the above morning shibboleth of England and then went to his
business. He was the proprietor of the famous Lowestoft pottery works,
so eventually Conrad served his time as a boy on a brig owned by the
pottery proprietor. It made fortnightly voyages to Newcastle for coal
needed by the pottery. In such coastwise service he passed the time
necessary for him to become by turn A.B., second mate and master. He
became a naturalised British subject just before passing for master....

It was during all these years that he read. Men at sea read an
inordinate amount. During the watches when they are off duty they can,
if they are so minded, sit about by the hour with books, engrossed,
like children. A large percentage of the letters received by writers
from readers come from sailors either in the King's or the merchant
service. Conrad had a great many such correspondents: one of his own,
a naval officer, the writer curiously shared with Conrad. As each of
our books came out he would write to its author, from off Gibraltar,
from the China seas, from some Pacific station--very good letters. He
seemed to have no idea of any relationship between his two addressees,
but as he never gave the name of a ship neither of us ever wrote to
him. His letters ceased after 1914.

It was Conrad's great good luck to be spared the usual literature
that attends on the upbringing of the British writer. He read
such dog-eared books as are found in the professional quarters of
ships' crews. He read Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss Braddon--above all Miss
Braddon!--the _Family Herald_, rarely even going as high as the late
William Black or the pseudo-literary writers of his day. He once or
twice said that going down Ratcliffe Highway he was jumped out at from
a doorway by a gentleman who presented him with a pocket copy of the
English Bible. This was printed on rice paper. He used the leaves for
rolling cigarettes, but before smoking always read the page. So, he
said, he learned English. The writer has always imagined this story
to be one of Conrad's mystifications. Normally he would express the
deepest gratitude to the writers of the _Family Herald_--a compilation
of monthly novelettes the grammar of which was very efficiently
censored by its sub-editors--and above all to Miss Braddon. She wrote
very good, very sound English; machined her plots inoffensively and
well; was absolutely workmanlike, her best novels being the later and
less-known ones. Long after this period of seamanship Conrad read _The
Orange Girl_, a novel placed in the time of Charles II. He recognised
in it, so he then said, all the qualities that he had found in this
novelist's work when he had been before the mast. Miss Braddon learned
Greek at the age of eighty in order to read Homer in the original. She
died only very lately.

From that time, for ten years, Conrad followed the sea. The deep sea,
reading all sorts of books. Once an officer with quarters of his own
he resumed his reading of French along with the English popular works.
He read with the greatest veneration Flaubert and Maupassant; with
less, Daudet and Gautier; with much less Pierre Loti. Tormented with
the curiosity of words, even at sea, on the margins of the French
books he made notes for the translation of phrases. The writer has
seen several of these old books of Conrad, notably an annotated copy
of _Pecheur d'Islande_--and of course the copy of _Madame Bovary_ upon
the end papers and margins of which _Almayer's Folly_ was begun.

Of Conrad's deep-sea life the writer proposes to say next to nothing.
Intimately mixed up as he was with the writing of so many of Conrad's
sea-stories he could not disentangle to his own satisfaction which
version of a semi-autobiographic story, like _Heart of Darkness_, was
the printed story, which the preparation for the printed story, as
Conrad told it to the writer, which the version that Conrad told for
the pleasure of chance hearers and which was, as it were, the official
autobiographic account. Occasionally, as in his account of his meeting
with Roger Casement on the fringe of the bush outside Boma, Conrad
would turn to the writer and say: "You'll keep that, _mon vieux_, for
my biography, ..." speaking semi-jocularly.

However, by a curious fatality, during the late war the writer
happened to come across a largish body of writing in the form of
letters written by Conrad from aboard ship to a compatriot. By Conrad
as politician, not as seaman! It was precisely a body of writing since
each of the letters was a sort of essay on international politics and
it was curious in that it was to all intents and purposes completely
uninteresting. It was in a sense passionate in that it was filled
with aspirations that Great Britain should join in one combination or
another against Russia. She was to join Germany, Austria, France--any
one, so long only as she fought the Bear. But all these letters were
written with a fluency, such that, had they come before the writer
editorially he would at once have thrown them into the waste-paper
basket. It was as if Lord Macaulay had been writing leaders for a
popular paper.... Before that one of Conrad's relatives had showed
the writer a number of letters that Conrad had written to the
_Indpendance Belge_. These were quite another matter--admirably
written, intensely emotional. As if Pierre Loti had had some heart!
They had in fact, as is to be expected, a great deal of the body and
substance of _Heart of Darkness_.

At both of these documents, however, the writer did no more
than glance. The lady had treasured up as cuttings her nephew's
correspondence and, when Conrad was out of the room, presented the
bundle to Conrad's _ami le pote_. He read them for perhaps half an
hour before Conrad came in again: then their author exhibited so much
perturbation that the writer desisted. The probability is that Conrad
burned the bundle.... It was very similar with the other letters. They
were lent to the writer by their addressee at a time when the writer
was extremely occupied; he glanced at them for long enough to form
the opinion expressed above and then put them away. Before he had had
time to look at them again it occurred to him that Conrad might prefer
him not to read them. He accordingly wrote to Conrad and received the
answer that Conrad would extremely prefer that the letters should not
be re-read and the author returned them to their owner. It is to be
hoped that they will not be disinterred.

It should not be inferred that Conrad had anything to hide. He
disliked the writer's reading his early works out of the shyness
that attends the maturity of every author. This writer would give a
good deal if the shelf in the British Museum that contains his early
writings could be burned, and Conrad would occasionally say that the
idea of the writer or anyone else reading certain of the stories of
the _Outpost of Progress_ or even certain paragraphs of his later work
caused him to have _chair de poule_ all down his spine. It is like a
feeling of physical modesty.

However, in moments more robust he would declare that the articles
in the form of letters were remarkable productions. He would remind
the writer of his aunt's expressed opinion that those letters formed
magnificent prose: and in moments of depression over his then work he
would declare that what he had written in French before ever trying
English was infinitely above anything he could do in the inexact,
half-baked language that English was. He put it that the idea of
really _writing_ English--an English that should have an abiding
value--never appeared to him practical whilst he was at sea. He
would write essays and long letters with the idea of improving his
vocabulary for social occasions. Then, one day, writing an imaginary
letter to the _Times_ about some matter professional to the British
Mercantile Marine, he felt as if he had really 'bitten into his
pen.'... The earlier letters at which the writer glanced sufficiently
confirmed this. It was not that they were bad: they were just glib.

At what moment of writing or reading, on the bridge, in what harbour
Conrad thus found the religion of English prose the writer does not
remember. It was probably in Sydney during a period in a convalescent
home. It comes back, that this is what Conrad said, but that may
very well be a mistake.... Conrad, however, used to say that in that
convalescent home they were fed on tomatoes and milk, a horrible
combination: occasionally also he used to say that his early work was
like tomatoes and milk taken together. A horrible combination! he
would add.... Or, of course, the revelation of his powers may have
come to him in Rouen.

Anyhow, somewhere on the dark waters Conrad found religion.

We had left Lowestoft and passed for master.... We made the voyage
in the _Judea, Do or Die_--actually the _Palestine_--that you find
narrated in _Youth_. In the East we passed so and so many years.
You find the trace of them in the _End of the Tether_, to go no
further outside the _Youth_ volume. We commanded the Congo Free State
navy--for the sake of _Heart of Darkness_. So we have the whole gamut
of youth, of fidelity and of human imbecility.... And if the writer
write 'we'--that is how it feels. For it was not possible to be
taken imperiously through Conrad's life, in those unchronological
and burning passages of phraseology, and not to feel--even to
believe--that one had had, oneself, that experience. And the feeling
was heightened by Conrad's affecting to believe that one had, at least
to the extent of knowing at all times where he had been, what seen,
and what performed.

The scenes of Conrad's life as afterwards rendered, say in _Heart of
Darkness_, are really as vivid in the writer's mind from what Conrad
said as from what Conrad there wrote. It is a curious affair. Actually
under the writer's eyes are the bright, lit up keys of a typewriter.
Yet perfectly definitely he sees _both_ the interior and the outside
of a palm-leaf hut, daylight shining through the interstices. A man
lies on the floor of the hut, reaching towards a pile of condensed
milk tins. The man is half in shadow--half Conrad, half the writer:
too tall for Conrad; stretched out a full eight feet, trunk and arms.
Outside an immense grey tide, the other shore hardly visible: a few
darkish trees of irregular outline. And a man--Coming. In a planter's
dress: breeches, leggings, a flannel shirt, a sombrero.... Some time
before he had lifted up the branches of the forest on the opposite
shore and looked across at our hut.... He makes a fire and gives us
some soup.... He comes once a fortnight....

We had been at the sources of the Congo: nearly to Fashoda, says
the ungeographical part of our minds that once pored over a map of
Africa to see everywhere _Terra Incognita_--in the eighties--and that
has never again looked at a map of Africa. We had belonged to the
Humanitarian Party. The Humanitarian Party did not approve of feeding
our black troops on black prisoners: the Conservatives did. So the
Conservatives had poisoned us or something the equivalent. And had
put our quasi corpse in charge of native bearers to take us, dead
or alive, down to Boma on the coast. It was all one to the natives
whether at Boma they delivered us quick or dead: they were paid the
same.

Half down the Congo they had dumped us in a hut that was a cache
for condensed milk. They had gone away for a fortnight to their own
village.... We extracted the condensed milk from the tins by suction,
having first pierced them with a pocket knife.... The condensed milk
was the very antidote for the poison!... The bearers, black, their
white teeth protruding, come back, not displeased to find us alive.
Not pleased.... Astonished!... They carried Conrad down to Boma, a
sweltering collection of tin huts. The Bomese took great pains to keep
you alive: you must die at sea, otherwise the death rate of the Congo
Free State rises by one....

At Boma then, listless from the abominable huts, we strolled out one
day along the coast, between the satin sea and the steaming trees. A
man, with the sunlight on his face, in white tennis shoes with two
bulldogs at his heels stepped out of the dark forest. He said Hullo!
He had strolled across Africa from the Zanzibar side in his tennis
shoes, with no bearers, no escort but his bulldogs, no arms. He had
such a fascination for the black fellows. That was Roger Casement....
There was a great deal of light, the sky blue, the sea dove-coloured
and oily, the forest black-green, a wall; the beach pink, the bulldogs
crashed over it to sniff at our heels....

It was in pictures like that that the writer had Conrad's life, up to
about the time when we engaged on the _Inheritors_. Half of it came
in a shyish way, for biography, half in pictures, the result of stray
anecdotes. Thus if one or other of us happened to be nervous from
overwork and we talked of nerves Conrad would say: "By Jove, after I
came out of the Ospedale Italiano and went into the City to draw some
pay, I was so frightened at the racket on the Underground that I had
to lie down on the floor of the compartment. Nerves all to pieces...."
So the writer has his picture of Conrad lying between the seats on
the things like duckboards that used to floor the old Underground
carriages; it was only by conjunctions before and after that he pieced
together that Conrad went into the Italian Hospital for Seamen in
London after coming back from Boma and that from there he went to
Switzerland, to the hydrotherapie near Geneva in which Maupassant died.

All to pieces as he then was he had to think of how he was going to
employ the rest of his life. For following the sea he imagined that
he would be no longer fit. When he was a little better he saw on the
bookstall of Geneva station those yellow volumes. The sight of them
and the thought of Maupassant made him say: "By Jove: Why not write?"
When he had settled that he might write he had to settle in which
language his writing should be. There were French and English. In
English there were no stylists--or very rare ones. French bristled
with them. When he made the decision to write in English the writer
does not know. He used to say that it was in Rouen harbour, opposite
the hotel in which Emma Bovary had been accustomed to meet Rodolphe.

Here, looking out of his porthole across the frozen ground at the inn
door, he began translating phrases from the scene between Rodolphe and
Emma at the cattle-show. He said that he began with Rodolphe's formal
phrases of romantic love that were whispered between the announcements
of prizes for bullocks and so, working outwards, reached the blanker
pages of cover, title and half-title pages. On these he began
_Almayer's Folly_. He was reading at the time Daudet's _Jack_, which
immensely fascinated him, though he found it _trop charg_--as who
should say, too harrowing.

What stands in the two paragraphs above Conrad told the writer over
and over and over again.

In the sad years for Europe, Conrad wrote a passage contradicting
the statement made by someone somewhere in print that he had had to
choose between writing in French or English. He stated that from the
first English had jumped at him and held him. This was a politeness
to England at a time when extravagantly patriotic pronouncements were
called for from persons of foreign origin: Henry James imagined the
_beau geste_ of naturalising himself as a British subject practically
on his deathbed, Conrad this other. From the national point of view
it was desirable, from the point of view of literary precision, to
be regretted. For it is obvious that anyone who contemplates writing
and is practically bi-lingual must from time to time hesitate as to
in which language he will write. The writer has to make the choice
every morning. He had to make the choice on the morning after the day
on which he learned of Conrad's death. That was a choice a little
more definite than that Conrad made--but not much more. His relations
and connections in Belgium certainly pressed him to write in French
before he even thought of writing in English. Of that the writer
was assured by Conrad's aunt, who regretted to the last that Conrad
chose to write in a language that rendered him inaccessible to what
she considered to be the civilised world. She herself wrote several
novels, notably for the _Revue des deux Mondes_.

The point is of no great importance. Obviously if, as Conrad
frequently asserted, the first English words that he ever heard
were the verses containing the pious aspiration: We've fought the
Bear before, and so we will again, the Russians shall not have
Constantinople!--those words might well jump at a young Pole, sick
to take part in politics. What is material is that Conrad always
knew French much better than he knew English. This only enhances
the glory of his achievements in our language. In French he was
perfectly fluent, in English never; abroad he was constantly taken
for a Frenchman; no one could ever have imagined him English from
his speech or bearing. Those points again are of no importance:
what is miraculous is that he took English, as it were by the
throat and, wrestling till the dawn, made it obedient to him as it
has been obedient to few other men. The fact is extraordinary, but
not incomprehensible. The writer writes French better than he does
English, not because he knows French better, but precisely because
he knows French worse: in English he can go gaily on exulting in
his absolute command of the tongue. He can write like the late Mr.
Ruskin or like the late Charles Garvice, at will. In writing, but not
in speaking French, he must pause for a word: it is in pausing for a
word that lies the salvation of all writers. The proof of prose is in
the percentage of right words. Not the precious word: not even the
startlingly real word.

We once discussed for a long time whether Conrad should write of a
certain character's _oaken_ resolution. As a picturesque adjective
'oaken' has its attractions. You imagine a foursquare, lumpish fellow,
inarticulate and apt to be mulish, but of good conscience. The writer
must obviously have suggested the adjective. We turned it down after
a good deal of discussion, the writer being against, Conrad for, its
use. Conrad liked its picturesqueness and was always apt to be polite
to the writer's suggestions. He could afford to be. We decided for
'stolidity' which is more quiet in the phrase. Eventually the whole
sentence went.... The story was Conrad's _Gaspar Ruiz_. That is a
fairly exact specimen of the way we worked during many years....

Conrad then, in Rouen harbour, decided that he would write books in
English. From that point the following episodes come back to the
writer from Conrad's recounted autobiography. He lay for long in that
port, because the ship upon which he found himself as master had been
seized by the sheriff's officers, for debt. Not of course for Conrad's
debt. The ship was one of a projected French Rouen-to-New York line
that never got beyond that one ship, and that one ship lay there for
a long time, the financier having failed to raise capital enough....
There comes in here another rather curious coincidence between the
career of Conrad and the writer: it cannot unfortunately be narrated
for the moment, one of the parties concerned being out of reach and
probably still alive.... Presumably, however, if two people knock
about the world in similar districts for a number of years before
acquaintanceship, they will come very near touching hands several
times all unconsciously....

Gradually, then, Conrad seemed to lose touch with the open sea. There
opened up more and more glimpses of shore careers, so that of those
relatively later days the record would seem to be one of abortive
voyages.... Thus the writer remembers with peculiar vividness a
telegram coming to Captain Conrad, telling him to assume command
of a ship taking in cargo in Antwerp harbour, and a journey out in
mid-winter.... But it is only a vignette of a wintry port with icy
arc-lamps amongst bare trees over black water: the stowing was being
done all wrong, the ship being a bad one to shift her cargo. That was
apparently why Conrad had been called in. Whether she ever went to
sea remains as a blank in the writer's mind.

By all accounts Conrad was a very efficient master--but extravagantly
nervous about details. All the several officers who once sailed with
him have narrated the same thing to the writer. Conrad would indulge
in extremely dangerous manoeuvres, going about within knife-blades
of deadly shores whilst his officers and crew shivered--but over
very small details of the stowing of spars and the like he would go
out of his mind and swear the ship to pieces. In the same way, in
writing he would attack subjects almost impossible and go almost mad
over a sentence; or, in driving, he would shave stone posts like a
madman, and then curse the stable-boy to pieces for letting him come
out with the old instead of the new whip.... You get an account of a
going about in the _Secret Sharer_. It is, however, possible that the
minuteness of detail on which, according to his officers, Conrad so
insisted on board was not so very minute.

There is for instance the story of the Conway boy. This Conrad was
fond of relating as an instance of the complete want of any sense of
responsibility in the character of the English--or at any rate of the
English when young. Conrad had, then, with him on a vessel in Table
Bay a third mate, or perhaps an apprentice, who had just come from
the _Conway_ training ship. Bad weather appeared to be coming on and
Conrad asked the boy if he had seen the cables properly stowed. The
boy answered that he had. The expected gale came on, blowing in shore.
It was necessary to let go another anchor. As the cable ran out one
of its links jammed.... The writer does not profess to understand
this technical detail.... The ship at any rate was in imminent danger
owing to the neglect--the sheer irresponsibility--of that Conway boy.
The Conway boy, at frightful risk, jumped on the cable and kicked
the link into place, saving the ship.... Conrad used to comment that
it was unimaginable that any French boy would have neglected the
supervision of that cable: had he done, however, the impossible, and
so neglected, he would probably not have jumped on the cable. He would
have committed suicide, out of shame and knowing that his career
was ended.... It might have been better to have jumped on the cable
first, and then committed suicide. The matter under consideration was,
however, responsibility....

If then one of the officers who had sailed with Conrad and afterwards
talked with the writer happened--as the writer strongly suspected--to
have been that Conway boy it is not unlikely that he would enlarge
on Conrad's hypercritical attention to detail. The people you have
strafed--and Conrad said he strafed that boy until he precious nearly
wanted to commit suicide--well, they take it out of you like that
afterwards. That is only human nature.

At any rate Conrad, by all accounts, was a very admirable officer. Yet
he hated the sea.... Over and over again he related how overwhelming,
with his small stature, he found negotiations with heavy spars,
stubborn cordage and black weather. He used to say, half raising his
arms: "Look at me.... How was I made for such imbecilities? Besides,
my nerves were for ever on the racket...." And he would recount
how, when he had been running up the channel on a moonlight night,
suddenly, right under the foot of the _Torrens_, there had appeared
the ghostly sails of a small vessel. It was, he used to say, something
supernatural, something of the sort that was always happening at sea.
He said it wasn't so much that his heart was in his mouth for the
seconds it took that vessel to clear: it remained in his mouth for
months after. It was there yet when he thought of it....

On the outward voyage of the _Torrens_ he had had as a passenger
Mr. Galsworthy, going to the Cape. They had confided in each other
shyly--each of them was writing!... From that sprang up a friendship
that was lifelong.... The bustle that arose in the Pent when Conrad,
opening a letter, exclaimed: "Hurray... Jack's coming down!" The mare
would have to go down to Dan West's at Hythe half a dozen times that
day.... Once Mr. Galsworthy, arriving at Sandling Junction, found
the trap too loaded. He ran beside it all the two and a half uphill
miles to the Pent talking pleasantly as he trotted. The writer has
never seen anything so effortless, for Nancy went quite well, long
ears and all.... That became one of the legendary feats of the Pent
along with the writer's long shot at the rat.... It was the better
performance.... It is a pity that there is no feat of Mr. Robert
Bontine Cunninghame Graham's to set beside it. That mighty horseman
also, with a letter announcing a visit, could wake up the studious
Pent as a junction springs into life at the coming of a great mail
train.... Conrad had very good friends.

Other departures from the sea of which Conrad liked to talk and
which the writer could never chronologically disentangle were his
care-taking of a warehouse on the Thames beside one of the bridges....
London Bridge probably ... and his floating with Mr. Fountain Hope
of a South African Gold Mine.... Why Conrad should have found the
superintending of a warehouse that transhipped tinned meat attractive
the writer does not know. Or perhaps he does. At any rate, Conrad
talked of that time with enthusiasm as a period of fun. He had been
found the job whilst waiting for a ship by a friend with a name like
Krieger with whom he afterwards lost contact. Occasionally Conrad
would ask: "What's become of Krieger?"... They enjoyed themselves
together in a Jack-ashore way, going to the Royal Aquarium in the
evenings or sitting on barrels in the tobacconist's shop just near
Fenchurch Street station--a great place to hear of a ship. Once when
we were going to see Captain Hope--another good friend of Conrad's--at
Stanford le Hope Conrad pointed out to the writer marks that he
alleged his feet had kicked in that tobacconist's counter-front.... No
doubt other sea-captains awaiting ships had borne their part.

In Fenchurch Street and particularly in the station, Conrad was a
different man--with his echoes! The gloomy light framed him very
appropriately, truculences came into his voice: he knew all the bars
and became at once the city-man gentleman adventurer with an eye for
a skirt that hadn't disturbed the dust that twenty years. He had to
have from that tobacconist a handful of cigars--he who never smoked
anything but innumerable half cigarettes from year's end to year's
end, lighting up and almost immediately throwing away to light up
again. There is no station like Fenchurch Street on the road to
Tilbury. Conrad could tell you where every husky ear-ringed fellow
with under his arm a blue, white-spotted handkerchief was going
to.... It most impressed the writer that in the station barber's shop
was a placard that read: _Teeth scaled two shillings, extractions
sixpence...._ To come home from the great waters to that!

In that mood must have been Conrad's city adventure. It was perhaps
the third fortune that he lost. He, Mr. Hope and a brother--Mr. Hope
may well correct the details: this is the saga told in Fenchurch
Street (Do you know the story of Grunbaum who asks Klosterholm: Is it
true the story that I hear that Solomons made forty thousand dollars
in St. Louis in the retail clothing trade? Well, replies Klosterholm,
the story is true, it's the details is wrong. It wasn't in St. Louis
but in Chicago. It wasn't in the retail trade but in the wholesale.
It wasn't forty thousand dollars, but a hundred and forty thousand.
It wasn't his money, but mine. And he didn't make it: he lost it.)
Conrad, then, Mr. Hope and a brother had staked out in the South
African Gold-fields a claim to about a third of what is now the De
Beers Mine. They came to London to float a company at the time of the
boom in South Africans. Their solicitor, to begin with, with all the
deeds was lost in the _Kinfauns Castle_. Before they could get others
the boom was on the decline; by the time they were ready for flotation
the bottom dropped out of the market. One of the blackmailing
bucket-shopkeepers who seem indispensable as members of the British
and all other Parliaments turned his attention to Conrad & Co. He
demanded money as the price of a good report in his blackmailing
sheet. The adventurers told him to go to hell. The prospectus of
their mine was printed by the same firm as printed the blackmailing
sheet. When the prospectus came out the little red patch on the map
that should have showed the Conrad-Hope property was well away in the
territory of another company. The blackmailer in his sheet jubilantly
pointed out that the mine must be bogus.... They went nevertheless to
flotation....

Conrad used to describe how, having issued their prospectus on the
day of flotation they sailed the Thames jubilant in a steam launch
with cigars, champagne, plovers eggs in aspic.... God knows what.
They were to step ashore millionaires.... They stepped ashore to find
the flotation a disastrous failure. Only one hundred and eighty--some
fabulously small number--of shares had been subscribed by the public.

That was Conrad's last commercial venture. Whether he telegraphed
again to his uncle he never said.... Let us imagine for a moment's
pause what would have become of British Literature if that flotation
had succeeded.... For Conrad was certainly a magnificent business man
of the imaginative type. It might well have been Park Lane instead of
the Pent. For Conrad hated writing more than he hated the sea. _... Le
vrai mtier de chien...._




                               PART II

                    _EXCELLENCY? A FEW GOATS...._




                               PART II

                     EXCELLENCY? A FEW GOATS....


We come thus to the life purely literary.

After two and a half years we had abandoned _Romance_: the problem of
how to get John Kemp out of Cuba had grown too difficult. The writer's
invention at any rate had failed and Conrad was too involved with his
own work to do any inventing. Looking back, the period in which slowly
we dragged out that preposterous series of fatalities seems one of
long bush-fighting: as if we were clearing a piece of land in which
the vegetation grew faster than could be dealt with by such cutting
instruments as we had.

It is not to be imagined that we spent the whole of our times upon
this enterprise: we each at intervals carried on work of our own: then
we would drop it, have another month's try at _Romance_. Then drop
that again.... Or sometimes one of us would write his own work in the
morning; the other would write away at _Romance_: in the evenings and
till far into the night we would join up. We pursued this monstrous
undertaking all over the shores and near-shores of the British
Channel; at the Pent, near Hythe in Kent; at Aldington; at Winchelsea
in Sussex; in Bruges.... The most terrible struggles of all took
place in a windy hotel at Knocke on the Belgian coast, with, in the
basement a contralto from Bayreuth, practising. Her voice literally
shook the flimsy house. Whilst we wrote or groaned on the fourth floor
the glasses on a tray jarred together in sympathy with the contralto
passages of the _Goetterdaemmerung_.... And there was a child very
ill, with only Belgian doctors; abscesses in the jaw and no dentist;
gout; frigid rooms into which blew the sands from Holland; intolerable
winds; interminable gusts of rain.... It is thus the world gets its
masterpieces. Conrad was then beginning _Nostromo_ in the mornings:
it was going to be a slight book and very quickly finished--to make a
little money.

It was, however, before that that we abandoned _Romance_. We took
up the _Inheritors_, a queer, thin book which the writer has always
regarded with an intense dislike. Or no, with hatred and dread having
nothing to do with literature. What they have to do with he cannot
say: some obscure nervous first cause, no doubt that could not
interest anyone but a psychopathic expert.

Conrad had none of these feelings apparently. The writer's dislike
for the book began as soon as the last word was written, so that he
managed to shift the burden of proof correcting--which Conrad rather
liked--on to his collaborator's shoulders and from that day to this
has never looked at the book. When then, during the early days of the
late European struggle we met finally to settle up various matters
and when Conrad said: "As to collaborations, when it comes to our
collected editions, you had better take the _Inheritors_ because it
is practically all yours, and that will leave me _Romance_--not that
_Romance_ isn't practically all yours too" (Conrad talked like that!)
the writer was very pleased. His intention was to suppress the book.
He imagined that Conrad disliked it as much as he did himself, and
was just turning it over with polite contempt. So it would never
have appeared in either of our collected editions and would remain
unobtainable until, with the expiration of copyright, some German
research-worker might dig it up and make a pamphlet out of it.

However, a little later, Pinker, having been informed that the writer
was dead or in an asylum, made in America a contract for the collected
edition of Conrad, including all our collaborations past and to come.
Thus, before the writer knew anything about it, there the _Inheritors_
was, out again, not merely in one, but in three editions. He happened
then, rather with regret, to mention the re-publication to Conrad as
a thing that he supposed Conrad had not been able to prevent. Authors
are forced by agents and publishers into the re-publication of all
sorts of works they may wish to suppress--in the interests of a
sacred 'completeness.' Conrad, however, remarked with a great deal
of feeling--with more feeling than the writer otherwise remembers in
him: "Why not? Why not republish it? It's a good book, isn't it? It's
a _damn_ good book!" And the writer let the matter go at that--rather
than imply that Conrad would have set his name to a book that he did
not consider good, or even damn good. He had intended to raise the
matter later so as absolutely to assure himself as to what really was
Conrad's view of this work. But that is too late now. It must remain
as Conrad's opinion that the book is a _damn_ good one.

That being so we had better go on a little to consider the exegesis
of this work.... We had abandoned _Romance_: the writer had just
finished a preposterous work purporting to be a history of the _Cinque
Ports_: in elephant folio. In revenge it was written completely in
sentences of not more than ten syllables. The South African War was
there--or thereabouts, the writer being an excited Pacifist whose
hat was from time to time bashed in by still more excited Patriots.
Conrad was engaged with the end of _Heart of Darkness_, with thinking
out _Typhoon_ and with writing _Amy Foster_, a short story originally
by the writer which Conrad took over and entirely re-wrote. The
writer, in common with Conrad, had a great admiration for Mr. Balfour:
the writer at least had a profound detestation for the late Mr.
Chamberlain who, off his own bat, had caused the war. How Conrad felt
towards the late Mr. Chamberlain the writer does not remember. He was
certainly more Imperialistic than the writer....

Since it may seem odd to the reader that one author, living in close
intimacy with another author, should not know what were his friend's
views upon a point of politics so important as a war it might be
as well to say a word or two upon how we _did_ live together. Our
relationships were, then, curiously impersonal: never once did the
writer ask Conrad a question as to his past, his ethical or religious
outlook or as to any intimate point of his feelings or life. Never
once did Conrad ask the writer any such question. Never once did we
discuss any political matter.

We met at first as two English gentlemen do in a Club: upon that
footing we continued. We took it for granted that each _was_ a
gentleman, with the feelings, views of the world and composure of a
member of the ruling classes of the days of Lord Palmerston--tempered
of course with such eccentricities as go with the spleen of the
_milor anglais_. Such eccentricities we allowed each to the other,
but without question. Thus during the South African War, as has been
said, the writer was an active and sometimes uproarious Pacifist. Not
a pro-Boer: he would have hanged President Kruger on the same gallows
as Mr. Chamberlain. Or, later with an equal enthusiasm he supported
Miss Christabel Pankhurst and the Suffragettes. Now and then on idle
occasions after lunch he would declaim about either of these causes.
Conrad would listen.

From time to time, particularly whilst writing _Heart of Darkness_
Conrad would declaim passionately about the gloomy imbecility and
cruelty of the Belgians in the Congo Free State. Still more would
he so declaim now and then, after he had been up to London and had
met Casement who had been British Commissioner on the Congo and was
passionately the champion of the natives. Then the writer would listen.

If Conrad differed from the writer he never argued, nor did the
writer ever argue with Conrad. Once in his hotter youth--though he
would do the same in his sober age!--the writer put his name down as
willing to go with a crack-brained expedition to German Poland in
order to fight the Prussians and Conrad never so much as remonstrated,
though he expressed gloomy anticipations as to what would happen to
that expedition. The writer's ambition, however, was to fight the
Prussians: to that Conrad offered no objections....

Or, again, the writer never in his life uttered one word of personal
affection towards Conrad. What his affection was or was not here
appears. And Conrad never uttered one word of affection towards the
writer: what his affection was or was not will never now be known.
Conrad was infinitely the more lavish of praise of his collaborator's
books: so lavish that at times the writer would feel like a fatuous
Buddhist idol whilst Conrad went on. The writer on the other hand
supposes that Conrad gathered somehow how deeply his work was admired
by his companion. Perhaps he did, perhaps he did not: that, too, will
never now be known. The writer cannot remember ever to have addressed
any particularly moving praise to Conrad as to his work--except in his
last letter but one....

It is that that makes life the queer, solitary thing that it is.
You may live with another for years and years in a condition of the
closest daily intimacy and never know what, at the bottom of the
heart, goes on in your companion. Not really.

So there we lived, the two English gentlemen, the one bobbing stiffly
to the other, like mandarins.... Our politics were what they were;
our creeds were what they were. Out of the loyalty that is demanded
of gentlemen we were both papists--but not the faintest glimmer
of an idea is in the writer's mind as to what might have been the
religious condition of Joseph Conrad, except that, when out driving,
he would turn back rather than meet two priests. That is a Polish
superstition. Once in our lives the writer addressed a remonstrance--a
reproach--to Conrad. That has been already related. Once Conrad did
the same to the writer.

That was very characteristic. Conrad had very strongly the idea of the
Career. A Career was for him something a little sacred: any career. It
was part of his belief in the ship-shape. (The reader must not believe
that, though we did not question each other, we did not voluntarily
and at times the one to the other express our passionate beliefs.) A
career was a thing to be carried through tidily, without mistakes, as
a ship is taken through a voyage and stowed away safely in a port.
So one day, when the writer had both started a Review and permitted
someone to make a very indifferent play out of one of his novels that
was then being boomed by an enthusiastic Press, Conrad positively
addressed a letter of serious and formal remonstrance to the writer.
[If the reader will look at the facsimile of a letter from Conrad that
precedes these pages he will see that the first typewritten line or
so is scratched out. The writer had written to Conrad reminding him
that he had always disliked the _English Review_: Conrad was replying
that the writer was mistaken. Whether it was the writer or Conrad who
erased that line the writer is not certain.]

But Conrad had certainly intensely disliked the _English Review_, if
not for its contents or conduct, then for its effect on the writer's
career. With a great deal of perspicacity he pointed out that it is
ruin for any imaginative writer to edit any sort of periodical. In
the first place it is a waste of time; in the second place it raises
for you such hordes of enemies that, eventually they will bring you
down--or very nearly. All the writers you discover or benefit will
become your bitterest enemies, as soon as your connection with a
public organ ceases--or sooner! That is human nature. Even Benjamin
Franklin observes that his eminently successful career was made by
very carefully putting himself in a position to receive--as often
as not--unneeded benefits. He thus made for himself so many patrons
who gave him friendly shoves on the way, whenever the opportunity
occurred. And, by never conferring benefits, or by very skilfully
obscuring the origin of such benefits as he did confer, he made for
himself no enemies at all.... In addition, Conrad continued, every
soul who has ever written a favourable note about you will deluge you
with his manuscripts. You will be unable to print them; you will have
so many thousands to call you base ingrate in private and to stone
your work before the public--again as soon as you have no organ of
your own in which to revenge yourself....

But even conducting a review was as nothing to the sin of allowing
an indifferent play, made from one of your novels, to be produced.
In that day, in England, all novelists were obsessed by the idea
that if they could only get a play produced, fame, fortune and
eternal tranquillity, beyond the range of all temporal griefs would
be for ever theirs. A novel _may_ earn its hundreds. A play--even an
unsuccessful play--will earn thousands; the receipts for a successful
play run into the tens and hundreds of thousands. In addition, in
England at that date there was a glamour of its own attaching to the
Play. Even the Lord Chamberlain's censorship was nearly abolished.
There was something sacred about it.

The writer was practically the only British novelist who did not catch
that malady. It poisoned the whole of Henry James's after life; even
Conrad was not immune. The writer was--and he got it in the neck, as
the phrase is. There was never: there was _never_ such a debacle as
was that novel dramatised. It contained five acts each of innumerable
scenes; the curtain was down for twice as long as it was up; it played
from 8 till 12.15. Not ten people remained till the end. The Press
next day was livid with rage at the writer for daring to write a
play without having studied the technique of the drama. The writer's
connection with the _English Review_ had just come to an end. He had
had nothing to do with that play. It had been extracted from his novel
by a dramatist. The writer had never even seen a rehearsal.

The writer did not mind: Conrad did. He minded horribly. Coming down
from Town the day after he had received that letter, the writer just
mentioned its reception, and left it at that. Conrad did not. He
repeated the contents of the letter all over again: the writer was
ruining his career. The writer said that he did not care. At that
Conrad suffered really as much as he had suffered during the reading
of the first draft of _Romance_. It was in the same department
of suffering. He sat, rather curled up in the corner of a sofa,
sick-looking and wincing, flushed, and his eyebrows contracted
downwards.

A frame of mind, a conception of life, according to which a man did
not take stock of the results of his actions upon himself, as it
were at long range, was something that he had never contemplated. As
he saw life, you wrote a book, lived circumspectly, avoided making
enemies, meddled only with what immediately concerned you: or you
passed for second mate, lived circumspectly, avoided making enemies,
concerned yourself only with your ship and ship's company.... Then
you could foresee that in ten years' time: in fifteen: in twenty: you
would be promoted to the command of the _Torrens_, the finest sailing
ship afloat; to be commodore of a great line; to be an elder brother
of the Trinity House.... Or the _Times_ would salute you as a great
light in the literary firmament: you would become the doyen of British
letters and an honorary member of the French Academy; you would have
a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Or even be buried there: an
aspiration the fulfilment of which was forbidden to Nelson.... He
desired the ship-shape life.

That anyone--_any_ soul--could be indifferent to these honours was
new to him, and terribly painful. He had taken it as so for granted
that all proper men deserved those tranquil and as if British
peacefulnesses!... In the same way in His Majesty's Army it _has_ to
be taken for granted that _every_ officer desires promotion to the
rank, eventually, of honorary colonel commanding his regiment. Life
could not otherwise go on. That any officer should be indifferent
to promotion then becomes painful: as if you should not care about
the dressing of the men of your unit upon inspection by the Field
Marshal Commanding in Chief.... It is, in effect, the same crime as
not squeezing the last drop of blood out of your subject when you are
writing a book: the real crime against the Holy Ghost.

For _that_ crime presumably is neither more nor less than to be out
of harmony with the universe and for Conrad the universe was the
ship-shape. Any soul wandering outside that corral in the abyss was
for him a matter purely of gloomy indifference.... "The fellow simply
does not exist!" That was the formula.... That anyone with whom he was
on terms of intimacy should, all unsuspected, hold such a philosophy
was to him unspeakably painful: as if it were a treachery to the
British flag. It was as unspeakably painful to him as when later
Casement, loathing the Belgians so much for their treatment of the
natives on the Congo, took up arms against his own country and was,
to our eternal discredit, hanged, rather than shot in the attempt
to escape.... We might have achieved _that_ effort of our wooden
imaginations....

It will be as well to attempt here some sort of chronology. This
is a novel exactly on the lines of the formula that Conrad and the
writer evolved. For it became very early evident to us that what
was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular,
was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making
acquaintanceship with your fellows you never do go straight forward.
You meet an English gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full
of health, the moral of the boy from an English Public School of
the finest type. You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly
neurasthenic, dishonest in matters of small change, but unexpectedly
self-sacrificing, a dreadful liar but a most painfully careful student
of lepidoptera and, finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who
was once, under another name, hammered on the Stock Exchange....
Still, there he is, the beefy, full-fed fellow, moral of an English
Public School product. To get such a man in fiction you could not
begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end.
You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work
backwards and forwards over his past.... That theory at least we
gradually evolved.

At the beginning, then, of this chapter we had arrived at the 1900
or so. We went to Knocke in Belgium and took up _Romance_ once more,
probably a year or so later; but Conrad's letter as to an endangered
career was not written until about 1908. It comes in here as a light
upon what did--upon what can have--induced Conrad to desire to take a
hand in the production of the book called the _Inheritors_....

Since the beginning of this chapter the writer has read a sufficiency
of that work to satisfy him as to what it was all about. The process
was distasteful, but the subordinating of one's nerves to duty is the
first step towards a career or even towards the writing of a novel.
And what made Conrad passionately desirous of laying hands on the
writer's then subject was a sentence. One sentence coming after an
effective couple or so of sentences with which the manuscript had
opened.

The scene of that barratry is perfectly vivid to the writer at this
moment. He had driven over to the Pent with the manuscript of the
opening chapters of the novel rather shyly in his pocket. Conrad was
as yet unaware that a novel was in progress. He was sitting in the
parlour of the Pent with the monthly roses peeping just above the
window sill. After he had seen to the unharnessing of the disgraceful
Exmoor pony--who had only one accomplishment, that of undoing the bolt
of his oat-chest with his teeth, which was a damnable inconvenience,
the animal would fill itself full to the lips with oats and then
have to be walked for seven or eight hours to save its life, and
usually in the dead of the night. After then the writer had seen to
the unharnessing of that plague, with the aid of a disreputable,
aged ex-time-serving soldier called Hunt, who had had sunstroke,
ague and malaria in Quetta with the Buffs, who claimed to be heir,
in Chancery, of half the County of Kent, who had always sore feet,
hobbled, and whose proximity resembled that of a rum-keg, and who
acted as our outdoor factotum and gardener, the writer went into the
parlour. Conrad was sitting reflecting and, beyond his saying, "My
dear faller..." we did not speak.... We were so constantly about each
other's houses that, quite often we could meet after driving over,
without any particular greeting, as if one of us had just come down
from washing his hands in the bedroom....

Conrad, then, was sitting gloomily reflecting--upon his career, upon
the almost-impossibility of wrestling any longer with the English
that shall describe lagoons, shallows, brigs reflected in breathless
water, upon the possibility that he would have to get over neck into
debt before he should have finished the _Rescue_--a slight book almost
no longer than a novelette, it was already mortgaged to Heinemann,
that decent fellow who never worried his authors to complete their
manuscripts. And there was the beginnings of another attack of gout in
the right wrist, and Nancy needed shoeing....

The writer then came in, and before sitting down drew the manuscript
of the first chapter of the _Inheritors_ from his pocket. Conrad said:
"Another story... Donne! Donne!" Conrad had no particular admiration
for the writer's short stories. He had simply taken _Amy Foster_
from the writer, with no particular apology, and had just re-written
it--introducing Amy herself who had not existed in the writer's
draft. This, however, was a novel, not a short story, and instead
of giving the manuscript to Conrad who would merely have glanced
at it perfunctorily and, dropping it, would have returned to the
contemplation of his debts and gout, the writer sat down and began to
read aloud.

At the end of the first paragraph Conrad said: "Mais mon cher, c'est
trs chic! What is it?" At the end of a sentence on the sixth page
he was exclaiming: "But what is this? What the devil is this? It
is trs, trs, trs chic! It is _patant_. That's magnificent."
And already the writer knew that either he was in for another
collaboration or that he would hand over the manuscript altogether.

The sentence was:

     "I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had
     been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant
     physical kind."

The opening paragraphs had run:

     "'Ideas,' she said. 'Oh, as for ideas----'

     "'Well,' I hazarded, 'as for ideas----'

     "We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over
     my shoulder. The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over
     the little saints' effigies, over the little fretted canopies,
     the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping...."

And as soon as the writer had let Conrad know that this was a novel,
not a short story, he knew that he was in for another collaboration.
Every word spoken added to that conviction.... The novel was to be a
political work, rather allegorically backing Mr. Balfour in the then
Government; the villain was to be Joseph Chamberlain who had made the
war. The sub-villain was to be Leopold II, King of the Belgians, the
foul--and incidentally lecherous--beast who had created the Congo
Free State in order to grease the wheels of his harems with the
blood of murdered negroes and to decorate them with fretted ivory cut
from stolen tusks in the deep forests.... For the writer, until that
moment, it had appeared to be an allegorico-realist romance: it showed
the superseding of previous generations and codes by the merciless
young who are always alien and without remorse.... But the moment
Conrad spoke, he spoke with the voice of the Conrad who was avid of
political subjects to treat, and the writer knew that this indeed was
the Conrad subject....


                                  II

The _Inheritors_ is a work of seventy-five thousand words, as
nearly as possible. In the whole of it there cannot be more than a
thousand--certainly there cannot be two--of Conrad's writing; these
crepitate from the emasculated prose like fire-crackers amongst
ladies' skirts.

     "I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways,
     critical glance at her. I came out of my moodiness to wonder
     what type this was. _She had good hair, good eyes, and some
     charm. Yes._ And something besides--a something--a something
     _that was not an attribute of her beauty_. The modelling of her
     face was so perfect as to produce an effect of transparency,
     _yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her glance had
     an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and
     gleaming, her cheeks coloured_ as if a warm light had fallen on
     them from somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you
     that she was strange."

Do you not hear Conrad saying: "_Damn_ Ford's women," and putting in:
"She had good hair, good eyes and some charm." And do you not see the
writer, at twenty-six, hitching and fitching with 'a something--a
something--a something' to get an effect of delicacy and Conrad
saying: "Oh, hang it all, do let's get some definite particulars about
the young woman?"

That was how, normally, we collaborated. But in this volume that is
the only discoverable passage with which Conrad notably interfered.
Occasionally he wrote in a whole speech that made a situation. The
difference between our methods in those days was this: We both
desired to get into situations, at any rate when anyone was speaking,
the sort-of indefiniteness that is characteristic of all human
conversations, and particularly of all English conversations that are
almost always conducted entirely by means of allusions and unfinished
sentences. If you listen to two Englishmen communicating by means
of words, for you can hardly call it conversing, you will find that
their speeches are little more than this: A. says: "What sort of a
fellow is... _you_ know!" B. replies: "Oh, he's a sort of a..." and
A. exclaims: "Ah, I always thought so...." This is caused partly by
sheer lack of vocabulary, partly by dislike for uttering any definite
statement at all. For anything that you say you may be called to
account. The writer really had a connection who said to one of her
nieces: "My dear, never keep a diary. It may one day be used against
you," and that thought has a profound influence on English life and
speech.

The writer used to try to get that effect by almost directly rendering
speeches that, practically, never ended so that the original draft
of the _Inheritors_ consisted of a series of vague scenes in which
nothing definite was ever said. These scenes melted one into the other
until the whole book, in the end, came to be nothing but a series
of the very vaguest hints. The writer hoped by this means to get an
effect of a sort of silverpoint: a delicacy. No doubt he succeeded.
But the strain of reading him must have been intolerable.

Conrad's function in the _Inheritors_ as it to-day stands was to
give to each scene a final tap; these, in a great many cases,
brought the whole meaning of the scene to the reader's mind. Looking
through the book the writer comes upon instance after instance of
these completions of scenes by a speech of Conrad's. Here you have
the--quite unbearably vague--hero talking to the Royal financier about
the supernatural-adventuress heroine. Originally the speeches ran:

     "'You don't understand.... She.... She will....'

     "He said: 'Ah! Ah!' in an intolerable tone of royal
     badinage.

     "I said again: 'You don't understand.... Even for your own
     sake....'

     "He swayed a little on his feet and said: 'Bravo....
     Bravissimo.... You propose to frighten....'

     "I looked at his great bulk of a body.... People began to
     pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place."

The scene died away in that tone. In the book as it stands it runs,
with Conrad's additions in italics:

     "'_If you do not_,' (cease persecuting her had been
     implied several speeches before), _I said_, '_I shall forbid
     you to see her_. And I shall....'

     "'_Oh, oh_!' _he interjected_ with the intonation of a
     reveller at a farce. 'We are at that--we are the excellent
     brother----' _He paused and then added: 'Well, go to the devil,
     you and your forbidding.' He spoke with the greatest good
     humour._

     "'I am in earnest,' I said, 'very much in earnest. _The
     thing has gone too far._ And even for your own sake you had
     better....'

     "He said: 'Ah, ah!' in the tone of his 'Oh, oh!'

     "'_She is no friend, to you_,' I struggled on, '_she is
     playing with you for her own purposes_; you will....'

     "He swayed a little on his feet and said: '_Bravo....
     bravissimo. If we can't forbid him we will frighten him. Go on
     my good fellow...._' and then, '_Come, go on._'

     "I looked at his great bulk of a body....

     "'_You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?_' I said.

     "'_Oh, absolutely_,' he answered."

At that point Conrad cut out a page or two of writing which was
transferred to later in the book and came straight on to:

     "Baron Halderschrodt has _committed suicide_,"

which the writer for greater delicacy had rendered: "Baron
Halderschrodt has..." Conrad, however, added still further to the
effect by adding:

     "Half sentences came to our ears from groups that passed
     us: _A very old man with a nose that almost touched his thick
     lips was saying:_

     "'_Shot himself.... Through the left temple. ... Mon
     Dieu!_'"

If the reader asks how the writer identifies which was his writing and
which Conrad's in a book nearly twenty-five years old, the answer is
very simple. Partly the writer remembers. This was the only scene in
the book at which we really hammered away for any time and the way
we did it is fresh still in his mind. Partly it is knowledge: Conrad
would never have written--'a very old man' or 'almost.' He would have
supplied an image for the old man's nose and would have given him an
exact age, just as he had to precise the fact that Halderschrodt had
shot himself, and through the left temple at that.

The only other passage in the book that the writer can quite
definitely identify as Conrad's is what follows. For the sake of the
adventuress-heroine and an income the lugubrious hero--and this is
the point--has betrayed to Mr. Chamberlain and the powers of evil,
Mr. Balfour, Lord Northcliffe, Leopold of Belgium, sound finance, the
small investor and the past. He is alone at four in the morning with
the drunken journalist, the actual writer of the leader that produces
these sweeping results. The whole passage, which is solid Conrad, is a
matter of two pages. Here is the most characteristic portion.

     "'You can't frighten me,' I said.... 'No one can frighten
     me now.' A sense of my inaccessibility was the first taste
     of an achieved triumph. I had done with fear. The poor devil
     before me appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but he was
     only one of the lost: one of those that I could see already
     overwhelmed by the rush from the floodgates opened at my
     touch. He would be destroyed in good company; swept out of my
     sight together with the past they had known and with the future
     they had waited for. But he was odious. 'I am done with you,' I
     said.

     "'Eh, what?... Who wants to frighten?... I wanted to know
     what's your pet vice.... Won't tell? You might safely--I'm
     off.... Want me to tell mine?... No time.... I'm off.... Ask
     the policeman... crossing sweeper will do ... I'm going.'

     "'You will have to,' I said.

     "'What.... Dismiss me?... Throw the indispensable Soane
     overboard like a squeezed lemon?... What would Fox say?...
     Eh? But you can't, my boy. Not you. Tell you... can't....
     Beforehand with you ... sick of it.... I'm off ... to the
     Islands ... the Islands of the Blest.... Come too ... dismiss
     yourself out of all this. Warm sand, warm, mind you. You
     won't?' He had an injured expression. 'Well, I'm off. See me
     into the cab, old chap, you're a decent fellow after all ...
     not one of these beggars who would sell their best friend ...
     for a little money ... or some woman. Well, see me off.'

     "... I went downstairs and watched him march up the street
     with a slight stagger under the pallid dawn.... The echo of my
     footsteps on the flagstones accompanied me, filling the empty
     earth with the sound of my footsteps." #/

That occurs nearly at the end of the book. There is one other passage
of complete Conrad two pages further on:

     "I turned towards the river and on the broad embankment
     the sunshine enveloped me, friendly, familiar, warm like the
     care of an old friend. A black dumb-barge drifted, clumsy and
     empty, and the solitary man in it wrestled with the heavy
     sweep, straining his arms, throwing his face up to the sky at
     every effort....

     "The barge with the man still straining at the oar has
     gone out of sight under the arch of the bridge, as through a
     gate into another world. A bizarre sense of solitude stole upon
     me and I turned my back upon the river as empty as my day.
     Hansoms, broughams, streamed with a continuous muffled roll of
     wheels and a beat of hoofs. A big dray put in a note of thunder
     and a clank of chains...."

Those two passages are practically all the Conrad writing that there
is in the book. We must have had a severe struggle over those six or
seven pages. That the writer realises because he remembers still the
sense of relief that attended his writing the tremendously sentimental
last scene, his wallowing in his own juvenile prose and his own
dreadful sentences. As thus:

     "I had had my eyes on the ground all this while; now I
     looked at her, trying to realise that I should never see her
     again. It was impossible. There was that intense beauty, that
     shadowlessness that was like translucence. And there was her
     voice. It was impossible to understand that I was never to see
     her again, never to hear her voice after this.

     "She was silent for a long time and I said
     nothing--nothing at all.... At last she said: 'There is no
     hope. We have to go our ways; you yours, I mine. And then if
     you will--if you cannot forget--you may remember that I cared;
     that, for a moment, in between two breaths, I thought of... of
     failing. That is all I can do ... for your sake.'... I had not
     looked at her; but stood with my eyes averted, very conscious
     of her standing before me; of her great beauty, her great
     glory."

The punctuation of this passage is that of the uniform edition of the
_Collected Works of Joseph Conrad_, the cover of which gives the book
to Joseph Conrad alone. The punctuation and the misprints, which are
very many, are American and not the writer's. The rest is.

Having achieved this ending the writer carried it over to the Pent.
Conrad glanced at two or three pages of the manuscript, exclaimed:
"Marvellous! My dear boy.... My dear Ford. Mon vieux, I don't know how
you do it!" and put the manuscript down on the table. The whole went
that afternoon to the printers.

It has sometimes occurred to the writer to wonder whether Conrad ever
read--ever could have read--that passage. If he never did the omission
would have been all right. There was for excuse the extreme fatigue
of our struggle of wills that went on whenever we really got down
to a difficult passage: there was also the fact that the writer was
supposed to handle all the women in the books we wrote together....
Conrad, however, assured the writer that he had very carefully
corrected the proofs of the English Collected Edition of the book, at
a time when the writer was elsewhere employed. This was when he also
asserted that the _Inheritors_ was a _damn_ good book. And if we add
that he did let his name as sole author remain on the cover of the
book we must imagine that he regarded it with _some_ satisfaction.
That his name so appeared was of course no doing of Conrad's but was
due to the business talents of the late Mr. Pinker and the publishers.
(An author as a rule is not shown the cover of his book before
publication. And this is naturally more especially the case when it
is a matter of all the volumes of a collected edition.) But Conrad
offered to have all the copies of the _Inheritors_ and _Romance_
called in and the covers altered. The writer, however, said that it
did not matter: as far as he was concerned Conrad might have signed
all his books. He might still. So the edition was left alone. But at
least Conrad did not mind the attribution.

Nevertheless the writer prefers to believe that Conrad never read the
last chapter of the _Inheritors_. The factor of fatigue would be quite
enough to excuse it. The writer is ready to confess that there are a
few passages of _Romance_ that he himself has only read in French....
And it was permitted to Conrad not to read the passages concerning
what he called 'Ford's women.' It had been only with something like
nausea that he had brought himself to approach this lady for long
enough to introduce the 'she had good hair, good eyes and some charm'
of the opening quotation of this chapter. It was only with difficulty
that he was restrained from adding good teeth to the catalogue. He
said with perfect seriousness: "Why not good teeth? Good teeth in a
woman are part of her charm. Think of when she laughs. You would not
have her _not_ have good teeth. They are a sign of health. Your damn
woman has to be healthy, doesn't she?" The writer, however, stopped
that.... To-day he would not.

Still the writer would rather believe that Conrad lied about the
reading, about the proof-correcting, about anything; he would rather
Conrad had robbed an alms box than that he should have read that
dreadful prose and have called it damn good. The rest of the book is
badly written but not so dreadfully. Still it is bad enough: a medley
of prose conceived in the spirit of Christina Rossetti with imitations
of the late Henry James; inspired by the sentimentality of a
Pre-Raphaelite actor in love scenes--precisely by Sir Johnston Forbes
Robertson dyspeptically playing Romeo to Mrs. Patrick Campbell's
Juliet; cadenced like Flaubert and full of little half-lines dragged
in from the writer's own verses of that day. He was only twenty-six at
the time and was very late in maturing....

It runs like this: country atmosphere, romantic place-names and all:

     "We were sauntering along the forgotten valley that lies
     between Hardres and Stelling Minnis; we had been silent for
     several minutes. For me at least the silence was pregnant with
     ... undefinable emotions.... There was something of the past
     world about the hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving
     mist--as if Time did not exist in those furrows of the great
     world; and one was so absolutely alone; (Conrad suddenly put in
     here: _anything might have happened_. But the writer went on
     bravely.) I was silent. The birds were singing the sun down. It
     was very dark among the branches and from minute to minute the
     colours of the world deepened and grew sombre.... I was silent.
     A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely...."

You perceive: the writer got his nightingale in after all: a marvel of
oaken persistency. It may have been out of sheer agony that Conrad
burst in here:

     "I stretched out my hand and it touched hers. I seized it
     without an instant of hesitation. 'How could I resist you?' I
     said, and heard my own whisper with a sort of amazement at its
     emotion...."

Do not be alarmed. Anything _might_ have happened. But the writer was
there to save the young woman. Positively he remarks:

     "I did not know what it might lead to: I remembered that I
     did not know even who she was.... I let her hand fall. 'We must
     be getting on,' I said a trifle hoarsely...."

What then attracted Conrad to this farrago of nonsense? Partly no
doubt it was the idea of getting a book finished quickly: here was
another unexplored creek with possible gold in its shallows or its
huts. But it was only very partially that. There was some mysterious
attraction: Conrad's manner was too animated, his enthusiasm too great
at the first reading. It may have been partly because the manuscript
_was_ read. The rhetorical will pass when it comes in a human voice.
The writer has very frequently found good, manuscripts that young men
read to him, only to be appalled by their ornamentation--or their
baldness, even!--when he afterwards read them for himself.... Yet
it cannot have been wholly that: Conrad had opportunities enough of
going through the manuscript before the book was finished. Or it may
have been affection: Conrad may really have had an affection for the
writer. Yet it can hardly have been that....

The writer has sometimes imagined that, however much we might have
scoffed at jewels five words long that on the stretched forefinger
of old time, sparkle for ever... however much we might have scoffed,
it was half-sentences of the writer's that, inscrutably, jumped out
of the prose and caught Conrad by the throat. At the head of this
chapter stands the mysterious phrase: "Excellency, a few goats...."
The writer imagined this. He wrote it in a quite commonplace frame of
mind, much as you might write an order for a hoe when sending a list
of agricultural instruments that you required, to your ironmonger. He
wanted to provide an obscure Lugareno with a plausible occupation. But
no sooner had he got the words on the paper than Conrad burst into one
of his roars of ecstasy. "This," he shouted when he was in a condition
to speak, "is genius!" And out of breath, exhausted and rolling on the
sofa he continued to gasp: "Genius!... This is genius.... That's what
it is. Pure genius.... Genius, I tell you!" The writer agreed that it
_was_ genius--for the sake of peace! And for twenty years afterwards,
in every second or third letter to the writer Conrad returned to
the charge. "Excellency, a few goats..." he would write. "Do you
remember?" Even this year in a letter to the _Transatlantic Review_,
allotting parts of _Romance_ to its various authors, he wrote: "Fifth
Part, practically all yours, including the famous sentence at which
we both exclaimed: This is genius! (Do you remember what it is?) with
perhaps half a dozen lines by me...."

In a subsequent number of the periodical in question the writer
offered its readers as a prize a copy of _Romance_ if any one of them
could identify that passage of genius. A great many replies were
received from readers offering passages of what, on the surface, looks
more like genius.... But no one offered: "Excellency, a few goats!"...
It is perhaps genius. But, frequently on receiving a "Don't you
remember the few goats?" letter from Conrad the writer has felt as if
he were getting credit for another immensely long shot at a rat....

In the _Inheritors_, then, there were several sentences which Conrad
applauded almost as rapturously. There was the one already quoted
about the stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind....
In that Conrad would like the words 'obscure and unimportant.'
Another--it came after the passage concerning the suicide already
quoted--is altogether the writer's and was in the first draft:

     "De Mersch walked slowly along the long corridor away from
     us. There was an extraordinary stiffness in his gait, as if he
     were trying to emulate the goose step of his old days in the
     Prussian Guard. My companion looked after him as though she
     wished to gauge the extent of his despair.

     "'You would say "_Habet_," wouldn't you?' she asked me."

This last sentence Conrad also called genius. Perhaps it may be.

The _Inheritors_ appeared. It caused no excitement; even to ourselves
it caused so little that the writer cannot so much as remember opening
the parcel that contained the first copies. By that time Conrad had
got over believing in its saleable qualities: the writer had never had
any delusions. He had been too well drilled by Mr. Edward Garnett.

It was received by the English critics with a paean of abuse for the
number of dots it contained.... One ingenious gentleman even suggested
that we had cheated Mr. Heinemann and the public who had paid for a
full six-shilling novel with words all solid on the page. In America
it attracted even less attention, but the publishers, having issued
the book with, as far as the writer can remember, a fault on the
title page, or possibly on the cover, it was withdrawn after only
four copies had been sold, and then re-issued. These four copies are
said to command an exorbitant price from collectors. The writer never
remembers to have seen one.


                                 III

We returned then to _Romance_....

It has been asserted that the writer paid Conrad large sums for the
honour of collaborating with him, this being Conrad's inducement
for continuing those very arduous labours. This was not the case.
Even to lend money to Conrad was always a very difficult operation.
Frequently it was a very painful one, seeing the agony of mind Conrad
would be in over his debts or his complication of affairs; so that to
be refused the ease to oneself of making a small loan had almost the
aspect of a cruelty--as if a patient in great pain should refuse, for
the sake of conscience, the alleviation of an ansthetic. From the
writer Conrad, except in one extreme case, never accepted any loan
that he did not see his way plain to returning shortly and with an
exact punctuality--and he always repaid on the date thus appointed
by himself. The exception was a case of one of those complicated
disasters that from time to time overwhelm those who have no means
of making a livelihood, other than the frail, thin point of the pen.
Conrad had been ill, there had been illness in his household. On top
of it there came a bank smash, and Conrad was faced either with
paying immediately a fairly substantial sum, or with being sold up.
This sum the writer advanced to Conrad: it was in due time repaid.

Illness and the anticipation of illness, debt and still more the
vision of the approach of a time when he must inevitably incur debt
are, because of his necessary powers of the imagination, more terrible
to the novelist than to any other human creature. As regards illness:
In a society that has gradually become self-protectively organised
the vocations or professions are very few in which the illness of a
worker means entire cessation of income. The shopkeeper's shop will
go on, perhaps it will be less efficiently conducted if its head is
absent for any long period; and so with the business of the merchant
or the financier. The doctor, the parson and the lawyer can find
_locos tenentes_ of course at some expense. The working man has his
insurance; the serving class are to some extent protected by law. The
literary man has nothing. Even insurance against illness is for him a
very poor expedient since the things that will stop him working are
as frequently as not diseases in no way diagnosable. The writer once
suffered from a nervous breakdown that lasted for two years and over,
during which he was withdrawn from practically all human activities,
except taking the waters at various German Spas. He was completely
unable to write. He had been insured against illness with a large
and reputable society for a considerable time; yet all that he was
able to recover, by way of a compromise, from that society was a sum a
little less than a quarter of the instalments he had paid. There was
no redress: apparently the laws of England hold that diseases of the
nerves are not illnesses.

Yet they will stop you writing. And to so admirable a family man
as was Conrad, half of whose mind at least was given to the matter
of securing comfort and permanent provision for those dependent on
him, whose agonies over this department of his life were sempiternal
and overwhelming, the mere illness of a member of his family was
sufficient to maim his working mind for long periods. For the author's
mind jumps very fast to extreme apprehensions, and only too frequently
he knows a great deal too much, for his peace of mind, of the progress
of illnesses. He is forced to that by the very necessities of his
profession in the course of which he must, from time to time at
least, describe the progress of one illness or another. Indeed he
writes because his memory is more tenacious and more vivid in its
functionings than that of other men. That causes the anticipation of
all misfortunes to weigh more heavily on him.

That is if possible even more the case with the facing of debts or
the anticipation of debts. The layman incurs debts as a part of the
necessary business of life without which commercial operations cannot
be conducted. As often as not his creditors are great corporations,
unfeeling it is true, but immune from personal suffering. If he
himself goes bankrupt it is nowadays usually in the form of a firm or
a public company, and he will go on much as before. To the novelist a
debt is a sword in the hands of an individual who himself may starve
if he do not receive his due, who is also an executioner, who is also
a mysterious and dreaded force of evil, unknown in his functionings.
Unknown, particularly.... _What_ happens if you are county-courted?
What sort of faces have brokers' men? Do they despise or reprove you
for having dared to incur a debt that you cannot discharge?... The
pictured horrors of the situation are infinite: you imagine your
infant child turned out of its cot by rough men like the murderers in
the Tower, or still more terribly, you imagine your child old enough
to appreciate deprivations, squalors, and the disgrace....

Almost the most vivid emotion that the writer can remember in his
whole life was caused by the first visit one of the greatest of
writers paid to the Pent. It has been already described in a book of
the writer's; but as no one discoverable ever read it it may come in
here again. We were sitting then on a quiet sunlit day in the parlour
of the Pent. Conrad was at the round table in the middle of the
room, writing, his face to the window; his collaborator was reading
some pages of corrected manuscript, facing into the room. A shadow
went over those pages from the window, behind. Conrad exclaimed:
"Good God!" in an accent of such agony and terror that the writer's
heart actually stopped as he swung round to the window to follow the
direction of his companion's appalled glance. It went through his
mind: "This must be the bailiffs.... He has debts of which I do not
know.... What's to be done?... Are all the doors bolted?... What
does one do?" An extremely tall man with a disproportionately small,
grave head was stalking past the window; examining the house-front
with suspicion.... The family were all out, driving. How could they
be got in if all the doors had to be bolted? Through the window? But
if a window is used as a place of ingress surely a bailiff can use it
too.... One imagines that immense, grave fellow, in a pepper and salt
gamekeeper's coat with tails, putting one knee over the window sill as
a small boy is handed in.... Surely an execution for debt cannot take
place after sunset?... Then they will have to remain out till then. Or
perhaps that is obsolete law.... They could go into the great barn....
It is always warm and still there, with the scent of hay: like an
immense church.

The house was perfectly still. The tall figure with the aspect of
a Spanish alcalde disappeared from above the monthly roses. He had
been stalking, very slowly, like a man in a grave pageant--a stork.
Suddenly Conrad exclaimed in a voice that was like a shout of joy:
"By Jove!... It's the man come about the mare!" Conrad was almost
always going through some complicated horse-dealings with that mare of
his. He was going to exchange her for a pair of Shetland ponies and a
chaff-cutting machine; he was going to sell her in Ashford market as
against part of the price of a stout Irish cob, the remainder to be
paid by the loaning of her during hay-making to the farmer who hired
the lands of the Pent; she was to be exchanged with a horse-dealer who
was shortly going out of business and had a most admirable roll-top
desk and a really good typewriter. Traps could be hired from the Drum
Inn at Stamford....

Conrad's conviction restored life to the fainting Pent: it breathed
once more: the cat jumped off the window sill; the clock struck
four.... The writer hurried, a little tremulous still, to open the
front door.... The tall, thin, grave man looked gravely at him.
The writer exclaimed hurriedly: "The mare's out driving...." He
added: "With the ladies!" It's a great thing to be able to prove to
a horse-dealer that your mare can really be driven by a lady. The
man--he resembled a sundial--said in the slow voice a sundial must
have: "I'm Hudson!" The writer said: "Yes, yes. The mare's out with
the ladies." Getting into his voice the resonance of a great bell the
tall man with the Spanish sort of beard said: "I'm ... W---- H----
Hud----son. I want to see Conrad. You are not Conrad, are you? You are
Hueffer."...

The writer may very well have psychologised Conrad wrongly, though
he remains strongly under the impression that after that king of men
had gone Conrad said: "By Jove, I thought he was a bailiff!" But
the occupation of writing to such a nature as Conrad's is terribly
engrossing. To be suddenly disturbed is apt to cause a second's real
madness.... We were once going up to Town in order to take some proofs
to a publisher, and half-way between Sandling and Charing Cross Conrad
remembered some phrase that he had forgotten to attend to in the
proofs. He tried to correct them with a pencil, but the train jolted
so badly that writing, sitting on a seat was impossible. Conrad got
down on the floor of the carriage and lying on his stomach went on
writing. Naturally when the one phrase was corrected twenty other
necessities for correction stuck out of the page. We were alone in
the carriage. The train passed Paddock Wood, passed Orpington, rushed
through the suburbs. The writer said: "We're getting into Town!"
Conrad never moved except to write. The house-roofs of London whirled
in perspective round us; the shadow of Cannon Street station was over
us. Conrad wrote. The final shadow of Charing Cross was over us. It
must have been very difficult to see down there. He never moved....
Mildly shocked at the idea that a porter might open the carriage door
and think us peculiar the writer touched Conrad on the shoulder and
said: "We're there!" Conrad's face was most extraordinary--suffused
and madly vicious. He sprang to his feet and straight at the writer's
throat....

The lay reader--say an officer of His Majesty's Army--should not here
say: "Ah, these literary men!"... Let him think of his own feelings
when he is trying to write some particularly complicated lie in an
excuse to Orderly Room over something or other.... The writer once saw
a colonel--and a deuced smart colonel at that--in Orderly Room, snatch
up a revolver and _damn_ near shoot an orderly who had interrupted him
in a literary composition. The quartermaster whose job it was, the
adjutant, and the writer, who had been called in, having all failed,
the C.O. was himself trying to explain to garrison headquarters why
the regiment's washing was given to the Riverdale Laundry Co. instead
of to some firm recommended by G.H.Q. You could almost swear his
tongue followed his pen, round and round in his mouth in the effort of
composition....

Well, the lay reader should understand that _our_ tongues really do
follow our pens when we are engaged in writing the specious lies on
which our existence depends. And if our lies are not convincing, we,
even as he, shall starve. And we are at it all the time whilst he
gives on an average not more than five minutes a day for five days
of the week to composing the misleading documents that save him from
having to resign his commission. And he has only one Orderly Room and
only one assistant adjutant to deceive: we lie to thousands. If we
are lucky, to tens of thousands! So we are engrossed.... It is not
more easy for us to put words together: it is more difficult because
we have more sense of words. And we who go at it with persistence,
undespairing, in the face of inevitable failure... are the gallant
spirits.

Conrad at least was. It has to be remembered that he had to wrestle,
not with one language only, but with three. Or, say with two and the
ghost of one: for it happened to him occasionally to say: "There's a
word _so and so_ in Polish to express what I want." But that happened
only very seldom. All the rest of the time he got an effect to satisfy
himself in French. This was of course the case preponderantly in
passages of some nicety of thought and expression. He could naturally
write: "Will you have a cup of tea?" or "He is dead," without
first expressing himself to himself in French. But when he wrote
a set of phrases like: "the gift of expression, the bewildering,
the illuminating, the most exalted, the most contemptible, the
pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an
impenetrable darkness," he was translating directly from the French
in his mind: Or when he wrote: "Their glance was guileless, profound,
confident and trusting," or: "The offing was barred by a black bank
of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of
the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness." Naturally as a British master mariner,
he did not _have_ to think of the offing as 'le large,' but when he
was trying the sound of that sentence for his final cadence he _did_
first say 'le large' and then said: "The open sea; the _way_ to the
open sea. No, the _offing_." That the writer very well remembers....
Conrad moreover had for long intended to end the story with the words:
'The horror! The horror!' 'L'horreur!' having been the last words of
Kurtz; but he gave that up. The accentuation of the English word was
different from the French; the shade of meaning too. And the device
of such an ending which would have been quite normal in a French
story would have been what we used to call _charg_--a word meaning
something between harrowing, melodramatic, and rhetorical, for which
there is no English equivalent. Perhaps 'overloaded with sentiment'
would come as near it as you can get: but that is clumsy....

But the mere direct translation from imagined French into English was
just child's play. It was when you came to the transposing precisely,
of such a word as _Charg_ from French into English that difficulties
began. The writer remembers Conrad spending nearly a whole day over
one word in two or three sentences of proofs for the Blackwood volume
called _Youth_. It was two words, perhaps--serene and azure. Certainly
it was azure. "And she crawled on, do or die, in the serene weather.
The sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure." Conrad said:
a_zure_, the writer aysure--or more exactly _ay_syeh. This worried
Conrad a good deal since he wanted azure for his cadence. He read the
sentence over and over again to see how it sounded.

The point was that he was perfectly aware that azure was a French
word, or in English almost exclusively a term of heraldry, and his
whole endeavour was given to using only such words as are found in
the normal English vernacular--or thereabouts, for he never could be
got really to believe how poverty-stricken a thing the normal English
vernacular is. The vocabulary that he used in speaking English was
enormous and he regarded it as a want of patriotism to think that the
average Englishman knew his language less well than himself.

Mr. Henry James used to call Marlowe, the usual narrator for many
years of Conrad's stories, "that preposterous master mariner." He
meant precisely that Marlowe was more of a philosopher and had a
vocabulary vastly larger and more varied than you could possibly
credit to the master mariner as a class. Conrad, however, persisted
that Marlowe was little above the average of the ship's officer in
either particular, and presumably he knew his former service mates
better than did Mr. James--or the rest of us.... Still he _did_ think
that the word azure would be outside the ordinary conversational
vocabulary of a ship's captain....

We talked about it then for a whole day.... Why not say simply
'blue'? Because really, it is not blue. Blue is something coarser in
the grain: you imagine it the product of the French Impressionist
painter--or of a house painter--with the brush strokes showing. Or
you think so of blue after you have thought of azure. Azure is more
transparent....

Or again the word 'serene.'... Why not calm? Why not quiet?... Well,
quiet as applied to weather is--or perhaps it is only was--part of
the 'little language' that was being used by the last Pre-Raphaelite
poets. That ruled quiet out. Calm on the other hand is, to a master
mariner, almost too normal and too technically inclusive. Calm is
in a log-book almost any weather that would not be agitating to a
landsman--or thereabouts. Dead calm is--again to a seaman--too
technical. Dead calmness precludes even the faintest ruffle of wind,
even the faintest cats'-paw on the unbroken surface of the sea.

The writer has heard it objected that Conrad was pernicketty: why
should he not use technical sea terms and let the reader make what he
could of it? But Conrad's sea is more real than the sea of any other
sea writer: and it is more real, because he avoided the technical word.

The whole passage of _Youth_ under consideration is as follows--The
writer is quoting from memory, but as far as this passage is concerned
he is fairly ready to back his memory against the printed page:

     "And she crawled on, do or die, in the serene weather. The
     sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure. The sea was
     polished, was blue, was pellucid, was sparkling like a precious
     stone, extending on all sides, all round to the horizon. As if
     the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colossal
     sapphire. And on the lustre of the great, calm waters the
     _Judea_ moved imperceptibly, enveloped in languid and unclean
     vapours...."

That is as far as the writer's memory will carry him, though the
paragraph ends with the words: "The splendour of sea and sky."

This then is almost the perfection of sea-writing of its type.
(Stephen Crane could achieve another perfection by writing of the
waves as barbarous and abrupt: but that in the end is no less
anthropomorphic.) And the words serene and azure remained after an
infinite amount of talking so that the whole passage might retain its
note of the personality of Destiny that watched inscrutably behind
the sky. It was Destiny that was serene, that had purity, that was
azure... and that ironically set that smudge of oily vapour from the
burning vessel across the serenity of the miraculous sapphire--so that
youth might be enlightened as to the nature of the cosmos, even whilst
in process of being impressed with its splendours.

'Serene' as applied to weather; 'azure' as applied to the sky are
over-writing a shade, are a shade _chargs_ if they apply merely to
the sea and merely to the sky.... But Conrad was obsessed by the
idea of a Destiny omnipresent behind things: of a Destiny, that was
august, blind, inscrutable, just and above all passionless, that has
decreed that the outside things, the sea, the sky, the earth, love,
merchandising, the winds, shall make youth seem tenderly ridiculous
and all the other ages of men gloomy, imbecile, thwarted--and possibly
heroic.... Had the central character of this story been a fortyish man
you would have had, added to the burning ship with its fumes, dirty
weather, dripping clothes, the squalid attributes of the bitter sea.
As it was an affair of _Youth_ you have serene weather and a miracle
of purity, to enhance the irony of Destiny.




                               PART III

                _IT IS ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE...._




                               PART III

                 IT IS ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE....


                                  I

The time has come, then, for some sort of critical estimate of this
author. Critical, not philosophical. For the philosophy of Joseph
Conrad was a very simple one: you might sum it all up in the maxim
of Herrick's: To live merrily and trust to good letters. Himself he
summed it up in the great word: Fidelity, and his last great novel
turned upon a breach of trust by his typical hero, his King Tom. It is
the misfortune of morality that the greatest thrills that men can get
from life come from the contemplation of its breaches!

About Conrad there was, however, as little of the moralist as there
was of the philosopher. When he had said that every work of art
has--must have--a profound moral purpose; and he said that every day
and all day long: he had done with the subject. So that the writer
has always wished that Conrad had never written his famous message
on Fidelity. Truly, those who read him knew his conviction that the
world, the temporal world, rests on a very few simple ideas--and
it might have been left at that. For it was the very basis of all
Conrad's work, that the fable must not have the moral tacked on to
its end. If the fable have not driven its message home the fable has
failed, must be scrapped and must give place to another one.

But the impulse to moralise, to pontify, is a very strong one, and
comes in many treacherous guises. One may so easily do it unawares:
and instances of Conrad's pontifications are far enough to seek
considering the temporal eminence to which he attained. He let,
otherwise, his light so shine before men that few would be inclined to
claim him amongst the preachers.

He was before all things the artist and his chief message to mankind
is set at the head of this chapter.... "It is before all things to
make you _see_...." Seeing is believing for all the doubters of this
planet, from Thomas to the end: if you can make humanity see the few
very simple things upon which this temporal world rests you will make
mankind believe such eternal truths as are universal....

That message, that the province of written art is above all things to
make you see was given before we met: it was because that same belief
was previously and so profoundly held by the writer that we could work
for so long together. We had the same aims and we had all the time the
same aims. Our attributes were no doubt different. The writer probably
knew more about words, but Conrad had certainly an infinitely greater
hold over the architectonics of the novel, over the way a story should
be built up so that its interest progresses and grows up to the last
word. Whether in the case of our officially collaborated work or in
the work officially independent in which we each modified the other
with almost as much enthusiasm and devotion as we gave to work done
together, the only instance that comes to the writer's mind in which
he of his own volition altered the structure of any work occurred in
the opening chapters of the _Rescue_.

Of that book Conrad made many drafts, over a very great number of
years. The writer seems to remember, but is not quite certain,
having heard Conrad say that he had meant to take up the story of
the _Rescue_ immediately after the publication or the finishing of
_Almayer_. And it obviously belongs to the group of subjects set in
Malaysia or thereabouts, of the date, say, of _Karain_ from _Tales of
Unrest_, or the _Lagoon_ that was published in the same volume, dated
1898. (In the matter of books published in London in the nineties,
dates of publication, if these are of any importance, are sometimes
hazy. Thus the writer's first book was published in 1891, but the date
given on the title page is 1892. The ingenious publisher, who was
also Conrad's, hit on this stratagem, afterwards imitated by American
magazines, with the idea of beguiling the possible buyer into the
belief that he was purchasing a brand new book eighteen months or so
after it had been published.) _Karain_, then, the one of his early
short stories that Conrad liked best, was published in _Blackwood's_
in 1897 and then in a volume that is dated 1898. It was, as far as the
writer's memory serves him, written in 1896.

The relationship of _Karain_ to the _Rescue_ is obvious. For two years
Conrad carried the idea of the novel about with him and then, after
the publication of the _Nigger_ by Heinemann in 1898, he definitely
sketched the plot of the _Rescue_ to Heinemann himself. On this sketch
he obtained one of his advances from that kindly man. Immediately
afterwards he began his first draft of the novel....

That advance remained an old man of the mountain for years and years.
There were the glorious schemes, for finishing off such and such a
book by such and such a date, and then quickly writing two or three
stories like _Gaspar Ruiz_ for a periodical that paid great prices,
thus getting free for ever of indebtedness!... Then there came
always the grim remembrance: "There's that advance of Heinemann's on
the _Rescue_...." That no doubt rather hypnotised his will when he
attacked, as he constantly did, that particular book. He made at least
six separate beginnings of a chapter or a chapter and a half each,
with every different kind of arrangement of paragraphs and openings.
At last, towards 1906, Conrad, in one of his crises of re-arrangement
had got his affairs nearly straightened out. He then once more
remembered with despair Heinemann's advance which, together with the
_Rescue_ itself had remained out of sight for four or five years. So
the writer said to Conrad: "You'd better give me those manuscripts
and let me put together some sort of a beginning for you." Conrad was
then wrestling with the opening chapter of _Chance_ which he expected
with any luck to finish, slight affair as it was going to be, in about
three months. It was actually finished seven years later.

Openings for us, as for most writers, were matters of great
importance, but probably we more than most writers realised of what
primary importance they are. A real short story must open with a
breathless sentence; a long-short story may begin with an 'as' or a
'since' and some leisurely phrases. At any rate the opening paragraph
of book or story should be of the tempo of the whole performance. That
is the _rgle generale_. Moreover, the reader's attention must be
gripped by that first paragraph. So our ideal novel must begin either
with a dramatic scene or with a note that should suggest the whole
book. The _Nigger_ begins:

     "Mr. Baker, chief mate of the _Narcissus_, stepped in
     one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the
     quarter-deck...." #/

_The Secret Agent:_

     "Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop
     nominally in charge of his brother-in-law...."

_The End of the Tether:_

     "For a long time after the course of the steamer _Sophala_
     had been altered...."

this last being the most fitting beginning for the long-short story
that the _End of the Tether_ is.

_Romance_, on the other hand begins:

     "To yesterday and to to-day I say my polite _vaya usted
     con dios_. What are those days to me? But that far-off day of
     my romance, when from between the blue and white bales in Don
     Ramon's darkened store-room in Kingston...."

an opening for a long novel in which the dominant interest lies far
back in the story and the note must be struck at once.

_The Inheritors'_ first lines are, as has been already quoted:

     "'Ideas,' she said. 'Oh, as for ideas...'"

an opening for a short novel.

Conrad's tendency and desire made for the dramatic opening: the
writer's as a rule for the more pensive approach, but we each, as a
book would go on were apt to find that we must modify our openings.
This was more often the case with Conrad than with the writer since
Conrad's books depended much more on the working out of an intrigue
which he would develop as the book was in writing: the writer has
seldom begun on a book without having, at least, the intrigue, the
'affair,' completely settled in his mind.

The disadvantage of the dramatic opening is that after the dramatic
passage is done you have to go back to getting your characters in,
a proceeding that the reader is apt to dislike. The danger with the
reflective opening is that the reader is apt to miss being gripped at
once by the story. Openings are therefore of necessity always affairs
of compromise.

The note should here be struck that in all the conspiracies that went
on at the Pent or round the shores of the Channel there was absolutely
no mystery. We thought just simply of the reader: Would this passage
grip him? If not it must go. Will this word make him pause and so slow
down the story? If there is any danger of that, away with it. That is
all that is meant by the dangerous word _technique_.

Tremendous readers both of us, we tried to gather from the books we
had read what made one book readable and the other not: English
gentlemen of the Palmerston days, there was no nonsense about us: we
tried to turn out the sort of book that--from _Lady Audley's Secret_
to Boswell's _Johnson_, and from _Midshipman Easy_ to... _Education
Sentimentale_, the English gentleman might read in his library, with
the cedar trees on the lawn outside it--or the flag lieutenant in
harbour, during the dogwatches.

We had the intimate conviction that two and only two classes of books
are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst. The very
worst, securing immediate attention by way of some trick, gradually
fade from the public memories; the very best, being solid and
ship-shape productions of solid and ship-shape men with no nonsense
about them, remain. We attempted then to turn out solid and ship-shape
books.

There was really nothing more to it, Conrad being the more solid, the
more ship-shape and the more determined of the two, the writer being
the more tenacious.... "You have a perfect right to say that you are
rather unchangeable," Conrad wrote not long before his end, "Unlike
the serpent (which is Wise) you will die in your original skin."...
That is to say that the writer never made concessions. We elaborated
certain principles and the writer saw to it that we did work along
those lines: Conrad would occasionally try to rush a position, being
worn out by the long drag of work. That is why the ends of his
books have sometimes the air of being rather slight compared with
the immense fabrics to which they are the appendages. In effect,
Conrad was the more determined--to get something done; the writer,
more listless, never cared much whether a thing were done or not. He
insisted, however, that if it were done it should be done to contract.

It was a combination not really unfortunate. The cases must be rare
in which one man of letters can have had at his disposal for a number
of years the whole brain of another man of letters of an unpliant
disposition. Conrad so had the writer's. For it was quite definitely
the writer's conviction that the only occupation fitting for a proper
man in these centuries is the writing of novels--and that no novel
worth much could be written by himself or any other man--at any rate,
by himself--before he has reached the age of forty. So till he had
attained that age the writer was determined never to attempt the
production of anything that was not either a pastiche or a _tour de
force_--just for practice in writing. One must roll one's hump around
the world first.... Thus, rather listlessly and a little disdainfully,
from time to time the writer turned out historical novels--which
were received with very great acclamations--and books of connected
essays that were received with acclamations almost greater. But the
writer was not disturbed: a historical novel even at the best is
nothing more than a _tour de force_, a fake more or less genuine in
inspiration and workmanship, but none the less a fake. Even _Salammbo_
is that. A book of connected essays... well, it is not a novel! In
addition the writer did attempt two pastiches in the manner of Mr.
Henry James, written, one of them as a variation on a book of essays
to give the effect of a tour in the United States--an international
affair. The other was the product of an emotion, as you get over
things by writing them down in your diary.

From time to time gentlemen of the Press anxious to depreciate the
writer have said that he imitated the work of Conrad. This was not
the case. It is a curious characteristic of the work of Conrad that,
not only can you not recognisably imitate it, you hardly ever feel
even the impulse to do so, and the one writer who really sedulously
be-aped the more exotic romances of the author of _An Outpost of
Progress_ achieved performances so lugubrious that he seems to have
warned off any other imitators of his example. The fact is that
Conrad, like Turgenev, is very little mannered; his temperament had
no eccentricities that could be easily imitated; his vocabulary
was as much the result of difficulties as of arbitrary selection;
his cadences were so intimately his own that they were practically
unimitable. The writer probably more than any other man must have had
opportunities of studying the way prose came to Conrad but the writer
does not remember more than three sentences that he ever wrote--apart
from sentences that he actually composed for Conrad himself--in
which he either consciously tried for some purpose or other to get
the cadence of a sentence of Conrad's, or as to which he felt, after
having written them, the satisfaction which he might imagine himself
feeling if he _had_ written a Conrad sentence. If the accusation had
been of imitation of Mr. Henry James it might have been just enough,
though a pastiche is not exactly the same thing as an imitation--being
an exercise in the manner of a writer rather than an attempt to make a
living by concealed plagiarism....

Still, whatever may have been the writer's occupations, he was ready
to be pulled off them at any moment at the instance of Conrad's
necessities. And this probably _was_ of service to the author of the
_Rescue_.... As regards the opening of that book the writer very well
remembers how the re-arrangement was made.... In all Conrad's drafts
the opening was dramatic. In most of them it began with a speech of
Tom Lingard's, one of them with the words: "You've been sleeping--you.
Shift the helm. She has got stern way on her." One version even began
as far back, in the book as it stands at present, as an interview
between Lingard and Mrs. Travers.... Conrad had meant that to be the
dramatic opening: in that case he would have had to introduce an
immense retrospection giving the biographies of Lingard, of Carter,
of the Travers, of Jaffir, of the Malay serangs... of everybody and
everything.

On the impracticability of that we both agreed and the writer took the
various drafts away to Aldington to study. A good many of the drafts
that the writer made opened with a passage of description: "Out of the
level blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty barrenness of grey
and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid heights," the writer
thinking that a slow passage of geographical significance ought,
logically, to open what seemed likely to be a very long book. Then one
day it occurred to him to ask: "Why, after all, not have a historical
opening and so avoid, later on, the necessity to slow the story down
in order to get in the history?" So at the opening, at any rate of one
draft, of chapter two, he found the passage beginning: "The shallow
sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big
and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries
the scene of adventurous undertakings."

And all this passage seeming to him to be admirable, beautiful and
engrossing prose, it struck him that it might be relied on at once
to grip the reader's attention and to give the note of the coming
story. So in the _Rescue_ you have the opening historical passage; the
geographical passage and then Lingard's words:

     "'You've been sleeping--you. Shift the helm. She has got
     stern way on her.'"


                                  II

It might be as well here to put down under separate headings, such as
_Construction_, _Development_ and the like, what were the formul for
the writing of the novel at which Conrad and the writer had arrived,
say in 1902 or so, before we finally took up and finished _Romance_.
The reader will say that that is to depart from the form of the novel
in which form this book pretends to be written. But that is not the
case. The novel more or less gradually, more or less deviously lets
you into the secrets of the characters of the men with whom it deals.
Then, having got them in, it sets them finally to work. Some novels,
and still more short stories, will get a character in with a stroke
or two as does Maupassant in the celebrated sentence in the _Reine
Hortense_ which Conrad and the writer were never tired of--quite
intentionally--misquoting: "C'tait un monsieur  favoris rouges qui
entrait toujours le premier...." He was a gentleman with red whiskers
who always went first through a doorway.... _That_ gentleman is so
sufficiently got in that you need know no more of him to understand
how he will act. He has been 'got in' and can get to work at once.
That is called by the official British critics the static method and
is, for some reason or other, contemned in England.

Other novels, however, will take much, much longer to develop their
characters. Some--and this one is an example--will take almost a
whole book to really get their characters in and will then dispose
of the 'action' with a chapter, a line, or even a word--or two. The
most wonderful instance of all of that is the ending of the most
wonderful of all Maupassant's stories, _Champs d'Oliviers_ which, if
the reader has not read he should read at once. Let us now take a
heading. (This method has the advantage that the lay reader who cannot
interest himself in literary methods and the Critic-Annalist whose one
passion is to cut the cackle and come to the horses can skip the whole
chapter, certain that he will miss none of the spicy tit-bits.)


                            GENERAL EFFECT

We agreed that the general effect of a novel must be the general
effect that life makes on mankind. A novel must therefore not be
a narration, a report. Life does not say to you: In 1914 my next
door neighbour, Mr. Slack, erected a greenhouse and painted it with
Cox's green aluminium paint.... If you think about the matter you
will remember, in various unordered pictures, how one day Mr. Slack
appeared in his garden and contemplated the wall of his house. You
will then try to remember the year of that occurrence and you will
fix it as August 1914 because having had the foresight to bear the
municipal stock of the city of Lige you were able to afford a
first-class season ticket for the first time in your life. You will
remember Mr. Slack--then much thinner because it was before he found
out where to buy that cheap Burgundy of which he has since drunk an
inordinate quantity though whisky you think would be much better for
him! Mr. Slack again came into his garden, this time with a pale,
weaselly-faced fellow, who touched his cap from time to time. Mr.
Slack will point to his house-wall several times at different points,
the weaselly fellow touching his cap at each pointing. Some days
after, coming back from business you will have observed against Mr.
Slack's wall.... At this point you will remember that you were then
the manager of the fresh-fish branch of Messrs. Catlin and Clovis in
Fenchurch Street.... What a change since then! Millicent had not yet
put her hair up.... You will remember how Millicent's hair looked,
rather pale and burnished in plaits. You will remember how it now
looks, henna'd: and you will see in one corner of your mind's eye a
little picture of Mr. Mills the vicar talking--oh, very kindly--to
Millicent after she has come back from Brighton.... But perhaps you
had better not risk that. You remember some of the things said by
means of which Millicent has made you cringe--and her expression!...
Cox's Aluminium Paint!... You remember the half empty tin that Mr.
Slack showed you--he had a most undignified cold--with the name in
a horse-shoe over a blue circle that contained a red lion asleep in
front of a real-gold sun....

And, if that is how the building of your neighbour's greenhouse comes
back to you, just imagine how it will be with your love-affairs that
are so much more complicated....


                            IMPRESSIONISM

We accepted without much protest the stigma: "Impressionists" that was
thrown at us. In those days Impressionists were still considered to be
bad people: Atheists, Reds, wearing red ties with which to frighten
householders. But we accepted the name because Life appearing to us
much as the building of Mr. Slack's greenhouse comes back to you, we
saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We
in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not
narrate but render... impressions.


                              SELECTION

We agreed that the whole of Art consists in selection. To render your
remembrance of your career as a fish-salesman might enhance the
story of Mr. Slack's greenhouse, or it might _not_. A little image
of iridescent, blue-striped, black-striped, white fish on a white
marble slab with water trickling down to them round a huge mass of
orange salmon-roe; a vivid description of a horrible smell caused
by a cat having stolen and hidden in the thick of your pelargoniums
a cod's head that you had brought back as a perquisite, you having
subsequently killed the cat with a hammer, but long, long before you
had rediscovered her fishy booty.... Such little impressions might
be useful as contributing to illustrate your character--one should
not kill a cat with a hammer! They might illustrate your sense of the
beautiful--or your fortitude under affliction--or the disagreeableness
of Mr. Slack, who had a delicate sense of smell--or the point of view
of your only daughter Millicent.

We should then have to consider whether your sense of the beautiful
or your fortitude could in our rendering carry the story forward or
interest the reader. If it did we should include it; if in our opinion
it was not likely to, we should leave it out. Or the story of the cat
might in itself seem sufficiently amusing to be inserted as a purposed
_longueur_, so as to give the idea of the passage of time.... It may
be more amusing to read the story of a cat with your missing dinner
than to read: "A fortnight elapsed...." Or it might be better after
all to write boldly: "Mr. Slack, after a fortnight had elapsed,
remarked one day very querulously: 'That smell seems to get worse
instead of better.'"


                         SELECTION (SPEECHES)

That last would be compromise, for it would be narration instead of
rendering: it would be far _better_ to give an idea of the passage
of time by picturing a cat with a cod's head, but the length of the
story must be considered. Sometimes to render anything at all in a
given space will take up too much room--even to render the effect and
delivery of a speech. Then just boldly and remorselessly you must
relate and _risk_ the introduction of yourself as author, with the
danger that you may destroy all the illusion of the story.

Conrad and the writer would have agreed that the ideal rendering of
Mr. Slack's emotions would be as follows:

     "A scrawny, dark-brown neck, with an immense Adam's apple
     quivering over the blue stripes of a collar erected itself
     between the sunflower stems above the thin oaken flats of the
     dividing fence. An unbelievably long, thin gap of a mouth
     opened itself beneath a black-spotted handkerchief, to say that
     the unspeakable odour was sufficient to slay all the porters
     in Covent Garden. Last week it was only bad enough to drive a
     regiment of dragoons into a faint. The night before the people
     whom he had had to supper--I wondered who could eat any supper
     with any appetite under the gaze of those yellow eyes--people,
     mind you, to whom he had hoped to sell a little bit of property
     in the neighbourhood. Good people. With more than a little
     bit in the bank. People whose residence would give the whole
     neighbourhood a lift. They had asked if he liked going out
     alone at night with so many undiscovered murders about....
     'Undiscovered murders!' he went on repeating as if the words
     gave him an intimate sense of relief. He concluded with the
     phrase: 'I _don't_ think!'"

That would be a very fair _rendering_ of part of an episode: it
would have the use of getting quite a lot of Mr. Slack in; but you
might want to get on towards recounting how you had the lucky idea
of purchasing shares in a newspaper against which Mr. Slack had
counselled you.... And you might have got Mr. Slack in already!

The rendering in fact of speeches gave Conrad and the writer more
trouble than any other department of the novel whatever. It introduced
at once the whole immense subject of under what convention the novel
is to be written. For whether you tell it direct and as author--which
is the more difficult way--or whether you put it into the mouth of
a character--which is easier by far but much more cumbersome--the
question of reporting or rendering speeches has to be faced. To
pretend that any character or any author writing directly can remember
whole speeches with all their words for a matter of twenty-four hours,
let alone twenty-four years, is absurd. The most that the normal
person carries away of a conversation after even a couple of hours
is just a salient or characteristic phrase or two, and a mannerism
of the speaker. Yet, if the reader stops to think at all, or has any
acuteness whatever, to render Mr. Slack's speech directly: "Thet there
odour is enough to do all the porters in Common Gorden in. Lorst week
it wouldn' no more 'n 'v sent a ole squad of tinwiskets barmy on the
crumpet..." and so on through an entire monologue of a page and a
half, must set the reader at some point or other wondering, how the
author or the narrator can possibly, even if they were present, have
remembered every word of Mr. Slack's long speech. Yet the object of
the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact
that the author exists--even of the fact that he is reading a book.
This is of course not possible to the bitter end, but a reader _can_
be rendered very engrossed, and the nearer you can come to making
him entirely insensitive to his surroundings, the more you will have
succeeded.

Then again, directly reported speeches in a book do move very slowly;
by the use of indirect locutions, together with the rendering of
the effects of other portions of speech, you can get a great deal
more into a given space. There is a type of reader that likes what
is called conversations--but that type is rather the reader in an
undeveloped state than the reader who has read much. So, wherever
practicable, we used to arrange speeches much as in the paragraph
devoted to Mr. Slack above. But quite often we compromised and gave
passages of direct enough speech.

This was one of the matters as to which the writer was more
uncompromising than was Conrad. In the novel which he did at last
begin on his forty-first birthday there will be found to be hardly any
direct speech at all, and probably none that is more than a couple of
lines in length. Conrad indeed later arrived at the conclusion that,
a novel being in the end a matter of convention--and in the beginning
too for the matter of that, since what are type, paper, bindings and
all the rest, but matters of agreement and convenience--you might as
well stretch convention a little farther, and postulate that your
author or your narrator is a person of a prodigious memory for the
spoken. He had one minute passion with regard to conversations: he
could not bear the repetition of 'he said's and 'she said's, and would
spend agitated hours in chasing those locutions out of his or our
pages and substituting: 'he replied,' 'she ejaculated,' 'answered Mr.
Verloc' and the like. The writer was less moved by this consideration:
it seemed to him that you could employ the words 'he said' as often
as you like, accepting them as being unnoticeable, like 'a,' 'the'
'his' 'her,' or 'very.'


                            CONVERSATIONS

One unalterable rule that we had for the rendering of
conversations--for genuine conversations that are an exchange of
thought, not interrogatories or statements of fact--was that no speech
of one character should ever answer the speech that goes before it.
This is almost invariably the case in real life where few people
listen, because they are always preparing their own next speeches.
When, of a Saturday evening, you are conversing over the fence with
your friend Mr. Slack, you hardly notice that he tells you he has
seen an incredibly coloured petunia at a market-gardener's, because
you are dying to tell him that you have determined to turn author to
the extent of writing a letter on local politics to the newspaper of
which, against his advice, you have become a large shareholder.

     He says: "Right down extraordinary that petunia was----"

     You say: "What would you think now of my..."

     He says: "Diamond-shaped stripes it had, blue-black and
     salmon...."

     You say: "I've always thought I had a bit of a gift...."

     Your daughter Millicent interrupts: "Julia Gower has got
     a pair of snake-skin shoes. She bought them at Wiston and
     Willocks's."

You miss Mr. Slack's next two speeches in wondering where Millicent
got that bangle on her wrist. You will have to tell her more carefully
than ever that she must _not_ accept presents from Tom, Dick and
Harry. By the time you have come out of that reverie Mr. Slack is
remarking:

     "I said to him use turpentine and sweet oil, three parts
     to two. What do you think?"


                               SURPRISE

We agreed that the one quality that gave interest to Art was the
quality of surprise. That is very well illustrated in the snatch of
conversation just given. If you reported a long speech of Mr. Slack's
to the effect that he was going to enter some of his petunias for
the local flower show and those, with his hydrangeas and ornamental
sugar-beet, might well give him the Howard Cup for the third time, in
which case it would become his property out and out. He would then
buy two silver and cut-glass epergnes one to stand on each side of
the Cup on his sideboard. He always did think that a touch of silver
and cut glass.... If, after that you gave a long speech of your own:
after, naturally, you had added a few commonplaces as a politeness
to Mr. Slack: if you gave a long speech in which with modesty you
dwelt on the powers of observation and of the pen that you had always
considered yourself to possess, and in which you announced that you
certainly meant to write a letter to the paper in which you had
shares--on the statuary in the faade of the new town hall which
was an offence to public decency.... And if in addition to that you
added a soliloquy from your daughter Millicent to the effect that she
intended to obtain on credit from your bootmakers, charging them to
your account, a pair of scarlet morocco shoes with two-inch heels with
which to go joy-riding on the Sunday with a young actor who played
under the name of Hildebrand Hare and who had had his portrait in your
paper.... If you gave all these long speeches one after the other you
might be aware of a certain dullness when you re-read that _compte
rendu_.... But if you carefully broke up petunias, statuary, and
flower-show motives and put them down in little shreds one contrasting
with the other, you would arrive at something much more coloured,
animated, life-like and interesting and you would convey a profoundly
significant lesson as to the self-engrossment of humanity. Into that
live scene you could then drop the piece of news that you wanted to
convey and so you would carry the chapter a good many stages forward.

Here, again, compromise must necessarily come in: there must come
a point in the dramatic working up of every scene in which the
characters do directly answer each other, for a speech or for two or
three speeches. It was in this department, as has already been pointed
out, that Conrad was matchless and the writer very deficient. Or,
again, a point may come in which it is necessary--in which at least it
is to take the line of least resistance--to report directly a whole
tremendous effort of eloquence as ebullient as an oration by Mr. Lloyd
George on the hymns of the Welsh nation. For there are times when the
paraphernalia of indirect speech, interruptions and the rest retard
your action too much. Then they must go: the sense of reality must
stand down before the necessity to get on.

But, on the whole, the indirect, interrupted method of handling
interviews is invaluable for giving a sense of the complexity, the
tantalisation, the shimmering, the haze, that life is. In the pre-war
period the English novel began at the beginning of a hero's life and
went straight on to his marriage without pausing to look aside. This
was all very well in its way, but the very great objection could
be offered against it that such a story was too confined to its
characters and, too self-centredly, went on, _in vacuo_. If you are
so set on the affair of your daughter Millicent with the young actor
that you forget that there _are_ flower shows and town halls with nude
statuary your intellect will appear a thing much more circumscribed
than it should be. Or, to take a larger matter. A great many novelists
have treated of the late war in terms solely of the war: in terms
of pip-squeaks, trench-coats, wire-aprons, shells, mud, dust, and
sending the bayonet home with a grunt. For that reason interest in
the late war is said to have died. But, had you taken part actually
in those hostilities, you would know how infinitely little part the
actual fighting itself took in your mentality. You would be lying on
your stomach, in a beast of a funk, with an immense, horrid German
barrage going on all over and round you and with hell and all let
loose. But, apart from the occasional, petulant question: "When the
deuce will our fellows get going and shut 'em up?" your thoughts were
really concentrated on something quite distant: on your daughter
Millicent's hair, on the fall of the Asquith Ministry, on your
financial predicament, on why your regimental ferrets kept on dying,
on whether Latin is really necessary to an education, or in what way
really _ought_ the Authorities to deal with certain diseases.... You
were there, but great shafts of thought from the outside, distant and
unattainable world infinitely for the greater part occupied your mind.

It was that effect then, that Conrad and the writer sought to get into
their work, that being Impressionism.

_But these two writers were not unaware that there are other methods:
they were not rigid in_ _their own methods: they were sensible to the
fact that compromise is at all times necessary in the execution of
every work of art._

Let us come, then, to the eternally vexed seas of the Literary Ocean.


                                STYLE

We agreed on this axiom:

The first business of Style is to make work interesting: the second
business of Style is to make work interesting: the third business of
Style is to make work interesting: the fourth business of Style is to
make work interesting: the fifth business of Style....

Style, then, has no other business.

A style interests when it carries the reader along: it is then a
good style. A style ceases to interest when by reason of disjointed
sentences, over-used words, monotonous or jog-trot cadences, it
fatigues the reader's mind. _Too_ startling words, however apt,
_too_ just images, too great displays of cleverness are apt in the
long run to be as fatiguing as the most over-used words or the most
jog-trot cadences. That a face resembles a Dutch clock has been too
often said; to say that it resembles a ham is inexact and conveys
nothing; to say that it has the mournfulness of an old, squashed-in
meat tin, cast away on a waste building lot, would be smart--but
too much of that sort of thing would become a nuisance. To say that
a face was cramoisy is undesirable: few people nowadays know what
the word means. Its employment will make the reader marvel at the
user's erudition: in thus marvelling he ceases to consider the story
and an impression of vagueness or length is produced on his mind. A
succession of impressions of vagueness and length render a book in the
end unbearable.

There are, of course, pieces of writing intended to convey the sense
of the author's cleverness, knowledge of obsolete words or power of
inventing similes: with such exercises Conrad and the writer never
concerned themselves.

We used to say: the first lesson that an author has to learn is that
of humility. Blessed are the humble because they do not get between
the reader's legs. Before everything the author must learn to suppress
himself: he must learn that the first thing he has to consider is his
story and the last thing that he has to consider is his story, and in
between that he will consider his story.

We used to say that a passage of good style began with a fresh, usual
word, and continued with fresh, usual words to the end: there was
nothing more to it. When we felt that we had really got hold of the
reader, with a great deal of caution we would introduce a word not
common to a very limited vernacular, but that only very occasionally.
Very occasionally indeed: practically never. Yet it is in that way
that a language grows and keeps alive. People get tired of hearing the
same words over and over again.... It is again a matter for compromise.

Our chief masters in style were Flaubert and Maupassant: Flaubert in
the greater degree, Maupassant in the less. In about the proportion
of a sensible man's whisky and soda. We stood as it were on those
hills and thence regarded the world. We remembered long passages of
Flaubert: elaborated long passages in his spirit and with his cadences
and then translated them into passages of English as simple as the
subject under treatment would bear. We remembered short, staccato
passages of Maupassant: invented short staccato passages in his spirit
and then translated them into English as simple as the subject would
bear. Differing subjects bear differing degrees of simplicity: To
apply exactly the same timbre of language to a dreadful interview
between a father and a daughter as to the description of a child's
bedroom at night is impracticable because it is unnatural. In thinking
of the frightful scene with your daughter Millicent which ruined
your life, town councillor and parliamentary candidate though you
had become, you will find that your mind employs a verbiage quite
different from that which occurs when you remember Millicent asleep,
her little mouth just slightly opened, her toys beside the shaded
night-light.

Our vocabulary, then, was as simple as was practicable. But there are
degrees of simplicity. We employed as a rule in writing the language
that we employed in talking the one to the other. When we used
French in speaking we tried mentally to render in English the least
literary equivalent of the phrase. We were, however, apt to employ in
our conversation words and periphrases that are not in use by, say,
financiers. This was involuntary, we imagining that we talked simply
enough. But later a body of younger men with whom the writer spent
some years would say, after dinner: "Talk like a book, H.... Do talk
like a book!" The writer would utter some speeches in the language
that he employed when talking with Conrad: but he never could utter
more than a sentence or two at a time. The whole mess would roar with
laughter and, for some minutes, would render his voice inaudible.

If you will reflect on the language you then employed--and the
writer--you will find that it was something like: "Cheerio, old bean.
The beastly Adjutant's Parade is at five ack emma. Will you take my
Johnnie's and let me get a real good fug in my downy bug walk? I'm
fair blind to the wide to-night." That was the current language then
and, in the earlier days of our conversations, some equivalent with
which we were unacquainted must normally have prevailed. That we
could hardly have used in our books, since within a very short time
such languages become incomprehensible. Even to-day the locution 'ack
emma' is no longer used and the expression 'blind to the wide' is
incomprehensible--the very state is unfamiliar--to more than half the
English-speaking populations of the globe.

So we talked and wrote a Middle-High-English of as unaffected a sort
as would express our thoughts. And that was all that there really was
to our 'style.' Our greatest admiration for a stylist in any language
was given to W. H. Hudson of whom Conrad said that his writing was
like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there
you could not tell how it came.

Carefully examined a good--an interesting--style will be found to
consist in a constant succession of tiny, unobservable surprises. If
you write: "His range of subject was very wide and his conversation
very varied and unusual; he could rouse you with his perorations or
lull you with his periods; therefore his conversation met with great
appreciation and he made several fast friends"--you will not find
the world very apt to be engrossed by what you have set down. The
results will be different if you put it: "He had the power to charm or
frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance; he could
also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he
had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the
world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking."

Or, let us put the matter in another way. The catalogue of an
ironmonger's store is uninteresting as literature because things in
it are all classified and thus obvious: the catalogue of a farm sale
is more interesting because things in it are contrasted. No one would
for long read: Nails, drawn wire,  inch, per lb....; nails do., 
inch, per lb....; nails, do., inch, per lb.... But it is often not
disagreeable to read desultorily "_Lot_ 267. Pair rabbit gins. _Lot_
268, Antique powder flask. _Lot_ 269, Malay Kris. _Lot_ 270, Set of
six sporting prints by Herring. _Lot_ 271, Silver caudle cup... for
that, as far as it goes, has the quality of surprise.

That is, perhaps, enough about Style. This is not a technical manual,
and at about this point we arrive at a region in which the writer's
memory is not absolutely clear as to the points on which he and Conrad
were agreed. We made in addition an infinite number of experiments,
together and separately in points of style and cadence. The writer,
as has been said, wrote one immense book entirely in sentences of
not more than ten syllables. He read the book over. He found it
read immensely long. He went through it all again. He joined short
sentences: he introduced relative clauses: he wrote in long sentences
that had a gentle sonority and ended with a dying fall. The book read
less long. Much less long.

Conrad also made experiments, but not on such a great scale since
he could always have the benefit of the writer's performances of
that sort. The writer only remembers specifically one instance of an
exercise on Conrad's part. He was interested in blank verse at the
moment--though he took no interest in English verse as a rule--and the
writer happening to observe that whole passages of _Heart of Darkness_
were not very far off blank verse Conrad tried for a short time to
turn a paragraph into decasyllabic lines. The writer remembers the
paragraph quite well. It is the one which begins:

     "She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and
     fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly with a slight jingle
     and flash of barbarous ornaments...."

But he cannot remember what Conrad added or took away. There come back
vaguely to him a line or two like:

     She carried high her head, her hair was done In the shape
     of a helmet; she had greaves of brass To the knee; gauntlets of
     brass to th' elbow. A crimson spot....

That, however, may just as well be the writer's contrivance as
Conrad's: it happened too long ago for the memory to be sure. A little
later, the writer occupying himself with writing French rhymed _vers
libre_, Conrad tried his hand at that too. He produced:

    Riez toujours! La vie n'est pas si gaie,
    Ces tristes jours quand  travers la haie
    Tombe le long rayon
    Dernier
    De mon soleil qui gagne
    Les sommets, la montagne,
    De l'horizon....

There was a line or two more that the writer has forgotten.

That was Conrad's solitary attempt to write verse.

We may as well put the rest of this matter under a separate heading:


                               CADENCE

This was the one subject upon which we never came to any agreement. It
was the writer's view that everyone has a natural cadence of his own
from which in the end he cannot escape. Conrad held that a habit of
good cadence could be acquired by the study of models. His own he held
came to him from constant reading of Flaubert. He did himself probably
an injustice.

But questions of cadence and accentuation as of prosody in general we
were chary of discussing. They were matters as to which Conrad was
very touchy. His ear was singularly faulty for one who was a great
writer of elaborated prose so that at times the writer used to wonder
how the deuce he _did_ produce his effects of polyphonic closings
to paragraphs. In speaking English he had practically no idea of
accentuation whatever, and indeed no particular habits. He would talk
of Mr. Cunninghame Graham's book _Success_ alternately as _Suc_cess
and Suc_cess_, half a dozen times in the course of a conversation
about the works of that very wonderful writer. Over French he was not
much better. He became quite enraged when told that if the first line
of his verse quoted above was to be regarded as decasyllabic--and
it _must_ by English people be regarded as decasyllabic--then the
word 'vie' must be a monosyllable in spite of its termination in e.
He had in the second line quite correctly allowed for '_tristes_'
as being two syllables, and '_tombe_' in the third. In the clash of
French verse-theories of those days he might be correct or incorrect
without committing a solecism, but he could not be incorrect in the
first line and formal in the others. Conrad's face would cloud over.
He would snatch up a volume of Racine and read half a dozen lines. He
would exclaim contemptuously: "Do you mean to say that each of those
verses _con_sists of ten syllables?"... Yet he would have read the
verse impeccably.... He would flush up to the eyes. He would cry:
"Did you ever hear a Frenchman say vee-yeh when he meant vee? You
never did! _Jamais de la vie!_" And with fury he would read his verse
aloud, making, with a slight stammer, '_vie_' a monosyllable and, with
impetus, two syllables each out of _tristes_ and _tombe_. He would
begin to gesticulate, his eyes flashing....

One would change the subject of discussion to the unfailing topic
of the rottenness of French as a medium for poetry, finding
perfect harmony again in the thought that French was as rotten for
verse-poetry as was English for any sort of prose....

The curious thing was that when he read his prose aloud his
accentuation was absolutely faultless. So that it always seemed to
the writer that Conrad's marvellous gift of language was, in the end,
dramatic. When he talked his sense of phonetics was dormant, but the
moment it came to any kind of performance the excitement would quicken
the brain centres that governed his articulation. It was, indeed, the
same with his French. When conversing desultorily with the writer,
he had much of the accent and the negligence of an aristocratic,
meridional lounger of the seventies.... But when at Lamb House, Rye,
he addressed compliments to Mr. Henry James, you could imagine, if
you closed your eyes, that it was the senior actor of the Thtre
Franais, addressing an eulogium to the bust of Molire....

Probably the mere thought of reading aloud subconsciously aroused
memories of once-heard orations of Mr. Gladstone or John Bright: so,
in writing, even to himself he would accentuate and pronounce his
words as had done those now long defunct orators.... And it is to be
remembered that, during all those years, the writer wrote every word
that he wrote, with the idea of reading aloud to Conrad, and that
during all those years Conrad wrote what he wrote with the idea of
reading it aloud to this writer.


                              STRUCTURE

That gets rid, as far as is necessary in order to give a pretty fair
idea of Conrad's methods, of the questions that concern the texture
of a book. More official or more learned writers who shall not be
novelists shall treat of this author's prose with less lightness--but
assuredly too with less love.... Questions then of vocabulary,
selection of incident, style, cadence and the rest concern themselves
with the colour and texture of prose and, since this writer, again,
will leave to more suitable pens the profounder appraisements of
Conrad's morality, philosophy and the rest, there remains only to say
a word or two on the subject of form.

Conrad then, never wrote a true short story, a matter of two or three
pages of minutely considered words, ending with a smack... with what
the French call a _coup de canon_. His stories were always what for
lack of a better phrase one has to call 'long-short' stories. For
these the form is practically the same as that of the novel. Or,
to avoid the implication of saying that there is only one form for
the novel, it would be better to put it that the form of long-short
stories may vary as much as may the form for novels. The short story
of Maupassant, of Tchekhov or even of the late O. Henry is practically
stereotyped--the introduction of a character in a word or two, a word
or two for atmosphere, a few paragraphs for story, and then, click!
a sharp sentence that flashes the illumination of the idea over the
whole.

This Conrad--and for the matter of that, the writer--never so much
as attempted, either apart or in collaboration. The reason for this
lies in all that is behind the mystic word 'justification.' Before
everything a story must convey a sense of inevitability: that which
happens in it must seem to be the only thing that could have happened.
Of course a character may cry: "If I had then acted differently how
different everything would now be." The problem of the author is to
make his then action the only action that character could have taken.
It must be inevitable, because of his character, because of his
ancestry, because of past illness or on account of the gradual coming
together of the thousand small circumstances by which Destiny, who is
inscrutable and august, will push us into one certain predicament. Let
us illustrate:

In the rendering of your long friendship with, and ultimate bitter
hostility towards, your neighbour Mr. Slack who had a greenhouse
painted with Cox's aluminium paint you will, if you wish to get
yourself in with the scrupulousness of a Conrad, have to provide
yourself, in the first place, with an ancestry at least as far back
as your grandparents. To account for your own stability of character
and physical robustness you will have to give yourself two dear
old grandparents in a lodge at the gates of a great nobleman: if
necessary you will have to give them a brightly polished copper
kettle simmering on a spotless hob, with silhouettes on each side
of the mantel: in order to account for the lamentable procedure
of your daughter Millicent you must provide yourself with an
actress- or gipsy-grandmother. Or at least with a French one. This
grandmother will have lived, unfortunately unmarried, with someone of
eloquence--possibly with the great Earl-Prime Minister at whose gates
is situated the humble abode of your other grandparents--at any rate
she will have lived with someone from whom you will have inherited
your eloquence. From her will have descended the artistic gifts to
which the reader will owe your admirable autobiographic novel. If you
have any physical weakness, to counterbalance the robustness of your
other grandparents, you will provide your mother, shortly before your
birth, with an attack of typhoid fever, due to a visit to Venice in
company with your father, who was a gentleman's courier in the family
in which your mother was a lady's maid. Your father, in order to be a
courier, will have had, owing to his illegitimacy, to live abroad in
very poor circumstances. The very poor circumstances will illustrate
the avarice of his statesman father--an avarice which will have
descended to you in the shape of that carefulness in money matters
that, reacting on the detrimental tendencies inherited by Millicent
from her actress-grandmother, so lamentably influences your daughter's
destiny.

And of course there will have to be a great deal more than that,
always supposing you to be as scrupulous as was Conrad in this
matter of justification. For Conrad--and for the matter of that the
writer--was never satisfied that he had really and sufficiently got
his characters in: he was never convinced that he had convinced the
reader, this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books. He
never introduced a character, however subsidiary, without providing
that character with ancestry and hereditary characteristics, or at
least with home surroundings--always supposing that character had
any influence on the inevitability of the story. Any policeman who
arrested any character must be 'justified' because the manner in which
he effected the arrest, his mannerisms, his vocabulary and his voice,
might have a permanent effect on the psychology of the prisoner. The
writer remembers Conrad using almost those very words during the
discussion of the plot of the _Secret Agent_.

This method, unless it is very carefully handled, is apt to have the
grave defect of holding a story back very considerably. You must as
a rule bring the biography of a character in only after you have
introduced the character: yet, if you introduce a policeman to make an
arrest the rendering of his biography might well retard the action of
an exciting point in the story.... It becomes then your job to arrange
that the very arresting of the action is an incitement of interest in
the reader, just as, if you serialise a novel, you take care to let
the words "_to be continued in our next_" come in at as harrowing a
moment as you can contrive.

And of course the introducing of the biography of a character may
have the great use of giving contrast to the tone of the rest of the
book.... Supposing that in your history of your affair with Mr. Slack
you think that the note of your orderly middle-class home is growing a
little monotonous, it would be very handy if you could discover that
Mr. Slack had a secret, dipsomaniacal wife, confined in a country
cottage under the care of a rather criminal old couple: with a few
pages of biography of that old couple you could give a very pleasant
relief to the sameness of your narrative. In that way the sense of
reality is procured.


                           PHILOSOPHY, ETC.

We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the
thought of our day. With the novel you can do anything: you can
inquire into every department of life, you can explore every
department of the world of thought. The one thing that you can not do
is to propagandise, as author, for any cause. You must not, as author,
utter any views: above all you must not fake any events. You must not,
however humanitarian you may be, over-elaborate the fear felt by a
coursed rabbit.

It is obviously best if you can contrive to be without views at all:
your business with the world is rendering, not alteration. You have
to render life with such exactitude that more specialised beings
than you, learning from you what are the secret needs of humanity,
may judge how many white-tiled bathrooms are, or to what extent
parliamentary representation is, necessary for the happiness of
men and women. If, however, your yearning to amend the human race
is so great that you cannot possibly keep your fingers out of the
watchsprings there is a device that you can adopt.

Let us suppose that you feel tremendously strong views as to sexual
immorality or temperance. You feel that you must express these,
yet you know that, like, say, M. Anatole France, who is also a
propagandist, you are a supreme novelist. You must then invent,
justify, and set going in your novel a character who can convincingly
express your views. If you are a gentleman you will also invent,
justify and set going characters to express views opposite to those
you hold....

You have reached the climax of your long relationship with Mr. Slack;
you have been invited and are just going to address a deputation
that has come to invite you to represent your native city in the
legislature of your country. The deputation is just due. Five minutes
before it arrives to present you with the proudest emotion of your
life, you learn that your daughter Millicent is going to have a child
by Mr. Slack (Him, of course, you will have already 'justified' as the
likely seducer of a young lady whose cupidity in the matter of bangles
and shoes you by your pecuniary carefulness have kept perpetually
on the stretch.) Mr. Slack has a dipsomaniacal wife, so there is no
chance of his making the matter good.... You thus have an admirable
opportunity of expressing quite a number of views through the mouth
of the character whom you have so carefully 'justified' as yourself.
Quite a number of views!

That then was, cursorily stated, the technique that we evolved at the
Pent. It will be found to be nowadays pretty generally accepted as the
normal way of handling the novel. It is founded on common sense and
some of its maxims may therefore stand permanently. Or they may not.


                         PROGRESSION D'EFFET

There is just one other point. In writing a novel we agreed that every
word set on paper--_every_ word set on paper--must carry the story
forward and, that as the story progressed, the story must be carried
forward faster and faster and with more and more intensity. That is
called _progression d'effet_, words for which there is no English
equivalent.

One might go on to further technicalities, such as how to squeeze the
last drop out of a subject. The writer has, however, given an instance
of this in describing how we piled perils of the hangman's rope on the
unfortunate John Kemp. To go deeper into the matter would be to be too
technical. Besides enough has been said in this chapter to show you
what was the character, the scrupulousness and the common sense of our
hero.

There remains to add once more:

_But these two writers were not unaware_--were not unaware--_that
there are other methods of writing novels. They were not rigid even in
their own methods. They were sensible to the fact that compromise is
at all times necessary to the execution of a work of art._

The lay reader will be astonished at this repetition and at these
italics. They are inserted for the benefit of gentlemen and ladies who
comment on books in the Press.


                               LANGUAGE

It would be disingenuous to avoid the subject of language. This is
the only matter on which the writer ever differed fundamentally
from Conrad. It was one upon which the writer felt so deeply that,
for several years, he avoided his friend's society. The pain of
approaching the question is thus very great.

Conrad's dislike for the English language, then, was during all
the years of our association extreme, his contempt for his medium,
unrivalled. Again and again during the writing of, say, _Nostromo_
he expressed passionate regret that it was then too late to hope to
make a living by writing in French, and as late as 1916 he expressed
to the writer an almost equally passionate envy of the writer who was
in a position to write in French, propaganda for the government of
the French Republic.... And Conrad's contempt for English as a prose
language was not as in the writer's case mitigated by love for English
as the language for verse-poetry. For, to the writer, English is as
much superior to French in the one particular as French to English in
the other.

Conrad, however, knew nothing of, and cared less for, English
verse--and his hatred for English as a prose medium reached such
terrible heights that during the writing of _Nostromo_ the continual
weight of Conrad's depression broke the writer down. We had then
published _Romance_ and Conrad, breaking, in the interests of that
work, his eremitic habits, decided that we ought to show ourselves in
Town. The writer therefore took a very large, absurd house on Campden
Hill and proceeded to 'entertain.' Conrad had lodgings also on Campden
Hill. At this time _Nostromo_ had begun to run as a serial in a very
popular journal, and on the placards of that journal Conrad's name
appeared on every hoarding in London. This publicity caused Conrad an
unbelievable agony, he conceiving himself for ever dishonoured by such
vicarious pandering to popularity.

It was the most terrible period of Conrad's life and of the writer's.
Conrad at that time considered himself completely unsuccessful;
ignored by the public; ill-treated by the critics; [he was certainly
at that date being treated with unusual stupidity by the critics] he
was convinced that he would never make a decent living. And he was
convinced that he would never master English. He used to declare that
English was a language in which it was impossible to write a direct
statement. That was true enough. He used to declare that to make a
direct statement in English is like trying to kill a mosquito with a
forty-foot stock-whip when you have never before handled a stock-whip.
One evening he made, in French, to the writer, the impassioned
declaration which will be found in French at the end of this volume.
On the following afternoon he made a really terrible scene at the
writer's house....

The writer was at the time very much harassed. The expense of keeping
up a rather portentous establishment made it absolutely necessary that
he should add considerably to his income with his pen--a predicament
with which he had not yet been faced. There was nothing in that except
that it was almost impossible to find time to write. An epidemic of
influenza running through the house crippled its domestic staff so
that all sorts of household tasks had of necessity to be performed by
the writer: there were, in addition, social duties--and the absolute
necessity of carrying Conrad every afternoon through a certain quantum
of work without which he must miss his weekly instalments in the
popular journal....

At an At Home there, amongst eminently decorous people, a well-meaning
but unfortunate gentleman congratulated Conrad on the fact that
his name appeared on all the hoardings and Conrad considered that
these congratulations were ironical gibes at him because his
desperate circumstances had forced him to agree to the dishonour of
serialisation in a popular journal....

Conrad's indictment of the English language was this, that no English
word is a word: that all English words are instruments for exciting
blurred emotions. 'Oaken' in French means 'made of oak wood'--nothing
more. 'Oaken' in English connotes innumerable moral attributes: it
will connote stolidity, resolution, honesty, blond features, relative
unbreakableness, absolute unbendableness--also, made of oak.... The
consequence is, that no English word has clean edges: a reader is
always, for a fraction of a second, uncertain as to which meaning of
the word the writer may intend. Thus, all English prose is blurred.
Conrad desired to write a prose of extreme limpidity....

We may let it go at that. In later years Conrad achieved a certain
fluency and a great limpidity of language--the result being the
_Rover_, which strikes the writer as being a very serene and beautiful
work. Conrad then regretted that, for him, all the romance of writing
was gone. In between the two he made tributes to the glory of the
English language by implication contemning the tongue that Flaubert
used. This at the time struck the writer, at that time in a state of
exhausted depression, as unforgivable--as the very betrayal of Dain
by Tom Lingard.... Perhaps it was. If it were Conrad faced the fact
in that book. There are predicaments that beset great Adventurers, in
dark hours, in the shallows: the overtired nerve will fail.... We may
well let it go at that....

     "_For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the
     desperate and funny quarrels that enlivened these old days. The
     pity of it is that there comes a time when all the fun of one's
     life must be looked for in the past...._"

Those were Conrad's last words on all the matters of our
collaborations here treated of. They were, too, almost his last
words.... For those who can catch them here then are the echoes....




                               PART IV

                      _THAT, TOO, IS ROMANCE..._




                               PART IV

                       THAT, TOO, IS ROMANCE...


With the turn of the century we took up again _Romance_.

For a long time we had talked of going to Bruges in order to get quiet
in which to finish this work, this not because the Pent was noisy:
but its corners seemed to be filled with the whispering echoes of our
struggles. The crux of the difficulties in this book had arrived. By
that time a great deal of it was finished and in about its present
condition.

Conrad's allotment of the authorship of the parts of this work had
better be given here again. "'I suppose our recollections agree,' he
writes to the author. 'Mine in their simplest form, are:

     "'First part, yours; Second part, mainly yours, with
     a little by me on points of seamanship and suchlike small
     matters; Third part about 60 per cent. mine with important
     touches by you. Fourth part mine, with here and there an
     important sentence by you: Fifth part practically all yours,
     including the famous sentence at which we both exclaimed: "This
     is Genius" (Do you remember what it was?) with perhaps half a
     dozen lines by me.'"

The writer's recollection agrees except as to the Fourth part which
does not contain one word by the writer. How that came about shall now
be recounted.

The writer with his family and paraphernalia had transported
themselves to Bruges to await Conrad and his. Bruges is a grey, silent
town with crowstep gables to the house-fronts, its shadows being
shot with the gleams from canals that run through the streets. Its
roof-level is dominated by an immense belfry from which there descend
chimes. The chimes are practically never silent. Beautifully and
drowsily five minutes before every quarter of the hour they begin to
announce that the quarter is about to strike; for ten minutes after
the quarter has struck they go on announcing that the quarter has
struck. The hour is greeted for a quarter of an hour by chimes that
announce that the hour is about to strike; for forty-five minutes
after the hour has struck they continue to announce that the hour
has struck. The hours and the quarters are struck on great bells
whose overtones go on reverberating for fifty and for ten minutes
respectively.... That is impressionism: the impressionism of those
who in Bruges lie awake at night. There are in Bruges a great number
of churches--all with bells--and some very lovely, bright little
pictures by van Eyck. There was also an English Pension to which we
had agreed to go. Conrad liked to be amongst English people when
abroad.... Bruges is also very relaxing: except at night it is
difficult not to sleep.

The Contents Page of _Romance_ looks like this:

      PART FIRST

  THE QUARRY AND THE BEACH

      PART SECOND

  THE GIRL WITH THE LIZARD

      PART THIRD

  CASA RIEGO

      PART FOURTH

  BLADE AND GUITAR

      PART FIFTH

  THE LOT OF MAN

... whose names are five sweet symphonies in the _capa y espada_
manner. They are all Conrad's, those names. There was nothing he loved
so much as inventing titles for Parts: it was like being a herald
proclaiming war from the steps of St. Paul's....

On arrival in Bruges the author was carrying the manuscript of Parts
One, Two and Three complete. The end of the book was also done by
then exactly as it stands, except for the peroration over which,
subsequently, we worked for twenty hours on end. We were to meet,
cheered by the new atmosphere of Bruges and, in a rush, finish off
Part Four and the opening of Part Five.... In three or four days. Then
we would take a week's holiday and look at the churches. We had also
planned an excursion to Ghent: two sailors ashore after a four years'
voyage. For, by that time, we had been, on and off, four years over
_Romance_....

So there we were in Bruges, in the English Pension, waiting for
Conrad. The English Pension seemed to be distinguished chiefly by
brown linoleum, bentwood chairs in long perspectives, long teeth in
withered faces, dimness and placards forbidding you to take water
between certain hours from certain taps--and by complete, absolute,
unshakable lassitude. There was no place in which to write. When,
with a desperate struggle of the will the writer took a private
sitting-room on the ground floor, little boys from the school opposite
used to throw in at the windows envelopes full of ink which made a
delectable mess. About the shadowy streets and along the dim canals
the Briton was pursued by crowds of little boys whose shouts of
_Vivent les Boers!_ gave temporary animation to Bruges la Morte.

Conrad delayed to come... _Romance_ was thus hung up. We had agreed
that the writer would work in the mornings on _Romance_ whilst Conrad
wrote--probably _Typhoon_--at the same time. We would play dominoes
in agreeable cafs during the afternoons and after dinner collaborate
gaily. The work would take only a few days....

It was impossible to do anything during the day in Bruges, but lie
on one's bed; at night it was impossible to sleep for chimes and
mosquitoes.... Conrad delayed to come.... The diet of the English
Pension: thin slices of cold mutton, potatoes boiled in water,
'greens' boiled in water which remained with the greens--began
seriously to deteriorate a digestion used to food more elaborate. The
taste of the greens was never out of the mouth.... One hesitated to
change one's lodging because Conrad was coming to-morrow. He liked
to be amongst English people when abroad. It was perhaps _To-morrow_
that he was then writing: or both _To-morrow_ and _Typhoon_. The
withered faces and the long teeth that phantasmally loomed in the
more dim places of the English Pension were curious to know why we
needed a private sitting-room.... To write a book in?... A novel? Oh,
good gracious.... They had never been in a Pension with a novelist
before.... Was it quite.... Of course you locked your door at
night.... But they had always thought.... Like common soldiers, you
know.... Not allowed in the best....

Telegrams went backwards and forwards between the Pension and the
Pent.... Book just being finished, came the cheerful news from the
Pent. Pinker would come down with large sum.... The early summer
waned: the dog-days were intolerably there.... The French-Swiss
governess, indispensable, declared she would not stop another day in
Bruges.... Little boys calling her _Sale Anglaise_ had thrown ink over
her pink striped, best dimity dress.... Agitated packings began. In
the midst of them a telegram from Sandling Junction to say: _Starting_.

There was, of course, a rush to Ostend where the boat comes
in. Travellers not coming by boat are not allowed on the
Ostend-Bruges express. The writer visited the _sous chef de gare_:
Statie-Onderovervorste. He removed his hat, bowing with exquisite
politeness and announced to a uniformed man as big as a sea-lion
"qu'il serait infiniment reconnaissant si M. Le Chef de Gare lui
accorderait la permission...." The sea-lion mumbled: "Wat wolt
gi?... Wadger want." The writer wanted permission to travel by the
Ostend-Bruges Express. The sea-lion waved a flapper and cried: "Vat do
_I_ kerr?... Do wadger want.... Ko erway...."

Conrad appeared on the platform, over-burdened by the weight of a
large-small boy, not very well.... Bearers staggering after that
Congo caravan.... The scared face of Amy Foster, maid, who had never
been abroad.... A swarm of frightened ticket-collectors running
alongside. Conrad infuriated.... The caravan is assimilated by the
express.... The timid ticket-collectors waver round the open door
of the carriage bleating: "Tickets pliss. Billets. Koupongs....
Bitte die Fahrkarten...." Conrad, exhausted but volcanic, sunk on
the cushions, exclaims: "Dirt: foreigners.... Sales Belges.... Damn,
damn, _damn_!..." The sea-lion in an unbuttoned blue tunic with
gilt buttons--a tunic large enough to be a truck cover--waddles
like a great sow amongst a poultry-yard of ticket-collectors. He
exclaims: "Det maakt mix.... Verrokter Engelsker... Ko away...." The
ticket-collectors disperse.... Whether Conrad had any tickets the
writer never knew. He certainly never showed them.... It is perhaps in
that way that one _ought_ to handle foreigners....

Conrad remained wrapped in a comminative gloom, the train going over
the flat lands. He contrived to communicate to the milder writer that
all... all... all these things: the train, the boat, the mislaid
trunks, the ticket-collectors and the whole dreary waste of foreigners
were _his_--the writer's--fault.... One ought to be English.... The
writer ought to be English.... Why wasn't he English to the soul?
Asking permission of a Statie-Onderovervorste!... It made these
fellows not know their places.... But it would be all right when we
got to the English Pension, amongst English people....

At the first sight of the first placard on the first landing,
surrounded by long teeth that peeped from the gloom of corridors
Conrad stiffened, like a sudden corpse. WATER MUST NOT BE DRAWN FROM
THIS TAP BETWEEN THE HOURS OF ELEVEN AND TEN MORNING OR EVENING.
GUESTS WILL BE STRICTLY SILENT ON THE STAIRS. A FINE OF ONE FRANC
TWENTY-FIVE WILL BE ENACTED FOR EVERY FIVE MINUTES LATE AT MEALS. NO
SMOKING IN THE DINING-ROOM SALONS STAIRS BATH ROOMS OR W.C.S. BOOTS
ARE NOT CLEANED IN THE CORRIDORS. ANGLICAN SERVICE DAILY IN THE
DINING-ROOM FROM NINE THIRTY TO ONE....

Thus England spoke.

What Conrad said made all the glimmering teeth vanish from those
corridors for the next seven hours. He disappeared. Gone.

He seemed to be gone for days.... But within seven hours we were
all aboard the tram for Knocke.... He had met an admirable Abb in
the Place du Beffroi.... He had been directed to that sea-shore.
Admirable hotel.... Wonderful domino players.... Charming Dutch,
French, Spanish, German fellow guests.... Belgians not so bad.... Best
class.... Director of Brussels orchestra.... Wagnerian cantatrice....
Unsurpassed sands.... Cooking ... Hum, hum.... Four francs a day
bath and _vin compris_.... A little music with the chasse caf, mon
vieux.... We will finish _Romance_ in a week....

It was not so bad. When Conrad really went at it he fell on his feet
all right.... Knocke was just within the Belgian border. You could
run in a sand-yacht in front of the dunes, right to Sluys, far in
Holland.... The hotel was very airy, the fellow guests were pleasant.
You could play in domino or _cart_ tournaments or sand-tennis ones.
Even Miss Benny van der Meer de Walcheren was charming when, at meals,
her voice was not shaking the glasses on the trays in the sixth-floor
back bedroom where we tried to collaborate....

Alas: a child fell ill: the book would not go in the mornings in the
top room: _Romance_ in the mornings would not go, either, on the
corner of the caf table: doctors had to be fetched at midnights in
the teeth of westerly gales, the foam white like a bar across the
sky, the sand skinning your lips. The child was very ill.... The
writer developed symptoms of idiocy never before suspected.... Owing
to the illness of the child it was impossible for Conrad to invent
the escape of John Kemp from the Casa Riego in Rio Media. The writer
was set to invent. ... He invented John Kemp boarding the _Lion_, or
some other ship, with the fainting Seraphina on one arm: Kemp swarming
up a rope with his burden and shooting two negroes whose white teeth
gleamed at the wheel.... It became touch and go with the child. Conrad
had very bad gout, his wrist all wrapped up. He groaned all day long
in the top room. Writing was impossible. From time to time he would
smile distractedly to the writer and say: "If I didn't know that you,
_mon vieux_, were writing away at that book I should go mad...."

Alas!... In the caf downstairs the sand and the draughts filtered
round the writer's ankles. The ink was full of sand, the typewriter
was stopped by sand, the marble table on which one wrote was like
ice. Autumn was there: the voice of Miss Benny competed with great
gales off the leaden North Sea.... The child lived to become an
admirable son, and to make the proudest of fathers that Conrad was,
the discreetly proudest of grandfathers.... So Conrad had mind enough
to read how the bodies of those white-teethed niggers falling on the
wheel made the pirate ship come about, and how John Kemp exclaimed
to the villainous O'Brien: "Foiled! And by a stripling!"... It was
not really as bad as that: but that was how it felt as the writer
sat by with Conrad reading the manuscript. Conrad had too bad a
headache, and was too bad with the gout to be read to in the top
room that contained a deal table, an unmade-up bed, some ash trays
and a portrait of Leopold, King of the Belgians, hanging on the wall
askew.... Leopold had his revenge for the _Inheritors_ as he simpered
down over his preposterous beard, the ugly Jew!...

The writer almost turned. Not because Conrad did not like John
Kemp's pistol practice, but because Conrad's belief in the writer's
omniscience should have put him to the job of writing sea-adventures,
which was trying him altogether too high. For Conrad really had that
belief: that is the one certainty that the writer had as to how
Conrad really regarded him. He may have had affection for the writer
or he may not; he may have had admiration for his gifts or he may
not. The one thing that is certain is that he really regarded him as
omniscient. Otherwise he would never have put him at the jobs that
he did put him at. For of our establishment the writer was Bill the
Lizard. It was: "Here Bill.... Where's Bill?... Bill, the master says
that you've got to go up the chimney!" all day long.... And proud
too! The writer would have to supply authentic information about
Anarchists as about Cabinet Ministers, about Courts of Justice as
about the emotions of women, about leases, mining shares, brands of
cigarettes, the verse of Christina Rossetti.... He did too, and was
mostly treated with an exaggerated politeness. As to the accusation of
omniscience and the politeness there is documentary evidence: you may
read in the preface of the _Secret Agent_ of "the omniscient friend
who first gave me the first suggestion of the book." Or again--this is
Conrad giving you the writer:

     "The subject of the _Secret Agent_--I mean the tale--came
     to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend, in a
     casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchists'
     activities; how brought about I do not remember now....

     "I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility
     of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality.... Presently
     passing to particular instances we recalled the already old
     story of the attempt to blow up Greenwich Observatory.... That
     outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of a
     way....

     "I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent
     for a while, and then remarked in his characteristically casual
     and omniscient manner: 'Oh that fellow was half an idiot. His
     sister committed suicide afterwards.'... It never occurred to
     me later to ask how he arrived at his knowledge. I am sure
     that if he had once in his life seen the back of an anarchist
     that must have been the whole of his connection with the
     underworld...." #/

That passage is curiously characteristic Conrad.... For what the
writer really did say to Conrad was: "Oh that fellow was half an
idiot! His sister murdered her husband afterwards and was allowed to
escape by the police. I remember the funeral...." The suicide was
invented by Conrad. And the writer knew--and Conrad knew that the
writer knew--a great many anarchists of the Goodge Street group,
as well as a great many of the police who watched them. The writer
had provided Conrad with Anarchist literature, with memoirs, with
introductions to at least one Anarchist young lady who figures in the
_Secret Agent_.... Indeed the writer's first poems were set up by that
very young lady on an Anarchist printing-press.

Acquiring such knowledge is the diversion of most youths, the writer
having once been young. There are few English boys of spirit who have
not at one time or other dressed up in sweaters and with handkerchiefs
round their necks gone after experience amongst the cut-throats at
Wapping Old Stairs.... But Conrad, when he met the writer after the
publication of the _Secret Agent_ with preface in 1920, remarked
almost at once and solicitously:

"You know.... The preface to the _Secret Agent_.... I did not give
you away too much.... I was very cautious."... He had wished politely
to throw a veil of eternal respectability over the writer. And he
had been afraid that the suggestion that the writer had once known
some anarchists, thirty-five years before, might ruin the writer's
career!... And of course few men in self-revelations and prefaces have
ever so contrived under an aspect of lucidity to throw over themselves
veils of confusion.

For the sake of completing the picture of collaborators at work,
whilst we are quoting, the writer will quote here a passage from
Stephen Crane that has always pleased the writer very much. "You
must not be offended," he writes to someone, "by Hueffer's manner.
He patronises Mr. James, he patronises Mr. Conrad. Of course he
patronises me, and he will patronise Almighty God when they meet,
but God will get used to it, for Hueffer is all right." With the
additional information that it was according to Conrad that Henry
James always referred to the writer as _votre ami, le jeune homme
modeste_ the writer will leave the reader to make what he can of it.
Relationships are extraordinarily indefinable things.

But with the Fourth Part of _Romance_ the writer really did
momentarily feel that he was being tried too high. And he protested.
He pointed out that he knew nothing about the sea, except that it was
salt and bitter. He ought not to have been set to contrive the escape
of John Kemp by sea. He could have done it overland, and would have
made Kemp just as hangable.

Conrad grumbled rather suspiciously that the writer had managed all
right with the pirate attack on the Breeze in Part II. The writer
pointed out that it was one thing to elaborate a scene from the
evidence of a trial and to write: "a quarter of a mile astern and
between the land and us, a little schooner, rather low in the water,
curtsying under a cloud of white canvas--a wonderful thing to look
at." Anyone who could describe a pint pot could write that. But with
the impression that the writer knew all about his, Conrad's past, at
the back of his mind, Conrad said, still suspiciously: "That's all
right.... What's the matter with it...." The implication being that
the writer really knew all about sea-faring and had just not tried
when he invented those niggers at the wheel.

... The fact was that Conrad suspected the writer of not having taken
trouble with the passage, because of going joy-riding with Miss Benny
on a sand-yacht into Holland. Something like that....

In any case, that was the end of the writer's invention of parts of
_Romance_. Conrad took over the Fourth Part which begins: "There
was a slight, almost imperceptible jar, a faint grating noise, a
whispering sound of sand--and the boat, without a splash, floated."
In the literature of romantic adventure there is nothing more
admirable--unless only, Conrad would have added, the _Purple Land_.

So the writer failed Conrad as any other King Tom always fails any
Malay Prince, for the labours Conrad put into that immense wad out of
the book must have been agonising, and in that matter the writer was
past help....

But it must not be imagined that that ended our labours. The Parts
once joined up, we went right over the book again, working upon every
passage with microscopes. It then went to the printers and there was
an interval. But the proof-corrections we made were so overwhelming
that when we were half-way through the Second Part, Messrs. Smith
and Elder sent the manuscript back suggesting that we might as well
make our corrections on that. We went through it all again and, even
after that, corrected elaborately. On the last section of the proof
we worked at the Pent from ten in the morning till fire-lighting time
of the next morning, as has been related. What our labours amounted
to was what follows. This passage from the end of _Romance_ has been
printed elsewhere as well. The reader may not have seen that book. We
worked all that day on those passages, putting in sentences and taking
them out: there was a great deal more Conrad at one time, a great
deal more Hueffer at another. It all went but what here is given. We
were, you see, shortening, shortening, shortening--for the sake of
_progression d'effet_.


     "_Part Five: The End._

     "_It takes long enough to realise that someone is dead at
     a distance. I had done that. But how long, how long it needs to
     know that the life of your heart has come back from the dead._
     For years afterwards I could not bear to have her out of my
     sight.

     "Of our first meeting in London all I can remember is
     a speechlessness that was like the awed hesitation of our
     overtried souls before the greatness of a change from the verge
     of despair to the opening of a supreme joy. The whole world,
     the whole of life, with her return had changed all around me;
     it enveloped me, it enfolded me so lightly as not to be felt,
     so suddenly as not to be believed in, so completely that the
     whole meeting was an embrace, so softly that at last it lapsed
     into a sense of rest that was like the fall of a beneficent and
     welcome death.

     "_For suffering is the lot of man_, but not inevitable
     failure or worthless despair which is without end--suffering,
     the mark of manhood, which bears within its pain a hope of
     felicity like a jewel set in iron....

     "Her first words were:

     "'You broke our compact. You went away from me whilst I
     was sleeping.' Only the deepness of her reproach revealed the
     depth of her love, and the suffering she too had endured to
     reach a union that was to be without end--and to forgive.

     "_And, looking back, we see Romance--that subtle thing
     that is mirage--that is life. It is the goodness of the years
     we have lived through, of the old time when we did this or
     that, when we dwelt here or there. Looking back it seems a
     wonderful enough thing that I who am this and she who is that,
     commencing so far away a life that, after such sufferings borne
     together and apart, ended so tranquilly there in a world so
     stable--that she and I should have passed through so much, good
     chance and evil chance, sad hours and joyful, all lived down
     and swept away into the little heap of dust that is life. That,
     too, is Romance._"


                               L'ENVOI

The writer has always considered that that man may be said to have
lived happily who has a happy death. What are all the glories of
Napoleon as set against his fretted and fretful end? Death is no doubt
to all kind; a dulling of the faculties sets in and it is, however
fast, a gradual, restful affair. But how kind must death be to the
faithful worker, who having toiled all his life, can say with his
last breath, I have achieved. His last backwards glance must show all
his reverses as mere reverses; but all his progresses have had such
permanence as is vouchsafed to us mortals. So the writer in these sad
months and years has one certain happiness....

In the days here mostly treated of Conrad had a very dreadful, a very
agonising life. Few men can so much have suffered: there was about
all his depressed moments a note of pain--of agony indeed--that
coloured our whole relationship: that caused one to have an almost
constant quality of solicitude. It is all very well to say that he had
his marvellous resilience. He had, and that was his greatness. But
the note of a sailor's life cannot be called preponderantly cheerful
whose whole existence is passed in a series of ninety-day passages, in
labouring ships, beneath appalling weathers, amongst duties and work
too heavy, in continual discomfort and acute physical pain--with, in
between each voyage, a few days spent as Jack-ashore. And that, in
effect, was the life of Conrad.

His resilience was his own: his oppressions were the work of humanity
or of destiny. That is why his personality struck so strong a note
of humour. The personality of Conrad as it remains uppermost in the
reader's mind was threefold, with very marked divisions. There was
the Conrad with the sharp, agonising intake of the breath who feared
your approach because you might jar his gout-martyrised wrist, or the
approach of fate with the sharp pain of new disaster. There was the
gloomy aristocrat--as man and as intellect--who mused unceasingly
upon the treacheries, the muddles, the lack of imagination, the
imbecilities which make up the conduct of human affairs; who said
after the relation of each new story of incapacity and cruelness:
"Cela vous donne une fire ide de l'homme."... But most marked
in the writer's mind was the alert, dark, extremely polished and
tyrannous personality, tremendously awake, tremendously interested
in small things, peering through his monocle at something close to
the ground, taking in a characteristic and laughing consumedly--at
a laborious child progressing engrossedly over a sloping lawn, at a
bell-push that functioned of itself in the doorpost of a gentleman who
had written about an invisible man...or at the phrase: "Excellency, a
few goats...."

Once the writer in one of his more gorgeous frames of mind was
standing outside his bank, wearing a dazzling _huit-reflets_, a
long-tailed morning coat, beautiful trousers and spats, a very high
collar that was like enamel, a black satin stock, and dangling a
clouded cane.... Just like that! Bored stiff! Thinking nothing at all
he gazed down Pall Mall.... There approached him an old, shrunken,
wizened man, in an unbrushed bowler, an ancient burst-seamed overcoat,
one wrist wrapped in flannel, the other hand helping him to lean on
a hazel walking-stick, cut from a hedge and prepared at home. It had
in one tortured eye a round piece of dirty window-glass. It said:
"_Ford_..." "How dare..." the writer said to himself, "this atrocious
old usurer...." For naturally, no one but a moneylender would have
dared... in such a get-up.

But, within three minutes, as he stood and talked, the bowler hat
was jetty black, the overcoat just come from Poole's, the beard
torpedo-shaped, black, and defiant, the confident accents dusky and
caressing; the monocle sparkled like cut crystal, the eyes glowed.
And, almost more wonderfully, Pall Mall became alive as we went
towards the Bodega: it became alive as towns of the true belief awaken
in the presence of the Prince of True Believers, come to saunter
through his slave market.... That, too, was Romance....

But, indeed, with Conrad in it, London was another place. The writer
knows his London, has written about it silly books that have been
violently if undeservedly belauded: there is not much that you could
tell him about what lies two miles or so west of Piccadilly and no one
should go anywhere else: at any rate, not in that frame of mind. But
with Conrad at your elbow it became extraordinarily altered and more
vivid. It was not, of course, that he discoursed archologies or told
you what famous men had lived in such a house in Panton Street. It was
simply that he looked at a house-front and laughed; or at a hat on a
cabman, or his horse, or a tree in a London square, or the skirt of
a girl with a bandbox crossing the road in front of the Ritz, or at
the Foreign Office faade.... Once we were sitting in the front row
of the stalls at the Empire--and Conrad was never tired of wondering
at the changes that had come over places of musical entertainment
since his time, when they had lodged in cellars, with sanded floors,
pots of beer and chairmen. On that night at the Empire there was at
least one clergyman with a number of women: ladies is meant.... And,
during applause by the audience of some _too_ middle-class joke one of
us leaned over towards the other and said: "Doesn't one feel lonely
in this beastly country!"... Which of us it was that spoke neither
remembered after: the other had been at that moment thinking so
exactly the same thing.

And that must not be taken as want of patriotism to Great Britain
on the part of either of us. To the measure of our abilities we
were ready to do our bits each for the little bit of scarlet on the
map, and that seems to be all that is wanted.... But in any popular
assembly, anywhere, the artist must needs feel a foreigner and lonely.
He must have the feeling that not one soul of all those thousands
would understand one word of what he was talking of if he really
talked of the things that occupied his mind. You are a part of the
mob, at times with some of the mob-psychology yourself. But if you
draw into yourself and resume your individuality you are frightened.
That is what it is. You are frightened. If that House knew what you
were thinking of their entertainment and themselves they would tear
you to pieces on the instant--precisely as a foreigner. That is the
same all over the world; but it is at its worst in Anglo-Saxondom.

Indeed, in that frame of mind, Conrad was very impartial. He used to
shock the writer who, as a Briton, knows nothing about his Imperial
possessions, by declaring that the French were the only European
nation who knew how to colonise: they had none of the spirit of
Mr. Kipling's 'You-bloody-niggerisms' about them, but regarded
black or tan or black and tan as all one humanity with themselves,
intermarrying, working peacefully side by side, and side by side in
Algerian cafs of an evening sitting and drinking their aperitifs.
And they provided the nigger with exactly the same mairies, frescoes,
statuary in the midst of jungles, representation in Paris and
maddening regulations for obtaining _permis de chasse_ or money from
the Post Office as are provided in any French town from Pont l'Evque
to Aigues Mortes. That seemed to Conrad the way to colonise: and
indeed one never heard of any Secessionist movements in the French
colonies, from Algeria to Annam. But be that as it may, with all
his gloomily fatalistic views of the incapacity of Anglo-Saxons
as colonists other than by butchery and the sjambok, in _Heart of
Darkness_ it is a French, not a British, ship-of-war that bombards the
unanswering bush from the tepid seas of the African coasts.

     "There wasn't even a shed there and she was shelling the
     bush.... Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of
     the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the
     greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down. In
     the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was,
     incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one
     of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a
     little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile give a
     feeble screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.
     There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding...."

It was not that Conrad was markedly humanitarian; it was that he
disliked waste of human effort even when it is expended in meaningless
cruelty.

So, against the cruelties of fate, he stood up.... There was an
occasion when the whole of the manuscript of the last instalment of
the _End of the Tether_ for _Blackwood's_ was burnt shortly before
it was due for publication. That sounds a small thing. But the
instalments of _Blackwood_ are pretty long and the idea of letting
_Maga_ miss an instalment appalled: it was the almost unthinkable
crime.... The manuscript had been lying on the round, Madox Brown
table, under a paraffin lamp with a glass reservoir, no doubt also
an eighteen-forty contrivance: the reservoir had burst.... For a
day or so it was like a funeral: then for moral support or because
his writing-room was burnt out, Conrad drove over to Winchelsea, to
which ancient town the writer had removed. Then you should have seen
Romance! It became a matter of days: then of hours. Conrad wrote: the
writer corrected the manuscript behind him or wrote in a sentence;
the writer in his study on the street, Conrad in a two-roomed cottage
that we had hired immediately opposite. The household sat up all night
keeping soups warm. In the middle of the night Conrad would open his
window and shout: "For heaven's sake give me something for _sale
pochard_: it's been holding me up for an hour." The writer called
back: "Confounded swilling pig!" across the dead-still grass-grown
street....

Telegrams went backwards and forwards between ancient Winchelsea and
the ancient house of Blackwood in Edinburgh. So ancient was that
house that it was said to send its proofs from London to Edinburgh
and back by horse-messenger. We started the manuscript like that. Our
telegrams would ask what was the latest day, the latest hour, the
latest half-minute that would do if the _End of the Tether_ was to
catch the presses. Blackwoods answered, at first Wednesday morning,
then Thursday. Then Friday night would be just possible.... At two
in the morning the mare--another mare by then--was saddled by the
writer and the stable-boy. The stable-boy was to ride to the junction
with the manuscript and catch the six in the morning mail train. The
soup kept hot; the writers wrote. By three the writer had done all
that he could in his room. He went across the road to where Conrad
was still at it. Conrad said: "For God's sake.... Another half-hour:
just finishing...." At four the writer looked over Conrad's shoulder.
He was writing: "The blow had come, softened by the spaces of the
earth, by the years of absence." The writer said: "You must finish
now." To Ashford junction was eighteen miles. Conrad muttered: "Just
two paragraphs more." He wrote: "There had been whole days when she
had not thought of him at all--had no time." The writer said: "You
absolutely must stop!" Conrad wrote on: "But she loved him, she felt
that she had loved him after all," and muttered: "Two paragraphs...."
The writer shouted: it had come to him as an inspiration: "In the name
of God, don't you know you can write those two paragraphs into the
proofs when you get them back?..."

That was what life was like with us. At our last sitting over
_Romance_ we began, at the Pent, at ten in the morning. We worked
solidly till dinner, not lunch time; played two games of chess, began
again at nine and, just as we finished, the dilapidated Hunt fell back
and dropped the kindling-faggot wood wrapped in newspaper that he was
bringing in to light the fire with.... As for the last two paragraphs
of the _End of the Tether_, they never got written. Conrad disliked
the story as being too sentimental and never wanted to touch it again.
So the close remains, for Conrad, a trifle bald. It was to have ended
with two polyphonic paragraphs in a closing rhythm--as it might be:
the coming on of an incommensurable darkness!

And then we had the Jack-ashore touch. It brought into play Conrad's
incomparable business powers. The Insurance Man came to look at
the blistered table and the holes in the carpet, both of which had
belonged to Madox Brown. They were therefore on their last legs. The
Insurance Man, a gloomy sportsman in a long overcoat, sat on a small
chair, gazing at the ruins and leaning his chin on the crook of his
umbrella. "It looks a very _old_ carpet," he said. "Almost time the
moths had it, isn't it?" "But that's just what makes its value,"
Conrad said. "My dear faller, consider the feet that have walked on
it." "The table's very old, too," the Insurance Man said gloomily.
"That's why it's so immensely valuable," Conrad said. "Consider all
the people with great names that have sat round it. It's an historic
table. That's what it is." "I'm afraid," the Insurance Man said, "that
we can't pay for historic associations." "But that's just exactly what
you _do_ have to pay for," Conrad cried. "That before everything.
Consider what you would have to pay if Windsor Castle burned down. Yet
that's most incommodious as a residence. Dreadfully old-fashioned."
The Insurance Man shivered and drove away more depressed than
ever.... Eventually the Company repaired the table so that the top
shone as it can never have shone since 1840: they replaced the carpet
and paid quite a substantial sum for the historic associations.

What we did with that windfall the writer cannot remember. Perhaps we
hired the amazing vehicle in which we made our first motor trip: a
pink charabanc on solid wooden, iron-tyred wheels, of almost no horse
power. It broke down eight times in thirty-six miles and we pushed it
hilariously up the slightest incline. But it was a good beanfeast.
Conrad had hired that machine from the retired master mariner who,
all unconsciously, had sat to him for _Falk_. He was reputed to have
become a cannibal after the screw dropped off his vessel in the
Antarctic, drifting helpless for months. The disappointing thing about
that ride was that the children were in no sort of a way impressed.
It was no good pointing out to them that that carriage ran without
horses; they just accepted that fact along with every other phenomenon
and considered that a carriage with a horse or two was a much more
spirited affair.

We went in that vehicle through Postling, through Lyminge, Barham and
Elham along the shallow depression that is the Elham Valley--past
the house, about eight miles from the Pent, in which he eventually
died--to Canterbury, where he lies buried. That was a happy day. We
put up at the Falstaff Inn where, as they say, Chaucer stayed with his
pilgrims.... And the happy thought of which the writer spoke at the
beginning of this chapter is this.... Yesterday a young lady came into
his office and said that she had interviewed Conrad just before--for a
Kansas paper: Conrad who had never allowed himself to be interviewed.
He had received her with great charm: had told her many beautiful
things: the writer does not interfere with the charming young lady's
story by here repeating them.... But he must have been just the old
Conrad of the old days. And he did not have to say: _Alas! that
there comes a day when all the fun of life lies in the past._ For,
after lunch he had out his own car and drove the young lady all over
Barham Downs, by Stelling Minnis and Upper and Lower Hardres--in the
forgotten valleys of the _Inheritors'_ opening. From time to time he
said: "This is what I like: this is what I really like in life." And
he stopped the car in Postling Gap that looks over the lands of the
Pent, right away over the Stour Valley that is like the end of a bowl,
over the Channel, to France on a clear day. He said: "This is the view
I love best in the world!" That was his last Wednesday but one and the
writer hopes that he will never speak with anyone who saw Conrad later.

For that is the happy memory to have. He surely could look back on
life, so much of it passing in that country that he loved: and could
say with his dying breath that all his reverses had been temporary but
that his achievements truly had all such permanence as is vouchsafed
to us men.... That is to be granted what we Papists call the cross of
the happy death.




                               APPENDIX


For those not dreading more emotion than the English language will
bear, the writer appends what follows, which was written immediately
after learning of the death of Conrad. It contains something that is
not in the foregoing pages. The writer could not face its translation.
It is reprinted from the _Journal Littraire_ of Paris for the 16th
August 1924.

     L'INTELLIGENCE, a dit M. H. G. Wells, consiste dans
     la facult de dcouvrir des relations entre des analogies
     loignes. Ce pouvoir tait le grand don de mon ami...

     J'ai crit "mon ami" et je me mets  rflchir... Pourquoi
     n'avoir pas crit: "Ce grand matre qui vient de trpasser..."
     ou "Ce grand gentilhomme anglais qui _suivait la mer_...", ce
     qu'il et prfr, lui-mme?

     Car, n en Pologne, au sicle dernier, il fut d'abord
     lieutenant de torpilleur de la marine militaire franaise--puis
     une espce de gentilhomme anglais du sicle de la reine
     Elizabeth, des Drake, des Grenville--et des grands potes,
     les contemporains de Shakespeare. Pour comprendre le gnie
     de Conrad, il faut se souvenir que la civilisation polonaise
     s'est arrte vers la fin du dix-septime sicle, sicle de ses
     gloires guerrires et de sa chute. Et Conrad garda jusqu' la
     fin de sa vie la mentalit de ce sicle de grands gentilshommes
     qui "suivaient la fortune sur la mer" et qui taient des
     grands potes.

     La plus forte influence qui s'est fait sentir sur la
     vie de Conrad--sur sa vie littraire, sur ses voyages,
     sur la faon dont il affronta sa carrire pnible et
     glorieuse--mane des romans du Capitaine Marryat. Un grand--un
     trs grand--romancier-marin anglais. Les livres de Marryat
     parlent presque exclusivement de la guerre des frgates dans la
     Mditerrane du temps de Napolon I^{er}... Et, au moment de sa
     mort, Conrad tait en train d'crire un roman sur ce mme sujet.

     _Peter Simple_, _Percival Keene_, _Japhet in Search of a
     Father_, _Midshipman Easy_... surtout peut-tre _Midshipman
     Easy_... ce sont les livres qu'il faut lire si l'on veut
     comprendre la simple philosophie de l'me anglaise--et de l'me
     de Conrad...

     Quelle est la profession de foi d'un Anglais du
     dix-neuvime sicle? Il pense que dans les questions de marine
     militaire, il vaut trois--que dis-je?--sept, huit, dix-sept
     Franais; qu'en mer, il existe seul et rgne tandis que les
     Franais restent  tout jamais ses subordonns; que les Anglais
     sont les reprsentants du Plus Haut qui tient la mer dans le
     creux de sa main, que les Franais, soutenus par un diable
     personnel, n'existent que pour tre chasss de la mer, pour
     se cacher derrire les digues de Toulon; que tout Anglais, et
     surtout l'Anglais qui "suit la mer" est courageux, hautain,
     hardi, probe, avis, blond, de six pieds de hauteur... Et
     cette profession de foi simpliste, Joseph Conrad Kurzeniowski,
     en a t imbib  l'ge de huit ans, dans la Vologda, en
     lisant ses premiers romans--les romans du Capitaine Marryat
     qui jouissaient d'une popularit incroyable en Pologne, de,
     disons, 1840  1870... Et les derniers mots que Conrad m'a
     adresss sur cette question furent justement que Conrad restait
     du mme avis: aprs Shakespeare, Marryat tait le plus grand
     romancier anglais. Je venais de lui rappeler que nos relations
     littraires s'taient noues vingt-cinq ans auparavant par
     l'expression d'une opinion identique--mme par des mots
     identiques...

     L'ironique destin a voulu que ses premiers voyages se
     fissent sous le pavillon franais. Il parlait l'anglais jusqu'
     sa mort d'un bon accent mridional franais qui le rendait
     presque incomprhensible  tout Anglais qui ne parlait pas au
     moins un peu le franais: il pensait, il me l'a avou pour la
     dernire fois en mai de cette anne, toujours en franais.
     Aujourd'hui il est mort: le plus grand matre, le plus grand
     dompteur de ces choses sauvages que sont les mots, les rythmes,
     les phrases et les cadences de la langue anglaise--le plus
     grand que nos les aient vu...

     Plutt petit de taille, les paules trs larges, les bras
     longs, la barbe courte et les cheveux trs noirs, les dents
     trs blanches, dou d'une voix profonde, quand son attention
     tait vraiment veille, il insrait un monocle dans l'oeil
     gauche et vous regardait de trs prs...

     Il possdait--pendant les jours de notre pauvret
     commune--une extraordinaire voiture  quatre roues,
     poussireuse, en osier noir et une femelle quadrupde,
     chevaline,  longues oreilles que tout le monde prenait pour
     un mulet... Et nous avons pass des heures, des journes, des
     nuits entires, balancs, cahots, trs fiers, dans notre
     calche qui roulait entre les haies vertes et soignes, l't,
     grises et en haillons pineux, l'hiver. Et nous nous demandions
     sans cesse l'un  l'autre:

     "Comment allez-vous 'rendre' en mots ces grands champs de
     bls que sillonnent les vents faibles?... Comment, donc, mon
     vieux Ford..."

     Lundi pass--c'est bien aujourd'hui dimanche--je
     passais, balanc, cahot, par le trot saccad d'un quadrupde
     fminin septuagnaire, dans une voiture de louage quelconque,
     noire-grise et poussireuse... Et nous nous promenions entre
     les champs de bls dont les vents faibles sillonnaient les
     surfaces rousstres... Et je me disais: c'est la vraie vrit
     que je me disais:

     "Eh bien, mon vieux, comment allez-vous 'rendre,' ces
     champs de bls, ces petits clos, ces petites collines vertes et
     ondulantes--de la France?"

     Et je continuais  y penser tout en discutant le prix de
     ce parcours avec le cocher vieux et sournois; tout en achetant
     mes billets; en achetant le _Daily Mail_ que jamais, jamais de
     ma vie je n'acheterai plus; et mme en lisant les mots: _Sudden
     Death of Joseph Conrad_.

     Je m'occupais de la recherche des mots justes qui
     rendraient ces champs chuchotants et dors... Et j'entendis ma
     voix qui criait:  ma compagne: "_Look_... _Look_... Regardez!"
     Et j'indiquais le journal qu'elle tenait et dont je pouvais
     lire les majuscules noires... _Mort soudaine de Joseph Conrad_.

     Et, d'un coup, j'ai vu, s'talant devant les btiments
     de cette gare de banlieue parisienne--j'ai vu une nuit de
     clair de lune dans une petite ville trs ancienne qui domine
     l-bas la Manche. C'tait sur une vrandah  toit de verre o
     grimpaient des vignes fanes... Et, dans les taches d'ombre
     noires, et les taches le lumire blanches, il tait une heure
     du matin, et debout, Conrad parlait...

     Il nous racontait comment, sous les palmiers des les
     malaisiennes, assis, les jambes croises, par terre, il
     enseigna, l'usage de la machine  coudre aux petites femmes des
     rajahs mussulmans malaisiens... Et, dans les entreponts de son
     schooner amarr au quai croulant, se trouvaient des caisses et
     des caisses de fusils cachs sous les caisses de machines 
     coudre... Car les rajahs des les malaisiennes n'aiment gure
     leurs seigneurs hollandais, et, l-bas la guerre a dur non pas
     cinq, mais trois cent cinquante ans.

     Et puis je m'entendis, me disant  moi-mme:

     "C'est le mur du silence ternel qui descend devant vous!"

     Que voulez-vous? Je ne deviserai jamais devant des
     littrateurs franais sur le mot juste... La modestie m'en
     dfend! Et jamais je ne reverrai Joseph Conrad qui tait le
     dernier Don Quixote de la Manza du mot juste en Angleterre.
     Mettez si vous voulez que la jument fut sa Rossinante, les
     champs de bls indescriptibles ses moulins  vent, sa voiture
     en osier noir le char triomphal de son apothose sur l'Ile...
     et moi-mme srement son Sancho... Et lui qui me disait sans
     cesse:

     "Mon cher; c'est, notre mtier, un vrai mtier de chien...
     Vous crirez, et vous crirez... Et personne, personne au
     monde ne comprendra, ni ce que vous voulez dire, ni ce que vous
     avez donn d'effort, de sang, de sueur. Et  la fin vous vous
     direz: C'est comme si j'avais ram toute ma vie dans un bateau,
     sur un fleuve immense, dans un brouillard impntrable... Et
     vous ramerez et vous ramerez et jamais, jamais vous ne verrez
     un poteau sur les rives invisibles pour vous dire si vous
     montez le fleuve ou si le courant vous entrane... et vous
     connatrez la disette; les nuits froides, faute de couvertures;
     les viandes amres, et le sommeil hant de regrets. Et vous ne
     trouverez jamais, jamais pendant toute votre vie, une me pour
     vous dire si  la fin vous tes le plus grand gnie du monde...
     Ni non plus si vous tes le dernier, le plus infecte descendant
     de... Ponson du Terrail..."




[End of Joseph Conrad, by Ford Madox Ford]
