"How we laughed as we laboured together!
How well I remember, to-day,
Our 'outings' in midsummer weather,
Our winter delights at the play!
We were not over-nice in our dinners;
Our 'rooms' were up rickety stairs;
But if hope be the wealth of beginners,
By Jove, we were all millionaires!
Our incomes were very uncertain,
Our prospects were equally vague;
Yet the persons I pity who know not the city,
The beautiful city of Prague!"
If you can imagine the lonely shade of the man who wrote that verse returning to Literary London—where there is no longer a young man who could write it, and merely a few greybeards are left still to understand what it means—I say, if you can imagine this, you may appreciate the condition of Conrad when he went back to the Quartier Latin.
Conrad was no less sad, his disappointment was no less bitter, the society that he had sought so eagerly was no less alien to him. But while he commanded bocks for all, and mourned the change that left him desolate, the melancholy of his mood was a subtler thing—for he realised that the profoundest change was in himself.
Something should be said of the longings that had brought him back to the Quarter—longings in one hour tender, and in the next tempestuous—something hinted of the regretful years during which his limbs reposed in an official chair while his mind flew out of the official window to places across the sea where he had been young, and sanguine, and infinitely glad. To a score of places it flew, but to none perhaps so often as Paris, where he had studied art in the days when he meant to move the world.
Of course the trouble with the man was that he wanted to be nineteen again, and didn't recognise it. We do not immediately recognise that our youth is going from us; it recedes stealthily, like our hair. For a long time he had missed the zest, the sparkle, the buoyancy from life, but for the flatness that distressed him he blamed the Colony instead of his age. He confused the emotions of his youth with the scenes where he had felt them, and yearned to make sentimental journeys, fancying that to revisit the scenes would be to recover the emotions.
Because the office rewarded his mental flights ungenerously he was restrained by one of those little realities which vulgar novelists observe and which are so out of place in novels—"sordid" considerations, like ways and means. Give us lots of Blood, and the dummy over the dashing highwayman's shoulder! If you call him a "cavalier" it's Breezy Romance.
And then his Aunt Tryphena died, and left him everything.
At once he was lord of himself. Liberated by "everything," he sailed for Home, and savouring the knowledge that he was free to rove where he listed, lingered in London. Some months afterwards—when the crocuses were perking behind the Park rails, and Piccadilly was abloom with the first millinery of spring—he travelled to Dover, en route for the Past.
And lilac was everywhere—Paris was all lilac and sunshine. He drove to an hotel on the left bank. To behold it again! The grotesque clock under the glass shade, and the clothes pegs that were too large to hang clothes on, the scarlet édredon that he would throw on the floor before he got into bed, the sight of these things was sweet to him as the welcome of a woman is sweet after a passage made on a slow steamer to reach her side.
He said to the femme de chambre—she was elderly and she was plain; pretty chambermaids are all employed in farcical comedies; but she was a femme de chambre, and he felt communicative. He said, "La dernière fois que j'étais Paris, j'étais un gamin." She smiled and gave a shrug: "Monsieur n'est qu'un enfant aujourd'hui." What English servant would have earned that tip? ... Oh, yes! English servants are all too truthful.