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

After telling Mr. Powell not to go away the captain remained silent.  Suddenly Mrs. Anthony pushed back her loose hair with a decisive gesture of her arms and moved still nearer to him.  “Here’s papa up yet,” she said, but she did not look towards Mr. Smith.  “Why is it?  And you?  I can’t go on like this, Roderick—between you two.  Don’t.”

Anthony interrupted her as if something had untied his tongue.

“Oh yes.  Here’s your father.  And . . . Why not.  Perhaps it is just as well you came out.  Between us two?  Is that it?  I won’t pretend I don’t understand.  I am not blind.  But I can’t fight any longer for what I haven’t got.  I don’t know what you imagine has happened.  Something has though.  Only you needn’t be afraid.  No shadow can touch you—because I give up.  I can’t say we had much talk about it, your father and I, but, the long and the short of it is, that I must learn to live without you—which I have told you was impossible.  I was speaking the truth.  But I have done fighting, or waiting, or hoping.  Yes.  You shall go.”

At this point Mr. Powell who (he confessed to me) was listening with uncomprehending awe, heard behind his back a triumphant chuckling sound.  It gave him the shudders, he said, to mention it now; but at the time, except for another chill down the spine, it had not the power to destroy his absorption in the scene before his eyes, and before his ears too, because just then Captain Anthony raised his voice grimly.  Perhaps he too had heard the chuckle of the old man.

“Your father has found an argument which makes me pause, if it does not convince me.  No!  I can’t answer it.  I—I don’t want to answer it.  I simply surrender.  He shall have his way with you—and with me.  Only,” he added in a gloomy lowered tone which struck Mr. Powell as if a pedal had been put down, “only it shall take a little time.  I have never lied to you.  Never.  I renounce not only my chance but my life.  In a few days, directly we get into port, the very moment we do, I, who have said I could never let you go, I shall let you go.”

To the innocent beholder Anthony seemed at this point to become physically exhausted.  My view is that the utter falseness of his, I may say, aspirations, the vanity of grasping the empty air, had come to him with an overwhelming force, leaving him disarmed before the other’s mad and sinister sincerity.  As he had said himself he could not fight for what he did not possess; he could not face such a thing as this for the sake of his mere magnanimity.  The normal alone can overcome the abnormal.  He could not even reproach that man over there.  “I own myself beaten,” he said in a firmer tone.  “You are free.  I let you off since I must.”

Powell, the onlooker, affirms that at these incomprehensible words Mrs. Anthony stiffened into the very image of astonishment, with a frightened stare and frozen lips.  But next minute a cry came out from her heart, not very loud but of a quality which made not only Captain Anthony (he was not looking at her), not only him but also the more distant (and equally unprepared) young man, catch their breath: “But I don’t want to be let off,” she cried.

She was so still that one asked oneself whether the cry had come from her.  The restless shuffle behind Powell’s back stopped short, the intermittent shadowy chuckling ceased too.  Young Powell, glancing round, saw Mr. Smith raise his head with his faded eyes very still, puckered at the corners, like a man perceiving something coming at him from a great distance.  And Mrs. Anthony’s voice reached Powell’s ears, entreating and indignant.

“You can’t cast me off like this, Roderick.  I won’t go away from you.  I won’t—”

Powell turned about and discovered then that what Mr. Smith was puckering his eyes at, was the sight of his daughter clinging round Captain Anthony’s neck—a sight not in itself improper, but which had the power to move young Powell with a bashfully profound emotion.  It was different from his emotion while spying at the revelations of the skylight, but in this case too he felt the discomfort, if not the guilt, of an unseen beholder.  Experience was being piled up on his young shoulders.  Mrs. Anthony’s hair hung back in a dark mass like the hair of a drowned woman.  She looked as if she would let go and sink to the floor if the captain were to withhold his sustaining arm.  But the captain obviously had no such intention.  Standing firm and still he gazed with sombre eyes at Mr. Smith.  For a time the low convulsive sobbing of Mr. Smith’s daughter was the only sound to trouble the silence.  The strength of Anthony’s clasp pressing Flora to his breast could not be doubted even at that distance, and suddenly, awakening to his opportunity, he began to partly support her, partly carry her in the direction of her cabin.  His head was bent over her solicitously, then recollecting himself, with a glance full of unwonted fire, his voice ringing in a note unknown to Mr. Powell, he cried to him, “Don’t you go on deck yet.  I want you to stay down here till I come back.  There are some instructions I want to give you.”

And before the young man could answer, Anthony had disappeared in the stern-cabin, burdened and exulting.

“Instructions,” commented Mr. Powell.  “That was all right.  Very likely; but they would be such instructions as, I thought to myself, no ship’s officer perhaps had ever been given before.  It made me feel a little sick to think what they would be dealing with, probably.  But there!  Everything that happens on board ship on the high seas has got to be dealt with somehow.  There are no special people to fly to for assistance.  And there I was with that old man left in my charge.  When he noticed me looking at him he started to shuffle again athwart the saloon.  He kept his hands rammed in his pockets, he was as stiff-backed as ever, only his head hung down.  After a bit he says in his gentle soft tone: “Did you see it?”

There were in Powell’s head no special words to fit the horror of his feelings.  So he said—he had to say something, “Good God!  What were you thinking of, Mr. Smith, to try to . . . ”   And then he left off.  He dared not utter the awful word poison.  Mr. Smith stopped his prowl.

“Think!  What do you know of thinking.  I don’t think.  There is something in my head that thinks.  The thoughts in men, it’s like being drunk with liquor or—You can’t stop them.  A man who thinks will think anything.  No!  But have you seen it.  Have you?”

“I tell you I have!  I am certain!” said Powell forcibly.  “I was looking at you all the time.  You’ve done something to the drink in that glass.”

Then Powell lost his breath somehow.  Mr. Smith looked at him curiously, with mistrust.

“My good young man, I don’t know what you are talking about.  I ask you—have you seen?  Who would have believed it? with her arms round his neck.  When!  Oh!  Ha!  Ha!  You did see!  Didn’t you?  It wasn’t a delusion—was it?  Her arms round . . . But I have never wholly trusted her.”

“Then I flew out at him, said Mr. Powell.  I told him he was jolly lucky to have fallen upon Captain Anthony.  A man in a million.  He started again shuffling to and fro.  “You too,” he said mournfully, keeping his eyes down.  “Eh?  Wonderful man?  But have you a notion who I am?  Listen!  I have been the Great Mr. de Barral.  So they printed it in the papers while they were getting up a conspiracy.  And I have been doing time.  And now I am brought low.”  His voice died down to a mere breath.  “Brought low.”

He took his hands out of his pocket, dragged the cap down on his head and stuck them back into his pockets, exactly as if preparing himself to go out into a great wind.  “But not so low as to put up with this disgrace, to see her, fast in this fellow’s clutches, without doing something.  She wouldn’t listen to me.  Frightened?  Silly?  I had to think of some way to get her out of this.  Did you think she cared for him?  No!  Would anybody have thought so?  No!  She pretended it was for my sake.  She couldn’t understand that if I hadn’t been an old man I would have flown at his throat months ago.  As it was I was tempted every time he looked at her.  My girl.  Ough!  Any man but this.  And all the time the wicked little fool was lying to me.  It was their plot, their conspiracy!  These conspiracies are the devil.  She has been leading me on, till she has fairly put my head under the heel of that jailer, of that scoundrel, of her husband . . .  Treachery!  Bringing me low.  Lower than herself.  In the dirt.  That’s what it means.  Doesn’t it?  Under his heel!”

He paused in his restless shuffle and again, seizing his cap with both hands, dragged it furiously right down on his ears.  Powell had lost himself in listening to these broken ravings, in looking at that old feverish face when, suddenly, quick as lightning, Mr. Smith spun round, snatched up the captain’s glass and with a stifled, hurried exclamation, “Here’s luck,” tossed the liquor down his throat.

“I know now the meaning of the word ‘Consternation,’” went on Mr. Powell.  “That was exactly my state of mind.  I thought to myself directly: There’s nothing in that drink.  I have been dreaming, I have made the awfulest mistake! . . .”

Mr. Smith put the glass down.  He stood before Powell unharmed, quieted down, in a listening attitude, his head inclined on one side, chewing his thin lips.  Suddenly he blinked queerly, grabbed Powell’s shoulder and collapsed, subsiding all at once as though he had gone soft all over, as a piece of silk stuff collapses.  Powell seized his arm instinctively and checked his fall; but as soon as Mr. Smith was fairly on the floor he jerked himself free and backed away.  Almost as quick he rushed forward again and tried to lift up the body.  But directly he raised his shoulders he knew that the man was dead!  Dead!

He lowered him down gently.  He stood over him without fear or any other feeling, almost indifferent, far away, as it were.  And then he made another start and, if he had not kept Mrs. Anthony always in his mind, he would have let out a yell for help.  He staggered to her cabin-door, and, as it was, his call for “Captain Anthony” burst out of him much too loud; but he made a great effort of self-control.  “I am waiting for my orders, sir,” he said outside that door distinctly, in a steady tone.

It was very still in there; still as death.  Then he heard a shuffle of feet and the captain’s voice “All right.  Coming.”  He leaned his back against the bulkhead as you see a drunken man sometimes propped up against a wall, half doubled up.  In that attitude the captain found him, when he came out, pulling the door to after him quickly.  At once Anthony let his eyes run all over the cabin.  Powell, without a word, clutched his forearm, led him round the end of the table and began to justify himself.  “I couldn’t stop him,” he whispered shakily.  “He was too quick for me.  He