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When his success came to him late in life, the natural princeliness of his nature made him lavish, and he put by next to nothing. Theoretically a wonderful man of business and full of elaborate projects, in actual practice he was entirely lacking in the money sense. His earnings melted away to his own perpetual astonishment, and I remember him telling me once, with humorous resignation, that if he had £100,000 a year he believed he would spend it all. And yet no man delighted more in drawing up minute budgets of expenditure for the coming year, budgets designed to leave him with comfortable surpluses. It was the contradiction again.

His own personal tastes were simple-a good table and a comfortable car were about all that he wanted-and he spent very little on himself. Possessions meant practically nothing to him, and although he enjoyed seeing his house fitted up with nice things, it was always more of a game than of a serious interest. He liked his home to be adequately furnished and to run smoothly in the same way as he had liked a ship to be well found and well sailed.

He had accumulated vast numbers of books, but they were either presentation copies, sets from friends or publishers, cheap editions of his favourites, memoirs that he had bought second-hand, volumes of the Naval Records Society, or miscellaneous travel books--not a library on a system. Never was there less of a collector in any line than Conrad. The only possessions he cherished were, I think, a few memorials of his parents; his very papers, notebooks, and manuscripts owe their survival to the care of his wife. Indeed, he could not understand the passion for things which enslaves so many men, though he felt a benevolent amusement towards the collectors of his own books, who were constantly pestering him, and usually with success, for autographs and for information.

Conrad never quite believed in his prosperity, and the sort of impersonal gratification he derived from it was tinged with scepticism and with fear of the future. It appeared to him a kind of bubble that might burst at any instant and he had no sooner committed himself to an expenditure than he began to have a panic lest he should not be able to carry it through. Precise in plans, he was often vague in practice, and he seldom seemed to have any clear notion what his books were bringing in. He

Jan. would calculate meticulously how much he need spend, and then his generosity would carry him away and he would spend much more. He had been harassed by money affairs for so many years that the prosperity that came to him in the end had a touch of irony he was the first to perceive. Wanting little for himself, he found his pleasure in the power to do splendid kindnesses.

He loved to entertain his friends in a style he thought worthy of them-and Conrad's friends were, in his eyes, worthy of everything. When some old friend would be coming down to lunch, his eagerness that everything should be just right was delicious. What was there for lunch, what wine would so-and-so prefer, had the car been ordered for the station, what suit should he himself wear, was everything in apple-pie order? And then, when he heard the car draw up outside, how he would hurry, or alas, often hobble, out into the hall to be the first to greet the arrival with outstretched hands and words of welcome.

His fondness for his friends had something playful in its genuineness; in each of them he found a special affinity, which gave them, one and all, their own particular niche in his thoughts. He liked to call them either by their Christian name or by names of his own choosing, which, as it were, bound them close to his heart and put the seal of his approval and affection upon their personalities. Thus his wife was "Chica," Sir Hugh Clifford, The Governor," the late Mr. Pinker, " J.B.," Mr. Cunninghame Graham, "Don Roberto," Sir Sidney Colvin, "Sidy," and so on down the list.

In all matters relating to friendship, Conrad's memory was perfect, as indeed, it was nearly always perfect about the things that interested him-the reminiscences of his sea days, the books he had read, the history of great movements. His knowledge of European affairs for hundreds of years back, in particular, was encyclopædic in its sweep, and he would dilate on them for hours, not only with an amazing detail for names and dates, but with a grasp of cause and effect impressive in its finality.

And yet on other points his memory was inexact, and sometimes even non-existent. On his own books, for example. He neither knew nor cared. Often he could not remember where his work had appeared serially; on occasions he would even deny having written things which, on infallible proof, he would recall to mind. I am quite prepared to believe that articles of his are

still lying unrecovered in old reviews, for I remember the sort of detective chase we had-it was great fun and quite excitingwhen the material for "Notes on Life and Letters " was being collected. He could be hazy to an incredible degree, and he could remember with entire precision; and that again-for they seemed curiously the absolute corollary of one another-was witness of his unconflicting dualism.

His power of visualisation was immense. He built up the whole atmosphere of " Nostromo," which breathes the very spirit of South America, from a few days upon the coast; he created Almayer-and one still alive, who knew Almayer well, says it is a life-like creation-from being in his company half a dozen times. Indeed, reality, some actual experience or event, is the basis of all his books, and that is why they have that air of ultimate truth, as if there was nothing more to be said. He was awake to the implications of a look or a gesture. From such little things, from hints and glances and disconnected words, arose the stirring of his creative vision until it took hold of him and possessed his soul. But there is an inner secret to his books, Conrad himself, cryptic and elusive, which cannot easily be pursued, and, in the upshot, nearly always evades one. This is not the place in which to discuss these works at length, but it may be hoped that one day it will be done in a manner not up till now fully attempted. For they have not yet given up all they have to give.

Few men's lives had known more astonishing vicissitudes and changes. As a child he had followed his father into Russian exile, as a boy he had been ceremoniously introduced to the Emperor Francis Joseph in private audience at the Hofburg in Vienna, as a youth he had fought a duel in Marseilles-he carried the scar of the bullet wound in his chest-as a young man he had sailed up the dark and dangerous rivers of Borneo and been wrecked in a burning ship, as a man of early middle age he had taken to literature and stuck to it through years of privation, and as an old man he had become famous in two continents and had even— sure sign of official recognition-been offered (and had declined in polished, cordial phrases) a knighthood at the end of his life. Is it surprising that now and again one had the feeling of being in the presence of an almost legendary figure and was inclined to rub one's eyes?

But what remains to his friends at the last is the impress of

his beautiful and moving personality. The loyalty and affection of his nature only deepened with time. His concern for his friends, his happiness in their company, grew stronger every year, and it was as if the glow of sunset was upon him. His death leaves most truly a sense of enduring, hopeless loss. He was so extraordinarily alive and he had overcome so many illnesses that one felt that he would just go on and on. One felt it against all reason, for one urgently wanted to feel it. And then, in a day, it was finished and he was no more.

The very fact of death is subtly disintegrating to memory, as though, with the vanishing of the personality, the image was fading too and the words once spoken were growing ghostlike in the distance. Life keeps a friend close, for he is here in the world with you, but death, which separates, is the undermining of the prop, and in the effort to recollect you are conscious of a mistiness and a dim uncertainty. It is the cold tragedy of life that nothing survives for ever: no memory, no emotion-nothing at all; but if Conrad also will pass finally into oblivion it is good to know that the written word of his invention will make his passing slower and more august than that of most of his fellow

men.

Veiled and strangely unreal there slip before me a thousand fragments of talk, a thousand incidents, through which the veritable Conrad-or so I persuade myself was gradually revealed to me by an intuitive interpretation of moods and reveries and by that unconscious filling-up of gaps which never ceases in any of us.

The veritable Conrad-yes; but not the whole Conrad. That, I am quite sure, was never revealed to anybody. The passionate and obscure depths of his intelligence, the mingled faith and scepticism of his philosophy, the secret hopes and fears of his heart, the shadowy glimpses of him that evanesced almost as they arose-how incommunicable! The anguish of the creative genius belonged to Conrad, and I believe that none can share that anguish with another.

RICHARD CURLE

FOOD PRESERVATION

Report of the Departmental Committee on the use of Preservatives in Food.

1924.

IT is a commonplace of modern life that man and the sources

of his food supply are separated, in many instances, by half the circumference of the world. What he eats to-day, in a fresh state, was grown or killed, months before, at places distant thousands of miles from his table. Yet, because food preservation has been brought to a pitch of efficiency, he takes no hurt, but, on the contrary, derives benefit in a more plentiful, a more varied and a less costly bill of fare.

Food preservation, indeed, is the key to a new world. It has already, in the space of a few years, doubled the available supplies of many commodities and actually multiplied the supplies of other commodities ten-fold. It has reduced enormously the losses by damage in transport, it has made production possible on the vastest scale, it has opened up new avenues to commerce and to agriculture. Because of it, great ships cross the seas, innumerable herds and flocks wander on the pasture lands of North and South America and of Australasia, thousands of men and women find profitable employment in countries which, little more than a generation ago, were uninhabited or untilled. And this transformation, by eliminating waste, by augmenting production and by increasing competition, has secured to all consumers what is actually a new standard of living. The poorest to-day may command the luxuries of the rich a century ago. The security and comfort of human life have been established on a new basis, while disease has been driven headlong from many of its immemorial strongholds. No student of the public health, for example, can doubt for a moment that the decline which has been witnessed in consumption, and tuberculosis generally, during the past thirty years, is related to the better feeding of the people which has been secured in that period. Indeed, it is an axiom of medicine that tubercular disease waxes or wanes in any community according to the fluctuations in the food-purchasing power of the wages paid.

These immense benefits are matters of certainty. The alleged

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