Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

“Oh!  The Ferndale.  A Liverpool ship.  Composite built.”

“Ferndale,” repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  “Ferndale.”

“Know her?”

“Our friend,” I said, “knows something of every ship.  He seems to have gone about the seas prying into things considerably.”

Marlow smiled.

“I’ve seen her, at least once.”

“The finest sea-boat ever launched,” declared Mr. Powell sturdily.  “Without exception.”

“She looked a stout, comfortable ship,” assented Marlow.  “Uncommonly comfortable.  Not very fast tho’.”

“She was fast enough for any reasonable man—when I was in her,” growled Mr. Powell with his back to us.

“Any ship is that—for a reasonable man,” generalized Marlow in a conciliatory tone.  “A sailor isn’t a globe-trotter.”

“No,” muttered Mr. Powell.

“Time’s nothing to him,” advanced Marlow.

“I don’t suppose it’s much,” said Mr. Powell.  “All the same a quick passage is a feather in a man’s cap.”

“True.  But that ornament is for the use of the master only.  And by the by what was his name?”

“The master of the Ferndale?  Anthony.  Captain Anthony.”

“Just so.  Quite right,” approved Marlow thoughtfully.  Our new acquaintance looked over his shoulder.

“What do you mean?  Why is it more right than if it had been Brown?”

“He has known him probably,” I explained.  “Marlow here appears to know something of every soul that ever went afloat in a sailor’s body.”

Mr. Powell seemed wonderfully amenable to verbal suggestions for looking again out of the window, he muttered:

“He was a good soul.”

This clearly referred to Captain Anthony of the Ferndale.  Marlow addressed his protest to me.

“I did not know him.  I really didn’t.  He was a good soul.  That’s nothing very much out of the way—is it?  And I didn’t even know that much of him.  All I knew of him was an accident called Fyne.

At this Mr. Powell who evidently could be rebellious too turned his back squarely on the window.

“What on earth do you mean?” he asked.  “An—accident—called Fyne,” he repeated separating the words with emphasis.

Marlow was not disconcerted.

“I don’t mean accident in the sense of a mishap.  Not in the least.  Fyne was a good little man in the Civil Service.  By accident I mean that which happens blindly and without intelligent design.  That’s generally the way a brother-in-law happens into a man’s life.”

Marlow’s tone being apologetic and our new acquaintance having again turned to the window I took it upon myself to say:

“You are justified.  There is very little intelligent design in the majority of marriages; but they are none the worse for that.  Intelligence leads people astray as far as passion sometimes.  I know you are not a cynic.”

Marlow smiled his retrospective smile which was kind as though he bore no grudge against people he used to know.

“Little Fyne’s marriage was quite successful.  There was no design at all in it.  Fyne, you must know, was an enthusiastic pedestrian.  He spent his holidays tramping all over our native land.  His tastes were simple.  He put infinite conviction and perseverance into his holidays.  At the proper season you would meet in the fields, Fyne, a serious-faced, broad-chested, little man, with a shabby knap-sack on his back, making for some church steeple.  He had a horror of roads.  He wrote once a little book called the ‘Tramp’s Itinerary,’ and was recognised as an authority on the footpaths of England.  So one year, in his favourite over-the-fields, back-way fashion he entered a pretty Surrey village where he met Miss Anthony.  Pure accident, you see.  They came to an understanding, across some stile, most likely.  Little Fyne held very solemn views as to the destiny of women on this earth, the nature of our sublunary love, the obligations of this transient life and so on.  He probably disclosed them to his future wife.  Miss Anthony’s views of life were very decided too but in a different way.  I don’t know the story of their wooing.  I imagine it was carried on clandestinely and, I am certain, with portentous gravity, at the back of copses, behind hedges . . .

“Why was it carried on clandestinely?” I inquired.

“Because of the lady’s father.  He was a savage sentimentalist who had his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives.  He was a terror; but the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in his wife’s parentage.  It stimulated his ingenuity too.  Difficult—is it not?—to introduce one’s wife’s maiden name into general conversation.  But my simple Fyne made use of Captain Anthony for that purpose, or else I would never even have heard of the man.  “My wife’s sailor-brother” was the phrase.  He trotted out the sailor-brother in a pretty wide range of subjects: Indian and colonial affairs, matters of trade, talk of travels, of seaside holidays and so on.  Once I remember “My wife’s sailor-brother Captain Anthony” being produced in connection with nothing less recondite than a sunset.  And little Fyne never failed to add “The son of Carleon Anthony, the poet—you know.”  He used to lower his voice for that statement, and people were impressed or pretended to be.”

The late Carleon Anthony, the poet, sang in his time of the domestic and social amenities of our age with a most felicitous versification, his object being, in his own words, “to glorify the result of six thousand years’ evolution towards the refinement of thought, manners and feelings.”  Why he fixed the term at six thousand years I don’t know.  His poems read like sentimental novels told in verse of a really superior quality.  You felt as if you were being taken out for a delightful country drive by a charming lady in a pony carriage.  But in his domestic life that same Carleon Anthony showed traces of the primitive cave-dweller’s temperament.  He was a massive, implacable man with a handsome face, arbitrary and exacting with his dependants, but marvellously suave in his manner to admiring strangers.  These contrasted displays must have been particularly exasperating to his long-suffering family.  After his second wife’s death his boy, whom he persisted by a mere whim in educating at home, ran away in conventional style and, as if disgusted with the amenities of civilization, threw himself, figuratively speaking, into the sea.  The daughter (the elder of the two children) either from compassion or because women are naturally more enduring, remained in bondage to the poet for several years, till she too seized a chance of escape by throwing herself into the arms, the muscular arms, of the pedestrian Fyne.  This was either great luck or great sagacity.  A civil servant is, I should imagine, the last human being in the world to preserve those traits of the cave-dweller from which she was fleeing.  Her father would never consent to see her after the marriage.  Such unforgiving selfishness is difficult to understand unless as a perverse sort of refinement.  There were also doubts as to Carleon Anthony’s complete sanity for some considerable time before he died.

Most of the above I elicited from Marlow, for all I knew of Carleon Anthony was his unexciting but fascinating verse.  Marlow assured me that the Fyne marriage was perfectly successful and even happy, in an earnest, unplayful fashion, being blessed besides by three healthy, active, self-reliant children, all girls.  They were all pedestrians too.  Even the youngest would wander away for miles if not restrained.  Mrs. Fyne had a ruddy out-of-doors complexion and wore blouses with a starched front like a man’s shirt, a stand-up collar and a long necktie.  Marlow had made their acquaintance one summer in the country, where they were accustomed to take a cottage for the holidays . . .

At this point we were interrupted by Mr. Powell who declared that he must leave us.  The tide was on the turn, he announced coming away from the window abruptly.  He wanted to be on board his cutter before she swung and of course he would sleep on board.  Never slept away from the cutter while on a cruise.  He was gone in a moment, unceremoniously, but giving us no offence and leaving behind an impression as though we had known him for a long time.  The ingenuous way he had told us of his start in life had something to do with putting him on that footing with us.  I gave no thought to seeing him again.

Marlow expressed a confident hope of coming across him before long.

“He cruises about the mouth of the river all the summer.  He will be easy to find any week-end,” he remarked ringing the bell so that we might settle up with the waiter.

* * * * *

Later on I asked Marlow why he wished to cultivate this chance acquaintance.  He confessed apologetically that it was the commonest sort of curiosity.  I flatter myself that I understand all sorts of curiosity.  Curiosity about daily facts, about daily things, about daily men.  It is the most respectable faculty of the human mind—in fact I cannot conceive the uses of an incurious mind.  It would be like a chamber perpetually locked up.  But in this particular case Mr. Powell seemed to have given us already a complete insight into his personality such as it was; a personality capable of perception and with a feeling for the vagaries of fate, but essentially simple in itself.

Marlow agreed with me so far.  He explained however that his curiosity was not excited by Mr. Powell exclusively.  It originated a good way further back in the fact of his accidental acquaintance with the Fynes, in the country.  This chance meeting with a man who had sailed with Captain Anthony had revived it.  It had revived it to some purpose, to such purpose that to me too was given the knowledge of its origin and of its nature.  It was given to me in several stages, at intervals which are not indicated here.  On this first occasion I remarked to Marlow with some surprise:

“But, if I remember rightly you said you didn’t know Captain Anthony.”

“No.  I never saw the man.  It’s years ago now, but I seem to hear solemn little Fyne’s deep voice announcing the approaching visit of his wife’s brother “the son of the poet, you know.”  He had just arrived in London from a long voyage, and, directly his occupations permitted, was coming down to stay with his relatives for a few weeks.  No doubt we two should find many things to talk about by ourselves in reference to our common calling, added little Fyne portentously in his grave undertones, as if the Mercantile Marine were a secret society.

You must understand that I cultivated the Fynes only in the country, in their holiday time.  This was the third year.  Of their existence in town I knew no more than may be inferred from analogy.  I played chess with Fyne in the late afternoon, and sometimes came over to the cottage early enough to have tea with the whole family at a big round table.  They sat about it, an unsmiling, sunburnt company of very few words indeed.  Even the children were silent and as if contemptuous of each other and of their elders.  Fyne muttered sometimes deep down in his chest some insignificant remark.  Mrs. Fyne smiled mechanically (she had splendid teeth) while distributing tea and bread and butter.  A something which was not coldness, nor yet indifference, but a sort of peculiar self-possession gave her the appearance of a very trustworthy, very capable and excellent governess; as if Fyne were a widower and the children not her own but only entrusted to her calm, efficient, unemotional care.  One expected her to address Fyne as Mr.  When she called him John it surprised one like a shocking familiarity.  The atmosphere of that holiday was—if I may put it so—brightly dull.  Healthy faces, fair complexions, clear eyes, and never a frank smile in the whole lot, unless perhaps from a girl-friend.

The girl-friend problem exercised me greatly.  How and where the Fynes got all these pretty creatures to come and stay with them