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 surprised and perhaps have dropped his precious banjo.  Neither could I have told him that the sun of my sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire.  I did not know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.

He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo and I went on looking through the porthole.  The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tailend of a great cart.  A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned against the wheel.  An idle, strolling custom-house guard, belted over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and the monotony of official existence.  The background of grimy houses found a place in the picture framed by my porthole, across a wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud.  The colouring was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river.  We had been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same porthole gave me a view of quite another sort of cafe—­the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of light music.