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A Personal Record-Part5_JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding

sweetness; and I also remember the great gathering of all the



relations from near and far, and the gray heads of the family

friends paying her the homage of respect and love in the house of



her favourite brother, who, a few years later, was to take the

place for me of both my parents.



I did not understand the tragicsignificance of it all at the

time, though, indeed, I remember that doctors also came. There



were no signs of invalidism about her--but I think that already

they had pronounced her doom unless perhaps the change to a



southern climate could re-establish her declining strength. For

me it seems the very happiest period of my existence. There was



my cousin, a delightful, quick-tempered little girl, some months

younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over as if she



were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.

There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and



not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung

the oppressive shadow of the great Russian empire--the shadow



lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered

by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the



ill-omened rising of 1863.

This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the



public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of

an uneasy egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant



in their appeal. It is meet that something more should be left

for the novelist's children than the colours and figures of his



own hard-won creation. That which in their grown-up years may

appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of



their natures and perhaps must remain forever obscure even to

themselves, will be their unconsciousresponse to the still voice



of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their

personalities are remotely derived.



Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and

undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme



master of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of

authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety toward



all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of

tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.



II

As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from



London into Ukraine. The MS. of "Almayer's Folly"--my companion

already for some three years or more, and then in the ninth



chapter of its age--was deposited unostentatiously on the

writing-table placed between two windows. It didn't occur to me



to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my

eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass



handles. Two candelabra, with four candles each, lighted up

festally the room which had waited so many years for the



wandering nephew. The blinds were down.

Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the



first peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal

grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession



of a member of the family; and beyond the village in the

limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great



unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread-

giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black



patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I

had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the



gates closing the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep

snow track; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the



stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper.

My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to



help me, and, for the most part, had been standingattentive but

unnecessary at the door of the room. I did not want him in the



least, but I did not like to tell him to go away. He was a young

fellow, certainly more than ten years younger than myself; I had



not been--I won't say in that place, but within sixty miles of

it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless physiognomy of the



open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was quite

possible that he might have been a descendant, a son, or even a






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