Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

All this was to him like yesterday, a long yesterday, a yesterday gone over innumerable times, analysed, meditated upon for years.  It had a vividness and force for that old man of which his daughter who had not been shut out of the world could have no idea.  She was to him the only living figure out of that past, and it was perhaps in perfect good faith that he added, coldly, inexpressive and thin-lipped: “I lived only for you, I may say.  I suppose you understand that.  There were only you and me.”

Moved by this declaration, wondering that it did not warm her heart more, she murmured a few endearing words while the uppermost thought in her mind was that she must tell him now of the situation.  She had expected to be questioned anxiously about herself—and while she desired it she shrank from the answers she would have to make.  But her father seemed strangely, unnaturally incurious.  It looked as if there would be no questions.  Still this was an opening.  This seemed to be the time for her to begin.  And she began.  She began by saying that she had always felt like that.  There were two of them, to live for each other.  And if he only knew what she had gone through!

Ensconced in his corner, with his arms folded, he stared out of the cab window at the street.  How little he was changed after all.  It was the unmovable expression, the faded stare she used to see on the esplanade whenever walking by his side hand in hand she raised her eyes to his face—while she chattered, chattered.  It was the same stiff, silent figure which at a word from her would turn rigidly into a shop and buy her anything it occurred to her that she would like to have.  Flora de Barral’s voice faltered.  He bent on her that well-remembered glance in which she had never read anything as a child, except the consciousness of her existence.  And that was enough for a child who had never known demonstrative affection.  But she had lived a life so starved of all feeling that this was no longer enough for her.  What was the good of telling him the story of all these miseries now past and gone, of all those bewildering difficulties and humiliations?  What she must tell him was difficult enough to say.  She approached it by remarking cheerfully:

“You haven’t even asked me where I am taking you.”  He started like a somnambulist awakened suddenly, and there was now some meaning in his stare; a sort of alarmed speculation.  He opened his mouth slowly.  Flora struck in with forced gaiety.  “You would never, guess.”

He waited, still more startled and suspicious.  “Guess!  Why don’t you tell me?”

He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward towards her.  She got hold of one of his hands.  “You must know first . . . ”  She paused, made an effort: “I am married, papa.”

For a moment they kept perfectly still in that cab rolling on at a steady jog-trot through a narrow city street full of bustle.  Whatever she expected she did not expect to feel his hand snatched away from her grasp as if from a burn or a contamination.  De Barral fresh from the stagnant torment of the prison (where nothing happens) had not expected that sort of news.  It seemed to stick in his throat.  In strangled low tones he cried out, “You—married?  You, Flora!  When?  Married!  What for?  Who to?  Married!”

His eyes which were blue like hers, only faded, without depth, seemed to start out of their orbits.  He did really look as if he were choking.  He even put his hand to his collar . . . ”

* * * * *

“You know,” continued Marlow out of the shadow of the bookcase and nearly invisible in the depths of the arm-chair, “the only time I saw him he had given me the impression of absolute rigidity, as though he had swallowed a poker.  But it seems that he could collapse.  I can hardly picture this to myself.  I understand that he did collapse to a certain extent in his corner of the cab.  The unexpected had crumpled him up.  She regarded him perplexed, pitying, a little disillusioned, and nodded at him gravely: Yes.  Married.  What she did not like was to see him smile in a manner far from encouraging to the devotion of a daughter.  There was something unintentionally savage in it.  Old de Barral could not quite command his muscles, as yet.  But he had recovered command of his gentle voice.

“You were just saying that in this wide world there we were, only you and I, to stick to each other.”

She was dimly aware of the scathing intention lurking in these soft low tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly.  She defended herself.  Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of him.  Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much sinister emphasis as he was capable of.

“But, papa,” she cried, “I haven’t been shut up like you.”  She didn’t mind speaking of it because he was innocent.  He hadn’t been understood.  It was a misfortune of the most cruel kind but no more disgraceful than an illness, a maiming accident or some other visitation of blind fate.  “I wish I had been too.  But I was alone out in the world, the horrid world, that very world which had used you so badly.”

“And you couldn’t go about in it without finding somebody to fall in love with?” he said.  A jealous rage affected his brain like the fumes of wine, rising from some secret depths of his being so long deprived of all emotions.  The hollows at the corners of his lips became more pronounced in the puffy roundness of his cheeks.  Images, visions, obsess with particular force, men withdrawn from the sights and sounds of active life.  “And I did nothing but think of you!” he exclaimed under his breath, contemptuously.  “Think of you!  You haunted me, I tell you.”

Flora said to herself that there was a being who loved her.  “Then we have been haunting each other,” she declared with a pang of remorse.  For indeed he had haunted her nearly out of the world, into a final and irremediable desertion.  “Some day I shall tell you . . . No.  I don’t think I can ever tell you.  There was a time when I was mad.  But what’s the good?  It’s all over now.  We shall forget all this.  There shall be nothing to remind us.”

De Barral moved his shoulders.

“I should think you were mad to tie yourself to . . . How long is it since you are married?”

She answered “Not long” that being the only answer she dared to make.  Everything was so different from what she imagined it would be.  He wanted to know why she had said nothing of it in any of her letters; in her last letter.  She said:

“It was after.”

“So recently!” he wondered.  “Couldn’t you wait at least till I came out?  You could have told me; asked me; consulted me!  Let me see—”

She shook her head negatively.  And he was appalled.  He thought to himself: Who can he be?  Some miserable, silly youth without a penny.  Or perhaps some scoundrel?  Without making any expressive movement he wrung his loosely-clasped hands till the joints cracked.  He looked at her.  She was pretty.  Some low scoundrel who will cast her off.  Some plausible vagabond . . . “You couldn’t wait—eh?”

Again she made a slight negative sign.

“Why not?  What was the hurry?”  She cast down her eyes.  “It had to be.  Yes.  It was sudden, but it had to be.”

He leaned towards her, his mouth open, his eyes wild with virtuous anger, but meeting the absolute candour of her raised glance threw himself back into his corner again.

“So tremendously in love with each other—was that it?  Couldn’t let a father have his daughter all to himself even for a day after—after such a separation.  And you know I never had anyone, I had no friends.  What did I want with those people one meets in the City.  The best of them are ready to cut your throat.  Yes!  Business men, gentlemen, any sort of men and women—out of spite, or to get something.  Oh yes, they can talk fair enough if they think there’s something to be got out of you . . . ”  His voice was a mere breath yet every word came to Flora as distinctly as if charged with all the moving power of passion . . . “My girl, I looked at them making up to me and I would say to myself: What do I care for all that!  I am a business man.  I am the great Mr. de Barral (yes, yes, some of them twisted their mouths at it, but I was the great Mr. de Barral) and I have my little girl.  I wanted nobody and I have never had anybody.”

A true emotion had unsealed his lips but the words that came out of them were no louder than the murmur of a light wind.  It died away.

“That’s just it,” said Flora de Barral under her breath.  Without removing his eyes from her he took off his hat.  It was a tall hat.  The hat of the trial.  The hat of the thumb-nail sketches in the illustrated papers.  One comes out in the same clothes, but seclusion counts!  It is well known that lurid visions haunt secluded men, monks, hermits—then why not prisoners?  De Barral the convict took off the silk hat of the financier de Barral and deposited it on the front seat of the cab.  Then he blew out his cheeks.  He was red in the face.

“And then what happens?” he began again in his contained voice.  “Here I am, overthrown, broken by envy, malice and all uncharitableness.  I come out—and what do I find?  I find that my girl Flora has gone and married some man or other, perhaps a fool, how do I know; or perhaps—anyway not good enough.”

“Stop, papa.”

“A silly love affair as likely as not,” he continued monotonously, his thin lips writhing between the ill-omened sunk corners.  “And a very suspicious thing it is too, on the part of a loving daughter.”

She tried to interrupt him but he went on till she actually clapped her hand on his mouth.  He rolled his eyes a bit but when she took her hand away he remained silent.

“Wait.  I must tell you . . .  And first of all, papa, understand this, for everything’s in that: he is the most generous man in the world.  He is . . . ”

De Barral very still in his corner uttered with an effort “You are in love with him.”

“Papa!  He came to me.  I was thinking of you.  I had no eyes for anybody.  I could no longer bear to think of you.  It was then that he came.  Only then.  At that time when—when I was going to give up.”

She gazed into his faded blue eyes as if yearning to be understood, to be given encouragement, peace—a word of sympathy.  He declared without animation “I would like to break his neck.”

She had the mental exclamation of the overburdened.

“Oh my God!” and watched him with frightened eyes.  But he did not appear insane or in any other way formidable.  This comforted her.  The silence lasted for some little time.  Then suddenly he asked:

“What’s your name then?”

For a moment in the profound trouble of the task before her she did not understand what the question meant.  Then, her face faintly flushing, she whispered: “Anthony.”

Her father, a red spot on each cheek, leaned his head back wearily in the corner of the cab.

“Anthony.  What is he?  Where did