menu_book Chapter 19

Part 2, Chapter 2, Section 2 of Chance by Joseph Conrad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan. Chance, Part 2, Chapter 2, Section 2. In the secret emotion of giving his first order as a fully responsible officer,

young Powell forgot the very existence of that old man in a moment. The following days, in the interest of getting in touch with the ship, with the men in her, with his duties, in the rather anxious period of settling down, his curiosity slumbered, for of course the pilot's few words had not extinguished it.

This settling down was made easy for him by the friendly character of his immediate superior, the Chief. Powell could not defend himself from some sympathy with that thick, bald man, comically shaped with his crimson complexion and something pathetic in the rolling of his very movable black eyes in the apparently immovable head. who was so tactfully ready to take his competency for granted.

There can be nothing more reassuring to a young man tackling his life's work for the first time. Mr Powell, his mind at ease about himself, had time to observe the people around with friendly interest. Very early in the beginning of the passage, he had discovered with some amusement that the marriage of Captain Anthony was resented by those to whom Powell, conscious of being looked upon as something of an outsider,

referred to in his mind as the old lot. They had the funny, regretful glances, intonations, nods of men who had seen other, better times. What difference it could have made to the bosun and the carpenter, Powell could not very well understand.

Yet these two pulled long faces and even gave hostile glances to the poop. The cook and the steward might have been more directly concerned, but the steward used to remark on occasion, Oh, she gives no extra trouble.

with scrupulous fairness of the most gloomy kind. He was rather a silent man with a great sense of his personal worth which made his speeches guarded. The cook, a neat man with fair side whiskers

who had been only three years in the ship seemed the least concerned. He was even known to have inquired once or twice as to the success of some of his dishes with the captain's wife.

This was considered a sort of disloyal falling away from the ruling feeling. The mate's annoyance was yet the easier to understand. As he let it out to Powell before the first week of the voyage was over, you can't expect me to be pleased at being chucked out of the saloon as if I weren't good enough to

sit down to meet with that woman. But he hastened to add, don't you think I'm blaming the captain? He isn't the man to be found fault with. You, Mr Powell, are too young yet to understand such matters. Some considerable time afterwards, at the end of a conversation of that aggrieved sort, he enlarged a little more by repeating, Yes, you're too young to understand these things.

I don't say you haven't plenty of sense. You're doing very well here. Jolly side better than I expected, though I liked your looks from the first. It was in the trade winds at night,

under a velvety, bespangled sky, a great multitude of stars watching, the shadows of the sea gleaming mysteriously in the wake of the ship, while the leisurely swishing of the water to leeward

was like a drowsy comment on her progress. Mr Powell expressed his satisfaction by a half-bashful laugh. The mate mused, And of course you haven't known the ship as she used to be. She was more than a home to a man.

She was not like any other ship, and Captain Anthony was not like any other master to sail with. Neither is she now. But before one never had a care in the world as to her, and as to him too.

No, indeed, there was never anything to worry about. Young Powell couldn't see what there was to worry about even then. The serenity of the peaceful night seemed as vast as all space and as enduring as eternity itself. It's true the sea is an uncertain element, but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its bewitching power any more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial inconstancy of women.

And Mr. Powell, being young, thought naively that the captain, being married, there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition. I suppose that to him, life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was something still in the nature of a fairy tale, with a they-lived-happy-ever-after termination.

We are the creatures of our light literature, much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible theories. Dull felt in that way the more,

because the captain of a ship at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a fairy tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to account except by powers practically invisible and so distant that they might well be looked upon as supernatural

for all that the rest of the crew knows of them as a rule. So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate, or rather he understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not seem to him adequate. He would have dismissed all this out of his mind with a contemptuous,

What the devil do I care if the captain's wife herself had not been so young? To see her for the first time had been something of a shock to him. He had some preconceived ideas as to captain's wives, which, while he did not believe the testimony of his eyes, made him open them very wide. He had stared till the captain's wife noticed it plainly and turned her face away.

Captain's wife? That girl, covered with rugs in a long chair? Captain's? He gasped mentally. It had never occurred to him that a captain's wife could be anything but a woman to be described as stout or thin, as jolly or crabbed, but always mature and even in comparison with his own years, frankly, old. But this, it was a sort of moral upset, as though he had discovered a case of abduction or something as surprising as that.

You understand that nothing is more disturbing than the upsetting of a preconceived idea. Each of us arranges the world according to his own notion of the fitness of things. To behold a girl where your average mediocre imagine had placed a comparatively old woman may easily become one of the strongest shocks. Marlowe paused, smiling to himself. Powell remained impressed after all these years by the very recollection, he continued, in a voice amused perhaps but not mocking.

He said to me only the other day, with something like the first awe of that discovery lingering in his tone. He said to me, why, she seemed so young, so girlish, that I looked round for some woman, which would be the captain's wife, though of course I knew there was no other woman on board that voyage. The voyage before, it seems, there had been the steward's wife to act as maid, to Mrs Anthony,

but she was not taken that time, for some reason he didn't know. Mrs Anthony? If it hadn't been the captain's wife, he would have referred to her mentally as a kid, he said. I suppose there must be a sort of divinity hedging in a captain's wife, however. incredible, which prevented him applying to her that contemptuous definition in the secret of his

thoughts. I asked him when this had happened, and he told me that it was three days after parting from the tug just outside the channel, to be precise. A headwind had set in with unpleasant damp weather. He had come up to leeward of the poop, still feeling very much of a stranger, and an untried officer at six in the evening to take his watch. To see her was quite as unexpected as seeing a vision. When she turned away her head, he recollected himself and dropped his eyes.

What he could see then was only, close to the long chair on which she reclined, a pair of long, thin legs ending in black cloth boots tucked in close to the skylight seat. Whence he concluded that the old gentleman, who wore a grey cap like the captain's, was sitting by her, his daughter. In his first astonishment, he had stopped dead short, with the consequence that now he felt very much abashed at having betrayed his surprise.

But he couldn't very well turn tail and bolt off the poop. He had come there on duty. So, still with downcast eyes, he made his way past them. Only when he got as far as the wheel grating did he look up. She was hidden from him by the back of her deck chair, but he had the view of the owner of the thin, aged leg sitting on the skylight, his clean-shaped cheek, his thin, compressed mouth with a hollow in each corner, the sparse grey locks escaping from under the

tweed coat, and curling slightly on the collar of the coat. He leant forward a little over Mrs Anthony, but they were not talking. Captain Anthony, walking with a springy, hurried gait on the other side of the poop from end to end, gazed straight before him. Young Powell might have thought that his captain was not aware of his presence either. However, he knew better, and for that reason spent a most uncomfortable hour motionless by the compass

before his captain stopped in his swift pacing and with an almost visible effort made some remark to him about the weather in a low voice. Before Powell, who was startled, could find a word of answer, the captain swung off again on his endless tramp with a fixed gaze. And till the supper bell rang, silence dwelt over that poop like an evil spell.

The captain walked up and down looking straight before him. The helmsman steered, looking upwards at the sails. The old gent on the skylight looked down on his daughter. And Mr. Powell confessed to me that he didn't know where to look, feeling as though he had blundered in where he had no business, which was absurd.

At last he fastened his eyes on the compass card, took refuge in spirit inside the binnacle. He felt chilled more than he should have been by the chilly dusk falling on the muddy green sea of the surroundings from a smoothly clouded sky. A fitful wind swept the cheerless waist,

and the ship, hauled up so close as to check her way, seemed to progress by languid fits and starts against the short seas which swept along her sides with a snarling sound. Young Powell thought that this was the dreariest evening aspect of the sea he had ever seen. He was glad when the other occupants of the poop left it at the sound of the bell.

The captain first, with a sudden swerve in his walk towards the companion, and not even looking once towards his wife and his wife's father. Those two got up and moved towards the companion, the old gent very erect, his thin locks stirring gently about the nape of his neck and carrying the rugs over his arm.

The girl who was Mrs Anthony went down first. The murky twilight had settled in deep shadow on her face. She looked at Mr Powell in passing. He thought that she was very pale, cold perhaps. The old gent stopped a moment, thin and stiff, before the young man,

and in a voice which was low, but distinct enough, and without any particular accent, not even of inquiry, he said, You are the new second officer, I believe. Mr Powell answered in the affirmative, wondering if this were a friendly overture. He had noticed that Mr Smith's eyes had a sort of inward look,

as though he had disliked or disdained his surroundings. The captain's wife had disappeared then down the companion stairs. Mr. Smith said, ah, and waited a little longer to put another question in his incurious voice. And did you know the man who was here before you? No, said young Powell.

I didn't know anybody belonging to this ship before I joined. He was much older than you, twice your age, perhaps more. His hair was iron-gray, yes, certainly more. The low, repressed voice paused, but the old man did not move away. He added,

Isn't it unusual? Mr Powell was surprised, not only by being engaged in conversation, but also by its character. It might have been the suggestion of the word

uttered by this old man, but it was distinctly at that moment that he became aware of something unusual, not only in this encounter, but generally around him,

about everybody, in the atmosphere. The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there

in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable safe sea, sheltering a man from all passions except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick glance he threw to windward, where the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring, diffused twilight, and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil,

it was the immensity of space made visible, almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation, The trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost indistinguishable,

the mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening universe. It took him a moment or so to seize the drift of the question. He repeated slowly,

Unusual? Oh, you mean for an elderly man to be the second of a ship? I don't know. There are a good many of us who don't get on. He didn't get on, I suppose.

The other, his head bowed a little, had the air of listening with acute attention. And now he's been taken to the hospital, he said. I believe so, yes. I remember Captain Anthony saying so in the shipping office. Possibly about to die, went on the old man in his careful, deliberate tone.

And perhaps glad enough to die. Mr Powell was young enough to be startled at the suggestion, which sounded confidential and blood-curdling in the dusk. He said sharply that it was not very likely, as if defending the absent victim of the accident from an unkind dispersion. He felt, in fact, indignant.

The other emitted a short, stifled laugh of a conciliatory nature. The second bell rang under the poop. He made a movement at the sound, but lingered. What I said was not meant seriously, he murmured, with that strange air of fearing to be overheard. Not in this case. I know the man.

The occasion, or rather the want of occasion for this conversation, had sharpened the perceptions of the unsophisticated second officer of the Ferndale. He was alive to the slightest shade of tone, and felt as if this I know the man should have been followed by a he was no friend of mine.

But after the shortest possible break, the old gentleman continued to murmur distinctly and evenly, whereas you have never seen him. Nevertheless, when you have gone through as many years as I have, you will understand how an event putting an end to one's existence may not be altogether unwelcome.

Of course, there are stupid accidents, and even then one needn't be very angry. What is it to be deprived of life? It's soon done. But what would you think of the feelings of a man who should have had his life stolen from him? Cheated out of it, I say. He ceased abruptly and remained still long enough for the astonished Powell to stammer out an

indistinct, What do you mean? I don't understand. Then, with a low good night, glided a few steps and sank through the shadow of the companion into the lamplight below, which did not reach higher than the turn of the staircase. The strange words, the cautious tone, the whole person left a strong uneasiness in the mind of Mr. Powell. He started walking the poop in great mental confusion. He felt all adrift.

This was funny talk and no mistake. And this cautious, low tone, as though we were watched by someone, was more than funny. The young second officer hesitated to break the established rule of every ship's discipline, but at last could not resist the temptation of getting hold of some other human being and spoke to the man at the wheel.

Did you hear what this gentleman was saying to me? No, sir, answered the sailor quietly. Then, encouraged by this evidence of laxity in his officer, made bold to add, A queer fish, sir.

This was tentative, and Mr Powell, busy with his own view, not saying anything, he ventured further. They are more like passengers.

One sees some queer passengers. Who are like passengers? asked Powell gruffly. Why, these two, sir. End of part two, chapter two, section two.