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 pity
which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care
the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived.
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