Chance by Joseph Conrad (free novel 24 .TXT) 📖

He envied them their places in the scheme of world’s labour.  And he envied also the miserable sallow, thin-faced loafers blinking their obscene eyes and rubbing their greasy shoulders against the door-jambs of the Black Horse pub, because they were too far gone to feel their degradation.

I must render the man the justice that he conveyed very well to us the sense of his youthful hopelessness surprised at not finding its place in the sun and no recognition of its right to live.

He went up the outer steps of St. Katherine’s Dock House, the very steps from which he had some six weeks before surveyed the cabstand, the buildings, the policemen, the boot-blacks, the paint, gilt, and plateglass of the Black Horse, with the eye of a Conqueror.  At the time he had been at the bottom of his heart surprised that all this had not greeted him with songs and incense, but now (he made no secret of it) he made his entry in a slinking fashion past the doorkeeper’s glass box.  “I hadn’t any half-crowns to spare for tips,” he remarked grimly.  The man, however, ran out after him asking: “What do you require?” but with a grateful glance up at the first floor in remembrance of Captain R-’s examination room (how easy and delightful all that had been) he bolted down a flight leading to the basement and found himself in a place of dusk and mystery and many doors.  He had been afraid of being stopped by some rule of no-admittance.  However he was not pursued.

The basement of St. Katherine’s Dock House is vast in extent and confusing in its plan.  Pale shafts of light slant from above into the gloom of its chilly passages.  Powell wandered up and down there like an early Christian refugee in the catacombs; but what little faith he had in the success of his enterprise was oozing out at his finger-tips.  At a dark turn under a gas bracket whose flame was half turned down his self-confidence abandoned him altogether.

“I stood there to think a little,” he said.  “A foolish thing to do because of course I got scared.  What could you expect?  It takes some nerve to tackle a stranger with a request for a favour.  I wished my namesake Powell had been the devil himself.  I felt somehow it would have been an easier job.  You see, I never believed in the devil enough to be scared of him; but a man can make himself very unpleasant.  I looked at a lot of doors, all shut tight, with a growing conviction that I would never have the pluck to open one of them.  Thinking’s no good for one’s nerve.  I concluded I would give up the whole business.  But I didn’t give up in the end, and I’ll tell you what stopped me.  It was the recollection of that confounded doorkeeper who had called after me.  I felt sure the fellow would be on the look-out at the head of the stairs.  If he asked me what I had been after, as he had the right to do, I wouldn’t know what to answer that wouldn’t make me look silly if no worse.  I got very hot.  There was no chance of slinking out of this business.

“I had lost my bearings somehow down there.  Of the many doors of various sizes, right and left, a good few had glazed lights above; some however must have led merely into lumber rooms or such like, because when I brought myself to try one or two I was disconcerted to find that they were locked.  I stood there irresolute and uneasy like a baffled thief.  The confounded basement was as still as a grave and I became aware of my heart beats.  Very uncomfortable sensation.  Never happened to me before or since.  A bigger door to the left of me, with a large brass handle looked as if it might lead into the Shipping Office.  I tried it, setting my teeth.  “Here goes!”

“It came open quite easily.  And lo! the place it opened into was hardly any bigger than a cupboard.  Anyhow it wasn’t more than ten feet by twelve; and as I in a way expected to see the big shadowy cellar-like extent of the Shipping Office where I had been once or twice before, I was extremely startled.  A gas bracket hung from the middle of the ceiling over a dark, shabby writing-desk covered with a litter of yellowish dusty documents.  Under the flame of the single burner which made the place ablaze with light, a plump, little man was writing hard, his nose very near the desk.  His head was perfectly bald and about the same drab tint as the papers.  He appeared pretty dusty too.

“I didn’t notice whether there were any cobwebs on him, but I shouldn’t wonder if there were because he looked as though he had been imprisoned for years in that little hole.  The way he dropped his pen and sat blinking my way upset me very much.  And his dungeon was hot and musty; it smelt of gas and mushrooms, and seemed to be somewhere 120 feet below the ground.  Solid, heavy stacks of paper filled all the corners half-way up to the ceiling.  And when the thought flashed upon me that these were the premises of the Marine Board and that this fellow must be connected in some way with ships and sailors and the sea, my astonishment took my breath away.  One couldn’t imagine why the Marine Board should keep that bald, fat creature slaving down there.  For some reason or other I felt sorry and ashamed to have found him out in his wretched captivity.  I asked gently and sorrowfully: “The Shipping Office, please.”

He piped up in a contemptuous squeaky voice which made me start: “Not here.  Try the passage on the other side.  Street side.  This is the Dock side.  You’ve lost your way . . . ”

He spoke in such a spiteful tone that I thought he was going to round off with the words: “You fool” . . . and perhaps he meant to.  But what he finished sharply with was: “Shut the door quietly after you.”

And I did shut it quietly—you bet.  Quick and quiet.  The indomitable spirit of that chap impressed me.  I wonder sometimes whether he has succeeded in writing himself into liberty and a pension at last, or had to go out of his gas-lighted grave straight into that other dark one where nobody would want to intrude.  My humanity was pleased to discover he had so much kick left in him, but I was not comforted in the least.  It occurred to me that if Mr. Powell had the same sort of temper . . . However, I didn’t give myself time to think and scuttled across the space at the foot of the stairs into the passage where I’d been told to try.  And I tried the first door I came to, right away, without any hanging back, because coming loudly from the hall above an amazed and scandalized voice wanted to know what sort of game I was up to down there.  “Don’t you know there’s no admittance that way?” it roared.  But if there was anything more I shut it out of my hearing by means of a door marked Private on the outside.  It let me into a six-feet wide strip between a long counter and the wall, taken off a spacious, vaulted room with a grated window and a glazed door giving daylight to the further end.  The first thing I saw right in front of me were three middle-aged men having a sort of romp together round about another fellow with a thin, long neck and sloping shoulders who stood up at a desk writing on a large sheet of paper and taking no notice except that he grinned quietly to himself.  They turned very sour at once when they saw me.  I heard one of them mutter ‘Hullo!  What have we here?’

“‘I want to see Mr. Powell, please,’ I said, very civil but firm; I would let nothing scare me away now.  This was the Shipping Office right enough.  It was after 3 o’clock and the business seemed over for the day with them.  The long-necked fellow went on with his writing steadily.  I observed that he was no longer grinning.  The three others tossed their heads all together towards the far end of the room where a fifth man had been looking on at their antics from a high stool.  I walked up to him as boldly as if he had been the devil himself.  With one foot raised up and resting on the cross-bar of his seat he never stopped swinging the other which was well clear of the stone floor.  He had unbuttoned the top of his waistcoat and he wore his tall hat very far at the back of his head.  He had a full unwrinkled face and such clear-shining eyes that his grey beard looked quite false on him, stuck on for a disguise.  You said just now he resembled Socrates—didn’t you?  I don’t know about that.  This Socrates was a wise man, I believe?”

“He was,” assented Marlow.  “And a true friend of youth.  He lectured them in a peculiarly exasperating manner.  It was a way he had.”

“Then give me Powell every time,” declared our new acquaintance sturdily.  “He didn’t lecture me in any way.  Not he.  He said: ‘How do you do?’ quite kindly to my mumble.  Then says he looking very hard at me: ‘I don’t think I know you—do I?’

“No, sir,” I said and down went my heart sliding into my boots, just as the time had come to summon up all my cheek.  There’s nothing meaner in the world than a piece of impudence that isn’t carried off well.  For fear of appearing shamefaced I started about it so free and easy as almost to frighten myself.  He listened for a while looking at my face with surprise and curiosity and then held up his hand.  I was glad enough to shut up, I can tell you.

“Well, you are a cool hand,” says he.  “And that friend of yours too.  He pestered me coming here every day for a fortnight till a captain I’m acquainted with was good enough to give him a berth.  And no sooner he’s provided for than he turns you on.  You youngsters don’t seem to mind whom you get into trouble.”

“It was my turn now to stare with surprise and curiosity.  He hadn’t been talking loud but he lowered his voice still more.

“Don’t you know it’s illegal?”

“I wondered what he was driving at till I remembered that procuring a berth for a sailor is a penal offence under the Act.  That clause was directed of course against the swindling practices of the boarding-house crimps.  It had never struck me it would apply to everybody alike no matter what the motive, because I believed then that people on shore did their work with care and foresight.

“I was confounded at the idea, but Mr. Powell made me soon see that an Act of Parliament hasn’t any sense of its own.  It has only the sense that’s put into it; and that’s precious little sometimes.  He didn’t mind helping a young man to a ship now and then, he said, but if we kept on coming constantly it would soon get about that he was doing it for money.

“A pretty thing that would be: the Senior Shipping-Master of the Port of London hauled up in a police court and fined fifty pounds,” says he.  “I’ve another four years to serve to get my pension.  It could be made to look very black against me and don’t you make any mistake about it,” he says.

“And all the time with one knee well up he went on swinging his other leg like a boy on a