CONRAD AT WINCHELSEA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3995, 7 October 1930, Page 68

CONRAD AT WINCHELSEA.

The centre of the little town of Winchelsea is occupied by an ancient church and its great yard of weathered, leaning tombstones. In a little cottage, steep-roofed, weather boarded, and, in summer time, covered with climbing roses, lived Joseph Conrad. The window of the little room in which the great Pole worked looks over this ancient square and takes in the great tree beneath which Wesley preached his last sermon.

In this typically English setting Conrad spent laborious days preoccupied with those romances that carried him upon the sure wings of his immense imagination into lands remote and sinister with untamed jungle growths and untamed passions, too. Here, at a tiny table, in the lowceilinged room whose old oak beams menace the heads of all but the short of stature, the great Pole worked.

“In those days,” Conrad’s former landlord told me, “ there were no motor buses, and grass grew up to my very door. Yet Mr Conrad complained bitterly of the noise. What noises? There were none, except the laughter of the children in the playground of the village school nearby. “ Once when he was working very hard, he came to me arid said: ‘ Is there no quieter cottage in the village where I can work in peace? ’ So I went along Friar’s lane and got Mr Conrad a room in the end cottage. I think that satisfied him, fot there were not even ghostly friars to disturb him there.” Conrad has himself described the agonies of composition that made his days ordeals of hardest labour. From this landlord of his I received a vivid impression of what those labours must have meant to the great master of English prose. “He often wrote throughout the night,” he told me. “ And often he complained of noise. One day, when I came down to light the fire, I met Mr Conrad

stumbling along the hallway, his two arms outstretched in front of him. “ ‘ Are you ill, sir ? I asked him. “He replied, much to my astonishment: ‘I am blind—l have written myself blind.’ And it was true. He could not see; I had to lead him up to bed.

My landlord pointed to a small table. “ You sec that,” he said, “ all burnt with cigarette ends. That’s Mr Conrad.

Never saw a man smoke as - he did. Absent minded, too, leaving the ends to burn.

“ One day,” he continued, “ when Mr Conrad had been complaining of noise again, a-gentleman called to see him. I hardly knew what to do, as I knew Mr Conrad hated interruptions. “‘What name?’ I asked.

“ ‘ Mr Kipling,’ he said. “ When Mr Kipling had gone I showed Mr Conrad my album. In it he had written: ‘The peace of Winchelsea has entered my soul.’ So much for the talk of noise, thought I.” At other times, my host told me, Stephen Crane came and spent brief periods with Conrad. Conrad, of course, was never tired of extolling the merits of “ The Red Badge of Courage.” Henry James, the recluse of Rye, walked sometimes the three dividing miles between the twin towns.

How strange this humble lodging of Conrad must have seemed to James, coming from his exquisite house in the narrow, cobbled Rye by-street. James loved mellow beauty and rightness; and here was this dark-visaged Pole, in shabby tweeds, sitting in his tiny cottage living room upon a rickety chair, his manuscript upon a bamboo table, and nothing of beauty anywhere. So much for Conrad through the eyes of his landlord.

“ What about Conrad? ” I I asked the landlady of the inn. Did she remember h iln ■ „ “Remember him! Of course. He came in to the coffee room sometimes for lunch. Always wore a monocle. A very foreign sort of gentleman, who bowed to you and had the most beautiful manners.

“ But, still, ho was a trial in a way. Take the days we served mutton. He must always have the joint befor him. He would allow nobody to carve for him. And then he would set about the job in such a way that the joint was hacked to pieces and ruined. Yes, he was a trial. But he had a way of saying ‘ Madame ’! ” y, .?. ¥ * Opposite the cottage where Cpnrad lived in those days there stands another, a snug, white cottage with roses climbing about its walls, too. Here lived Ford Madox Ford (Mr Hueffer), Conrad’s collaborator in “ Romance.” But that mighty tale was not spun in this ancient town, though, perhaps, the germs of it were engendered there. “ Sometimes Mr Hueffer would come in and spend an hour or two with Mr Conrad in the garden. He was a great talker, was Mr Hueffer. I could hear their voices from the kitchen. Which reminds me, Mr Conrad ruined my garden table, too, with his cigarette ends. He used to work out there sometimes, aud, at others, sit and read. A great reader, he was.” But beyond a general notion that this dark, bearded, courtly writer of some sort, Winchelsea remained oblivious that the guest it entertained had already wou for himself, if not a fortune, a worldwide renoun.

They say that there are people in Dorchester who scarcely know the name of Hardy, and it may be so.- But cer- I tainly, in those days, Conrad was better i known in Philadelphia than he was in this ancient English town. The arrows of fame speed far, and the arc of their flight passes over the heads of many who stand in the presence. It is the old truth again, that the prophet has no honour in his own country. Why did people come from distant places to see his guest? That was what this old landlord wondered for a while. “ Then,” he told . me. “ I became curious, and got one of my guest’s books and read it. It was ‘ Almayer’s Folly.’ And after that I understood that you can’t always go by wealth and things like that. I knew my cottage was being honoured -by the presence of a great writer.”—G. G., in John o’ London’s Weekly.