I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and more wonderful to me.  Still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity.  Let me confess here that I was never one of those wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the same with my writing.  Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages, and could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line; but I must confess that my sybaritic disposition will not consent to write without something at least resembling a chair.  Line by line, rather than page by page, was the growth of “Almayer’s Folly.”

And so it happened that I very nearly lost the Ms., advanced now to the first words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrichstrasse railway station (that’s in Berlin, you know), on my way to Poland, or more precisely to Ukraine.  On an early, sleepy morning changing trains in a hurry I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room.  A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager rescued it.  Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the Ms. but of all the other things that were packed in the bag.

In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never exposed to the light, except once, to candle-light, while the bag lay open on a chair.  I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club.  A friend of my childhood (he had been in the Diplomatic Service, but had turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each other for over twenty years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off there.

“You might tell me something of your life while you are dressing,” he suggested kindly.

I do not think I told him much of my life-story either then or later.  The talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was extremely animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from big-game shooting in Africa to the last poem published in a very modernist review, edited by the very young and patronised by the highest society.  But it never touched upon “Almayer’s Folly,” and next morning, in uninterrupted obscurity, this inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the south-east direction towards the Government of Kiev.

At that time there was an eight-hours’ drive, if not more, from the railway station to the country house which was my destination.

“Dear boy” (these words were always written in English), so ran the last letter from that house received in London,—­“Get yourself driven to the only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the evening my own confidential servant, factotum and major-domo, a Mr. V.S.  (I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you, reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next day.  I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on the road.”