There is a story which I am never tired – and which I hope I shall never tire, impenitently – of repeating. It belongs of right to Mr Christopher Morley, in one of whose books I read it. A Cockney in Canada was asked by a recruiting sergeant where he came from. He replied: ‘London.’ Said the sergeant: ‘London what? London, Ontario? London, N.Y.? London, Mass?’ ‘London the b—y world!’ the recruit replied with ineffable disgust. That is how it feels to the born Londoner.

I don’t believe I am immensely delighted at having been born in England. But I know that I should feel as disgusted as the recruit if, after accusing me of being English, you should suggest that I was born anywhere but within sound of Bow Bells. To be born there is almost like being born in the United States. At the beginning of the century it would have taken you 247 years walking at four miles an hour to cover all the streets of London on foot. What it would take now goodness knows… A thousand very likely. I daresay it would take no longer to traverse all the main roads of the United States. In any case it is good business to be born in London. You acquire very soon the knowledge that you are merely an atom amongst vastnesses and shouldn’t take yourself very seriously. That is the first lesson the artist has to learn.

Romance was published in 1903, and shortly afterwards Conrad and I determined to ‘shew ourselves’ – that was Conrad’s phrase – in London. I never understood Conrad’s desire to shew himself with me. It certainly existed. When we had finally decided on collaborating on Romance he insisted on driving the seven miles that separated the Pent from Spade House in order to break the news to Mr H. G. Wells. I suppose he regarded Mr Wells as the doyen of the younger school of writers. Certainly Mr Wells had written of Almayer’s Folly with extraordinary generosity. Anyhow, to my extraordinary discomfort we drove in state in a hired fly, down, down, down to the seashore. When I come to think of it it was not to Spade House that we drove but to a hired villa. The Wells’s were living in it while Spade House was building. The landscape from the terrace of that villa – the shingle, the swains and maidens in bathing garb, the break-water, the as-if-tamed Channel – was exactly that of The Sea Lady. That romance for which Conrad had the most ardent and unrestrained admiration must have been the last novel of Mr Wells’s to be relatively free of sociological speculation. Very shortly afterwards Mr Wells told me that it was his intention to galvanise the Fabian Society into new life. I begged him not to, for I had an admiration at least as ardent and unrestrained as that of Conrad’s for Mr Wells’s work of that period. And I have always considered – and alas, observed – that the work of imaginative writers markedly deteriorates as soon as they occupy themselves with politics.

Mr Wells got back at me by turning up at my cottage at Aldington and advising me not to collaborate with Conrad. He said that I should probably ruin Conrad’s ‘delicate Oriental style’. And, referring to the virulent controversy that was then raging between Henley and Mrs Stevenson he said that I should probably regret the step all my life. I can still see and hear him as he mounted his bicycle by the rear step.

I should like to add a pleasant detail with regard to that literary scrap that in the number of the Pall Mall Magazine which printed Henley’s most outrageous attack on the Shorter Catechist there appeared a collection of obviously fictitious epitaphs. And – as clearly as I remember Mr Wells’s departure – the print of the magazine and the passion-flowers that trailed over the stoep of General Prescott’s frame-cottage at Winchelsea where I read them – I remember my delight at those anonymous fragments. One of them began:

And after all these years I still remember those verses and feel the same delight of discovery in them. They must have been the first that Walter de la Mare published.

Conrad’s last request to me to stand side by side with him before the public I have already printed in this book… I never understood that desire in him. I don’t suppose he desired to exhibit me tied to his chariot wheels, though I should not have minded. But it occurs to me at this moment that his desire may have been solely for my good. The reader will remember that in a letter I have already quoted Conrad says: ‘Ford has become a daily habit with me,’ and adds that he is astonished because nobody liked me. No doubt he wished, in exhibiting me to his friends, to show that I was not as black as I was painted. I remember his saying to me about that time: ‘Ford, your ruin will be that you cannot suffer fools gladly.’ I daresay it has been.

The house that I took in London presented an appearance of such immensity that when Henry James called his eyes rolled nearly out of his head and he exclaimed: ‘When you do go in for largenesses you do go in for largenesses!’ He was accustomed to finding me in General Prescott’s Winchelsea cottage. That did not contain at the time any one room in which you could swing a cat – whether the cat were the naval instrument of punishment or one of Dr Garnett’s pussies that you held by the tail. I had at that time lent the Pent with most of my furniture – which had descended to me from Christina Rossetti and my grandfather – to Conrad. He used to imagine pleasure at writing at a desk on which she had composed Goblin Market. But as a matter of fact that masterpiece – which contains the first rhymed Free Verse that was ever written in English – was actually composed on the corner of her washing-stand. She used to be banished to her bedroom, the other apartments of her father’s house being needed for Mr Ruskin and the other pre-Raphaelites. They had to have space in which to shout the arguments for primitive and virtuous Arts.

In revenge I had a Chippendale desk at Winchelsea and at that Conrad firmly refused to write. It had been given to my father by Thomas Carlyle. Conrad used to pretend that if he wrote at a desk on which The French Revolution had been composed it would ruin his style. So I had to hire across the road a two-room cottage in which he could write. He need not really have worried. I found in a letter of Mrs Carlyle’s a passage in which she complains of the trouble it gave her to go out and buy that desk as a wedding present for my father, so Carlyle could never have written on it. It came from a second-hand dealer’s in the King’s Road, Chelsea. It cost six pounds – thirty dollars.

It was in the cottage across the road that Conrad re-wrote the latter half of The End of the Tether. A glass kerosine lamp had burst. It had belonged to my grandfather and was no doubt in a mind to revenge itself on the Arts after a too prolonged period of service. So at least Conrad used to say. It was in any case intended for colza oil, which is a vegetable and non-inflammable liquid. So it burst and the flames destroyed Conrad’s manuscript. He came over bag and baggage, horse and groom at once to Winchelsea, driving his old mare, Nancy of the long ears, in his old chaise. He brought such leaves of the manuscript as were decipherable.

We worked at the story day and night, Conrad writing in the cottage. In the house I wrote passages which he sometimes accepted and sometimes didn’t. Mrs Conrad typed – or perhaps I did. His groom – his name was Walter – a fresh-coloured chawbacon of a lad, relieved my groom who was a pasty-faced scoundrel called Ernest – in sitting up all night booted and spurred. The mare remained always saddled. The rest of my household made soup for the exhausted writers.

The occasion was thus tremendous because The End of the Tether was running in Blackwood’s then famous magazine and the sun had better stop than that Maga should appear with an instalment of its serial missing. So that cavalry was kept mobilised at night. At whatever hour the story was finished it must be galloped with to Ashford Junction to catch a mail train to Edinburgh. Blackwood’s was published there.

The move to London was for me the beginning of a series of disasters. That was perhaps because the year was 1903. Those digits added up to thirteen. No one should have done anything in that year. Or it was perhaps because the house I then took was accursed. It was a monstrous sepulchre – and not even whitened. It was grey with the greyness of withered bones. It was triangular in ground plan: the face formed the nose of a blunted redan, the body tapered to a wedge in which there was a staircase like the corkscrew staircases of the Middle Ages. The façade was thus monstrous, the tail ignoble. It was seven stories in height and in those days elevators in private houses were unknown. It was what housemaids call: ‘A Murderer’.

The happenings in that house come back to me as gruesome and bizarre. I daresay they were merely normal. They were mere episodes in the chain of disasters, suicides, bankruptcies and despairs that visited its successive tenants and owners. My first party was distinguished by Conrad’s attack on the unfortunate Mr Charles Lewis Hind. This violent encounter took place in a circle of half-gay, half-morose celebrities. Mr James had brought Mrs Humphry Ward; Mrs Clifford, who could be as awful as Mrs Ward, had brought some mild and decorous young American – I should think it was Mr Owen Wister. Mr Watts Dunton had brought a message from Swinburne, blessing me because he had known me as a baby. This he repeated à tort et à travers at the oddest and most inconvenient moments. He was deaf and accustomed to speaking to Swinburne who was deafer. I found myself distracted at odd moments by his rather snuffling, elevated voice exclaiming:

‘Swinburne said in excusing himself for not attending this party of our gifted young host…’

He was a little dark man with an immense waterfall of grey moustache. Finally he settled himself on, I think, the always patient Mr Galsworthy and repeated over and over again the message with which he was charged. Then I was aware that Conrad had hold of Lewis Hind’s tie and was dragging him towards the door that gave on to the corkscrew staircase. If he had thrown Hind down it the poor man would have been killed. I managed to separate them but I haven’t forgotten and don’t suppose I ever shall forget the look of polite incredulity of the more august guests. Mrs Humphry Ward looked like a disgusted sheep. Mrs Clifford, who loved the society of reviewers, was openly distressed at the disappearance of Mr Hind. Mr Hind was the editor of the Academy. The Academy was a rather livelier Athenaeum. A great lady of the Court of His Majesty put her lorgnettes up to her proud nose and weary eyes and exclaimed to me afterwards:

‘Haw! Very interesting. But awkward for you… I suppose all literary parties are like that.’

She added:

‘I wonder you give ’em. I shouldn’t. I once gave one but it did not work. Yet one tries to encourage … ah … these things!’

The court in those days had to be interested in Literature because Edward VII wanted to be told about books. I know this because I had at that date a secretary who was very highly connected. Her name was Smith and she was the daughter of a very famous soldier. She was one day sitting with the beautiful Lady Londonderry who was her cousin. Lady Londonderry was dying of a painful disease, but lay on a sofa. The King came in. Miss Smith was the shyest human being I have ever known. She desired to sink into the ground and made for the door. Lady Londonderry told her to stay and pour tea for them. Lady Londonderry presented her as ‘Miss Smith, the daughter of the famous soldier’. The King said:

‘Smith … ah we all know that name.’ Royal politenesses must exact a certain lack of the sense of humour.

I was once presented to the President of a Great Republic. He said he was delighted to see me and would never forget a certain passage in one of my books. He recited the passage. But the book was lying on the table behind him; with, in it, a slip inscribed in the handwriting of the friend who had introduced me: ‘Try here!’ They manage these things better in France. At any rate during the war I was sent for from the line by M. Delcassé, then Minister for Foreign Affairs. He showed a remarkable knowledge of a book of propaganda I had written for his Government. He even suggested alterations in certain passages. And the book was not to be seen even in his bookshelves…

Well; the King asked Lady Londonderry if he might touch the bell and ask the footman for some very dry toast as he was banting. Miss Smith poured tea. As she was finally escaping the King said:

‘Miss Smith. Lady Londonderry tells me you are interested in literature. I like books. I like boy’s books… Captain Marryat now. I have read all Captain Marryat. But I find it very difficult to get books like that.’ He said that he had asked all the Court but no one could tell him of books like that. He added:

‘If in the course of your researches at the British Museum, Miss Smith, you should come across any such books, I should be very much obliged if you would jot their names down on a postcard and send it to me, at Buckingham Palace.’

Miss Smith said it seemed to her curious that he should think she did not know his address.

Alas: she found no books like Marryat’s. All the horses and all the men of all the dozen sovereigns between the days of Shakespeare and our Roi Bon Homme had not sufficed to produce a second – nor all the wishes of Edward VII. It put him in the good books of Conrad at least, for Conrad considered Marryat to be the greatest English novelist since Shakespeare and always declared that it was reading Peter Simple and Midshipman Easy that made him wish to go to sea.

Edward VII put himself into my good books too. A little before he died I was at tea at the house of Mr G. W. Prothero, the Editor of the Quarterly Review. Mrs George Keppel rushed in and exclaimed:

‘For goodness sake tell me some stories for the King. I’ve got to tell him some in half an hour! Quick: lots of stories.’

Mrs Prothero turned me on to her and I told her the story of the ‘Seein’ Eye’ and the Lutheran Pastor on his honeymoon. She told me that the King had laughed very heartily at one of them. I can’t repeat it here. But I was glad to know how a king goes towards death.

The husband of the great lady who came to my tea-party was the official most closely in attendance on the King – the Deputy Earl Marshal. The King, who slept very badly, had a private telephone from his bedside to that poor man’s and constantly rang him up in the small hours to ask questions as to points of protocolar etiquette.

My poor friend – he eventually committed suicide – told me that three things passionately engrossed the King. In the first place there was his foreign policy. Of this the chief note was of course the Entente Cordiale. Then came men’s dress. The King would go on board a battleship with his mentor:

‘Now Mr — ,’ he would say, ‘I am naval, so I shall touch my hat on going on the quarterdeck. You are in civilian costume so you will take your hat off. And I should be obliged if you would have the top button of your waistcoat unbuttoned.’… In consequence every man in London would have the top of his waistcoat unbuttoned for the rest of the Season.

I suppose not everybody knows to what a king or a cabin boy touches his hat when he steps on the quarterdeck. It is done on the quarterdeck of vessels of war of nearly all nations. It is a salute to the crucifix that used to hang on the mainmast of the Harry Grace de Dieu, the galleon of Henry VIII which was the first royal battleship. Before that, fleets were hired by monarchs from various maritime cities like the Cinque Ports or the Hanseatic League.

The third preoccupation of Edward VII was Acts of Graciousness. You would not think that when a King or Queen gives a cake to a little boy in the street or a kiss to a little girl on a platform that the act was carefully discussed beforehand. Apparently it is. The case that of all others got on the King’s mind was that of the bridal tour of Mrs Longworth. Over that, my poor friend told me the King woke him up not once every night but six times at least – and for a fortnight.

The case was a very nice one. The King wanted to do everything that he could – and then some, as the saying is. But it was difficult. Mrs Longworth not being royal could not be given a banquet in the state apartments. Presidents of Republics rank as semi-royal and Mrs Longworth alone could have passed as such. But Mr Longworth could by no means be regarded even as semi-royal so a banquet could not be given for the lady even in the semi-state apartments. You could not give a banquet to a bride and not invite the groom. The King would ring up my friend and chafe against the Protocol that bound him in every imaginable manner. He would say: ‘Mr – if we gave a special Drawing Room for Mrs Longworth could the Queen take a step forward in greeting her?’ And the Earl Marshal’s Deputy would reply: ‘Quite impossible, sir!’ The King hit on the brilliant solution. He was permitted to get someone – the Duchess of Devonshire I think – to give a dinner at which Mrs Longworth was to be present. Then he himself could take the lady in to dinner because a bride takes precedence of all other ladies present.

After the King’s death – so my friend said – the Palace was one night thrown into a panic by the complete disappearance of Queen Alexandra. She had apparently slipped out by a back door accompanied only by a maid and had mailed to The Times office her letter to the Nation on the accession of the present King. I don’t think the Cabinet liked that very much. But after that no trace of her. She was at last found in Westminster Hall where the King was lying in state. She was kneeling on the right-hand side of the bier. Mrs Keppel was kneeling on the other.

It is curious – and sad! – to think that but for his altercation in my drawing-room Conrad might possibly have become Edward VII’s favourite writer. I was quite seriously given to understand later that he was then under the observation of the wife of the King’s mentor. But apparently the works of a writer so inconsiderate as to make a fuss in a drawing-room might be considered to be bad for a King who was thinking out an Entente Cordiale. It would have made all the difference in the world to the poor fellow. He might have had fifteen years or so of comparative ease. For the literary examples of Royalty in England are followed with extraordinary keenness by the King’s lieges and they have a contagious effect on the United States. As it was, a little before his death Conrad wrote to me that he had not made any money by his pen for nearly two years. He lived on royalties from his earlier books.

His estate at his death was sworn at £50,000. This may seem a large sum for a mere writer. But Conrad towards his death would have been pretty freely acknowledged to be the greatest member of his profession in Anglo-Saxondom – the greatest in the world with the doubtfu1 exception of Anatole France who was then already becoming unpopular in France. Think then of the sums of which dies possessed the greatest in the world of any other profession. Think of the greatest sausage skin maker in the world, or rag and bone dealer, or automobile manufacturer or basket-shop keeper. You will say that all these are purveyors of necessities. Well, then, think of the greatest or the greatest but one beauty specialist or perfumer. What would the heirs of M. Coty think if they received but £50,000 at his death?

When I made my £5 bet with Conrad, in 1901 or so that Chance when it came to be finished would sell 14,000 copies I was considering the fact that there are 14,000 railway stations in the United Kingdom. I said to myself that Conrad might well find one reader per town, village, or hamlet in the country of his adoption. But when, on the Somme in 1916, I received a money order telegram sending me, with the £5, the message: ‘Chance did 14,000 today’, it seemed to me a very small figure. The population of the British Empire at that date was some 250,000,000. For the purposes of the hostilities in which we were engaged it could find seven million men and two or three million women – say one in twenty-five. For its intellectual front line, that two hundred and fifty million could find only 14,000 – one in 17,857. It is not much consolation to say that a large percentage of that 250,000,000 do not read English. If the greatest Empire the world has ever seen cannot induce its subject races to assimilate its highest form of culture its existence seems unjustified. And unjustifiable.

The question of whether one should or should not write for money seems easy to answer at first sight. But the moment you approach it practically it becomes nearly insoluble. For myself I should be very glad if I could earn with my pen as a regular salary as much as a New York street sweeper does. But I am aware that the attempt would be impracticable on my part. I will not say that I have never written with an eye to a great public and great publicity. I have. The attempts have always been my most dismal failures. But when I have written the best that I knew how to I have now and then had very considerable successes. Shortly after the time of which I am writing I became for a time certainly the most ‘boomed’ writer in England. I had for one book fifteen, and for another seventeen, reviews on the day of publication. The review on day of publication was in those days the sign of popularity with the Press.

Yet in neither of those books had I ever thought of the public at all. Everything I wrote whilst I was looking after Conrad I wrote quite listlessly as far as the public fate of the work was concerned. What I wrote was almost always something in the way of experiment, and I did not even send the greater part of it to any publisher. Indeed, as I have already said, most of what I wrote was produced with the idea of reading it aloud to Conrad. Beyond that I gave it little thought. I had no need to earn a living by my pen and Conrad’s need was so insistent and clamant that I neither thought nor cared about my own.

Then accidentally I made the acquaintance of Mr R. B. Byles in a train going to Rye. We got into a talk about publishing in general. It appeared that he was just starting, with Mr Henry Bathurst and, I think, Mr Archibald Marshall, the firm of Alston Rivers. I imagine that he was hoping to publish the work of Henry James. He never told me so because he was not one to talk about his failures, but Mr James told me a day or two later that a publisher had been to see him. I do not see for what other reason Byles could have wanted to go to Rye for he hated the game of golf, and, even more than Stephen Crane, despised corner lots and battlefields.

In the event he asked to see what I was writing and I told Pinker to send him some of my MSS. Byles became one of my most intimate friends. His activities as a publisher were extraordinary and alas – meteoric. He was a small, grim, bronzed Sheffield man of the wildest prejudices. His real name was Boileaux, his original ancestor who emigrated to England having been a Huguenot. But – by Grimm’s Law I suppose – the name had become Boilers then Bilers and finally Byles. His parents had however conferred on him the forenames of René Boileau to his intense indignation and disgust. He aspired to be the absolute, commonsense Englishman. He refused to know any foreign language except Japanese of which he had a few words. He ate daily the same English food wherever he found himself – mutton chops grilled without condiments, potatoes boiled without sauce, a slice of apple pie, some Stilton with pulled bread. He was a martyr to indigestion. He died too young.

But for him it is almost certain that I should have given up writing. But his enthusiasm for my work was extraordinary and infectious. He almost made me believe in myself. He certainly made the newspapers believe in me – and indeed in many of the other books that he published. His office was a queer one. His partner, the Hon. Hervey Bathurst, was the casual peer’s son who takes up publishing as being a pursuit for a gentleman. He was lean, brown, with slightly curling hair. He was one of those Englishmen who perpetually smoke an enormous pipe and seem eternally just about to remove it and let out portentous utterances. I never saw Bathurst remove his pipe from his mouth.

Mr Archibald Marshall, the novelist, the other partner, was as English and almost as be-piped as Bathurst. He was however larger, plumper, a little more curly haired and more elaborately dressed. He was just as taciturn but gave the impression that his silences arose from bewilderment rather than from profound, pipe-inspired cogitations.

I do not say that Mr Marshall was actually bewildered, merely that he had that air. But he might well have been. For, before those tranquil, relative immensities, little Byles buzzed about like an English wasp in front of the winged bulls of Nineveh. There was nothing that he did not manage and no member of the office staff that he did not anathematise for incompetence. He must have been almost the first Englishman of business to use a card-index and the introduction of that admirable, brain-saving device caused immense confusion in an office that only asked to be conservative. Byles only thought that he was.