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

growing excited.  “From behind this.”  He grasped the curtain and glaring at the silent Anthony flung it back disclosing the forepart of the saloon.  There was on one to be seen.

Powell had not expected to see anybody.  “But,” he said to me, “I knew very well there was an ear listening and an eye glued to the crack of a cabin door.  Awful thought.  And that door was in that part of the saloon remaining in the shadow of the other half of the curtain.  I pointed at it and I suppose that old man inside saw me pointing.  The captain had a wonderful self-command.  You couldn’t have guessed anything from his face.  Well, it was perhaps more thoughtful than usual.  And indeed this was something to think about.  But I couldn’t think steadily.  My brain would give a sort of jerk and then go dead again.  I had lost all notion of time, and I might have been looking at the captain for days and months for all I knew before I heard him whisper to me fiercely: “Not a word!”  This jerked me out of that trance I was in and I said “No!  No!  I didn’t mean even you.”

“I wanted to explain my conduct, my intentions, but I read in his eyes that he understood me and I was only too glad to leave off.  And there we were looking at each other, dumb, brought up short by the question “What next?”

“I thought Captain Anthony was a man of iron till I saw him suddenly fling his head to the right and to the left fiercely, like a wild animal at bay not knowing which way to break out . . . ”

* * * * *

“Truly,” commented Marlow, “brought to bay was not a bad comparison; a better one than Mr. Powell was aware of.  At that moment the appearance of Flora could not but bring the tension to the breaking point.  She came out in all innocence but not without vague dread.  Anthony’s exclamation on first seeing Powell had reached her in her cabin, where, it seems, she was brushing her hair.  She had heard the very words.  “What are you doing here?”  And the unwonted loudness of the voice—his voice—breaking the habitual stillness of that hour would have startled a person having much less reason to be constantly apprehensive, than the captive of Anthony’s masterful generosity.  She had no means to guess to whom the question was addressed and it echoed in her heart, as Anthony’s voice always did.  Followed complete silence.  She waited, anxious, expectant, till she could stand the strain no longer, and with the weary mental appeal of the overburdened.  “My God!  What is it now?” she opened the door of her room and looked into the saloon.  Her first glance fell on Powell.  For a moment, seeing only the second officer with Anthony, she felt relieved and made as if to draw back; but her sharpened perception detected something suspicious in their attitudes, and she came forward slowly.

“I was the first to see Mrs. Anthony,” related Powell, “because I was facing aft.  The captain, noticing my eyes, looked quickly over his shoulder and at once put his finger to his lips to caution me.  As if I were likely to let out anything before her!  Mrs. Anthony had on a dressing-gown of some grey stuff with red facings and a thick red cord round her waist.  Her hair was down.  She looked a child; a pale-faced child with big blue eyes and a red mouth a little open showing a glimmer of white teeth.  The light fell strongly on her as she came up to the end of the table.  A strange child though; she hardly affected one like a child, I remember.  Do you know,” exclaimed Mr. Powell, who clearly must have been, like many seamen, an industrious reader, “do you know what she looked like to me with those big eyes and something appealing in her whole expression.  She looked like a forsaken elf.  Captain Anthony had moved towards her to keep her away from my end of the table, where the tray was.  I had never seen them so near to each other before, and it made a great contrast.  It was wonderful, for, with his beard cut to a point, his swarthy, sunburnt complexion, thin nose and his lean head there was something African, something Moorish in Captain Anthony.  His neck was bare; he had taken off his coat and collar and had drawn on his sleeping jacket in the time that he had been absent from the saloon.  I seem to see him now.  Mrs. Anthony too.  She looked from him to me—I suppose I looked guilty or frightened—and from me to him, trying to guess what there was between us two.  Then she burst out with a “What has happened?” which seemed addressed to me.  I mumbled “Nothing!  Nothing, ma’am,” which she very likely did not hear.

“You must not think that all this had lasted a long time.  She had taken fright at our behaviour and turned to the captain pitifully.  “What is it you are concealing from me?”  A straight question—eh?  I don’t know what answer the captain would have made.  Before he could even raise his eyes to her she cried out “Ah!  Here’s papa” in a sharp tone of relief, but directly afterwards she looked to me as if she were holding her breath with apprehension.  I was so interested in her that, how shall I say it, her exclamation made no connection in my brain at first.  I also noticed that she had sidled up a little nearer to Captain Anthony, before it occurred to me to turn my head.  I can tell you my neck stiffened in the twisted position from the shock of actually seeing that old man!  He had dared!  I suppose you think I ought to have looked upon him as mad.  But I couldn’t.  It would have been certainly easier.  But I could not.  You should have seen him.  First of all he was completely dressed with his very cap still on his head just as when he left me on deck two hours before, saying in his soft voice: “The moment has come to go to bed”—while he meant to go and do that thing and hide in his dark cabin, and watch the stuff do its work.  A cold shudder ran down my back.  He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his arms were pressed close to his thin, upright body, and he shuffled across the cabin with his short steps.  There was a red patch on each of his old soft cheeks as if somebody had been pinching them.  He drooped his head a little, and looked with a sort of underhand expectation at the captain and Mrs. Anthony standing close together at the other end of the saloon.  The calculating horrible impudence of it!  His daughter was there; and I am certain he had seen the captain putting his finger on his lips to warn me.  And then he had coolly come out!  He passed my imagination, I assure you.  After that one shiver his presence killed every faculty in me—wonder, horror, indignation.  I felt nothing in particular just as if he were still the old gentleman who used to talk to me familiarly every day on deck.  Would you believe it?”

“Mr. Powell challenged my powers of wonder at this internal phenomenon,” went on Marlow after a slight pause.  “But even if they had not been fully engaged, together with all my powers of attention in following the facts of the case, I would not have been astonished by his statements about himself.  Taking into consideration his youth they were by no means incredible; or, at any rate, they were the least incredible part of the whole.  They were also the least interesting part.  The interest was elsewhere, and there of course all he could do was to look at the surface.  The inwardness of what was passing before his eyes was hidden from him, who had looked on, more impenetrably than from me who at a distance of years was listening to his words.  What presently happened at this crisis in Flora de Barral’s fate was beyond his power of comment, seemed in a sense natural.  And his own presence on the scene was so strangely motived that it was left for me to marvel alone at this young man, a completely chance-comer, having brought it about on that night.

Each situation created either by folly or wisdom has its psychological moment.  The behaviour of young Powell with its mixture of boyish impulses combined with instinctive prudence, had not created it—I can’t say that—but had discovered it to the very people involved.  What would have happened if he had made a noise about his discovery?  But he didn’t.  His head was full of Mrs. Anthony and he behaved with a discretion beyond his years.  Some nice children often do; and surely it is not from reflection.  They have their own inspirations.  Young Powell’s inspiration consisted in being “enthusiastic” about Mrs. Anthony.  ‘Enthusiastic’ is really good.  And he was amongst them like a child, sensitive, impressionable, plastic—but unable to find for himself any sort of comment.

I don’t know how much mine may be worth; but I believe that just then the tension of the false situation was at its highest.  Of all the forms offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realize it fully, which is the most imperative.  Pairing off is the fate of mankind.  And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the—the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple.  Perhaps sacred.  And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a straight if despairing decision.

Powell on taking his eyes off the old gentleman noticed Captain Anthony, swarthy as an African, by the side of Flora whiter than the lilies, take his handkerchief out and wipe off his forehead the sweat of anguish—like a man who is overcome.  “And no wonder,” commented Mr. Powell here.  Then the captain said, “Hadn’t you better go back to your room.”  This was to Mrs. Anthony.  He tried to smile at her.  “Why do you look startled?  This night is like any other night.”

“Which,” Powell again commented to me earnestly, “was a lie . . . No wonder he sweated.”  You see from this the value of Powell’s comments.  Mrs. Anthony then said: “Why are you sending me away?”

“Why!  That you should go to sleep.  That you should rest.”  And Captain Anthony frowned.  Then sharply, “You stay here, Mr. Powell.  I shall want you presently.”

As a matter of fact Powell had not moved.  Flora did not mind his presence.  He himself had the feeling of being of no account to those three people.  He was looking at Mrs. Anthony as unabashed as the proverbial cat looking at a king.  Mrs. Anthony glanced at him.  She did not move, gripped by an inexplicable premonition.  She had arrived at the very limit of her endurance as the object of Anthony’s magnanimity; she was the prey of an intuitive dread of she did not know what mysterious influence; she felt herself being pushed back into that solitude, that moral loneliness, which had made all her life intolerable.  And then, in that close communion established again with Anthony, she felt—as on that night in the garden—the force of his personal fascination.  The passive quietness with which she looked at him gave her the appearance of a person bewitched—or, say,