"Conrad, Joseph - Tales Of Unrest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

the same pen: a common steel pen. Having been charged with a certain
lack of emotional faculty I am glad to be able to say that on one
occasion at least I did give way to a sentimental impulse. I thought
the pen had been a good pen and that it had done enough for me, and
so, with the idea of keeping it for a sort of memento on which I could
look later with tender eyes, I put it into my waistcoat pocket.
Afterwards it used to turn up in all sorts of places--at the bottom of
small drawers, among my studs in cardboard boxes--till at last it
found permanent rest in a large wooden bowl containing some loose
keys, bits of sealing wax, bits of string, small broken chains, a few
buttons, and similar minute wreckage that washes out of a man's life
into such receptacles. I would catch sight of it from time to time
with a distinct feeling of satisfaction till, one day, I perceived
with horror that there were two old pens in there. How the other pen
found its way into the bowl instead of the fireplace or wastepaper
basket I can't imagine, but there the two were, lying side by side,
both encrusted with ink and completely undistinguishable from each
other. It was very distressing, but being determined not to share my
sentiment between two pens or run the risk of sentimentalising over a
mere stranger, I threw them both out of the window into a flower bed--
which strikes me now as a poetical grave for the remnants of one's
past.

But the tale remained. It was first fixed in print in the "Cornhill
Magazine", being my first appearance in a serial of any kind; and I
have lived long enough to see it guyed most agreeably by Mr. Max
Beerbohm in a volume of parodies entitled "A Christmas Garland," where
I found myself in very good company. I was immensely gratified. I
began to believe in my public existence. I have much to thank "The
Lagoon" for.

My next effort in short-story writing was a departure--I mean a
departure from the Malay Archipelago. Without premeditation, without
sorrow, without rejoicing, and almost without noticing it, I stepped
into the very different atmosphere of "An Outpost of Progress." I
found there a different moral attitude. I seemed able to capture new
reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs.
For a moment I fancied myself a new man--a most exciting illusion. It
clung to me for some time, monstrous, half conviction and half hope as
to its body, with an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable
head like a plastic mask. It was only later that I perceived that in
common with the rest of men nothing could deliver me from my fatal
consistency. We cannot escape from ourselves.

"An Outpost of Progress" is the lightest part of the loot I carried
off from Central Africa, the main portion being of course "The Heart
of Darkness." Other men have found a lot of quite different things
there and I have the comfortable conviction that what I took would not
have been of much use to anybody else. And it must be said that it was
but a very small amount of plunder. All of it could go into one's