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Some Reminiscences-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 grey 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 for ever 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

towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a



writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own

experience.



Chapter 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

snowtrack; 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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