“You remember,” went on Marlow, “how I feared that Mr Powell’s want of
experience would stand in his way of appreciating the unusual. The
unusual I had in my mind was something of a very subtle sort: the
unusual in marital relations. I may well have doubted the capacity of a
young man too much concerned with the creditable performance of his
professional duties to observe what in the nature of things is not
easily observable in itself, and still less so under the special
circumstances. In the majority of ships a second officer has not many
points of contact with the captain’s wife. He sits at the same table
with her at meals, generally speaking; he may now and then be addressed
more or less kindly on insignificant matters, and have the opportunity
to show her some small attentions on deck. And that is all. Under such
conditions, signs can be seen only by a sharp and practised eye. I am
alluding now to troubles which are subtle often to the extent of not
being understood by the very hearts they devastate or uplift.
“Yes, Mr Powell, whom the chance of his name had thrown upon the
floating stage of that tragi-comedy 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 nightbirds, 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 in 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 (young Powell could not help thinking) embittered
by some mysterious grievance.
There was enough of the unusual there to be recognised even by Powell’s
inexperience. The officers kept out of the cabin against the custom of
the service, and then this sort of accent in the mate’s talk. Franklin
did not seem to expect conversational ease from the new second mate. He
made several remarks about the old, deploring the accident. Awkward.
Very awkward this thing to happen on the very eve of sailing.
“Collar-bone and arm broken,” he sighed. “Sad, very sad. Did you
notice if the captain was at all affected? Eh? Must have been.”
Before this congested face, these globular eyes turned yearningly upon
him, young Powell (one must keep in mind he was but a youngster then)
who could not remember any signs of visible grief, confessed with an
embarrassed laugh that, owing to the suddenness of this lucky chance
coming to him, he was not in a condition to notice the state of other
people.
“I was so pleased to get a ship at last,” he murmured, further
disconcerted by the sort of pent-up gravity in Mr Franklin’s aspect.
“One man’s food another man’s poison,” the mate remarked. “That holds
true beyond mere victuals. I suppose it didn’t occur to you that it was
a dam’ poor way for a good man to be knocked out.”
Mr Powell admitted openly that he had not thought of that. He was
ready to admit that it was very reprehensible of him. But Franklin had
no intention apparently, to moralise. He did not fall silent either.
His further remarks were to the effect that there had been a time when
Captain Anthony would have showed more than enough concern for the least
thing happening to one of his officers. Yes, there had been a time!
“And mind,” he went on, laying down suddenly a half-consumed piece of
bread and butter and raising his voice, “poor Mathews was the second man
the longest on board. I was the first. He joined a month later—about
the same time as the steward by a few days. The bo’sun and the
carpenter came the voyage after. Steady men. Still here. No good man
need ever have thought of leaving the _Ferndale_ unless he were a fool.
Some good men are fools. Don’t know when they are well off. I mean the
best of good men; men that you would do anything for. They go on for
years, then all of a sudden—”
Our young friend listened to the mate with a queer sense of discomfort
growing on him. For it was as though Mr Franklin were thinking aloud,
and putting him into the delicate position of an unwilling eavesdropper.
But there was in the mess-room another listener. It was the steward,
who had come in carrying a tin coffee-pot with a long handle, and stood
quietly by: a man with a middle-aged, sallow face, long features, heavy
eyelids, a soldierly grey moustache. His body encased in a short black
jacket with narrow sleeves, his long legs in very tight trousers, made
up an agile, youthful, slender figure. He moved forward suddenly, and
interrupted the mate’s monologue.
“More coffee, Mr Franklin? Nice fresh lot. Piping hot. I am going to
give breakfast to the saloon directly, and the cook is raking his fire
out. Now’s your chance.”
The mate who, on account of his peculiar build, could not turn his head
freely, twisted his thick trunk slightly, and ran his black eyes in the
corners towards the steward.
“And is the precious pair of them out?” he growled.
The steward, pouring out the coffee into the mate’s cup, muttered
moodily but distinctly: “The lady wasn’t when I was laying the table.”
Powell’s ears were fine enough to detect something hostile in this
reference to the captain’s wife. For of what other person could they be
speaking? The steward added with a gloomy sort of fairness: “But she
will be before I bring the dishes in. She never gives that sort of
trouble. That she doesn’t.”
“No. Not in that way,” Mr Franklin agreed, and then both he and the
steward, after glancing at Powell—the stranger to the ship—said
nothing more.
But this had been enough to rouse his curiosity. Curiosity is natural
to man. Of course it was not a malevolent curiosity which, if not
exactly natural, is to be met fairly frequently in men and perhaps more
frequently in women—especially if a woman be in question; and that
woman under a cloud, in a manner of speaking. For under a cloud Flora
de Barral was fated to be even at sea. Yes. Even that sort of darkness
which attends a woman for whom there is no clear place in the world hung
over her. Yes. Even at sea!
“And this is the pathos of being a woman. A man can struggle to get a
place for himself or perish. But a woman’s part is passive, say what
you like, and shuffle the facts of the world as you may, hinting at lack
of energy, of wisdom, of courage. As a matter of fact, almost all women
have all that—of their own kind. But they are not made for attack.
Wait they must. I am speaking here of women who are really women. And
it’s no use talking of opportunities, either. I know that some of them
do talk of it. But not the genuine women. Those know better. Nothing
can beat a true woman for a clear vision of reality; I would say a
cynical vision if I were not afraid of wounding your chivalrous
feelings—for which, by the by, women are not so grateful as you may
think, to fellows of your kind....”
“Upon my word, Marlow,” I cried, “what are you flying out at me for like
this? I wouldn’t use an ill-sounding word about women, but what right
have you to imagine that I am looking for gratitude?”
Marlow raised a soothing hand.
“There! There! I take back the ill-sounding word, with the remark,
though, that cynicism seems to me a word invented by hypocrites. But
let that pass. As to women, they know that the clamour for
opportunities for them to become something which they cannot be is as
reasonable as if mankind at large started asking for opportunities of
winning immortality in this world, in which death is the very condition
of life. You must understand that I am not talking here of material
existence. That naturally is implied; but you won’t maintain that a
woman who, say, enlisted, for instance (there have been cases) has
conquered her place in the world. She has only got her living in it—
which is quite meritorious, but not quite the same thing.”
All these reflections which arise from my picking up the thread of Flora
de Barral’s existence did not, I am certain, present themselves to Mr
Powell—not the Mr Powell we know taking solitary week-end cruises in
the estuary of the Thames (with mysterious dashes into lonely creeks)
but to the young Mr Powell, the chance second officer of the ship
_Ferndale_, commanded (and for the most part owned) by Roderick Anthony,
the son of the poet—you know. A Mr Powell, much slenderer than our
robust friend is now, with the bloom of innocence not quite rubbed off
his smooth cheeks, and apt not only to be interested but also to be
surprised by the experience life was holding in store for him. This
would account for his remembering so much of it with considerable
vividness. For instance, the impressions attending his first breakfast
on board the _Ferndale_, both visual and mental, were as fresh to him as
if received yesterday.
“The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability
to interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in
itself) makes to our understanding and emotions. For it is never more
than that. Our experience never gets into our blood and bones. It
always remains outside of us. That’s why we look with wonder at the
past. And this persists even when from practice and through growing
callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in
that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine—which our life
is—nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more. Not at
the time, I mean. If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such
exclamation: ‘Well! Well! I’ll be hanged if I ever...’ it is probably
because this very thing that there should be a past to look back upon,
other people’s, is very astounding in itself when one has the time, a
fleeting and immense instant to think of it....”
I was on the point of interrupting Marlow when he stopped of himself,
his eyes fixed on vacancy, or—perhaps—(I wouldn’t be too hard on him)
on a vision. He has the habit, or, say, the fault, of defective
mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very fulness of the
tick. If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that
perversity, you know how vexing it is—such a stoppage. I was vexed
with Marlow. He was smiling faintly while I waited. He even laughed a
little. And then I said acidly:
“Am I to understand that you have ferreted out something comic in the
history of Flora de Barral?”
“Comic!” he exclaimed. “No! What makes you say?... Oh, I laughed—
did I? But don’t you know that people laugh at absurdities that are
very far from being comic? Didn’t you read the latest books about
laughter written by philosophers, psychologists? There is a lot of
them....”
“I dare say there has been a lot of nonsense written about laughter—and
tears, too, for that matter,” I said impatiently.
“They say,” pursued the unabashed Marlow, “that we laugh from a sense of
superiority. Therefore, observe, simplicity, honesty, warmth of
feeling, delicacy of heart and of conduct, self-confidence, magnanimity
are laughed at, because the presence of these traits in a man’s
character often puts him into difficult, cruel or absurd situations, and
makes us, the majority who are fairly free as a rule from these
peculiarities, feel pleasantly superior.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “But have you discovered all these fine
things in the story; or has Mr Powell discovered them to you in his
artless talk? Have you two been having good healthy laughs together?
Come! Are your sides aching yet, Marlow?”
Marlow took no offence at my banter. He was quite serious.
“I should not like to say off-hand how much of that there was,” he
pursued with amusing caution. “But there was a situation, tense enough
for the signs of it to give many surprises to Mr Powell—neither of
them shocking in itself, but with a cumulative effect which made the
whole unforgettable in the detail of its progress. And the first
surprise came very soon, when the explosives (to which he owed his
sudden chance of engagement)—dynamite in cases and blasting powder in
barrels—taken on board, main hatch battened for sea, cook restored to
his functions in the galley, anchor fished and the tug ahead, rounding
the South Foreland, and with the sun sinking clear and red down the
purple vista of the channel, he went on the poop, on duty, it is true,
but with time to take the first freer breath in the busy day of
departure. The pilot was still on board, who gave him first a silent
glance, and then passed an insignificant remark before resuming his
lounging to and fro between the steering wheel and the binnacle. Powell
took his station modestly at the break of the poop. He had noticed
across the skylight a head in a grey cap. But when, after a time, he
crossed over to the other side of the deck he discovered that it was not
the captain’s head at all. He became aware of grey hairs curling over
the nape of the neck. How could he have made that mistake? But on
board ship away from the land one does not expect to come upon a
stranger.”
Powell walked past the man. A thin, somewhat sunken face, with a
tightly closed mouth, stared at the distant French coast, vague like a
suggestion of solid darkness, lying abeam beyond the evening light
reflected from the level waters, themselves growing more sombre than the
sky; a stare, across which Powell had to pass and did pass with a quick
side glance, noting its immovable stillness. His passage disturbed
those eyes no more than if he had been as immaterial as a ghost. And
this failure of his person in producing an impression affected him
strangely. Who could that old man be?
He was so curious that he even ventured to ask the pilot in a low voice.
The pilot turned out to be a good-natured specimen of his kind,
condescending, sententious. He had been down to his meals in the main
cabin, and had something to impart.
“That? Queer fish—eh? Mrs Anthony’s father. I’ve been introduced to
him in the cabin at breakfast time. Name of Smith. Wonder if he has
all his wits about him. They take him about with them, it seems. Don’t
look very happy—eh?”
Then, changing his tone abruptly, he desired Powell to get all hands on
deck and make sail on the ship. “I shall be leaving you in half an
hour. You’ll have plenty of time to find out all about the old gent,”
he added with a thick laugh.
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 for that thick, bald man, comically shaped, with his
crimson complexion and something pathetic in the rolling of his very
movable black eyes in an 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 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
bo’sun, 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 easiest to understand. As he let it
out to Powell before the first week of the passage 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 meat with that woman.’ But he
hastened to add: ‘Don’t you think I’m blaming the captain. He isn’t a
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 are
too young to understand these things. I don’t say you haven’t plenty of
sense. You are doing very well here. Jolly sight 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 on: ‘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 naïvely 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. Powell 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 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 imagination had placed a comparatively old woman may easily
become one of the strongest shocks....”
Marlow 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 head wind 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 legs seated on the skylight, his clean-shaved cheek,
his thin compressed mouth with a hollow in each corner, the sparse grey
locks escaping from under the tweed cap, and curling slightly on the
collar of the coat. He leaned 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 soundings from a smoothly clouded sky. A fitful wind swept
the cheerless waste, 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-grey. 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
undistinguishable, 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 has 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 aspersion. 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 he 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.”