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THE FLURRIED YEARS h

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The Flurried Years

:: :: By Violet Hunt :: ::

WITH ifl ILLUSTRATIONS

HURST & BLACKETT, LTD. PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C. 5

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Made and Printed in Great Britain by The Cameloi Press Limited, Southampton LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing Pagt FRONTISPIECE

JOSEPH CONRAD AND HIS PROOF-SHEET • 32

MARY MARTINDALE • 50

JOSEPH LEOPOLD . 62

MY NIECE . 66

HENRY JAMES . 88

MY MOTHER . 112

AUNT EMMA'S HOUSE AT BOPPARD . 126 DAVID GARNETT AND JOSEPH LEOPOLD AT ASSMANS-

HAUSEN • 132

GONERIL IN BED . 152

MY SISTER . 208

MISS REBECCA WEST AT HOME . 214

OUR COTTAGE AT SELSEY .... . 218

THE GOOD SOLDIER . 260

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON .... . 268

PART I

— —

THE FLURRIED YEARS

1908

The Great Affair of All—"One word is too often profaned " Oliver Madox Brown and Joseph Conrad on Passion—Oscar before America— " " Hie sunt leones —/ go there—The New Argonauts—W. L. George

on Genius—W. B. Yeats on the stoking of it—Mr. Chandler an important person—Mrs. Chandler ditto—Hermosa—The Impropriety of Thomas Hardy—Editors and Backers—The Pinker of Agents—With the Monds at Joyous Gard—Mr. Carlyon Bellairs and the British Navy—The German Professor—The Soul's Wireless—Conrad on Prestidiginous People—Perceval Gibbon—Arthur Marwood—Payment of Contribu- tors—Arnold Bennett——W. H. Hudson and the Cuckoo—His ideal Woman—The Association of Conrad and the Editor— Damon and Pythias—Agonies of Composition—The Pent Farm— S. S. McClure and Miss Willa Gather—Henry James as " Modeste " Mignon —H. G. and the Editor's Mead—Suffragettes at Mrs. Godfrey Benson's—Mr. Asquilh and the Dinner Napkin—Christmas Party at 84 The launch of the " English Review."

Life is a succession of affairs, but there is always one affair for which the years, from birth, are a preparation, a hardening, a tempering, and a more or less serious erosion, possibly, of the sword of the fighter. And there comes, sooner or later, according to the sets and the entries and exits of the other actors, one's own supreme moment. One is on. And that entry, being but human, one may so easily muff. That moment, some will say, I did muff. Not, said a soldier to me, walking along the pier at Redcar in the days of the bitterness of the war—when words flowed from the mouths of deeply tried men, ebullitions of a deep and desperate cynicism that seemed to sour the sunlight—not, said he, till a person comes to lie on his deathbed and is faced with that five minutes' io The Flurried Years unrolling of the Book of Judgment—that feverish access of memory, including full clarity of vision, of which all who have been brought back from the gates of death have spoken and written—does a person know which is the affair of all. And not even then, perhaps, with which of the three prime passions that moment would come to be concerned—affair of the heart ? —affair of ambi- tion ? —affair of revenge ? —these simple emotions that sway us indifferently still. Though nowadays Love stalks kingly in the forefront of motive, Elizabethan men were not ashamed to put either of the others first. Even Othello's great love was compound of the ambition to be master in his own house and husband of his own wife. " One word is too often profaned " So often that I will not. And because I think Love, in my exquisite

sense, is too beautiful and too rare. Once in a blue moon !

The blossoming of an aloe ! I confess I should like to see the word and the particular emotion it describes, relegated to the categories of abnormality—used to signify some m