第32章

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.

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 paternity--feats which you did not demand from me--but remember that all the toil and all the pain were mine.In your earthly life you haunted me,Almayer.Consider that this was taking a great liberty.Since you were always complaining of being lost to the world,you should remember that if I had not believed enough in your existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens,you would 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.