The Flurried Years

Abstract

Once that autumn [1908] the editor¹ and I were asked to a quiet dinner with a poetess — now Lady Dilke² — and her husband, and he called for me. It was foggy, the worst day of the year. We were eating quails stewed in wine, with little green grapes in the cocottes with them. Suddenly the editor let out that he had left Conrad at home in Holland Park Avenue,³ sitting over the fire with a bad cold. He was not allowed to hide his light under a bushel any longer, and the telephone was used. But Conrad — on the telephone I heard his queer, foreign voice — refused to stir out in the fog, but was going straight to bed. The editor drew a vivid picture of the great man sitting, full of aches and pains, grouting there in the lonely flat over a dying fire, and leaving even that poor comfort for the colder one of the cubicular bedroom. I thought that Joseph Conrad — his two Christian names, as it happens — must be very fond of Joseph Leopold⁴ to put up with the bedroom, but, then, he was used to the cabins of merchant ships.

From The Flurried Years (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1926) pp. 31–2, 52–3.