It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse.  I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue.  Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table and then the rest of that Pantai band came full of words and gestures.  Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs and half-castes.  They did not clamour aloud for my attention.  They came with a silent and irresistible appeal—­and the appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity.  It seems now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth?

I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers of any gifts of profit or fame.  There was no vision of a printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of Belgravia.  After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.

But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I should fail him in his ambition—­to satisfy at a few hours’ notice the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer.  He explained to me that the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a regular monthly line of sailings from Rouen, for the transport of French emigrants to Canada.  But, frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me very much.  I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up the reputation of the Shipmasters’ Society, I would consider it.  But the consideration was just for form’s sake.  The next day I interviewed the Captain, and I believe we were impressed favourably with each other.  He explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect and that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the higher position; but that if I consented to come as second officer I would be given certain special advantages—­and so on.

I told him that if I came at all the rank really did not matter.

“I am sure,” he insisted, “you will get on first rate with Mr. Paramor.”