quill-driver, he thought himself, by the
virtue of that furniture, at the head of a serious business. He had
sold himself to Lingard for these things--married the Malay girl of his
adoption for the reward of these things and of the great wealth that
must necessarily follow upon conscientious book-keeping. He found out
very soon that trade in Sambir meant something entirely different. He
could not guide Patalolo, control the irrepressible old Sahamin, or
restrain the youthful vagaries of the fierce Bahassoen with pen, ink,
and paper. He found no successful magic in the blank pages of his
ledgers; and gradually he lost his old point of view in the saner
appreciation of his situation. The room known as the office became
neglected then like a temple of an exploded superstition. At first, when
his wife reverted to her original savagery, Almayer, now and again, had
sought refuge from her there; but after their child began to speak, to
know him, he became braver, for he found courage and consolation in his
unreasoning and fierce affection for his daughter--in the impenetrable
mantle of selfishness he wrapped round both their lives: round himself,
and that young life that was also his.

When Lingard ordered him to receive Joanna into his house, he had a
truckle bed put into the office--the only room he could spare. The big
office desk was pushed on one side, and Joanna came with her little
shabby trunk and with her child and took possession in her dreamy,
slack, half-asleep way; took possession of the dust, dirt, and squalor,
where she appeared naturally at home, where she dragged a melancholy and
dull existence; an existence made up of sad remorse and frightened hope,
amongst the hopeless disorder--the senseless and vain decay of all these
emblems of civilized commerce. Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink,
blue: rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the
desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, grimy, but stiff-backed,
in virtue, perhaps, of their European origin. The biggest set of
bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waistband of which was
caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so
as to make an improvised clothespeg. The folding canvas bedstead stood
nearly in the middle of the room, stood anyhow, parallel to no wall, as
if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote place,
dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled