"Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how much trouble that woman took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn't make a damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we give her. And she's out about six francs for firewood, too—I wish to God I had the money to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and hungry, too.
"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause broken only by an occasional snore from our blissful neighbors. "Look at the way she cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit down there with her like we was her family. And look at the way she and the little Sallie there sung for us.
"I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing them church hymns to me that way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I sort of realize what we're fighting for now, and I never did before. It's for women like that and their kids.
"It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing them hymns. I remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there's many women like that in France now—telling their beads and singing the old hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she's just after treating us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.'"
A FAMILIAR PREFACE
By Joseph Conrad
This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in whatever form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It is from the preface to A Personal Record, that fascinating autobiographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in English. As a companion piece, those who have the honor of the writer's craft at heart should read Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus.
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to wonder what some newspaper owners—say Mr. Hearst—would reply to that?
Mr. Conrad's career is too well known to be annotated here. If by any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be to his soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up.
AS a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about ourselves; yet this little book[A] is the result of a friendly suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted, "You know, you really must."
It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must!...