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

Powell, must have been obviously predestined to add his native ingenuousness to the sum of all the others carried by the honest ship Ferndale.  He was too ingenuous.  Everybody on board was, exception being made of Mr. Smith who, however, was simple enough in his way, with that terrible simplicity of the fixed idea, for which there is also another name men pronounce with dread and aversion.  His fixed idea was to save his girl from the man who had possessed himself of her (I use these words on purpose because the image they suggest was clearly in Mr. Smith’s mind), possessed himself unfairly of her while he, the father, was locked up.

“I won’t rest till I have got you away from that man,” he would murmur to her after long periods of contemplation.  We know from Powell how he used to sit on the skylight near the long deck-chair on which Flora was reclining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship and investigation at the same time.

It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event rationally.  The avatar of de Barral into Mr. Smith had not been effected without a shock—that much one must recognize.  It may be that it drove all practical considerations out of his mind, making room for awful and precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards.

And it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent tenacity, of the man who had persisted in throwing millions of other people’s thrift into the Lone Valley Railway, the Labrador Docks, the Spotted Leopard Copper Mine, and other grotesque speculations exposed during the famous de Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of laughter.  For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy finds its last refuge in our deadly serious world.  As to tears and lamentations, these were not heard in the august precincts of comedy, because they were indulged in privately in several thousand homes, where, with a fine dramatic effect, hunger had taken the place of Thrift.

But there was one at least who did not laugh in court.  That person was the accused.  The notorious de Barral did not laugh because he was indignant.  He was impervious to words, to facts, to inferences.  It would have been impossible to make him see his guilt or his folly—either by evidence or argument—if anybody had tried to argue.

Neither did his daughter Flora try to argue with him.  The cruelty of her position was so great, its complications so thorny, if I may express myself so, that a passive attitude was yet her best refuge—as it had been before her of so many women.

For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore menacing.  It makes one pause.  A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply stupid.  But she is never dense.  She’s never made of wood through and through as some men are.  There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring.  Whatever men don’t know about women (and it may be a lot or it may be very little) men and even fathers do know that much.  And that is why so many men are afraid of them.

Mr. Smith I believe was afraid of his daughter’s quietness though of course he interpreted it in his own way.

He would, as Mr. Powell depicts, sit on the skylight and bend over the reclining girl, wondering what there was behind the lost gaze under the darkened eyelids in the still eyes.  He would look and look and then he would say, whisper rather, it didn’t take much for his voice to drop to a mere breath—he would declare, transferring his faded stare to the horizon, that he would never rest till he had “got her away from that man.”

“You don’t know what you are saying, papa.”

She would try not to show her weariness, the nervous strain of these two men’s antagonism around her person which was the cause of her languid attitudes.  For as a matter of fact the sea agreed with her.

As likely as not Anthony would be walking on the other side of the deck.  The strain was making him restless.  He couldn’t sit still anywhere.  He had tried shutting himself up in his cabin; but that was no good.  He would jump up to rush on deck and tramp, tramp up and down that poop till he felt ready to drop, without being able to wear down the agitation of his soul, generous indeed, but weighted by its envelope of blood and muscle and bone; handicapped by the brain creating precise images and everlastingly speculating, speculating—looking out for signs, watching for symptoms.

And Mr. Smith with a slight backward jerk of his small head at the footsteps on the other side of the skylight would insist in his awful, hopelessly gentle voice that he knew very well what he was saying.  Hadn’t she given herself to that man while he was locked up.

“Helpless, in jail, with no one to think of, nothing to look forward to, but my daughter.  And then when they let me out at last I find her gone—for it amounts to this.  Sold.  Because you’ve sold yourself; you know you have.”

With his round unmoved face, a lot of fine white hair waving in the wind-eddies of the spanker, his glance levelled over the sea he seemed to be addressing the universe across her reclining form.  She would protest sometimes.

“I wish you would not talk like this, papa.  You are only tormenting me, and tormenting yourself.”

“Yes, I am tormented enough,” he admitted meaningly.  But it was not talking about it that tormented him.  It was thinking of it.  And to sit and look at it was worse for him than it possibly could have been for her to go and give herself up, bad as that must have been.

“For of course you suffered.  Don’t tell me you didn’t?  You must have.”

She had renounced very soon all attempts at protests.  It was useless.  It might have made things worse; and she did not want to quarrel with her father, the only human being that really cared for her, absolutely, evidently, completely—to the end.  There was in him no pity, no generosity, nothing whatever of these fine things—it was for her, for her very own self such as it was, that this human being cared.  This certitude would have made her put up with worse torments.  For, of course, she too was being tormented.  She felt also helpless, as if the whole enterprise had been too much for her.  This is the sort of conviction which makes for quietude.  She was becoming a fatalist.

What must have been rather appalling were the necessities of daily life, the intercourse of current trifles.  That naturally had to go on.  They wished good morning to each other, they sat down together to meals—and I believe there would be a game of cards now and then in the evening, especially at first.  What frightened her most was the duplicity of her father, at least what looked like duplicity, when she remembered his persistent, insistent whispers on deck.  However her father was a taciturn person as far back as she could remember him best—on the Parade.  It was she who chattered, never troubling herself to discover whether he was pleased or displeased.  And now she couldn’t fathom his thoughts.  Neither did she chatter to him.  Anthony with a forced friendly smile as if frozen to his lips seemed only too thankful at not being made to speak.  Mr. Smith sometimes forgot himself while studying his hand so long that Flora had to recall him to himself by a murmured “Papa—your lead.”  Then he apologized by a faint as if inward ejaculation “Beg your pardon, Captain.”  Naturally she addressed Anthony as Roderick and he addressed her as Flora.  This was all the acting that was necessary to judge from the wincing twitch of the old man’s mouth at every uttered “Flora.”  On hearing the rare “Rodericks” he had sometimes a scornful grimace as faint and faded and colourless as his whole stiff personality.

He would be the first to retire.  He was not infirm.  With him too the life on board ship seemed to agree; but from a sense of duty, of affection, or to placate his hidden fury, his daughter always accompanied him to his state-room “to make him comfortable.”  She lighted his lamp, helped him into his dressing-gown or got him a book from a bookcase fitted in there—but this last rarely, because Mr. Smith used to declare “I am no reader” with something like pride in his low tones.  Very often after kissing her good-night on the forehead he would treat her to some such fretful remark: “It’s like being in jail—’pon my word.  I suppose that man is out there waiting for you.  Head jailer!  Ough!”

She would smile vaguely; murmur a conciliatory “How absurd.”  But once, out of patience, she said quite sharply “Leave off.  It hurts me.  One would think you hate me.”

“It isn’t you I hate,” he went on monotonously breathing at her.  “No, it isn’t you.  But if I saw that you loved that man I think I could hate you too.”

That word struck straight at her heart.  “You wouldn’t be the first then,” she muttered bitterly.  But he was busy with his fixed idea and uttered an awfully equable “But you don’t!  Unfortunate girl!”

She looked at him steadily for a time then said “Good-night, papa.”

As a matter of fact Anthony very seldom waited for her alone at the table with the scattered cards, glasses, water-jug, bottles and soon.  He took no more opportunities to be alone with her than was absolutely necessary for the edification of Mrs. Brown.  Excellent, faithful woman; the wife of his still more excellent and faithful steward.  And Flora wished all these excellent people, devoted to Anthony, she wished them all further; and especially the nice, pleasant-spoken Mrs. Brown with her beady, mobile eyes and her “Yes certainly, ma’am,” which seemed to her to have a mocking sound.  And so this short trip—to the Western Islands only—came to an end.  It was so short that when young Powell joined the Ferndale by a memorable stroke of chance, no more than seven months had elapsed since the—let us say the liberation of the convict de Barral and his avatar into Mr. Smith.

* * * * *

For the time the ship was loading in London Anthony took a cottage near a little country station in Essex, to house Mr. Smith and Mr. Smith’s daughter.  It was altogether his idea.  How far it was necessary for Mr. Smith to seek rural retreat I don’t know.  Perhaps to some extent it was a judicious arrangement.  There were some obligations incumbent on the liberated de Barral (in connection with reporting himself to the police I imagine) which Mr. Smith was not anxious to perform.  De Barral had to vanish; the theory was that de Barral had vanished, and it had to be upheld.  Poor Flora liked the country, even if the spot had nothing more to recommend it than its retired character.

Now and then Captain Anthony ran down; but as the station was a real wayside one, with no early morning trains up, he could never stay for more than the afternoon.  It appeared that he must sleep in town so as to be early on board his ship.  The weather was magnificent and whenever the captain of the Ferndale was seen on a brilliant afternoon coming down the road Mr. Smith would seize his stick and toddle off for a solitary walk.  But whether he would get tired or because it gave him some satisfaction to see “that man” go away—or for some cunning reason of his own, he was always back before the hour of Anthony’s departure.  On approaching the cottage he would see generally “that man” lying on the