you been long out from Europe?" he asked me.

"Not very. Not quite eight months," I told him. "I left a ship in
Samarang with a hurt back, and have been in the hospital in Singapore
some weeks."

He sighed.

"Trade is very bad here."

"Indeed!"

"Hopeless! . . . See these geese?"

With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what resembled
a patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant part of his
compound. It disappeared behind some bushes.

"The only geese on the East Coast," Almayer informed me, in a
perfunctory mutter without a spark of faith, hope, or pride. Thereupon,
with the same absence of any sort of sustaining spirit, he declared his
intention to select a fat bird and send him on board for us not later
than next day.

I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as if it
were a sort of court decoration given only to the tried friends of the
house. I had expected more pomp in the ceremony. The gift had surely
its special quality, multiple and rare. From the only flock on the East
Coast! He did not make half enough of it. That man did not understand
his opportunities. However, I thanked him at some length.

"You see," he interrupted, abruptly, in a very peculiar tone, "the worst
of this country is that one is not able to realize . . . it's impossible
to realize. . . ." His voice sank into a languid mutter. "And when
one has very large interests . . . very important interests . . ." he
finished, faintly . . . "up the river."

We looked at each other. He astonished me by giving a start and making a
very queer grimace.

"Well, I must be off," he burst out, hurriedly. "So long!"

At the moment of stepping over the gang way he checked himself, though,
to give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that evening with
my captain, an invitation which I accepted. I don't think it could have
been possible for me to refuse.

I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of
free-will, "at any rate for practical purposes." Free, is it? For
practical purposes! Bosh! How could I have refused to dine with that
man? I did not refuse, simply because I could not refuse. Curiosity, a
healthy desire for a change of cooking, common civility, the talk and
the smiles of the previous twenty days, every condition of my existence
at that moment and place made irresistibly for acceptance; and, crowning
all that, there was the ignorance--the ignorance, I say--the fatal