want
of fore knowledge to counterbalance these imperative conditions of the
problem. A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane. Nobody,
unless a surly lunatic, would have refused. But if I had not got to know
Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a
line of mine in print.

I accepted then--and I am paying yet the price of my sanity. The
possessor of the only flock of geese on the East Coast is responsible
for the existence of some fourteen volumes, so far. The number of
geese he had called into being under adverse climatic conditions was
considerably more than fourteen. The tale of volumes will never overtake
the counting of heads, I am safe to say; but my ambitions point not
exactly that way, and whatever the pangs the toil of writing has cost me
I have always thought kindly of Almayer.

I wonder, had he known anything of it, what his attitude would have
been? This is something not to be discovered in this world.

But if we ever meet in the Elysian Fields--where I cannot depict him
to myself otherwise than attended in the distance by his flock of geese
(birds sacred to Jupiter)--and he addresses me in the stillness of
that passionless region, neither light nor darkness, neither sound nor
silence, and heaving endlessly with billowy mists from the impalpable
multitudes of the swarming dead, I think I know what answer to make.

I would say, after listening courteously to the unvibrating tone of his
measured remonstrances, which should not disturb, of course, the solemn
eternity of stillness in the least--I would say something like this:

"It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted your name
to my own uses. But that is a very small larceny. What's in a name, O
Shade? If so much of your old mortal weakness clings to you yet as
to make you feel aggrieved (it was the note of your earthly voice,
Almayer), then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our
sublime fellow-Shade--with him who, in his transient existence as a
poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You
came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the
disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name
was the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked over
the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the
royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to put into the hollow
sound the very anguish of pa