Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week.  I won’t say in American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de Barral concerns.  There never had been any bottom to it.  It was like the cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its deposits.  That they were gone was clear; and the bankruptcy proceedings which followed were like a sinister farce, bursts of laughter in a setting of mute anguish—that of the depositors; hundreds of thousands of them.  The laughter was irresistible; the accompaniment of the bankrupt’s public examination.

I don’t know if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from both—and the three alternatives are possible—but it was discovered that this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors.  He had been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even lunatics.  Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of Patagonia, quarries in Labrador—such like speculations.  Fisheries to feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them.  A principality to be bought in Madagascar was another.  As the grotesque details of these incredible transactions came out one by one ripples of laughter ran over the closely packed court—each one a little louder than the other.  The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative effect of absurdity.  The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching anxiously every word, laughed like one man.  They laughed hysterically—the poor wretches—on the verge of tears.

There was only one person who remained unmoved.  It was de Barral himself.  He preserved his serene, gentle expression, I am told (for I have not witnessed those scenes myself), and looked around at the people with an air of placid sufficiency which was the first hint to the world of the man’s overweening, unmeasurable conceit, hidden hitherto under a diffident manner.  It could be seen too in his dogged assertion that if he had been given enough time and a lot more money everything would have come right.  And there were some people (yes, amongst his very victims) who more than half believed him, even after the criminal prosecution which soon followed.  When placed in the dock he lost his steadiness as if some sustaining illusion had gone to pieces within him suddenly.  He ceased to be himself in manner completely, and even in disposition, in so far that his faded neutral eyes matching his discoloured hair so well, were discovered then to be capable of expressing a sort of underhand hate.  He was at first defiant, then insolent, then broke down and burst into tears; but it might have been from rage.  Then he calmed down, returned to his soft manner of speech and to that unassuming quiet bearing which had been usual with him even in his greatest days.  But it seemed as though in this moment of change he had at last perceived what a power he had been; for he remarked to one of the prosecuting counsel who had assumed a lofty moral tone in questioning him, that—yes, he had gambled—he liked cards.  But that only a year ago a host of smart people would have been only too pleased to take a hand at cards with him.  Yes—he went on—some of the very people who were there accommodated with seats on the bench; and turning upon the counsel “You yourself as well,” he cried.  He could have had half the town at his rooms to fawn upon him if he had cared for that sort of thing.  “Why, now I think of it, it took me most of my time to keep people, just of your sort, off me,” he ended with a good humoured—quite unobtrusive, contempt, as though the fact had dawned upon him for the first time.

This was the moment, the only moment, when he had perhaps all the audience in Court with him, in a hush of dreary silence.  And then the dreary proceedings were resumed.  For all the outside excitement it was the most dreary of all celebrated trials.  The bankruptcy proceedings had exhausted all the laughter there was in it.  Only the fact of wide-spread ruin remained, and the resentment of a mass of people for having been fooled by means too simple to save their self-respect from a deep wound which the cleverness of a consummate scoundrel would not have inflicted.  A shamefaced amazement attended these proceedings in which de Barral was not being exposed alone.  For himself his only cry was: Time! Time!  Time would have set everything right.  In time some of these speculations of his were certain to have succeeded.  He repeated this defence, this excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome iteration.  Everything he had done or left undone had been to gain time.  He had hypnotized himself with the word.  Sometimes, I am told, his appearance was ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing down the vista of future ages.  Time—and of course, more money.  “Ah!  If only you had left me alone for a couple of years more,” he cried once in accents of passionate belief.  “The money was coming in all right.”  The deposits you understand—the savings of Thrift.  Oh yes they had been coming in to the very last moment.  And he regretted them.  He had arrived to regard them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion.  And yet it was a perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel who was beginning a question with the words “You have had all these immense sums . . . ” with the indignant retort “What have I had out of them?”

“It was perfectly true.  He had had nothing out of them—nothing of the prestigious or the desirable things of the earth, craved for by predatory natures.  He had gratified no tastes, had known no luxury; he had built no gorgeous palaces, had formed no splendid galleries out of these “immense sums.”  He had not even a home.  He had gone into these rooms in an hotel and had stuck there for years, giving no doubt perfect satisfaction to the management.  They had twice raised his rent to show I suppose their high sense of his distinguished patronage.  He had bought for himself out of all the wealth streaming through his fingers neither adulation nor love, neither splendour nor comfort.  There was something perfect in his consistent mediocrity.  His very vanity seemed to miss the gratification of even the mere show of power.  In the days when he was most fully in the public eye the invincible obscurity of his origins clung to him like a shadowy garment.  He had handled millions without ever enjoying anything of what is counted as precious in the community of men, because he had neither the brutality of temperament nor the fineness of mind to make him desire them with the will power of a masterful adventurer . . . ”

“You seem to have studied the man,” I observed.

“Studied,” repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  “No!  Not studied.  I had no opportunities.  You know that I saw him only on that one occasion I told you of.  But it may be that a glimpse and no more is the proper way of seeing an individuality; and de Barral was that, in virtue of his very deficiencies for they made of him something quite unlike one’s preconceived ideas.  There were also very few materials accessible to a man like me to form a judgment from.  But in such a case I verify believe that a little is as good as a feast—perhaps better.  If one has a taste for that kind of thing the merest starting-point becomes a coign of vantage, and then by a series of logically deducted verisimilitudes one arrives at truth—or very near the truth—as near as any circumstantial evidence can do.  I have not studied de Barral but that is how I understand him so far as he could be understood through the din of the crash; the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the newspaper contents bills, “The Thrift Frauds.  Cross-examination of the accused.  Extra special”—blazing fiercely; the charitable appeals for the victims, the grave tones of the dailies rumbling with compassion as if they were the national bowels.  All this lasted a whole week of industrious sittings.  A pressman whom I knew told me “He’s an idiot.”  Which was possible.  Before that I overheard once somebody declaring that he had a criminal type of face; which I knew was untrue.  The sentence was pronounced by artificial light in a stifling poisonous atmosphere.  Something edifying was said by the judge weightily, about the retribution overtaking the perpetrator of “the most heartless frauds on an unprecedented scale.”  I don’t understand these things much, but it appears that he had juggled with accounts, cooked balance sheets, had gathered in deposits months after he ought to have known himself to be hopelessly insolvent, and done enough of other things, highly reprehensible in the eyes of the law, to earn for himself seven years’ penal servitude.  The sentence making its way outside met with a good reception.  A small mob composed mainly of people who themselves did not look particularly clever and scrupulous, leavened by a slight sprinkling of genuine pickpockets amused itself by cheering in the most penetrating, abominable cold drizzle that I remember.  I happened to be passing there on my way from the East End where I had spent my day about the Docks with an old chum who was looking after the fitting out of a new ship.  I am always eager, when allowed, to call on a new ship.  They interest me like charming young persons.

I got mixed up in that crowd seething with an animosity as senseless as things of the street always are, and it was while I was laboriously making my way out of it that the pressman of whom I spoke was jostled against me.  He did me the justice to be surprised.  “What?  You here!  The last person in the world . . . If I had known I could have got you inside.  Plenty of room.  Interest been over for the last three days.  Got seven years.  Well, I am glad.”

“Why are you glad?  Because he’s got seven years?” I asked, greatly incommoded by the pressure of a hulking fellow who was remarking to some of his equally oppressive friends that the “beggar ought to have been poleaxed.”  I don’t know whether he had ever confided his savings to de Barral but if so, judging from his appearance, they must have been the proceeds of some successful burglary.  The pressman by my side said ‘No,’ to my question.  He was glad because it was all over.  He had suffered greatly from the heat and the bad air of the court.  The clammy, raw, chill of the streets seemed to affect his liver instantly.  He became contemptuous and irritable and plied his elbows viciously making way for himself and me.

A dull affair this.  All such cases were dull.  No really dramatic moments.  The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for revelations of that kind.  Dull dog that de Barral—he grumbled.  He could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive snigger that, after the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough to make a sort of protest.  ‘You haven’t given me