face? . . .

'I was completely unprepared for this. I could only mutter and shake my
head vaguely. Afterwards I am perfectly aware I cut a very poor figure
trying to extricate myself out of this difficulty. From that moment,
however, the old nakhoda became taciturn. He was not very pleased, I
fear, and evidently I had given him food for thought. Strangely enough,
on the evening of that very day (which was my last in Patusan) I was
once more confronted with the same question, with the unanswerable why
of Jim's fate. And this brings me to the story of his love.

'I suppose you think it is a story that you can imagine for yourselves.
We have heard so many such stories, and the majority of us don't believe
them to be stories of love at all. For the most part we look upon them
as stories of opportunities: episodes of passion at best, or perhaps
only of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end, even
if they pass through the reality of tenderness and regret. This view
mostly is right, and perhaps in this case too. . . . Yet I don't know.
To tell this story is by no means so easy as it should be--were the
ordinary standpoint adequate. Apparently it is a story very much like
the others: for me, however, there is visible in its background the
melancholy figure of a woman, the shadow of a cruel wisdom buried in a
lonely grave, looking on wistfully, helplessly, with sealed lips. The
grave itself, as I came upon it during an early morning stroll, was a
rather shapeless brown mound, with an inlaid neat border of white lumps
of coral at the base, and enclosed within a circular fence made of split
saplings, with the bark left on. A garland of leaves and flowers was
woven about the heads of the slender posts--and the flowers were fresh.

'Thus, whether the shadow is of my imagination or not, I can at all
events point out the significant fact of an unforgotten grave. When I
tell you besides that Jim with his own hands had worked at the rustic
fence, you will perceive directly the difference, the individual side of
the story. There is in his espousal of memory and affection belonging to
another human being something characteristic of his seriousness. He had
a conscience, and it was a romantic conscience. Through her whole life
the wife of the unspeakable Cornelius had no other companion, confidant,
and friend but her daughter. How the poor woman had come to marry the
awful little Malacca Portuguese--after the separation