n Jacques never
offered a word. "Well, what do you say?" I asked at last. "Is it worth
finishing?" This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.

"Distinctly," he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then coughed a
little.

"Were you interested?" I inquired further almost in a whisper.

"Very much!"

In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the
ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my
bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp
circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly
in the gusts of wind. It was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the
longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites
of Almayer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged
silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective
writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its
action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were being
born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the
officer of the watch and remained on the alert to catch the order that
was to follow this call to attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce
shout to "Square the yards." "Aha!" I thought to myself, "a westerly
blow coming on." Then I turned to my very first reader who, alas! was
not to live long enough to know the end of the tale.

"Now let me ask you one more thing: is the story quite clear to you as
it stands?"

He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.

"Yes! Perfectly."

This was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of
"Almayer's Folly." We never spoke together of the book again. A long
period of bad weather set in and I had no thoughts left but for my
duties, whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in
his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of my prose
went at once up-country, and died rather suddenly in the end, either in
Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez
Canal. I am not sure which it was now, and I do not think I ever heard
precisely; though I made inquiries about him from some of our return
passengers who, wandering about to "see the country" during the ship's
stay in port, had come upon him here and there. At last we sailed,
homeward bound, and still not one line was added to the careless scrawl
of the many pages which poor Jacq