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 precise, 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 back and forth 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 back and forth 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 on the prairie at night, at a little distance from a great fire, beside which the boy horsetenders 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

" and

oh, not the least in the world!-the writer began, "La nuit, balancé par l'ouragan Conrad went on, "tandis que le feu grégeois ruisselait," right down to, "Et comme il était très fort, hardi, courageux et avisé. .

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 any one else." No, it probably does not matter, except as a light on the character and methods of Conrad, and as to his ability to get his own way. . . .

For it was obviously une émotion 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 candlestick, 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.