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 forever
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 toward all things human
which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions
of the man reviewing his own experience.


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