This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and the grey heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect and love in the house of her favourite brother who, a few years later, was to take the place for me of both my parents.

I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time, though indeed I remember that doctors also came.  There were no signs of invalidism about her—­but I think that already they had pronounced her doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could re-establish her declining strength.  For me it seems the very happiest period of my existence.  There was my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.  There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a few whose very names I have forgotten.  Over all this hung the oppressive shadow of the great Russian Empire—­the shadow lowering with the darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.

This is a far cry back from the Ms. of “Almayer’s Folly,” but the public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy egotism.  These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal.  It is meet that something more should be left for the novelist’s children than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation.  That which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain for ever obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their personalities are remotely derived.

Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence.  Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.  An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.

Chapter II.

As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London into Ukraine.  The Ms. of “Almayer’s Folly”—­my companion already for some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age—­was deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two windows.  It didn’t occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer’s brass handles.  Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew.  The blinds were down.