AFTER finishing 'Freya' Conrad had a relapse for nearly two months. ¹
He was then able to take advantage of a good turn that Hugh Clifford
had done him some months earlier. Towards the end of 1909, in Cey-
lon, Clifford had met Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York
Herald, and had apparently 'fired into him' the whole of Conrad's
prose. As a result, in the summer of 1910, the Herald approached
Conrad with a view to serialising a novel. However he was so bound
up with a short story and, generally, in such a curious frame of mind
that nothing came of these negotiations. ² But an offer from a paper
of mass circulation was not something that Conrad could afford to
ignore and so he now decided to concentrate on Chance for the
Herald; this was the story at which he had been tinkering for the
last six years.

The agreement with the Herald was one of several straws in the
wind. Galsworthy and others had managed to get a Civil List Pension
of £100 for him, ³ while an American lawyer, John Quinn, who
was a great admirer of Conrad's work and a collector, had written
to ask Conrad whether he might buy some of his manuscripts; ⁴
Conrad agreed, and this proved a useful additional source of income,
although the prices paid were not very high--for instance, £80 for
The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', £15 for the first draft of 'Youth', and
£5 apiece for the corrected typed copies of Almayer and Chance. ⁵
Finally, Pinker had agreed to pay him £4 per thousand words of
Chance (£3 on delivery and £1 deferred till completion). ⁶

He managed to send in copy steadily and even told Garnett that
he was 'pelting along', ⁷ an astonishing phrase for him to be able to
use. There were of course interruptions; the most dramatic was when
Norman Douglas became very seriously ill while staying with the
Conrads, and was even expected to die. ⁸ Conrad also took his elder
son, Borys, to the nautical school-ship, H.M.S. Worcester, and he
gives a rather touching account in a letter to Galsworthy:

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