Renovated certainly the saloon of the _Ferndale_ was to receive the
“strange woman.” The mellowness of its old-fashioned, tarnished
decoration was gone. And Anthony looking round saw the glitter, the
gleams, the colour of new things, untried, unused, very bright—too
bright. The workmen had gone only last night; and the last piece of
work they did was the hanging of the heavy curtains which looped midway
the length of the saloon—divided it in two if released, cutting off the
after-end with its companion-way leading direct on the poop, from the
forepart with its outlet on the deck; making a privacy within a privacy,
as though Captain Anthony could not place obstacles enough between his
new happiness and the men who shared his life at sea. He inspected that
arrangement with an approving eye then made a particular visitation of
the whole, ending by opening a door which led into a large state-room
made of two knocked into one. It was very well furnished and had,
instead of the usual bed-place of such cabins, an elaborate swinging cot
of the latest pattern. Anthony tilted it a little by way of trial.
“The old man will be very comfortable in here,” he said to himself, and
stepped back into the saloon closing the door gently. Then another
thought occurred to him obvious under the circumstances but strangely
enough presenting itself for the first time. “Jove! Won’t he get a
shock,” thought Roderick Anthony.
He went hastily on deck. “Mr Franklin, Mr Franklin.”
The mate was not very far. “Oh! Here you are. Miss.... Mrs
Anthony’ll be coming on board presently. Just give me a call when you
see the cab.”
Then, without noticing the gloominess of the mate’s countenance he went
in again. Not a friendly word, not a professional remark, or a small
joke, not as much as a simple and inane “fine day.” Nothing. Just
turned about and went in.
We know that, when the moment came, he thought better of it and decided
to meet Flora’s father in that privacy of the main cabin which he had
been so careful to arrange. Why Anthony appeared to shrink from the
contact, he who was sufficiently self-confident not only to face but to
absolutely create a situation almost insane in its audacious generosity,
is difficult to explain. Perhaps when he came on the poop for a glance
he found that man so different outwardly from what he expected that he
decided to meet him for the first time out of everybody’s sight.
Possibly the general secrecy of his relation to the girl might have
influenced him. Truly he may well have been dismayed. That man’s
coming brought him face to face with the necessity to speak and act a
lie; to appear what he was not and what he could never be, unless,
unless—
In short, we’ll say if you like that for various reasons, all having to
do with the delicate rectitude of his nature, Roderick Anthony (a man of
whom his chief mate used to say: he doesn’t know what fear is) was
frightened. There is a Nemesis which overtakes generosity too, like all
the other imprudences of men who dare to be lawless and proud....
“Why do you say this?” I inquired, for Marlow had stopped abruptly and
kept silent in the shadow of the bookcase.
“I say this because that man whom chance had thrown in Flora’s way was
both: lawless and proud. Whether he knew anything about it or not it
does not matter. Very likely not. One may fling a glove in the face of
nature and in the face of one’s own moral endurance quite innocently,
with a simplicity which wears the aspect of perfectly Satanic conceit.
However, as I have said it does not matter. It’s a transgression all
the same and has got to be paid for in the usual way. But never mind
that. I paused because, like Anthony, I find a difficulty, a sort of
dread in coming to grips with old de Barral.”
You remember I had a glimpse of him once. He was not an imposing
personality: tall, thin, straight, stiff, faded, moving with short steps
and with a gliding motion, speaking in an even low voice. When the sea
was rough he wasn’t much seen on deck—at least not walking. He caught
hold of things then and dragged himself along as far as the after
skylight where he would sit for hours. Our, then young, friend offered
once to assist him and this service was the first beginning of a sort of
friendship. He clung hard to one—Powell says, with no figurative
intention. Powell was always on the lookout to assist, and to assist
mainly Mrs Anthony, because he clung so jolly hard to her that Powell
was afraid of her being dragged down notwithstanding that she very soon
became very sure-footed in all sorts of weather. And Powell was the
only one ready to assist at hand because Anthony (by that time) seemed
to be afraid to come near them; the unforgiving Franklin always looked
wrathfully the other way; the boatswain, if up there, acted likewise but
sheepishly; and any hands that happened to be on the poop (a feeling
spreads mysteriously all over a ship) shunned him as though he had been
the devil.
We know how he arrived on board. For my part I know so little of
prisons that I haven’t the faintest notion how one leaves them. It
seems as abominable an operation as the other, the shutting up with its
mental suggestions of bang, snap, crash and the empty silence outside—
where an instant before you were—you _were_—and now no longer are.
Perfectly devilish. And the release! I don’t know which is worse. How
do they do it? Pull the string, door flies open, man flies through: Out
you go! _Adios_! And in the space where a second before you were not,
in the silent space there is a figure going away, limping. Why limping?
I don’t know. That’s how I see it. One has a notion of a maiming,
crippling process; of the individual coming back damaged in some subtle
way. I admit it is a fantastic hallucination, but I can’t help it. Of
course I know that the proceedings of the best machine-made humanity are
employed with judicious care and so on. I am absurd, no doubt, but
still.... Oh yes it’s idiotic. When I pass one of these places ... did
you notice that there is something infernal about the aspect of every
individual stone or brick of them, something malicious as if matter were
enjoying its revenge of the contemptuous spirit of man. Did you notice?
You didn’t? Eh? Well I am perhaps a little mad on that point. When I
pass one of these places I must avert my eyes. I couldn’t have gone to
meet de Barral. I should have shrunk from the ordeal. You’ll notice
that it looks as if Anthony (a brave man indubitably) had shirked it
too. Little Fyne’s flight of fancy picturing three people in the fatal
four-wheeler—you remember?—went wide of the truth. There were only
two people in the four-wheeler. Flora did not shrink. Women can stand
anything. The dear creatures have no imagination when it comes to solid
facts of life. In sentimental regions—I won’t say. It’s another thing
altogether. There they shrink from or rush to embrace ghosts of their
own creation just the same as any fool-man would.
“No. I suppose the girl Flora went on that errand reasonably. And
then, why! This was the moment for which she had lived. It was her
only point of contact with existence. Oh yes. She had been assisted by
the Fynes. And kindly. Certainly. Kindly. But that’s not enough.
There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to
break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope. How cold, how
infernally cold she must have felt—unless when she was made to burn
with indignation or shame. Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone but
hang me if I don’t believe that some women could live by love alone. If
there be a flame in human beings fed by varied ingredients earthly and
spiritual which tinge it in different hues, then I seem to see the
colour of theirs. It is azure.... What the devil are you laughing
at....”
Marlow jumped up and strode out of the shadow as if lifted by
indignation but there was the flicker of a smile on his lips. “You say
I don’t know women. Maybe. It’s just as well not to come too close to
the shrine. But I have a clear notion of _woman_. In all of them,
termagant, flirt, crank, washerwoman, blue-stocking, outcast and even in
the ordinary fool of the ordinary commerce there is something left, if
only a spark. And when there is a spark there can always be a flame....”
He went back into the shadow and sat down again.
“I don’t mean to say that Flora de Barral was one of the sort that could
live by love alone. In fact she had managed to live without. But
still, in the distrust of herself and of others she looked for love, any
kind of love, as women will. And that confounded jail was the only spot
where she could see it—for she had no reason to distrust her father.”
She was there in good time. I see her gazing across the road at these
walls which are, properly speaking, awful. You do indeed seem to feel
along the very lines and angles of the unholy bulk, the fall of time,
drop by drop, hour by hour, leaf by leaf, with a gentle and implacable
slowness. And a voiceless melancholy comes over one, invading,
overpowering like a dream, penetrating and mortal like poison.
When de Barral came out she experienced a sort of shock to see that he
was exactly as she remembered him. Perhaps a little smaller. Otherwise
unchanged. You come out in the same clothes, you know. I can’t tell
whether he was looking for her. No doubt he was. Whether he recognised
her? Very likely. She crossed the road and at once there was
reproduced at a distance of years, as if by some mocking witchcraft, the
sight so familiar on the Parade at Brighton of the financier de Barral
walking with his only daughter. One comes out of prison in the same
clothes one wore on the day of condemnation, no matter how long one has
been put away there. Oh, they last! They last! But there is something
which is preserved by prison life even better than one’s discarded
clothing. It is the force, the vividness of one’s sentiments. A
monastery will do that too; but in the unholy claustration of a jail you
are thrown back wholly upon yourself—for God and Faith are not there.
The people outside disperse their affections, you hoard yours, you nurse
them into intensity. What they let slip, what they forget in the
movement and changes of free life, you hold on to, amplify, exaggerate
into a rank growth of memories. They can look with a smile at the
troubles and pains of the past; but you can’t. Old pains keep on
gnawing at your heart, old desires, old deceptions, old dreams,
assailing you in the dead stillness of your present where nothing moves
except the irrecoverable minutes of your life.
De Barral was out and, for a time speechless, being led away almost
before he had taken possession of the free world, by his daughter.
Flora controlled herself well. They walked along quickly for some
distance. The cab had been left round the corner—round several corners
for all I know. He was flustered, out of breath, when she helped him in
and followed herself. Inside that rolling box, turning towards that
recovered presence with her heart too full for words she felt the desire
of tears she had managed to keep down abandon her suddenly, her
half-mournful, half-triumphant exultation subside, every fibre of her
body, relaxed in tenderness, go stiff in the close look she took at his
face. He _was_ different. There was something. Yes, there was
something between them, something hard and impalpable, the ghost of
these high walls.
How old he was, how unlike!
She shook off this impression, amazed and frightened by it of course.
And remorseful too. Naturally. She threw her arms round his neck. He
returned that hug awkwardly, as if not in perfect control of his arms,
with a fumbling and uncertain pressure. She hid her face on his breast.
It was as though she were pressing it against a stone. They released
each other and presently the cab was rolling along at a jog-trot to the
docks with those two people as far apart as they could get from each
other, in opposite corners.
After a silence given up to mutual examination he uttered his first
coherent sentence outside the walls of the prison.
“What has done for me was envy. Envy. There was a lot of them just
bursting with it every time they looked my way. I was doing too well.
So they went to the Public Prosecutor—”
She said hastily “Yes! Yes! I know,” and he glared as if resentful
that the child had turned into a young woman without waiting for him to
come out. “What do you know about it?” he asked. “You were too young.”
His speech was soft. The old voice, the old voice! It gave her a
thrill. She recognised its pointless gentleness always the same no
matter what he had to say. And she remembered that he never had much to
say when he came down to see her. It was she who chattered, chattered,
on their walks, while stiff and with a rigidly-carried head, he dropped
a gentle word now and then.
Moved by these recollections waking up within her, she explained to him
that within the last year she had read and studied the report of the
trial.
“I went through the files of several papers, papa.”
He looked at her suspiciously. The reports were probably very
incomplete. No doubt the reporters had garbled his evidence. They were
determined to give him no chance either in court or before the public
opinion. It was a conspiracy.... “My counsel was a fool too,” he added.
“Did you notice? A perfect fool.”
She laid her hand on his arm soothingly. “Is it worth while talking
about that awful time? It is so far away now.” She shuddered slightly
at the thought of all the horrible years which had passed over her young
head; never guessing that for him the time was but yesterday. He folded
his arms on his breast, leaned back in his corner and bowed his head.
But in a little while he made her jump by asking suddenly:
“Who has got hold of the Lone Valley Railway? That’s what they were
after mainly. Somebody has got it. Parfitts and Co. grabbed it—eh?
Or was it that fellow Warner....”
“I—I don’t know,” she said quite scared by the twitching of his lips.
“Don’t know!” he exclaimed softly. Hadn’t her cousin told her? Oh yes.
She had left them—of course. Why did she? It was his first question
about herself but she did not answer it. She did not want to talk of
these horrors. They were impossible to describe. She perceived though
that he had not expected an answer, because she heard him muttering to
himself that: “There was half a million’s worth of work done and
material accumulated there.”
“You mustn’t think of these things, papa,” she said firmly. And he
asked her with that invariable gentleness, in which she seemed now to
detect some rather ugly shades, what else had he to think about?
Another year or two, if they had only left him alone, he and everybody
else would have been all right, rolling in money; and she, his daughter,
could have married anybody—anybody. A lord.
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 armchair, “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 he spring from?”
“Papa, it was in the country, on a road—”
He groaned, “On a road,” and closed his eyes.
“It’s too long to explain to you now. We shall have lots of time.
There are things I could not tell you now. But some day. Some day.
For now nothing can part us. Nothing. We are safe as long as we live—
nothing can ever come between us.”
“You are infatuated with the fellow,” he remarked, without opening his
eyes. And she said: “I believe in him,” in a low voice. “You and I
must believe in him.”
“Who the devil is he?”
“He’s the brother of the lady—you know Mrs Fyne, she knew mother—who
was so kind to me. I was staying in the country, in a cottage, with Mr
and Mrs Fyne. It was there that we met. He came on a visit. He
noticed me. I—well—we are married now.”
She was thankful that his eyes were shut. It made it easier to talk of
the future she had arranged, which now was an unalterable thing. She
did not enter on the path of confidences. That was impossible. She
felt he would not understand her. She felt also that he suffered. Now
and then a great anxiety gripped her heart with a mysterious sense of
guilt—as though she had betrayed him into the hands of an enemy. With
his eyes shut he had an air of weary and pious meditation. She was a
little afraid of it. Next moment a great pity for him filled her heart.
And in the background there was remorse. His face twitched now and
then just perceptibly. He managed to keep his eyelids down till he
heard that the ‘husband’ was a sailor and that he, the father, was being
taken straight on board ship ready to sail away from this abominable
world of treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over
the blue sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and
spacious refuge for wounded souls.
Something like that. Not the very words perhaps but such was the
general sense of her overwhelming argument—the argument of refuge.
I don’t think she gave a thought to material conditions. But as part of
that argument set forth breathlessly, as if she were afraid that if she
stopped for a moment she could never go on again, she mentioned that
generosity of a stormy type, which had come to her from the sea, had
caught her up on the brink of unmentionable failure, had whirled her
away in its first ardent gust and could be trusted now, implicitly
trusted, to carry them both, side by side, into absolute safety.
She believed it, she affirmed it. He understood thoroughly at last, and
at once the interior of that cab, of an aspect so pacific in the eyes of
the people on the pavements, became the scene of a great agitation. The
generosity of Roderick Anthony—the son of the poet—affected the
ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have brought home to Flora
de Barral the extreme arduousness of the business of being a woman.
Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists
principally of dealings with men. This man—the man inside the cab—
cast off his stiff placidity and behaved like an animal. I don’t mean
it in an offensive sense. What he did was to give way to an instinctive
panic. Like some wild creature scared by the first touch of a net
falling on its back, old de Barral began to struggle, lank and angular,
against the empty air—as much of it as there was in the cab—with
staring eyes and gasping mouth from which his daughter shrank as far as
she could in the confined space.
“Stop the cab. Stop him I tell you. Let me get out!” were the
strangled exclamations she heard. Why? What for? To do what? He
would hear nothing. She cried to him “Papa! Papa! What do you want to
do?” And all she got from him was: “Stop. I must get out. I want to
think. I must get out to think.”
It was a mercy that he didn’t attempt to open the door at once. He only
stuck his head and shoulders out of the window crying to the cabman.
She saw the consequences, the cab stopping, a crowd collecting around a
raving old gentleman.—In this terrible business of being a woman so
full of fine shades, of delicate perplexities (and very small rewards)
you can never know what rough work you may have to do, at any moment.
Without hesitation Flora seized her father round the body and pulled
back—being astonished at the ease with which she managed to make him
drop into his seat again. She kept him there resolutely with one hand
pressed against his breast, and leaning across him, she, in her turn put
her head and shoulders out of the window. By then the cab had drawn up
to the curbstone and was stopped. “No! I’ve changed my mind. Go on
please where you were told first. To the docks.”
She wondered at the steadiness of her own voice. She heard a grunt from
the driver and the cab began to roll again. Only then she sank into her
place keeping a watchful eye on her companion. He was hardly anything
more by this time. Except for her childhood’s impressions he was just—
a man. Almost a stranger. How was one to deal with him? And there was
the other too. Also almost a stranger. The trade of being a woman was
very difficult. Too difficult. Flora closed her eyes saying to
herself: “If I think too much about it I shall go mad.” And then
opening them she asked her father if the prospect of living always with
his daughter and being taken care of by her affection away from the
world, which had no honour to give to his grey hairs, was such an awful
prospect.
“Tell me, is it so bad as that?”
She put that question sadly, without bitterness. The famous—or
notorious—de Barral had lost his rigidity now. He was bent. Nothing
more deplorably futile than a bent poker. He said nothing. She added
gently, suppressing an uneasy remorseful sigh:
“And it might have been worse. You might have found no one, no one in
all this town, no one in all the world, not even me! Poor papa!”
She made a conscience-stricken movement towards him thinking: “Oh! I am
horrible, I am horrible.” And old de Barral, scared, tired, bewildered
by the extraordinary shocks of his liberation, swayed over and actually
leaned his head on her shoulder, as if sorrowing over his regained
freedom.
The movement by itself was touching. Flora supporting him lightly
imagined that he was crying; and at the thought that had she smashed in
a quarry that shoulder, together with some other of her bones, this grey
and pitiful head would have had nowhere to rest, she too gave way to
tears. They flowed quietly, easing her overstrained nerves. Suddenly
he pushed her away from him so that her head struck the side of the cab,
pushing himself away too from her as if something had stung him.
All the warmth went out of her emotion. The very last tears turned cold
on her cheek. But their work was done. She had found courage,
resolution, as women do, in a good cry. With his hand covering the
upper part of his face whether to conceal his eyes or to shut out an
unbearable sight, he was stiffening up in his corner to his usual
poker-like consistency. She regarded him in silence. His thin
obstinate lips moved. He uttered the name of the cousin—the man, you
remember, who did not approve of the Fynes, and whom rightly or wrongly
little Fyne suspected of interested motives, in view of de Barral having
possibly put away some plunder, somewhere before the smash.
I may just as well tell you at once that I don’t know anything more of
him. But de Barral was of the opinion, speaking in his low voice from
under his hand, that this relation would have been only too glad to have
secured his guidance.
“Of course I could not come forward in my own name, or person. But the
advice of a man of my experience is as good as a fortune to anybody
wishing to venture into finance. The same sort of thing can be done
again.”
He shuffled his feet a little, let fall his hand; and turning carefully
toward his daughter his puffy round cheeks, his round chin resting on
his collar, he bent on her the faded, resentful gaze of his pale eyes,
which were wet.
“The start is really only a matter of judicious advertising. There’s no
difficulty. And here you go and....”
He turned his face away. “After all I am still de Barral, _the_ de
Barral. Didn’t you remember that?”
“Papa,” said Flora; “listen. It’s you who must remember that there is
no longer a de Barral....” He looked at her sideways anxiously. “There
is Mr Smith, whom no harm, no trouble, no wicked lies of evil people
can ever touch.”
“Mr Smith,” he breathed out slowly. “Where does he belong to? There’s
not even a Miss Smith.”
“There is your Flora.”
“My Flora! You went and—I can’t bear to think of it. It’s horrible.”
“Yes. It was horrible enough at times,” she said with feeling, because
somehow, obscurely, what this man said appealed to her as if it were her
own thought clothed in an enigmatic emotion. “I think with shame
sometimes how I—No not yet. I shall not tell you. At least not now.”
The cab turned into the gateway of the dock. Flora handed the tall hat
to her father. “Here, papa. And please be good. I suppose you love
me. If you don’t, then I wonder who—”
He put the hat on, and stiffened hard in his corner, kept a sidelong
glance on his girl. “Try to be nice for my sake. Think of the years I
have been waiting for you. I do indeed want support—and peace. A
little peace.”
She clasped his arm suddenly with both hands pressing with all her might
as if to crush the resistance she felt in him. “I could not have peace
if I did not have you with me. I won’t let you go. Not after all I
went through. I won’t.” The nervous force of her grip frightened him a
little. She laughed suddenly. “It’s absurd. It’s as if I were asking
you for a sacrifice. What am I afraid of? Where could you go? I mean
now, to-day, to-night? You can’t tell me. Have you thought of it?
Well I have been thinking of it for the last year. Longer. I nearly
went mad trying to find out. I believe I was mad for a time or else I
should never have thought....”
“This was as near as she came to a confession,” remarked Marlow in a
changed tone. “The confession I mean of that walk to the top of the
quarry which she reproached herself with so bitterly. And he made of it
what his fancy suggested. It could not possibly be a just notion. The
cab stopped alongside the ship and they got out in the manner described
by the sensitive Franklin. I don’t know if they suspected each other’s
sanity at the end of that drive. But that is possible. We all seem a
little mad to each other; an excellent arrangement for the bulk of
humanity which finds in it an easy motive of forgiveness. Flora crossed
the quarter-deck with a rapidity born of apprehension. It had grown
unbearable. She wanted this business over. She was thankful on looking
back to see he was following her. ‘If he bolts away,’ she thought,
‘then I shall know that I am of no account indeed! That no one loves
me, that words and actions and protestations and everything in the world
is false—and I shall jump into the dock. _That_ at least won’t lie.’”
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 lifetime. 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 Powell, must have been obviously predestined to
add his native ingenuousness to the sum of all the others carried by the
honest ship _Ferndale_. He was too ingenuous. Everybody on board was,
exception being made of Mr Smith who, however, was simple enough in his
way, with that terrible simplicity of the fixed idea, for which there is
also another name men pronounce with dread and aversion. His fixed idea
was to save his girl from the man who had possessed himself of her (I
use these words on purpose because the image they suggest was clearly in
Mr Smith’s mind), possessed himself unfairly of her while he, the
father, was locked up.
“I won’t rest till I have got you away from that man,” he would murmur
to her after long periods of contemplation. We know from Powell how he
used to sit on the skylight near the long deck-chair on which Flora was
reclining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship
and investigation at the same time.
It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event
rationally. The avatar of de Barral into Mr Smith had not been
effected without a shock—that much one must recognise. It may be that
it drove all practical considerations out of his mind, making room for
awful and precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards. And
it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent tenacity, of the man
who had persisted in throwing millions of other people’s thrift into the
Lone Valley Railway, the Labrador Docks, the Spotted Leopard Copper
Mine, and other grotesque speculations exposed during the famous de
Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of
laughter. For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy finds its last
refuge in our deadly serious world. As to tears and lamentations, these
were not heard in the august precincts of comedy, because they were
indulged in privately in several thousand homes, where, with a fine
dramatic effect, hunger had taken the place of Thrift.
But there was one at least who did not laugh in court. That person was
the accused. The notorious de Barral did not laugh because he was
indignant. He was impervious to words, to facts, to inferences. It
would have been impossible to make him see his guilt or his folly—
either by evidence or argument—if anybody had tried to argue.
Neither did his daughter Flora try to argue with him. The cruelty of
her position was so great, its complications so thorny, if I may express
myself so, that a passive attitude was yet her best refuge—as it had
been before her of so many women.
For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore
menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an
agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply
stupid. But she is never dense. She’s never made of wood through and
through as some men are. There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring.
Whatever men don’t know about women (and it may be a lot or it may be
very little) men and even fathers do know that much. And that is why so
many men are afraid of them.
Mr Smith I believe was afraid of his daughter’s quietness though of
course he interpreted it in his own way.
He would, as Mr Powell depicts, sit on the skylight and bend over the
reclining girl, wondering what there was behind the lost gaze under the
darkened eyelids in the still eyes. He would look and look and then he
would say, whisper rather, it didn’t take much for his voice to drop to
a mere breath—he would declare, transferring his faded stare to the
horizon, that he would never rest till he had “got her away from that
man.”
“You don’t know what you are saying, papa.”
She would try not to show her weariness, the nervous strain of these two
men’s antagonism around her person which was the cause of her languid
attitudes. For as a matter of fact the sea agreed with her.
As likely as not Anthony would be walking on the other side of the deck.
The strain was making him restless. He couldn’t sit still anywhere.
He had tried shutting himself up in his cabin; but that was no good. He
would jump up to rush on deck and tramp, tramp up and down that poop
till he felt ready to drop, without being able to wear down the
agitation of his soul, generous indeed, but weighted by its envelope of
blood and muscle and bone; handicapped by the brain creating precise
images and everlastingly speculating, speculating—looking out for
signs, watching for symptoms.
And Mr Smith with a slight backward jerk of his small head at the
footsteps on the other side of the skylight would insist in his awful,
hopelessly gentle voice that he knew very well what he was saying.
Hadn’t she given herself to that man while he was locked up.
“Helpless, in jail, with no one to think of, nothing to look forward to,
but my daughter. And then when they let me out at last I find her
gone—for it amounts to this. Sold. Because you’ve sold yourself; you
know you have.”
With his round unmoved face, a lot of fine white hair waving in the
wind-eddies of the spanker, his glance levelled over the sea he seemed
to be addressing the universe across her reclining form. She would
protest sometimes.
“I wish you would not talk like this, papa. You are only tormenting me,
and tormenting yourself.”
“Yes, I am tormented enough,” he admitted meaningly. But it was not
talking about it that tormented him. It was thinking of it. And to sit
and look at it was worse for him than it possibly could have been for
her to go and give herself up, bad as that must have been.
“For of course you suffered. Don’t tell me you didn’t? You must have.”
She had renounced very soon all attempts at protests. It was useless.
It might have made things worse; and she did not want to quarrel with
her father, the only human being that really cared for her, absolutely,
evidently, completely—to the end. There was in him no pity, no
generosity, nothing whatever of these fine things—it was for _her_, for
her very own self such as it was, that this human being cared. This
certitude would have made her put up with worse torments. For, of
course, she too was being tormented. She felt also helpless, as if the
whole enterprise had been too much for her. This is the sort of
conviction which makes for quietude. She was becoming a fatalist.
What must have been rather appalling were the necessities of daily life,
the intercourse of current trifles. That naturally had to go on. They
wished good morning to each other, they sat down together to meals—and
I believe there would be a game of cards now and then in the evening,
especially at first. What frightened her most was the duplicity of her
father, at least what looked like duplicity, when she remembered his
persistent, insistent whispers on deck. However her father was a
taciturn person as far back as she could remember him best—on the
Parade. It was she who chattered, never troubling herself to discover
whether he was pleased or displeased. And now she couldn’t fathom his
thoughts. Neither did she chatter to him. Anthony with a forced
friendly smile as if frozen to his lips seemed only too thankful at not
being made to speak. Mr Smith sometimes forgot himself while studying
his hand so long that Flora had to recall him to himself by a murmured
“Papa—your lead.” Then he apologised by a faint as if inward
ejaculation “Beg your pardon, Captain.” Naturally she addressed Anthony
as Roderick and he addressed her as Flora. This was all the acting that
was necessary to judge from the wincing twitch of the old man’s mouth at
every uttered “Flora.” On hearing the rare “Rodericks” he had sometimes
a scornful grimace as faint and faded and colourless as his whole stiff
personality.
He would be the first to retire. He was not infirm. With him too the
life on board ship seemed to agree; but from a sense of duty, of
affection, or to placate his hidden fury, his daughter always
accompanied him to his state-room “to make him comfortable.” She
lighted his lamp, helped him into his dressing-gown or got him a book
from a bookcase fitted in there—but this last rarely, because Mr Smith
used to declare “I am no reader” with something like pride in his low
tones. Very often after kissing her good-night on the forehead he would
treat her to some such fretful remark: “It’s like being in jail—’pon my
word. I suppose that man is out there waiting for you. Head jailer!
Ough!”
She would smile vaguely; murmur a conciliatory “How absurd.” But once,
out of patience, she said quite sharply “Leave off. It hurts me. One
would think you hate me.”
“It isn’t you I hate,” he went on monotonously breathing at her. “No,
it isn’t you. But if I saw that you loved that man I think I could hate
you too.”
That word struck straight at her heart. “You wouldn’t be the first
then,” she muttered bitterly. But he was busy with his fixed idea and
uttered an awfully equable “But you don’t! Unfortunate girl!”
She looked at him steadily for a time then said:
“Good-night, papa.”
As a matter of fact Anthony very seldom waited for her alone at the
table with the scattered cards, glasses, water-jug, bottles and so on.
He took no more opportunities to be alone with her than was absolutely
necessary for the edification of Mrs Brown. Excellent, faithful woman;
the wife of his still more excellent and faithful steward. And Flora
wished all these excellent people, devoted to Anthony, she wished them
all further; and especially the nice, pleasant-spoken Mrs Brown with
her beady, mobile eyes and her “Yes certainly, ma’am,” which seemed to
her to have a mocking sound. And so this short trip—to the Western
Islands only—came to an end. It was so short that when young Powell
joined the _Ferndale_ by a memorable stroke of chance, no more than
seven months had elapsed since the—let us say the liberation of the
convict de Barral and his avatar into Mr Smith.
For the time the ship was loading in London Anthony took a cottage near
a little country station in Essex, to house Mr Smith and Mr Smith’s
daughter. It was altogether his idea. How far it was necessary for Mr
Smith to seek rural retreat I don’t know. Perhaps to some extent it was
a judicious arrangement. There were some obligations incumbent on the
liberated de Barral (in connection with reporting himself to the police
I imagine) which Mr Smith was not anxious to perform. De Barral had to
vanish; the theory was that de Barral had vanished, and it had to be
upheld. Poor Flora liked the country, even if the spot had nothing more
to recommend it than its retired character.
Now and then Captain Anthony ran down; but as the station was a real
wayside one, with no early morning trains up, he could never stay for
more than the afternoon. It appeared that he must sleep in town so as
to be early on board his ship. The weather was magnificent and whenever
the captain of the _Ferndale_ was seen on a brilliant afternoon coming
down the road Mr Smith would seize his stick and toddle off for a
solitary walk. But whether he would get tired or because it gave him
some satisfaction to see “that man” go away—or for some cunning reason
of his own, he was always back before the hour of Anthony’s departure.
On approaching the cottage he would see generally “that man” lying on
the grass in the orchard at some distance from his daughter seated in a
chair brought out of the cottage’s living-room. Invariably Mr Smith
made straight for them and as invariably had the feeling that his
approach was not disturbing a very intimate conversation. He sat with
them, through a silent hour or so, and then it would be time for Anthony
to go. Mr Smith, perhaps from discretion, would casually vanish a
minute or so before, and then watch through the diamond panes of an
upstairs room “that man” take a lingering look outside the gate at the
invisible Flora, lift his hat, like a caller, and go off down the road.
Then only Mr Smith would join his daughter again.
These were the bad moments for her. Not always, of course, but
frequently. It was nothing extraordinary to hear Mr Smith begin gently
with some observation like this:
“That man is getting tired of you.”
He would never pronounce Anthony’s name. It was always “that man.”
Generally she would remain mute with wide open eyes gazing at nothing
between the gnarled fruit trees. Once, however, she got up and walked
into the cottage. Mr Smith followed her carrying the chair. He banged
it down resolutely and in that smooth inexpressive tone so many ears
used to bend eagerly to catch when it came from the Great de Barral he
said:
“Let’s get away.”
She had the strength of mind not to spin round. On the contrary she
went on to a shabby bit of a mirror on the wall. In the greenish glass
her own face looked far off like the livid face of a drowned corpse at
the bottom of a pool. She laughed faintly.
“I tell you that man’s getting—”
“Papa,” she interrupted him. “I have no illusions as to myself. It has
happened to me before but—”
Her voice failing her suddenly her father struck in with quite an
unwonted animation. “Let’s make a rush for it, then.”
Having mastered both her fright and her bitterness, she turned round,
sat down and allowed her astonishment to be seen. Mr Smith sat down
too, his knees together and bent at right angles, his thin legs parallel
to each other and his hands resting on the arms of the wooden armchair.
His hair had grown long, his head was set stiffly, there was something
fatuously venerable in his aspect.
“You can’t care for him. Don’t tell me. I understand your motive. And
I have called you an unfortunate girl. You are that as much as if you
had gone on the streets. Yes. Don’t interrupt me, Flora. I was
everlastingly being interrupted at the trial and I can’t stand it any
more. I won’t be interrupted by my own child. And when I think that it
is on the very day before they let me out that you....”
He had wormed this fact out of her by that time because Flora had got
tired of evading the question. He had been very much struck and
distressed. Was that the trust she had in him? Was that a proof of
confidence and love? The very day before! Never given him even half a
chance. It was as at the trial. They never gave him a chance. They
would not give him time. And there was his own daughter acting exactly
as his bitterest enemies had done. Not giving him time!
The monotony of that subdued voice nearly lulled her dismay to sleep.
She listened to the unavoidable things he was saying.
“But what induced that man to marry you? Of course he’s a gentleman.
One can see that. And that makes it worse. Gentlemen don’t understand
anything about city affairs—finance. Why!—the people who started the
cry after me were a firm of gentlemen. The counsel, the judge—all
gentlemen—quite out of it! No notion of.... And then he’s a sailor
too. Just a skipper—”
“My grandfather was nothing else,” she interrupted. And he made an
angular gesture of impatience.
“Yes. But what does a silly sailor know of business? Nothing. No
conception. He can have no idea of what it means to be the daughter of
Mr de Barral—even after his enemies had smashed him. What on earth
induced him—”
She made a movement because the level voice was getting on her nerves.
And he paused, but only to go on again in the same tone with the remark:
“Of course you are pretty. And that’s why you are lost—like many other
poor girls. Unfortunate is the word for you.”
She said: “It may be. Perhaps it is the right word; but listen, papa.
I mean to be honest.”
He began to exhale more speeches.
“Just the sort of man to get tired and then leave you and go off with
his beastly ship. And anyway you can never be happy with him. Look at
his face. I want to save you. You see I was not perhaps a very good
husband to your poor mother. She would have done better to have left me
long before she died. I have been thinking it all over. I won’t have
you unhappy.”
He ran his eyes over her with an attention which was surprisingly
noticeable. Then said, “H’m! Yes. Let’s clear out before it is too
late. Quietly, you and I.”
She said as if inspired and with that calmness which despair often
gives: “There is no money to go away with, papa.”
He rose up straightening himself as though he were a hinged figure. She
said decisively:
“And of course you wouldn’t think of deserting me, papa?”
“Of course not,” sounded his subdued tone. And he left her, gliding
away with his walk which Mr Powell described to me as being as level
and wary as his voice. He walked as if he were carrying a glass full of
water on his head.
Flora naturally said nothing to Anthony of that edifying conversation.
His generosity might have taken alarm at it and she did not want to be
left behind to manage her father alone. And moreover she was too
honest. She would be honest at whatever cost. She would not be the
first to speak. Never. And the thought came into her head: “I am
indeed an unfortunate creature!”
It was by the merest coincidence that Anthony coming for the afternoon
two days later had a talk with Mr Smith in the orchard. Flora for some
reason or other had left them for a moment; and Anthony took that
opportunity to be frank with Mr Smith. He said: “It seems to me, sir,
that you think Flora has not done very well for herself. Well, as to
that I can’t say anything. All I want you to know is that I have tried
to do the right thing.” And then he explained that he had willed
everything he was possessed of to her. “She didn’t tell you, I
suppose?”
Mr Smith shook his head slightly. And Anthony, trying to be friendly,
was just saying that he proposed to keep the ship away from home for at
least two years: “I think, sir, that from every point of view it would
be best,” when Flora came back and the conversation, cut short in that
direction, languished and died. Later in the evening, after Anthony had
been gone for hours, on the point of separating for the night, Mr Smith
remarked suddenly to his daughter after a long period of brooding:
“A will is nothing. One tears it up. One makes another.” Then after
reflecting for a minute he added unemotionally:
“One tells lies about it.”
Flora, patient, steeled against every hurt and every disgust to the
point of wondering at herself, said: “You push your dislike of—of—
Roderick too far, papa. You have no regard for me. You hurt me.”
He, as ever inexpressive to the point of terrifying her sometimes by the
contrast of his placidity and his words, turned away from her a pair of
faded eyes.
“I wonder how far _your_ dislike goes,” he began. “His very name sticks
in your throat. I’ve noticed it. It hurts me. What do you think of
that? You might remember that you are not the only person that’s hurt
by your folly, by your hastiness, by your recklessness.” He brought
back his eyes to her face. “And the very day before they were going to
let me out.” His feeble voice failed him altogether, the narrow
compressed lips only trembling for a time before he added with that
extraordinary equanimity of tone, “I call it sinful.”
Flora made no answer. She judged it simpler, kinder and certainly safer
to let him talk himself out. This, Mr Smith, being naturally taciturn,
never took very long to do. And we must not imagine that this sort of
thing went on all the time. She had a few good days in that cottage.
The absence of Anthony was a relief and his visits were pleasurable.
She was quieter. He was quieter too. She was almost sorry when the
time to join the ship arrived. It was a moment of anguish, of
excitement; they arrived at the dock in the evening and Flora after
“making her father comfortable” according to established usage lingered
in the state-room long enough to notice that he was surprised. She
caught his pale eyes observing her quite stonily. Then she went out
after a cheery good-night.
Contrary to her hopes she found Anthony yet in the saloon. Sitting in
his armchair at the head of the table he was picking up some business
papers which he put hastily in his breast-pocket and got up. He asked
her if her day, travelling up to town and then doing some shopping, had
tired her. She shook her head. Then he wanted to know in a
half-jocular way how she felt about going away, and for a long voyage
this time.
“Does it matter how I feel?” she asked in a tone that cast a gloom over
his face. He answered with repressed violence which she did not expect:
“No, it does not matter, because I cannot go without you. I’ve told
you.... You know it. You don’t think I could.”
“I assure you I haven’t the slightest wish to evade my obligations,” she
said steadily. “Even if I could. Even if I dared, even if I had to die
for it!”
He looked thunderstruck. They stood facing each other at the end of the
saloon. Anthony stuttered. “Oh no. You won’t die. You don’t mean it.
You have taken kindly to the sea.”
She laughed, but she felt angry.
“No, I don’t mean it. I tell you I don’t mean to evade my obligations.
I shall live on ... feeling a little crushed, nevertheless.”
“Crushed!” he repeated. “What’s crushing you?”
“Your magnanimity,” she said sharply. But her voice was softened after
a time. “Yet I don’t know. There is a perfection in it—do you
understand me, Roderick?—which makes it almost possible to bear.”
He sighed, looked away, and remarked that it was time to put out the
lamp in the saloon. The permission was only till ten o’clock.
“But you needn’t mind that so much in your cabin. Just see that the
curtains of the ports are drawn close and that’s all. The steward might
have forgotten to do it. He lighted your reading lamp in there before
he went ashore for a last evening with his wife. I don’t know if it was
wise to get rid of Mrs Brown. You will have to look after yourself,
Flora.”
He was quite anxious; but Flora as a matter of fact congratulated
herself on the absence of Mrs Brown. No sooner had she closed the door
of her state-room than she murmured fervently, “Yes! Thank goodness,
she is gone.” There would be no gentle knock, followed by her
appearance with her equivocal stare and the intolerable: “Can I do
anything for you, ma’am?” which poor Flora had learned to fear and hate
more than any voice or any words on board that ship—her only refuge
from the world which had no use for her, for her imperfections and for
her troubles.
Mrs Brown had been very much vexed at her dismissal. The Browns were a
childless couple and the arrangement had suited them perfectly. Their
resentment was very bitter. Mrs Brown had to remain ashore alone with
her rage, but the steward was nursing his on board. Poor Flora had no
greater enemy, the aggrieved mate had no greater sympathiser. And Mrs
Brown, with a woman’s quick power of observation and inference (the
putting of two and two together) had come to a certain conclusion which
she had imparted to her husband before leaving the ship. The morose
steward permitted himself once to make an allusion to it in Powell’s
hearing. It was in the officers’ mess-room at the end of a meal while
he lingered after putting a fruit pie on the table. He and the chief
mate started a dialogue about the alarming change in the captain, the
sallow steward looking down with a sinister frown, Franklin rolling
upwards his eyes, sentimental in a red face. Young Powell had heard a
lot of that sort of thing by that time. It was growing monotonous; it
had always sounded to him a little absurd. He struck in impatiently
with the remark that such lamentations over a man merely because he had
taken a wife seemed to him like lunacy.
Franklin muttered, “Depends on what the wife is up to.” The steward
leaning against the bulkhead near the door glowered at Powell, that
newcomer, that ignoramus, that stranger without right or privileges. He
snarled:
“Wife! Call her a wife, do you?”
“What the devil do you mean by this?” exclaimed young Powell.
“I know what I know. My old woman has not been six months on board for
nothing. You had better ask her when we get back.”
And meeting sullenly the withering stare of Mr Powell the steward
retreated backwards.
Our young friend turned at once upon the mate. “And you let that
confounded bottle-washer talk like this before you, Mr Franklin. Well,
I am astonished.”
“Oh, it isn’t what you think. It isn’t what you think.” Mr Franklin
looked more apoplectic than ever. “If it comes to that I _could_
astonish you. But it’s no use. I myself can hardly.... You couldn’t
understand. I hope you won’t try to make mischief. There was a time,
young fellow, when I would have dared any man—any man, you hear?—to
make mischief between me and Captain Anthony. But not now. Not now.
There’s a change! Not in me though....”
Young Powell rejected with indignation any suggestion of making
mischief. “Who do you take me for?” he cried. “Only you had better
tell that steward to be careful what he says before me or I’ll spoil his
good looks for him for a month and will leave him to explain the why of
it to the captain the best way he can.”
This speech established Powell as a champion of Mrs Anthony. Nothing
more bearing on the question was ever said before him. He did not care
for the steward’s black looks; Franklin, never conversational even at
the best of times and avoiding now the only topic near his heart,
addressed him only on matters of duty. And for that, too, Powell cared
very little. The woes of the apoplectic mate had begun to bore him long
before. Yet he felt lonely a bit at times. Therefore the little
intercourse with Mrs Anthony either in one dog-watch or the other was
something to be looked forward to. The captain did not mind it. That
was evident from his manner. One night he inquired (they were then
alone on the poop) what they had been talking about that evening?
Powell had to confess that it was about the ship. Mrs Anthony had been
asking him questions.
“Takes interest—eh?” jerked out the captain moving rapidly up and down
the weather-side of the poop.
“Yes, sir. Mrs Anthony seems to get hold wonderfully of what one’s
telling her.”
“Sailor’s granddaughter. One of the old school. Old sea-dog of the
best kind, I believe,” ejaculated the captain, swinging past his
motionless second officer and leaving the words behind him like a trail
of sparks succeeded by a perfect conversational darkness, because, for
the next two hours till he left the deck, he didn’t open his lips again.
On another occasion ... we mustn’t forget that the ship had crossed the
line and was adding up south latitude every day by then—on another
occasion, about seven in the evening, Powell on duty, heard his name
uttered softly in the companion. The captain was on the stairs,
thin-faced, his eyes sunk, on his arm a Shetland wool wrap.
“Mr Powell—here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give this to Mrs Anthony. Evenings are getting chilly.”
And the haggard face sank out of sight. Mrs Anthony was surprised on
seeing the shawl.
“The captain wants you to put this on,” explained young Powell, and as
she raised herself in her seat he dropped it on her shoulders. She
wrapped herself up closely.
“Where was the captain?” she asked.
“He was in the companion. Called me on purpose,” said Powell, and then
retreated discreetly, because she looked as though she didn’t want to
talk any more that evening. Mr Smith—the old gentleman—was as usual
sitting on the skylight near her head, brooding over the long chair but
by no means inimical, as far as his unreadable face went, to those
conversations of the two youngest people on board. In fact they seemed
to give him some pleasure. Now and then he would raise his faded china
eyes to the animated face of Mr Powell thoughtfully. When the young
sailor was by, the old man became less rigid, and when his daughter, on
rare occasions, smiled at some artless tale of Mr Powell, the
inexpressive face of Mr Smith reflected dimly that flash of evanescent
mirth. For Mr Powell had come now to entertain his captain’s wife with
anecdotes from the not very distant past when he was a boy, on board
various ships,—funny things do happen on board ship. Flora was quite
surprised at times to find herself amused. She was even heard to laugh
twice in the course of a month. It was not a loud sound but it was
startling enough at the after-end of the _Ferndale_ where low tones or
silence were the rule. The second time this happened the captain
himself must have been startled somewhere down below; because he emerged
from the depths of his unobtrusive existence and began his tramping on
the opposite side of the poop.
Almost immediately he called his young second officer over to him. This
was not done in displeasure. The glance he fastened on Mr Powell
conveyed a sort of approving wonder. He engaged him in desultory
conversation as if for the only purpose of keeping a man who could
provoke such a sound, near his person. Mr Powell felt himself liked.
He felt it. Liked by that haggard, restless man who threw at him
disconnected phrases to which his answers were, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,”
“Oh, certainly,” “I suppose so, sir,”—and might have been clearly
anything else for all the other cared.
It was then, Mr Powell told me, that he discovered in himself an
already old-established liking for Captain Anthony. He also felt sorry
for him without being able to discover the origins of that sympathy of
which he had become so suddenly aware.
Meantime Mr Smith, bending forward stiffly as though he had a hinged
back, was speaking to his daughter.
She was a child no longer. He wanted to know if she believed in—in
hell. In eternal punishment?
His peculiar voice, as if filtered through cotton-wool was inaudible on
the other side of the deck. Poor Flora, taken very much unawares, made
an inarticulate murmur, shook her head vaguely, and glanced in the
direction of the pacing Anthony who was not looking her way. It was no
use glancing in that direction. Of young Powell, leaning against the
mizzen-mast and facing his captain she could only see the shoulder and
part of a blue serge back.
And the unworried, unaccented voice of her father went on tormenting
her.
“You see, you must understand. When I came out of jail it was with joy.
That is, my soul was fairly torn in two—but anyway to see you happy—I
had made up my mind to that. Once I could be sure that you were happy
then of course I would have had no reason to care for life—strictly
speaking—which is all right for an old man; though naturally—no reason
to wish for death either. But this sort of life! What sense, what
meaning, what value has it either for you or for me? It’s just sitting
down to look at the death, that’s coming, coming. What else is it? I
don’t know how you can put up with that. I don’t think you can stand it
for long. Some day you will jump overboard.”
Captain Anthony had stopped for a moment staring ahead from the break of
the poop, and poor Flora sent at his back a look of despairing appeal
which would have moved a heart of stone. But as though she had done
nothing he did not stir in the least. She got out of the long chair and
went towards the companion. Her father followed carrying a few small
objects, a handbag, her handkerchief, a book. They went down together.
It was only then that Captain Anthony turned, looked at the place they
had vacated and resumed his tramping, but not his desultory conversation
with his second officer. His nervous exasperation had grown so much
that now very often he used to lose control of his voice. If he did not
watch himself it would suddenly die in his throat. He had to make sure
before he ventured on the simplest saying, an order, a remark on the
wind, a simple good morning. That’s why his utterance was abrupt, his
answers to people startlingly brusque and often not forthcoming at all.
It happens to the most resolute of men to find himself at grips not only
with unknown forces, but with a well-known force the real might of which
he had not understood. Anthony had discovered that he was not the proud
master but the chafing captive of his generosity. It rose in front of
him like a wall which his respect for himself forbade him to scale. He
said to himself: “Yes, I was a fool—but she has trusted me!” Trusted!
A terrible word to any man somewhat exceptional in a world in which
success has never been found in renunciation and good faith. And it
must also be said, in order not to make Anthony more stupidly sublime
than he was, that the behaviour of Flora kept him at a distance. The
girl was afraid to add to the exasperation of her father. It was her
unhappy lot to be made more wretched by the only affection which she
could not suspect. She could not be angry with it, however, and out of
deference for that exaggerated sentiment she hardly dared to look
otherwise than by stealth at the man whose masterful compassion had
carried her off. And quite unable to understand the extent of Anthony’s
delicacy, she said to herself that “he didn’t care.” He probably was
beginning at bottom to detest her—like the governess, like the maiden
lady, like the German woman, like Mrs Fyne, like Mr Fyne—only he was
extraordinary, he was generous. At the same time she had moments of
irritation. He was violent, headstrong—perhaps stupid. Well, he had
had his way.
A man who has had his way is seldom happy, for generally he finds that
the way does not lead very far on this earth of desires which can never
be fully satisfied. Anthony had entered with extreme precipitation the
enchanted gardens of Armida saying to himself “At last!” As to Armida,
herself, he was not going to offer her any violence. But now he had
discovered that all the enchantment was in Armida herself, in Armida’s
smiles. This Armida did not smile. She existed, unapproachable, behind
the blank wall of his renunciation. His force, fit for action,
experienced the impatience, the indignation, almost the despair of his
vitality arrested, bound, stilled, progressively worn down, frittered
away by Time; by that force blind and insensible, which seems inert and
yet uses one’s life up by its imperceptible action, dropping minute
after minute on one’s living heart like drops of water wearing down a
stone.
He upbraided himself. What else could he have expected? He had rushed
in like a ruffian; he had dragged the poor defenceless thing by the hair
of her head, as it were, on board that ship. It was really atrocious.
Nothing assured him that his person could be attractive to this or any
other woman. And his proceedings were enough in themselves to make
anyone odious. He must have been bereft of his senses. She must
fatally detest and fear him. Nothing could make up for such brutality.
And yet somehow he resented this very attitude which seemed to him
completely justifiable. Surely he was not too monstrous (morally) to be
looked at frankly sometimes. But no! She wouldn’t. Well, perhaps,
some day.... Only he was not going ever to attempt to beg for
forgiveness. With the repulsion she felt for his person she would
certainly misunderstand the most guarded words, the most careful
advances. Never! Never!
It would occur to Anthony at the end of such meditations that death was
not an unfriendly visitor after all. No wonder then that even young
Powell, his faculties having been put on the alert, began to think that
there was something unusual about the man who had given him his chance
in life. Yes, decidedly, his captain was “strange.” There was
something wrong somewhere, he said to himself, never guessing that his
young and candid eyes were in the presence of a passion profound,
tyrannical and mortal, discovering its own existence, astounded at
feeling itself helpless and dismayed at finding itself incurable.
Powell had never before felt this mysterious uneasiness so strongly as
on that evening when it had been his good fortune to make Mrs Anthony
laugh a little by his artless prattle. Standing out of the way, he had
watched his captain walk the weather-side of the poop, he took full
cognizance of his liking for that inexplicably strange man and saw him
swerve towards the companion and go down below with sympathetic if
utterly uncomprehending eyes.
Shortly afterwards, Mr Smith came up alone and manifested a desire for
a little conversation. He, too, if not so mysterious as the captain,
was not very comprehensible to Mr Powell’s uninformed candour. He
often favoured thus the second officer. His talk alluded somewhat
enigmatically and often without visible connection to Mr Powell’s
friendliness towards himself and his daughter. “For I am well aware
that we have no friends on board this ship, my dear young man,” he would
add, “except yourself. Flora feels that too.”
And Mr Powell, flattered and embarrassed, could but emit a vague murmur
of protest. For the statement was true in a sense, though the fact was
in itself insignificant. The feelings of the ship’s company could not
possibly matter to the captain’s wife and to Mr Smith—her father. Why
the latter should so often allude to it was what surprised our Mr
Powell. This was by no means the first occasion. More like the
twentieth rather. And in his weak voice, with his monotonous
intonation, leaning over the rail and looking at the water the other
continued this conversation, or rather his remarks, remarks of such a
monstrous nature that Mr Powell had no option but to accept them for
gruesome jesting.
“For instance,” said Mr Smith, “that mate, Franklin, I believe he would
just as soon see us both overboard as not.”
“It’s not so bad as that,” laughed Mr Powell, feeling uncomfortable,
because his mind did not accommodate itself easily to exaggeration of
statement. “He isn’t a bad chap really,” he added, very conscious of
Mr Franklin’s offensive manner of which instances were not far to seek.
“He’s such a fool as to be jealous. He has been with the captain for
years. It’s not for me to say, perhaps, but I think the captain has
spoiled all that gang of old servants. They are like a lot of pet old
dogs. Wouldn’t let anybody come near him if they could help it. I’ve
never seen anything like it. And the second mate, I believe, was like
that too.”
“Well, he isn’t here, luckily. There would have been one more enemy,”
said Mr Smith. “There’s enough of them without him. And you being
here instead of him makes it much more pleasant for my daughter and
myself. One feels there may be a friend in need. For really, for a
woman all alone on board ship amongst a lot of unfriendly men....”
“But Mrs Anthony is not alone,” exclaimed Powell. “There’s you, and
there’s the....”
Mr Smith interrupted him.
“Nobody’s immortal. And there are times when one feels ashamed to live.
Such an evening as this for instance.”
It was a lovely evening; the colours of a splendid sunset had died out
and the breath of a warm breeze seemed to have smoothed out the sea.
Away to the south the sheet lightning was like the flashing of an
enormous lantern hidden under the horizon. In order to change the
conversation Mr Powell said:
“Anyway no one can charge you with being a Jonah, Mr Smith. We have
had a magnificent quick passage so far. The captain ought to be
pleased. And I suppose you are not sorry either.”
This diversion was not successful. Mr Smith emitted a sort of bitter
chuckle and said: “Jonah! That’s the fellow that was thrown overboard
by some sailors. It seems to me it’s very easy at sea to get rid of a
person one does not like. The sea does not give up its dead as the
earth does.”
“You forget the whale, sir,” said young Powell.
Mr Smith gave a start. “Eh? What whale? Oh! Jonah. I wasn’t
thinking of Jonah. I was thinking of this passage which seems so quick
to you. But only think what it is to me? It isn’t a life, going about
the sea like this. And, for instance, if one were to fall ill, there
isn’t a doctor to find out what’s the matter with one. It’s worrying.
It makes me anxious at times.”
“Is Mrs Anthony not feeling well?” asked Powell. But Mr Smith’s
remark was not meant for Mrs Anthony. She was well. He himself was
well. It was the captain’s health that did not seem quite satisfactory.
Had Mr Powell noticed his appearance?
Mr Powell didn’t know enough of the captain to judge. He couldn’t
tell. But he observed thoughtfully that Mr Franklin had been saying
the same thing. And Franklin had known the captain for years. The mate
was quite worried about it.
This intelligence startled Mr Smith considerably. “Does he think he is
in danger of dying?” he exclaimed with an animation quite extraordinary
for him, which horrified Mr Powell.
“Heavens! Die! No! Don’t you alarm yourself, sir. I’ve never heard a
word about danger from Mr Franklin.”
“Well, well,” sighed Mr Smith and left the poop for the saloon rather
abruptly.
As a matter of fact Mr Franklin had been on deck for some considerable
time. He had come to relieve young Powell; but seeing him engaged in
talk with the “enemy”—with one of the “enemies” at least—had kept at a
distance, which, the poop of the _Ferndale_ being over seventy feet
long, he had no difficulty in doing. Mr Powell saw him at the head of
the ladder leaning on his elbow, melancholy and silent. “Oh! Here you
are, sir.”
“Here I am. Here I’ve been ever since six o’clock. Didn’t want to
interrupt the pleasant conversation. If you like to put in half of your
watch below jawing with a dear friend, that’s not my affair. Funny
taste though.”
“He isn’t a bad chap,” said the impartial Powell.
The mate snorted angrily, tapping the deck with his foot; then: “Isn’t
he? Well, give him my love when you come together again for another
nice long yarn.”
“I say, Mr Franklin, I wonder the captain don’t take offence at your
manners.”
“The captain. I wish to goodness he would start a row with me. Then I
should know at least I am somebody on board. I’d welcome it, Mr
Powell. I’d rejoice. And dam’ me I would talk back too till I roused
him. He’s a shadow of himself. He walks about his ship like a ghost.
He’s fading away right before our eyes. But of course you don’t see.
You don’t care a hang. Why should you?”
Mr Powell did not wait for more. He went down on the main deck.
Without taking the mate’s jeremiads seriously he put them beside the
words of Mr Smith. He had grown already attached to Captain Anthony.
There was something not only attractive but compelling in the man. Only
it is very difficult for youth to believe in the menace of death. Not
in the fact itself, but in its proximity to a breathing, moving,
talking, superior human being, showing no sign of disease. And Mr
Powell thought that this talk was all nonsense. But his curiosity was
awakened. There was something, and at any time some circumstance might
occur.... No, he would never find out.... There was nothing to find
out, most likely. Mr Powell went to his room where he tried to read a
book he had already read a good many times. Presently a bell rang for
the officers’ supper.