This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap pulled up between the house and the great gates.  I regret not being able to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in the rights of conquest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial greatness.  On the other hand, I am in a position to state the name of the Governor-General who signed the order with the marginal note “to be carried out to the letter” in his own handwriting.  The gentleman’s name was Bezak.  A high dignitary, an energetic official, the idol for a time of the Russian Patriotic Press.

Each generation has its memories.

Chapter IV.

It must not be supposed that in setting forth the memories of this half-hour between the moment my uncle left my room till we met again at dinner, I am losing sight of “Almayer’s Folly.”  Having confessed that my first novel was begun in idleness—­a holiday task—­I think I have also given the impression that it was a much-delayed book.  It was never dismissed from my mind, even when the hope of ever finishing it was very faint.  Many things came in its way:  daily duties, new impressions, old memories.  It was not the outcome of a need—­the famous need of self-expression which artists find in their search for motives.  The necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity, a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon.  Or perhaps some idle and frivolous magician (there must be magicians in London) had cast a spell over me through his parlour window as I explored the maze of streets east and west in solitary leisurely walks without chart and compass.  Till I began to write that novel I had written nothing but letters and not very many these.  I never made a note of a fact, of an impression or of an anecdote in my life.  The conception of a planned book was entirely outside my mental range when I sat down to write; the ambition of being an author had never turned up amongst these gracious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and immobility of a day-dream:  yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday that from the moment I had done blackening over the first manuscript page of “Almayer’s Folly” (it contained about two hundred words and this proportion of words to a page has remained with me through the fifteen years of my writing life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of my heart and the amazing ignorance of my mind, written that page the die was cast.  Never had Rubicon been more blindly forded, without invocation to the gods, without fear of men.