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.

Chapter V.

In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event.  In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and hold to.  The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen.  The pen at any rate was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that.  Everybody keeps a pen (the cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of penny stamps and halfpenny postcards.  In fact, this was the epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made the reputation of a novel or two.  And I too had a pen rolling about somewhere—­the seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency permitted, of letters begun with infinite reluctance and put off suddenly till next day—­tell next week as likely as not!  The neglected, uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm, in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the “Where the devil is the beastly thing gone to?” ungracious spirit.  Where indeed!  It might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so.  My landlady’s anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner of approaching her domestic duties.  Or it might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which would have discouraged any man of literary instincts.  But not me!  “Never mind.  This will do.”