a mere "notice," as it were the relation of a journey where
nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should

be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood
and field, the hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh,

the sufferings too! I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the
traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful

plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance
looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen

running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure. "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I

should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to
the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."

Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't really. Je vous
donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not. Not all. I am thus

emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a
general. . .

Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and
then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle

Ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations
of the world's superficial judgment, shocking to the souls

concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of
sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say, or of

art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute. And
thus this general's daughter came to me--or I should say one of

the general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor
ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring

farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The
eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village

children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers
for the conquest of curtseys. It sounds futile, but it was

really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all
over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance

right to my very table--I mean the one who wore stand-up collars.
She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of

afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination.
She marched into my room swinging her stick. . .but no--I mustn't

exaggerate. It is not my speciality. I am not a humoristic
writer. In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she

had a stick to swing.
No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the

door too stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm,
still sunshine of the wide fields. They lay around me infinitely

helpful, but truth to say I had not known for weeks whether the
sun shone upon the earth and whether the stars above still moved

on their appointed courses. I was just then giving up some days
of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel "Nostromo,"

a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still
mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in

connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction
with the word "astonishing." I have no opinion on this

discrepancy. It's the sort of difference that can never be
settled. All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the

common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this
earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with the Lord"

for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness
of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the

sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the
shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile.

These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to
characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative

effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the
full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to

the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle--
something for which a material parallel can only be found in the

everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round
Cape Horn. For that too is the wrestling of men with the might

of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without
the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a

sense of over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be
adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain

longitude, once won, cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars
and the shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain;

whereas a handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them
your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil.

Here they are. "Failure"--"Astonishing": take your choice; or
perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of

paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the

sunshine.
"How do you do?"

It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard
nothing--no rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment

before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an
inauspicious presence--just that much warning and no more; and

then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible
fall from a great height--a fall, let us say, from the highest of

the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the
faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself up

quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair
stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being

uprooted out of one world and flung down into another--perfectly
civil.

"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"
That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly

true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of
confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I

didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself
on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other way

at the appallingmagnitude of the disaster. The whole world of
Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my seaboard tale),

men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was
not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not

placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's

silver-mine, and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de
Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham

heard it pass over his head--in Linda Viola's voice), dominated
even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of

treasure and love--all that had come down crashing about my ears.
I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in that very moment

I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"
The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck

training even in a merchant ship will do! This episode should
give you a new view of the English and Scots seamen (a much-

caricatured folk) who had the last say in the formation of my
character. One is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster I

think I have done some honour to their simple teaching. "Won't
you sit down?" Very fair; very fair indeed. She sat down. Her

amused glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of MS.
on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a

chair, single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners;
there were there living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead

pages that would be burnt at the end of the day--the litter of a
cruel battlefield, of a long, long and desperate fray. Long! I

suppose I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of
times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the food put before me,

and talked connectedly to my household on suitable occasions.
But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily life, made

easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at

that table surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days
and nights on end. It seemed so, because of the intense