purposes! Bosh! How could I have refused to dine with that man? I did
not refuse simply because I could not refuse. Curiosity, a healthy
desire for a change of cooking, common civility, the talk and the smiles
of the previous twenty days, every condition of my existence at that
moment and place made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning all
that, there was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say, the fatal want
of foreknowledge to counter-balance 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.