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
silence 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 realise . . . it's impossible
to realise . . ." 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 gangway 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 want
of foreknowledge to counter-balance these imperative conditions of
the problem. A refusal would have appeared perverse and insane. Nobody
unless a surly lunatic would have refused. But if I had not got to know
Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been