My next effort in short-story writing was a departure—­I mean a departure from the Malay Archipelago.  Without premeditation, without sorrow, without rejoicing, and almost without noticing it, I stepped into the very different atmosphere of “An Outpost of Progress.”  I found there a different moral attitude.  I seemed able to capture new reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs.  For a moment I fancied myself a new man—­a most exciting illusion.  It clung to me for some time, monstrous, half conviction and half hope as to its body, with an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable head like a plastic mask.  It was only later that I perceived that in common with the rest of men nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency.  We cannot escape from ourselves.

“An Outpost of Progress” is the lightest part of the loot I carried off from Central Africa, the main portion being of course “The Heart of Darkness.”  Other men have found a lot of quite different things there and I have the comfortable conviction that what I took would not have been of much use to anybody else.  And it must be said that it was but a very small amount of plunder.  All of it could go into one’s breast pocket when folded neatly.  As for the story itself it is true enough in its essentials.  The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a talent which I do not possess.

“The Idiots” is such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is impossible for me to say anything about it here.  The suggestion of it was not mental but visual:  the actual idiots.  It was after an interval of long groping amongst vague impulses and hesitations which ended in the production of “The Nigger” that I turned to my third short story in the order of time, the first in this volume:  “Karain:  A Memory.”

Reading it after many years “Karain” produced on me the effect of something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous position.  In that story I had not gone back to the Archipelago, I had only turned for another look at it.  I admit that I was absorbed by the distant view, so absorbed that I didn’t notice then that the motif of the story is almost identical with the motif of “The Lagoon.”  However, the idea at the back is very different; but the story is mainly made memorable to me by the fact that it was my first contribution to “Blackwood’s Magazine” and that it led to my personal acquaintance with Mr. William Blackwood whose guarded appreciation I felt nevertheless to be genuine, and prized accordingly.  “Karain” was begun on a sudden impulse only three days after I wrote the last line of “The Nigger,” and the recollection of its difficulties is mixed up with the worries of the unfinished “Return,” the last pages of which I took up again at the time; the only instance in my life when I made an attempt to write with both hands at once as it were.