have been much more lost. You affirm that had I been capable of looking
at you with a more perfect detachment and a greater simplicity, I might
have perceived better the inward marvellousness which, you insist,
attended your career upon that tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible
far, far below us, where both our graves lie. No doubt! But reflect, O
complaining Shade! that this was not so much my fault as your crowning
misfortune. I believed in you in the only way it was possible for me to
believe. It was not worthy of your merits? So be it. But you were always
an unlucky man, Almayer. Nothing was ever quite worthy of you. What made
you so real to me was that you held this lofty theory with some force of
conviction and with an admirable consistency."

It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy
expressions that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian Abode
of Shades, since it has come to pass that, having parted many years ago,
we are never to meet again in this world.


V

In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that
literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the
coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event.
In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological
cause which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts
being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to
boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen, at any
rate, was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps
a pen (the cold steel of our days) in his rooms, in this enlightened age
of penny stamps and halfpenny post-cards. In fact, this was the epoch