At the moment of stepping over the gang way he checked himself, though,
to give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that evening with
my captain, an invitation which I accepted. I don't think it could have
been possible for me to refuse.

I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of
free-will, "at any rate for practical purposes." Free, is it? For
practical 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 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.