Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

Well I don’t know.  If it had come to that she would have been most likely fished out, what with her natural want of luck and the good many people on the quay and on board.  And just where the Ferndale was moored there hung on a wall (I know the berth) a coil of line, a pole, and a life-buoy kept there on purpose to save people who tumble into the dock.  It’s not so easy to get away from life’s betrayals as she thought.  However it did not come to that.  He followed her with his quick gliding walk.  Mr. Smith!  The liberated convict de Barral passed off the solid earth for the last time, vanished for ever, and there was Mr. Smith added to that world of waters which harbours so many queer fishes.  An old gentleman in a silk hat, darting wary glances.  He followed, because mere existence has its claims which are obeyed mechanically.  I have no doubt he presented a respectable figure.  Father-in-law.  Nothing more respectable.  But he carried in his heart the confused pain of dismay and affection, of involuntary repulsion and pity.  Very much like his daughter.  Only in addition he felt a furious jealousy of the man he was going to see.

A residue of egoism remains in every affection—even paternal.  And this man in the seclusion of his prison had thought himself into such a sense of ownership of that single human being he had to think about, as may well be inconceivable to us who have not had to serve a long (and wickedly unjust) sentence of penal servitude.  She was positively the only thing, the one point where his thoughts found a resting-place, for years.  She was the only outlet for his imagination.  He had not much of that faculty to be sure, but there was in it the force of concentration.  He felt outraged, and perhaps it was an absurdity on his part, but I venture to suggest rather in degree than in kind.  I have a notion that no usual, normal father is pleased at parting with his daughter.  No.  Not even when he rationally appreciates “Jane being taken off his hands” or perhaps is able to exult at an excellent match.  At bottom, quite deep down, down in the dark (in some cases only by digging), there is to be found a certain repugnance . . .  With mothers of course it is different.  Women are more loyal, not to each other, but to their common femininity which they behold triumphant with a secret and proud satisfaction.

The circumstances of that match added to Mr. Smith’s indignation.  And if he followed his daughter into that ship’s cabin it was as if into a house of disgrace and only because he was still bewildered by the suddenness of the thing.  His will, so long lying fallow, was overborne by her determination and by a vague fear of that regained liberty.

You will be glad to hear that Anthony, though he did shirk the welcome on the quay, behaved admirably, with the simplicity of a man who has no small meannesses and makes no mean reservations.  His eyes did not flinch and his tongue did not falter.  He was, I have it on the best authority, admirable in his earnestness, in his sincerity and also in his restraint.  He was perfect.  Nevertheless the vital force of his unknown individuality addressing him so familiarly was enough to fluster Mr. Smith.  Flora saw her father trembling in all his exiguous length, though he held himself stiffer than ever if that was possible.  He muttered a little and at last managed to utter, not loud of course but very distinctly: “I am here under protest,” the corners of his mouth sunk disparagingly, his eyes stony.  “I am here under protest.  I have been locked up by a conspiracy.  I—”

He raised his hands to his forehead—his silk hat was on the table rim upwards; he had put it there with a despairing gesture as he came in—he raised his hands to his forehead.  “It seems to me unfair.  I—”  He broke off again.  Anthony looked at Flora who stood by the side of her father.

“Well, sir, you will soon get used to me.  Surely you and she must have had enough of shore-people and their confounded half-and-half ways to last you both for a life-time.  A particularly merciful lot they are too.  You ask Flora.  I am alluding to my own sister, her best friend, and not a bad woman either as they go.”

The captain of the Ferndale checked himself.  “Lucky thing I was there to step in.  I want you to make yourself at home, and before long—”

The faded stare of the Great de Barral silenced Anthony by its inexpressive fixity.  He signalled with his eyes to Flora towards the door of the state-room fitted specially to receive Mr. Smith, the free man.  She seized the free man’s hat off the table and took him caressingly under the arm.  “Yes!  This is home, come and see your room, papa!”

Anthony himself threw open the door and Flora took care to shut it carefully behind herself and her father.  “See,” she began but desisted because it was clear that he would look at none of the contrivances for his comfort.  She herself had hardly seen them before.  He was looking only at the new carpet and she waited till he should raise his eyes.

He didn’t do that but spoke in his usual voice.  “So this is your husband, that . . . And I locked up!”

“Papa, what’s the good of harping on that,” she remonstrated no louder.  “He is kind.”

“And you went and . . . married him so that he should be kind to me.  Is that it?  How did you know that I wanted anybody to be kind to me?”

“How strange you are!” she said thoughtfully.

“It’s hard for a man who has gone through what I have gone through to feel like other people.  Has that occurred to you?  . . . ”  He looked up at last . . .  “Mrs. Anthony, I can’t bear the sight of the fellow.”  She met his eyes without flinching and he added, “You want to go to him now.”  His mild automatic manner seemed the effect of tremendous self-restraint—and yet she remembered him always like that.  She felt cold all over.

“Why, of course, I must go to him,” she said with a slight start.

He gnashed his teeth at her and she went out.

Anthony had not moved from the spot.  One of his hands was resting on the table.  She went up to him, stopped, then deliberately moved still closer.  “Thank you, Roderick.”

“You needn’t thank me,” he murmured.  “It’s I who . . . ”

“No, perhaps I needn’t.  You do what you like.  But you are doing it well.”

He sighed then hardly above a whisper because they were near the state-room door, “Upset, eh?”

She made no sign, no sound of any kind.  The thorough falseness of the position weighed on them both.  But he was the braver of the two.  “I dare say.  At first.  Did you think of telling him you were happy?”

“He never asked me,” she smiled faintly at him.  She was disappointed by his quietness.  “I did not say more than I was absolutely obliged to say—of myself.”  She was beginning to be irritated with this man a little.  “I told him I had been very lucky,” she said suddenly despondent, missing Anthony’s masterful manner, that something arbitrary and tender which, after the first scare, she had accustomed herself to look forward to with pleasurable apprehension.  He was contemplating her rather blankly.  She had not taken off her outdoor things, hat, gloves.  She was like a caller.  And she had a movement suggesting the end of a not very satisfactory business call.  “Perhaps it would be just as well if we went ashore.  Time yet.”

He gave her a glimpse of his unconstrained self in the low vehement “You dare!” which sprang to his lips and out of them with a most menacing inflexion.

“You dare . . . What’s the matter now?”

These last words were shot out not at her but at some target behind her back.  Looking over her shoulder she saw the bald head with black bunches of hair of the congested and devoted Franklin (he had his cap in his hand) gazing sentimentally from the saloon doorway with his lobster eyes.  He was heard from the distance in a tone of injured innocence reporting that the berthing master was alongside and that he wanted to move the ship into the basin before the crew came on board.

His captain growled “Well, let him,” and waved away the ulcerated and pathetic soul behind these prominent eyes which lingered on the offensive woman while the mate backed out slowly.  Anthony turned to Flora.

“You could not have meant it.  You are as straight as they make them.”

“I am trying to be.”

“Then don’t joke in that way.  Think of what would become of—me.”

“Oh yes.  I forgot.  No, I didn’t mean it.  It wasn’t a joke.  It was forgetfulness.  You wouldn’t have been wronged.  I couldn’t have gone.  I—I am too tired.”

He saw she was swaying where she stood and restrained himself violently from taking her into his arms, his frame trembling with fear as though he had been tempted to an act of unparalleled treachery.  He stepped aside and lowering his eyes pointed to the door of the stern-cabin.  It was only after she passed by him that he looked up and thus he did not see the angry glance she gave him before she moved on.  He looked after her.  She tottered slightly just before reaching the door and flung it to behind her nervously.

Anthony—he had felt this crash as if the door had been slammed inside his very breast—stood for a moment without moving and then shouted for Mrs. Brown.  This was the steward’s wife, his lucky inspiration to make Flora comfortable.  “Mrs. Brown!  Mrs. Brown!”  At last she appeared from somewhere.  “Mrs. Anthony has come on board.  Just gone into the cabin.  Hadn’t you better see if you can be of any assistance?”

“Yes, sir.”

And again he was alone with the situation he had created in the hardihood and inexperience of his heart.  He thought he had better go on deck.  In fact he ought to have been there before.  At any rate it would be the usual thing for him to be on deck.  But a sound of muttering and of faint thuds somewhere near by arrested his attention.  They proceeded from Mr. Smith’s room, he perceived.  It was very extraordinary.  “He’s talking to himself,” he thought.  “He seems to be thumping the bulkhead with his fists—or his head.”

Anthony’s eyes grew big with wonder while he listened to these noises.  He became so attentive that he did not notice Mrs. Brown till she actually stopped before him for a moment to say:

“Mrs. Anthony doesn’t want any assistance, sir.”

* * * * *

This was you understand the voyage before Mr. Powell—young Powell then—joined the Ferndale; chance having arranged that he should get his start in life in that particular ship of all the ships then in the port of London.  The most unrestful ship that ever sailed out of any port on earth.  I am not alluding to her sea-going qualities.  Mr. Powell tells me she was as steady as a church.  I mean unrestful in the sense, for instance in which this planet of ours is unrestful—a matter of an uneasy atmosphere disturbed by passions, jealousies, loves, hates and the troubles of transcendental good intentions, which, though ethically valuable, I have no doubt cause often more unhappiness than the plots of the most evil tendency.  For those who refuse to believe in chance he, I mean Mr.