Chance — Part 11

The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability to interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in itself) makes to our understanding and emotions.

For it is never more than that.

Our experience never gets into our blood and bones.

It always remains outside of us.

That's why we look with wonder at the past.

And this persists even when from practice and through growing callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine--which our life is--nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more.

Not at the time, I mean.

If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such exclamation: 'Well!

Well!

I'll be hanged if I ever, .

.

.

' it is probably because this very thing that there should be a past to look back upon, other people's, is very astounding in itself when one has the time, a fleeting and immense instant to think of it .

.

.

" I was on the point of interrupting Marlow when he stopped of himself, his eyes fixed on vacancy, or--perhaps--(I wouldn't be too hard on him) on a vision.

He has the habit, or, say, the fault, of defective mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very fulness of the tick.

If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that perversity, you know how vexing it is--such a stoppage.

I was vexed with Marlow.

He was smiling faintly while I waited.

He even laughed a little.

And then I said acidly: "Am I to understand that you have ferreted out something comic in the history of Flora de Barral?"

"Comic!"

he exclaimed.

"No!

What makes you say?

.

.

.

Oh, I laughed--did I?

But don't you know that people laugh at absurdities that are very far from being comic?

Didn't you read the latest books about laughter written by philosophers, psychologists?

There is a lot of them .

.

" "I dare say there has been a lot of nonsense written about laughter--and tears, too, for that matter," I said impatiently.

"They say," pursued the unabashed Marlow, "that we laugh from a sense of superiority.

Therefore, observe, simplicity, honesty, warmth of feeling, delicacy of heart and of conduct, self-confidence, magnanimity are laughed at, because the presence of these traits in a man's character often puts him into difficult, cruel or absurd situations, and makes us, the majority who are fairly free as a rule from these peculiarities, feel pleasantly superior."

"Speak for yourself," I said.

"But have you discovered all these fine things in the story; or has Mr. Powell discovered them to you in his artless talk?

Have you two been having good healthy laughs together?

Come!

Are your sides aching yet, Marlow?"

Marlow took no offence at my banter.

He was quite serious.

"I should not like to say off-hand how much of that there was," he pursued with amusing caution.

"But there was a situation, tense enough for the signs of it to give many surprises to Mr. Powell--neither of them shocking in itself, but with a cumulative effect which made the whole unforgettable in the detail of its progress.

And the first surprise came very soon, when the explosives (to which he owed his sudden chance of engagement)--dynamite in cases and blasting powder in barrels--taken on board, main hatch battened for sea, cook restored to his functions in the galley, anchor fished and the tug ahead, rounding the South Foreland, and with the sun sinking clear and red down the purple vista of the channel, he went on the poop, on duty, it is true, but with time to take the first freer breath in the busy day of departure.

The pilot was still on board, who gave him first a silent glance, and then passed an insignificant remark before resuming his lounging to and fro between the steering wheel and the binnacle.

Powell took his station modestly at the break of the poop.

He had noticed across the skylight a head in a grey cap.

But when, after a time, he crossed over to the other side of the deck he discovered that it was not the captain's head at all.

He became aware of grey hairs curling over the nape of the neck.

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 naively 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.

At last he fastened his eyes on the compass card, took refuge, in spirit, inside the binnacle.

He felt chilled more than he should have been by the chilly dusk falling on the muddy green sea of the soundings from a smoothly clouded sky.

A fitful wind swept the cheerless waste, and the ship, hauled up so close as to check her way, seemed to progress by languid fits and starts against the short seas which swept along her sides with a snarling sound.

Young Powell thought that this was the dreariest evening aspect of the sea he had ever seen.

He was glad when the other occupants of the poop left it at the sound of the bell.

The captain first, with a sudden swerve in his walk towards the companion, and not even looking once towards his wife and his wife's father.

Those two got up and moved towards the companion, the old gent very erect, his thin locks stirring gently about the nape of his neck, and carrying the rugs over his arm.

The girl who was Mrs. Anthony went down first.

The murky twilight had settled in deep shadow on her face.

She looked at Mr. Powell in passing.

He thought that she was very pale.

Cold perhaps.

The old gent stopped a moment, thin and stiff, before the young man, and in a voice which was low but distinct enough, and without any particular accent--not even of inquiry--he said: "You are the new second officer, I believe."

Mr. Powell answered in the affirmative, wondering if this were a friendly overture.

He had noticed that Mr. Smith's eyes had a sort of inward look as though he had disliked or disdained his surroundings.

The captain's wife had disappeared then down the companion stairs.

Mr. Smith said 'Ah!'

and waited a little longer to put another question in his incurious voice.

"And did you know the man who was here before you?"

"No," said young Powell, "I didn't know anybody belonging to this ship before I joined."

"He was much older than you.

Twice your age.

Perhaps more.

His hair was iron grey.

Yes.

Certainly more."

The low, repressed voice paused, but the old man did not move away.

He added: "Isn't it unusual?"

Mr. Powell was surprised not only by being engaged in conversation, but also by its character.

It might have been the suggestion of the word uttered by this old man, but it was distinctly at that moment that he became aware of something unusual not only in this encounter but generally around him, about everybody, in the atmosphere.

The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick glance he threw to windward where the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring limit to the eye.

In the expiring, diffused twilight, and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space made visible--almost palpable.

Young Powell felt it.

He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable, the mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening universe.

It took him a moment or so to seize the drift of the question.

He repeated slowly: 'Unusual .

.

.

Oh, you mean for an elderly man to be the second of a ship.

I don't know.

There are a good many of us who don't get on.

He didn't get on, I suppose.'

The other, his head bowed a little, had the air of listening with acute attention.

"And now he has been taken to the hospital," he said.

"I believe so.

Yes.

I remember Captain Anthony saying so in the shipping office."

"Possibly about to die," went on the old man, in his careful deliberate tone.

"And perhaps glad enough to die."

Mr. Powell was young enough to be startled at the suggestion, which sounded confidential and blood-curdling in the dusk.

He said sharply that it was not very likely, as if defending the absent victim of the accident from an unkind aspersion.

He felt, in fact, indignant.

The other emitted a short stifled laugh of a conciliatory nature.

The second bell rang under the poop.

He made a movement at the sound, but lingered.

"What I said was not meant seriously," he murmured, with that strange air of fearing to be overheard.

"Not in this case.

I know the man."

The occasion, or rather the want of occasion, for this conversation, had sharpened the perceptions of the unsophisticated second officer of the _Ferndale_.

He was alive to the slightest shade of tone, and felt as if this "I know the man" should have been followed by a "he was no friend of mine."

But after the shortest possible break the old gentleman continued to murmur distinctly and evenly: "Whereas you have never seen him.

Nevertheless, when you have gone through as many years as I have, you will understand how an event putting an end to one's existence may not be altogether unwelcome.

Of course there are stupid accidents.

And even then one needn't be very angry.

What is it to be deprived of life?

It's soon done.

But what would you think of the feelings of a man who should have had his life stolen from him?

Cheated out of it, I say!"

He ceased abruptly, and remained still long enough for the astonished Powell to stammer out an indistinct: "What do you mean?

I don't understand."

Then, with a low 'Good-night' glided a few steps, and sank through the shadow of the companion into the lamplight below which did not reach higher than the turn of the staircase.

The strange words, the cautious tone, the whole person left a strong uneasiness in the mind of Mr. Powell.

He started walking the poop in great mental confusion.

He felt all adrift.

This was funny talk and no mistake.

And this cautious low tone as though he were watched by someone was more than funny.

The young second officer hesitated to break the established rule of every ship's discipline; but at last could not resist the temptation of getting hold of some other human being, and spoke to the man at the wheel.

"Did you hear what this gentleman was saying to me?"

"No, sir," answered the sailor quietly.

Then, encouraged by this evidence of laxity in his officer, made bold to add, "A queer fish, sir."

This was tentative, and Mr. Powell, busy with his own view, not saying anything, he ventured further.

"They are more like passengers.

One sees some queer passengers."

"Who are like passengers?"

asked Powell gruffly.

"Why, these two, sir."

CHAPTER THREE--DEVOTED SERVANTS--AND THE LIGHT OF A FLARE

Young Powell thought to himself: "The men, too, are noticing it."

Indeed, the captain's behaviour to his wife and to his wife's father was noticeable enough.

It was as if they had been a pair of not very congenial passengers.

But perhaps it was not always like that.

The captain might have been put out by something.

When the aggrieved Franklin came on deck Mr. Powell made a remark to that effect.

For his curiosity was aroused.

The mate grumbled "Seems to you?

.

.

.

Putout?

.

.

.

eh?"

He buttoned his thick jacket up to the throat, and only then added a gloomy "Aye, likely enough," which discouraged further conversation.

But no encouragement would have induced the newly-joined second mate to enter the way of confidences.

His was an instinctive prudence.

Powell did not know why it was he had resolved to keep his own counsel as to his colloquy with Mr. Smith.

But his curiosity did not slumber.

Some time afterwards, again at the relief of watches, in the course of a little talk, he mentioned Mrs. Anthony's father quite casually, and tried to find out from the mate who he was.

"It would take a clever man to find that out, as things are on board now," Mr. Franklin said, unexpectedly communicative.

"The first I saw of him was when she brought him alongside in a four-wheeler one morning about half-past eleven.

The captain had come on board early, and was down in the cabin that had been fitted out for him.

Did I tell you that if you want the captain for anything you must stamp on the port side of the deck?

That's so.

This ship is not only unlike what she used to be, but she is like no other ship, anyhow.

Did you ever hear of the captain's room being on the port side?

Both of them stern cabins have been fitted up afresh like a blessed palace.

A gang of people from some tip-top West-End house were fussing here on board with hangings and furniture for a fortnight, as if the Queen were coming with us.

Of course the starboard cabin is the bedroom one, but the poor captain hangs out to port on a couch, so that in case we want him on deck at night, Mrs. Anthony should not be startled.

Nervous!

Phoo!

A woman who marries a sailor and makes up her mind to come to sea should have no blamed jumpiness about her, I say.

But never mind.

Directly the old cab pointed round the corner of the warehouse I called out to the captain that his lady was coming aboard.

He answered me, but as I didn't see him coming, I went down the gangway myself to help her alight.

She jumps out excitedly without touching my arm, or as much as saying "thank you" or "good morning" or anything, turns back to the cab, and then that old joker comes out slowly.

I hadn't noticed him inside.

I hadn't expected to see anybody.

It gave me a start.

She says: "My father--Mr. Franklin."

He was staring at me like an owl.

"How do you do, sir?"

says I.

Both of them looked funny.

It was as if something had happened to them on the way.