econd
officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign
of being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical
forests; and even my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a person of weak
character) had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years
he and the world of his story had been the companions of my imagination
without, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of
sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my
return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day of which
I speak.

It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico
square that they first began to live again with a vividness and
poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been
treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of
occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the
rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined
him round my table and then the rest of that Pantai band came full
of words and gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my
practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions
of Malays, Arabs and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my
attention. They came with a silent and irresistible appeal--and the
appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems
now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these
beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express
itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious
fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the
dwellers on this earth?

I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers
of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book
before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of
Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly
blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety
which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care
the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.

But, coming back to Captain Froud and his fixed idea of never
disappointing ship-owners or ship-captains, it was not likely that I
should fail him in his ambition--to satisfy at a few hours' notice the
unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that
th