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

How could he have made that mistake?  But on board ship away from the land one does not expect to come upon a stranger.

Powell walked past the man.  A thin, somewhat sunken face, with a tightly closed mouth, stared at the distant French coast, vague like a suggestion of solid darkness, lying abeam beyond the evening light reflected from the level waters, themselves growing more sombre than the sky; a stare, across which Powell had to pass and did pass with a quick side glance, noting its immovable stillness.  His passage disturbed those eyes no more than if he had been as immaterial as a ghost.  And this failure of his person in producing an impression affected him strangely.  Who could that old man be?

He was so curious that he even ventured to ask the pilot in a low voice.  The pilot turned out to be a good-natured specimen of his kind, condescending, sententious.  He had been down to his meals in the main cabin, and had something to impart.

“That?  Queer fish—eh?  Mrs. Anthony’s father.  I’ve been introduced to him in the cabin at breakfast time.  Name of Smith.  Wonder if he has all his wits about him.  They take him about with them, it seems.  Don’t look very happy—eh?”

Then, changing his tone abruptly, he desired Powell to get all hands on deck and make sail on the ship.  “I shall be leaving you in half an hour.  You’ll have plenty of time to find out all about the old gent,” he added with a thick laugh.

* * * * *

In the secret emotion of giving his first order as a fully responsible officer, young Powell forgot the very existence of that old man in a moment.  The following days, in the interest of getting in touch with the ship, with the men in her, with his duties, in the rather anxious period of settling down, his curiosity slumbered; for of course the pilot’s few words had not extinguished it.

This settling down was made easy for him by the friendly character of his immediate superior—the chief.  Powell could not defend himself from some sympathy for that thick, bald man, comically shaped, with his crimson complexion and something pathetic in the rolling of his very movable black eyes in an apparently immovable head, who was so tactfully ready to take his competency for granted.

There can be nothing more reassuring to a young man tackling his life’s work for the first time.  Mr. Powell, his mind at ease about himself, had time to observe the people around with friendly interest.  Very early in the beginning of the passage, he had discovered with some amusement that the marriage of Captain Anthony was resented by those to whom Powell (conscious of being looked upon as something of an outsider) referred in his mind as ‘the old lot.’

They had the funny, regretful glances, intonations, nods of men who had seen other, better times.  What difference it could have made to the bo’sun and the carpenter Powell could not very well understand.  Yet these two pulled long faces and even gave hostile glances to the poop.  The cook and the steward might have been more directly concerned.  But the steward used to remark on occasion, ‘Oh, she gives no extra trouble,’ with scrupulous fairness of the most gloomy kind.  He was rather a silent man with a great sense of his personal worth which made his speeches guarded.  The cook, a neat man with fair side whiskers, who had been only three years in the ship, seemed the least concerned.  He was even known to have inquired once or twice as to the success of some of his dishes with the captain’s wife.  This was considered a sort of disloyal falling away from the ruling feeling.

The mate’s annoyance was yet the easiest to understand.  As he let it out to Powell before the first week of the passage was over: ‘You can’t expect me to be pleased at being chucked out of the saloon as if I weren’t good enough to sit down to meat with that woman.’  But he hastened to add: ‘Don’t you think I’m blaming the captain.  He isn’t a man to be found fault with.  You, Mr. Powell, are too young yet to understand such matters.’

Some considerable time afterwards, at the end of a conversation of that aggrieved sort, he enlarged a little more by repeating: ‘Yes!  You are too young to understand these things.  I don’t say you haven’t plenty of sense.  You are doing very well here.  Jolly sight better than I expected, though I liked your looks from the first.’

It was in the trade-winds, at night, under a velvety, bespangled sky; a great multitude of stars watching the shadows of the sea gleaming mysteriously in the wake of the ship; while the leisurely swishing of the water to leeward was like a drowsy comment on her progress.  Mr. Powell expressed his satisfaction by a half-bashful laugh.  The mate mused on: ‘And of course you haven’t known the ship as she used to be.  She was more than a home to a man.  She was not like any other ship; and Captain Anthony was not like any other master to sail with.  Neither is she now.  But before one never had a care in the world as to her—and as to him, too.  No, indeed, there was never anything to worry about.’

Young Powell couldn’t see what there was to worry about even then.  The serenity of the peaceful night seemed as vast as all space, and as enduring as eternity itself.  It’s true the sea is an uncertain element, but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its bewitching power any more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial inconstancy of women.  And Mr. Powell, being young, thought naïvely that the captain being married, there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition.  I suppose that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was something still in the nature of a fairy-tale with a ‘they lived happy ever after’ termination.  We are the creatures of our light literature much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible theories.  Powell felt in that way the more because the captain of a ship at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to account except by powers practically invisible and so distant, that they might well be looked upon as supernatural for all that the rest of the crew knows of them, as a rule.

So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate—or rather he understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not seem to him adequate.  He would have dismissed all this out of his mind with a contemptuous: ‘What the devil do I care?’ if the captain’s wife herself had not been so young.  To see her the first time had been something of a shock to him.  He had some preconceived ideas as to captain’s wives which, while he did not believe the testimony of his eyes, made him open them very wide.  He had stared till the captain’s wife noticed it plainly and turned her face away.  Captain’s wife!  That girl covered with rugs in a long chair.  Captain’s . . . !  He gasped mentally.  It had never occurred to him that a captain’s wife could be anything but a woman to be described as stout or thin, as jolly or crabbed, but always mature, and even, in comparison with his own years, frankly old.  But this!  It was a sort of moral upset as though he had discovered a case of abduction or something as surprising as that.  You understand that nothing is more disturbing than the upsetting of a preconceived idea.  Each of us arranges the world according to his own notion of the fitness of things.  To behold a girl where your average mediocre imagination had placed a comparatively old woman may easily become one of the strongest shocks . . . ”

Marlow paused, smiling to himself.

“Powell remained impressed after all these years by the very recollection,” he continued in a voice, amused perhaps but not mocking.  “He said to me only the other day with something like the first awe of that discovery lingering in his tone—he said to me: “Why, she seemed so young, so girlish, that I looked round for some woman which would be the captain’s wife, though of course I knew there was no other woman on board that voyage.”  The voyage before, it seems, there had been the steward’s wife to act as maid to Mrs. Anthony; but she was not taken that time for some reason he didn’t know.  Mrs. Anthony . . . !  If it hadn’t been the captain’s wife he would have referred to her mentally as a kid, he said.  I suppose there must be a sort of divinity hedging in a captain’s wife (however incredible) which prevented him applying to her that contemptuous definition in the secret of his thoughts.

I asked him when this had happened; and he told me that it was three days after parting from the tug, just outside the channel—to be precise.  A head wind had set in with unpleasant damp weather.  He had come up to leeward of the poop, still feeling very much of a stranger, and an untried officer, at six in the evening to take his watch.  To see her was quite as unexpected as seeing a vision.  When she turned away her head he recollected himself and dropped his eyes.  What he could see then was only, close to the long chair on which she reclined, a pair of long, thin legs ending in black cloth boots tucked in close to the skylight seat.  Whence he concluded that the ‘old gentleman,’ who wore a grey cap like the captain’s, was sitting by her—his daughter.  In his first astonishment he had stopped dead short, with the consequence that now he felt very much abashed at having betrayed his surprise.  But he couldn’t very well turn tail and bolt off the poop.  He had come there on duty.  So, still with downcast eyes, he made his way past them.  Only when he got as far as the wheel-grating did he look up.  She was hidden from him by the back of her deck-chair; but he had the view of the owner of the thin, aged legs seated on the skylight, his clean-shaved cheek, his thin compressed mouth with a hollow in each corner, the sparse grey locks escaping from under the tweed cap, and curling slightly on the collar of the coat.  He leaned forward a little over Mrs. Anthony, but they were not talking.  Captain Anthony, walking with a springy hurried gait on the other side of the poop from end to end, gazed straight before him.  Young Powell might have thought that his captain was not aware of his presence either.  However, he knew better, and for that reason spent a most uncomfortable hour motionless by the compass before his captain stopped in his swift pacing and with an almost visible effort made some remark to him about the weather in a low voice.  Before Powell, who was startled, could find a word of answer, the captain swung off again on his endless tramp with a fixed gaze.  And till the supper bell rang silence dwelt over that poop like an evil spell.  The captain walked up and down looking straight before him, the helmsman steered, looking upwards at the sails, the old gent on the skylight looked down on his daughter—and Mr. Powell confessed to me that he didn’t know where to look, feeling as though he had blundered in where he had no business—which was absurd.