Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

Yes, Mr. Powell, whom the chance of his name had thrown upon the floating stage of that tragicomedy would have been perfectly useless for my purpose if the unusual of an obvious kind had not aroused his attention from the first.

We know how he joined that ship so suddenly offered to his anxious desire to make a real start in his profession.  He had come on board breathless with the hurried winding up of his shore affairs, accompanied by two horrible night-birds, escorted by a dock policeman on the make, received by an asthmatic shadow of a ship-keeper, warned not to make a noise in the darkness of the passage because the captain and his wife were already on board.  That in itself was already somewhat unusual.  Captains and their wives do not, as a rule, join a moment sooner than is necessary.  They prefer to spend the last moments with their friends and relations.  A ship in one of London’s older docks with their restrictions as to lights and so on is not the place for a happy evening.  Still, as the tide served at six in the morning, one could understand them coming on board the evening before.

Just then young Powell felt as if anybody ought to be glad enough to be quit of the shore.  We know he was an orphan from a very early age, without brothers or sisters—no near relations of any kind, I believe, except that aunt who had quarrelled with his father.  No affection stood in the way of the quiet satisfaction with which he thought that now all the worries were over, that there was nothing before him but duties, that he knew what he would have to do as soon as the dawn broke and for a long succession of days.  A most soothing certitude.  He enjoyed it in the dark, stretched out in his bunk with his new blankets pulled over him.  Some clock ashore beyond the dock-gates struck two.  And then he heard nothing more, because he went off into a light sleep from which he woke up with a start.  He had not taken his clothes off, it was hardly worth while.  He jumped up and went on deck.

The morning was clear, colourless, grey overhead; the dock like a sheet of darkling glass crowded with upside-down reflections of warehouses, of hulls and masts of silent ships.  Rare figures moved here and there on the distant quays.  A knot of men stood alongside with clothes-bags and wooden chests at their feet.  Others were coming down the lane between tall, blind walls, surrounding a hand-cart loaded with more bags and boxes.  It was the crew of the Ferndale.  They began to come on board.  He scanned their faces as they passed forward filling the roomy deck with the shuffle of their footsteps and the murmur of voices, like the awakening to life of a world about to be launched into space.

Far away down the clear glassy stretch in the middle of the long dock Mr. Powell watched the tugs coming in quietly through the open gates.  A subdued firm voice behind him interrupted this contemplation.  It was Franklin, the thick chief mate, who was addressing him with a watchful appraising stare of his prominent black eyes: “You’d better take a couple of these chaps with you and look out for her aft.  We are going to cast off.”

“Yes, sir,” Powell said with proper alacrity; but for a moment they remained looking at each other fixedly.  Something like a faint smile altered the set of the chief mate’s lips just before he moved off forward with his brisk step.

Mr. Powell, getting up on the poop, touched his cap to Captain Anthony, who was there alone.  He tells me that it was only then that he saw his captain for the first time.  The day before, in the shipping office, what with the bad light and his excitement at this berth obtained as if by a brusque and unscrupulous miracle, did not count.  He had then seemed to him much older and heavier.  He was surprised at the lithe figure, broad of shoulder, narrow at the hips, the fire of the deep-set eyes, the springiness of the walk.  The captain gave him a steady stare, nodded slightly, and went on pacing the poop with an air of not being aware of what was going on, his head rigid, his movements rapid.

Powell stole several glances at him with a curiosity very natural under the circumstances.  He wore a short grey jacket and a grey cap.  In the light of the dawn, growing more limpid rather than brighter, Powell noticed the slightly sunken cheeks under the trimmed beard, the perpendicular fold on the forehead, something hard and set about the mouth.

It was too early yet for the work to have begun in the dock.  The water gleamed placidly, no movement anywhere on the long straight lines of the quays, no one about to be seen except the few dock hands busy alongside the Ferndale, knowing their work, mostly silent or exchanging a few words in low tones as if they, too, had been aware of that lady ‘who mustn’t be disturbed.’  The Ferndale was the only ship to leave that tide.  The others seemed still asleep, without a sound, and only here and there a figure, coming up on the forecastle, leaned on the rail to watch the proceedings idly.  Without trouble and fuss and almost without a sound was the Ferndale leaving the land, as if stealing away.  Even the tugs, now with their engines stopped, were approaching her without a ripple, the burly-looking paddle-boat sheering forward, while the other, a screw, smaller and of slender shape, made for her quarter so gently that she did not divide the smooth water, but seemed to glide on its surface as if on a sheet of plate-glass, a man in her bow, the master at the wheel visible only from the waist upwards above the white screen of the bridge, both of them so still-eyed as to fascinate young Powell into curious self-forgetfulness and immobility.  He was steeped, sunk in the general quietness, remembering the statement ‘she’s a lady that mustn’t be disturbed,’ and repeating to himself idly: ‘No.  She won’t be disturbed.  She won’t be disturbed.’  Then the first loud words of that morning breaking that strange hush of departure with a sharp hail: ‘Look out for that line there,’ made him start.  The line whizzed past his head, one of the sailors aft caught it, and there was an end to the fascination, to the quietness of spirit which had stolen on him at the very moment of departure.  From that moment till two hours afterwards, when the ship was brought up in one of the lower reaches of the Thames off an apparently uninhabited shore, near some sort of inlet where nothing but two anchored barges flying a red flag could be seen, Powell was too busy to think of the lady ‘that mustn’t be disturbed,’ or of his captain—or of anything else unconnected with his immediate duties.  In fact, he had no occasion to go on the poop, or even look that way much; but while the ship was about to anchor, casting his eyes in that direction, he received an absurd impression that his captain (he was up there, of course) was sitting on both sides of the aftermost skylight at once.  He was too occupied to reflect on this curious delusion, this phenomenon of seeing double as though he had had a drop too much.  He only smiled at himself.

As often happens after a grey daybreak the sun had risen in a warm and glorious splendour above the smooth immense gleam of the enlarged estuary.  Wisps of mist floated like trails of luminous dust, and in the dazzling reflections of water and vapour, the shores had the murky semi-transparent darkness of shadows cast mysteriously from below.  Powell, who had sailed out of London all his young seaman’s life, told me that it was then, in a moment of entranced vision an hour or so after sunrise, that the river was revealed to him for all time, like a fair face often seen before, which is suddenly perceived to be the expression of an inner and unsuspected beauty, of that something unique and only its own which rouses a passion of wonder and fidelity and an unappeasable memory of its charm.  The hull of the Ferndale, swung head to the eastward, caught the light, her tall spars and rigging steeped in a bath of red-gold, from the water-line full of glitter to the trucks slight and gleaming against the delicate expanse of the blue.

“Time we had a mouthful to eat,” said a voice at his side.  It was Mr. Franklin, the chief mate, with his head sunk between his shoulders, and melancholy eyes.  “Let the men have their breakfast, bo’sun,” he went on, “and have the fire out in the galley in half an hour at the latest, so that we can call these barges of explosives alongside.  Come along, young man.  I don’t know your name.  Haven’t seen the captain, to speak to, since yesterday afternoon when he rushed off to pick up a second mate somewhere.  How did he get you?”

Young Powell, a little shy notwithstanding the friendly disposition of the other, answered him smilingly, aware somehow that there was something marked in this inquisitiveness, natural, after all—something anxious.  His name was Powell, and he was put in the way of this berth by Mr. Powell, the shipping master.  He blushed.

“Ah, I see.  Well, you have been smart in getting ready.  The ship-keeper, before he went away, told me you joined at one o’clock.  I didn’t sleep on board last night.  Not I.  There was a time when I never cared to leave this ship for more than a couple of hours in the evening, even while in London, but now, since—”

He checked himself with a roll of his prominent eyes towards that youngster, that stranger.  Meantime, he was leading the way across the quarter-deck under the poop into the long passage with the door of the saloon at the far end.  It was shut.  But Mr. Franklin did not go so far.  After passing the pantry he opened suddenly a door on the left of the passage, to Powell’s great surprise.

“Our mess-room,” he said, entering a small cabin painted white, bare, lighted from part of the foremost skylight, and furnished only with a table and two settees with movable backs.  “That surprises you?  Well, it isn’t usual.  And it wasn’t so in this ship either, before.  It’s only since—”

He checked himself again.  “Yes.  Here we shall feed, you and I, facing each other for the next twelve months or more—God knows how much more!  The bo’sun keeps the deck at meal-times in fine weather.”

He talked not exactly wheezing, but like a man whose breath is somewhat short, and the spirit