Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
the decks of a 2000-ton steamer called the "Adowa," on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of "Almayer's Folly" was begun. With interest, I say, for was
not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering
voice the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost
ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?

"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
behind which the sun had sunk. . . ." These words of Almayer's romantic
daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on
the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles
and shaped themselves in my mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests
and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town
of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,
coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation: "You've made it
jolly warm in here."

It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tin under
the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that water will leak
where steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had
been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together
vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their
mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and
being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling,
by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have
been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this
sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the strings
under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:

"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"

It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply
turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy: I could not
have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her
opening speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's
wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night.
I could not have told him that Nina had said: "It has set at last."
He would have been extremely surp