ted 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 i