“It was the quickest dodge for getting him away from that tray,” he
explained. “My throat was so dry that I didn’t know if I could shout
loud enough. And this was not a case for shouting, either.”
The boatswain, sleepy and disgusted, arriving on the poop, found the
second officer doubled up over the end of the skylight in a pose which
might have been that of severe pain. And his voice was so changed that
the man, though naturally vexed at being turned out, made no comment on
the plea of sudden indisposition which young Powell put forward.
The rapidity with which the sick man got off the poop must have
astonished the boatswain. But Powell, at the moment he opened the door
leading into the saloon from the quarter-deck, had managed to control
his agitation. He entered swiftly but without noise and found himself
in the dark part of the saloon, the strong sheen of the lamp on the
other side of the curtains visible only above the rod on which they ran.
The door of Mr Smith’s cabin was in that dark part. He passed by it
assuring himself by a quick side glance that it was imperfectly closed.
“Yes,” he said to me. “The old man must have been watching through the
crack. Of that I am certain; but it was not for me that he was watching
and listening. Horrible! Surely he must have been startled to hear and
see somebody he did not expect. He could not possibly guess why I was
coming in, but I suppose he must have been concerned.” Concerned
indeed! He must have been thunderstruck, appalled.
Powell’s only distinct aim was to remove the suspected tumbler. He had
no other plan, no other intention, no other thought. Do away with it in
some manner. Snatch it up and run out with it.
You know that complete mastery of one fixed idea, not a reasonable but
an emotional mastery, a sort of concentrated exaltation. Under its
empire men rush blindly through fire and water and opposing violence,
and nothing can stop them—unless, sometimes, a grain of sand. For his
blind purpose (and clearly the thought of Mrs Anthony was at the bottom
of it) Mr Powell had plenty of time. What checked him at the crucial
moment was the familiar, harmless aspect of common things, the steady
light, the open book on the table, the solitude, the peace, the
home-like effect of the place. He held the glass in his hand; all he
had to do was to vanish back beyond the curtains, flee with it
noiselessly into the night on deck, fling it unseen overboard. A minute
or less. And then all that would have happened would have been the
wonder at the utter disappearance of a glass tumbler, a ridiculous
riddle in pantry-affairs beyond the wit of anyone on board to solve.
The grain of sand against which Powell stumbled in his headlong career
was a moment of incredulity as to the truth of his own conviction
because it had failed to affect the safe aspect of familiar things. He
doubted his eyes too. He must have dreamt it all! “I am dreaming now,”
he said to himself. And very likely for a few seconds he must have
looked like a man in a trance or profoundly asleep on his feet, and with
a glass of brandy-and-water in his hand.
What woke him up and, at the same time, fixed his feet immovably to the
spot, was a voice asking him what he was doing there in tones of
thunder. Or so it sounded to his ears. Anthony, opening the door of
his stern-cabin had naturally exclaimed. What else could you expect?
And the exclamation must have been fairly loud if you consider the
nature of the sight which met his eye. There, before him, stood his
second officer, a seemingly decent, well-bred young man, who, being on
duty, had left the deck and had sneaked into the saloon, apparently for
the inexpressibly mean purpose of drinking up what was left of his
captain’s brandy-and-water. There he was, caught absolutely with the
glass in his hand.
But the very monstrosity of appearances silenced Anthony after the first
exclamation; and young Powell felt himself pierced through and through
by the overshadowed glance of his captain. Anthony advanced quietly.
The first impulse of Mr Powell, when discovered, had been to dash the
glass on the deck. He was in a sort of panic. But deep down within him
his wits were working, and the idea that if he did that he could prove
nothing and that the story he had to tell was completely incredible,
restrained him. The captain came forward slowly. With his eyes now
close to his, Powell, spell-bound, numb all over, managed to lift one
finger to the deck above mumbling the explanatory words, “Boatswain on
the poop.”
The captain moved his head slightly as much as to say, “That’s all
right”—and this was all. Powell had no voice, no strength. The air
was unbreathable, thick, sticky, odious, like hot jelly in which all
movements became difficult. He raised the glass a little with immense
difficulty and moved his trammelled lips sufficiently to form the words:
“Doctored.”
Anthony glanced at it for an instant, only for an instant, and again
fastened his eyes on the face of his second mate. Powell added a
fervent “I believe” and put the glass down on the tray. The captain’s
glance followed the movement and returned sternly to his face. The
young man pointed a finger once more upwards and squeezed out of his
iron-bound throat six consecutive words of further explanation.
“Through the skylight. The white pane.”
The captain raised his eyebrows very much at this, while young Powell,
ashamed but desperate, nodded insistently several times. He meant to
say that: Yes. Yes. He had done that thing. He had been spying....
The captain’s gaze became thoughtful. And, now the confession was over,
the iron-bound feeling of Powell’s throat passed away giving place to a
general anxiety which from his breast seemed to extend to all the limbs
and organs of his body. His legs trembled a little, his vision was
confused, his mind became blankly expectant. But he was alert enough.
At a movement of Anthony he screamed in a strangled whisper.
“Don’t, sir! Don’t touch it.”
The captain pushed aside Powell’s extended arm, took up the glass and
raised it slowly against the lamplight. The liquid, of very pale amber
colour, was clear, and by a glance the captain seemed to call Powell’s
attention to the fact. Powell tried to pronounce the word, “dissolved”
but he only thought of it with great energy which however failed to move
his lips. Only when Anthony had put down the glass and turned to him he
recovered such a complete command of his voice that he could keep it
down to a hurried, forcible whisper—a whisper that shook him.
“Doctored! I swear it! I have seen. Doctored! I have seen.”
Not a feature of the captain’s face moved. His was a calm to take one’s
breath away. It did so to young Powell. Then for the first time
Anthony made himself heard to the point.
“You did!... Who was it?”
And Powell gasped freely at last. “A hand,” he whispered fearfully, “a
hand and the arm—only the arm—like that.”
He advanced his own, slow, stealthy, tremulous in faithful reproduction,
the tips of two fingers and the thumb pressed together and hovering
above the glass for an instant—then the swift jerk back, after the
deed.
“Like that,” he repeated growing excited. “From behind this.” He
grasped the curtain and glaring at the silent Anthony flung it back
disclosing the forepart of the saloon. There was no one to be seen.
Powell had not expected to see anybody. “But,” he said to me, “I knew
very well there was an ear listening and an eye glued to the crack of a
cabin door. Awful thought. And that door was in that part of the
saloon remaining in the shadow of the other half of the curtain. I
pointed at it and I suppose that old man inside saw me pointing. The
captain had a wonderful self-command. You couldn’t have guessed
anything from his face. Well, it was perhaps more thoughtful than
usual. And indeed this was something to think about. But I couldn’t
think steadily. My brain would give a sort of jerk and then go dead
again. I had lost all notion of time, and I might have been looking at
the captain for days and months for all I knew before I heard him
whisper to me fiercely: ‘Not a word!’ This jerked me out of that trance
I was in and I said ‘No! No! I didn’t mean even you.’”
“I wanted to explain my conduct, my intentions, but I read in his eyes
that he understood me and I was only too glad to leave off. And there
we were looking at each other, dumb, brought up short by the question
‘What next?’
“I thought Captain Anthony was a man of iron till I saw him suddenly
fling his head to the right and to the left fiercely, like a wild animal
at bay not knowing which way to break out....”
“Truly,” commented Marlow, “brought to bay was not a bad comparison; a
better one than Mr Powell was aware of. At that moment the appearance
of Flora could not but bring the tension to the breaking point. She
came out in all innocence but not without vague dread. Anthony’s
exclamation on first seeing Powell had reached her in her cabin, where,
it seems, she was brushing her hair. She had heard the very words.
‘What are you doing here?’ And the unwonted loudness of the voice—his
voice—breaking the habitual stillness of that hour would have startled
a person having much less reason to be constantly apprehensive, than the
captive of Anthony’s masterful generosity. She had no means to guess to
whom the question was addressed and it echoed in her heart, as Anthony’s
voice always did. Followed complete silence. She waited, anxious,
expectant, till she could stand the strain no longer, and with the weary
mental appeal of the overburdened. ‘My God! What is it now?’ she
opened the door of her room and looked into the saloon. Her first
glance fell on Powell. For a moment, seeing only the second officer
with Anthony, she felt relieved and made as if to draw back; but her
sharpened perception detected something suspicious in their attitudes,
and she came forward slowly.
“I was the first to see Mrs Anthony,” related Powell, “because I was
facing aft. The captain, noticing my eyes, looked quickly over his
shoulder and at once put his finger to his lips to caution me. As if I
were likely to let out anything before her! Mrs Anthony had on a
dressing-gown of some grey stuff with red facings and a thick red cord
round her waist. Her hair was down. She looked a child; a pale-faced
child with big blue eyes and a red mouth a little open showing a glimmer
of white teeth. The light fell strongly on her as she came up to the
end of the table. A strange child though; she hardly affected one like
a child, I remember. Do you know,” exclaimed Mr Powell, who clearly
must have been, like many seamen, an industrious reader, “do you know
what she looked like to me with those big eyes and something appealing
in her whole expression. She looked like a forsaken elf. Captain
Anthony had moved towards her to keep her away from my end of the table,
where the tray was. I had never seen them so near to each other before,
and it made a great contrast. It was wonderful, for, with his beard cut
to a point, his swarthy, sunburnt complexion, thin nose and his lean
head there was something African, something Moorish in Captain Anthony.
His neck was bare; he had taken off his coat and collar and had drawn on
his sleeping jacket in the time that he had been absent from the saloon.
I seem to see him now. Mrs Anthony too. She looked from him to me—I
suppose I looked guilty or frightened—and from me to him, trying to
guess what there was between us two. Then she burst out with a ‘What
has happened?’ which seemed addressed to me. I mumbled ‘Nothing!
Nothing, ma’am,’ which she very likely did not hear.
“You must not think that all this had lasted a long time. She had taken
fright at our behaviour and turned to the captain pitifully. ‘What is
it you are concealing from me?’ A straight question—eh? I don’t know
what answer the captain would have made. Before he could even raise his
eyes to her she cried out ‘Ah! Here’s papa!’ in a sharp tone of relief,
but directly afterwards she looked to me as if she were holding her
breath with apprehension. I was so interested in her that, how shall I
say it, her exclamation made no connection in my brain at first. I also
noticed that she had sidled up a little nearer to Captain Anthony,
before it occurred to me to turn my head. I can tell you my neck
stiffened in the twisted position from the shock of actually seeing that
old man! He had dared! I suppose you think I ought to have looked upon
him as mad. But I couldn’t. It would have been certainly easier. But
I could _not_. You should have seen him. First of all he was
completely dressed with his very cap still on his head just as when he
left me on deck two hours before, saying in his soft voice: ‘The moment
has come to go to bed’—while he meant to go and do that thing and hide
in his dark cabin, and watch the stuff do its work. A cold shudder ran
down my back. He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his arms
were pressed close to his thin, upright body, and he shuffled across the
cabin with his short steps. There was a red patch on each of his old
soft cheeks as if somebody had been pinching them. He drooped his head
a little, and looked with a sort of underhand expectation at the captain
and Mrs Anthony standing close together at the other end of the saloon.
The calculating horrible impudence of it! His daughter was there; and
I am certain he had seen the captain putting his finger on his lips to
warn me. And then he had coolly come out! He passed my imagination, I
assure you. After that one shiver his presence killed every faculty in
me—wonder, horror, indignation. I felt nothing in particular just as
if he were still the old gentleman who used to talk to me familiarly
every day on deck. Would you believe it?”
“Mr Powell challenged my powers of wonder at this internal phenomenon,”
went on Marlow after a slight pause. “But even if they had not been
fully engaged, together with all my powers of attention in following the
facts of the case, I would not have been astonished by his statements
about himself. Taking into consideration his youth they were by no
means incredible; or, at any rate, they were the least incredible part
of the whole. They were also the least interesting part. The interest
was elsewhere, and there of course all he could do was to look at the
surface. The inwardness of what was passing before his eyes was hidden
from him, who had looked on, more impenetrably than from me who at a
distance of years was listening to his words. That what presently
happened at this crisis in Flora de Barral’s fate was beyond his power
of comment, seemed in a sense natural. And his own presence on the
scene was so strangely motived that it was left for me to marvel alone
at this young man, a completely chance-comer, having brought it about on
that night.”
Each situation created either by folly or wisdom has its psychological
moment. The behaviour of young Powell with its mixture of boyish
impulses combined with instinctive prudence, had not created it—I can’t
say that—but had discovered it to the very people involved. What would
have happened if he had made a noise about his discovery? But he
didn’t. His head was full of Mrs Anthony and he behaved with a
discretion beyond his years. Some nice children often do; and surely it
is not from reflection. They have their own inspirations. Young
Powell’s inspiration consisted in being “enthusiastic” about Mrs
Anthony. ‘Enthusiastic’ is really good. And he was amongst them like a
child, sensitive, impressionable, plastic—but unable to find for
himself any sort of comment.
I don’t know how much mine may be worth; but I believe that just then
the tension of the false situation was at its highest. Of all the forms
offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realise it
fully, which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of
mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist
the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the—
the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are
committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps
sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a
tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form
of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last,
which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a
straight if despairing decision.
Powell on taking his eyes off the old gentleman noticed Captain Anthony,
swarthy as an African, by the side of Flora whiter than the lilies, take
his handkerchief out and wipe off his forehead the sweat of anguish—
like a man who is overcome. “And no wonder,” commented Mr Powell here.
Then the captain said, “Hadn’t you better go back to your room.” This
was to Mrs Anthony. He tried to smile at her. “Why do you look
startled? This night is like any other night.”
“Which,” Powell again commented to me earnestly, “was a lie.... No
wonder he sweated.” You see from this the value of Powell’s comments.
Mrs Anthony then said: “Why are you sending me away?”
“Why! That you should go to sleep. That you should rest.” And Captain
Anthony frowned. Then sharply, “You stay here, Mr Powell. I shall
want you presently.”
As a matter of fact Powell had not moved. Flora did not mind his
presence. He himself had the feeling of being of no account to those
three people. He was looking at Mrs Anthony as unabashed as the
proverbial cat looking at a king. Mrs Anthony glanced at him. She did
not move, gripped by an inexplicable premonition. She had arrived at
the very limit of her endurance as the object of Anthony’s magnanimity;
she was the prey of an intuitive dread of she did not know what
mysterious influence; she felt herself being pushed back into that
solitude, that moral loneliness, which had made all her life
intolerable. And then, in that close communion established again with
Anthony, she felt—as on that night in the garden—the force of his
personal fascination. The passive quietness with which she looked at
him gave her the appearance of a person bewitched—or, say, mesmerically
put to sleep—beyond any notion of her surroundings.
After telling Mr Powell not to go away the captain remained silent.
Suddenly Mrs Anthony pushed back her loose hair with a decisive gesture
of her arms and moved still nearer to him. “Here’s papa up yet,” she
said, but she did not look towards Mr Smith. “Why is it? And you? I
can’t go on like this, Roderick—between you two. Don’t.”
Anthony interrupted her as if something had untied his tongue.
“Oh yes. Here’s your father. And.... Why not. Perhaps it is just as
well you came out. Between us two? Is that it? I won’t pretend I
don’t understand. I am not blind. But I can’t fight any longer for
what I haven’t got. I don’t know what you imagine has happened.
Something has though. Only you needn’t be afraid. No shadow can touch
you—because I give up. I can’t say we had much talk about it, your
father and I, but, the long and the short of it is, that I must learn to
live without you—which I have told you was impossible. I was speaking
the truth. But I have done fighting, or waiting, or hoping. Yes. You
shall go.”
At this point Mr Powell who (he confessed to me) was listening with
uncomprehending awe, heard behind his back a triumphant chuckling sound.
It gave him the shudders, he said, to mention it now; but at the time,
except for another chill down the spine, it had not the power to destroy
his absorption in the scene before his eyes, and before his ears too,
because just then Captain Anthony raised his voice grimly. Perhaps he
too had heard the chuckle of the old man.
“Your father has found an argument which makes me pause, if it does not
convince me. No! I can’t answer it. I—I don’t want to answer it. I
simply surrender. He shall have his way with you—and with me. Only,”
he added in a gloomy lowered tone which struck Mr Powell as if a pedal
had been put down, “only it shall take a little time. I have never lied
to you. Never. I renounce not only my chance but my life. In a few
days, directly we get into port, the very moment we do, I, who have said
I could never let you go, I shall let you go.”
To the innocent beholder Anthony seemed at this point to become
physically exhausted. My view is that the utter falseness of his, I may
say, aspirations, the vanity of grasping the empty air, had come to him
with an overwhelming force, leaving him disarmed before the other’s mad
and sinister sincerity. As he had said himself he could not fight for
what he did not possess; he could not face such a thing as this for the
sake of his mere magnanimity. The normal alone can overcome the
abnormal. He could not even reproach that man over there. “I own
myself beaten,” he said in a firmer tone. “You are free. I let you off
since I must.”
Powell, the onlooker, affirms that at these incomprehensible words Mrs
Anthony stiffened into the very image of astonishment, with a frightened
stare and frozen lips. But next minute a cry came out from her heart,
not very loud but of a quality which made not only Captain Anthony (he
was not looking at her), not only him but also the more distant (and
equally unprepared) young man, catch their breath: “But I don’t want to
be let off,” she cried.
She was so still that one asked oneself whether the cry had come from
her. The restless shuffle behind Powell’s back stopped short, the
intermittent shadowy chuckling ceased too. Young Powell, glancing
round, saw Mr Smith raise his head with his faded eyes very still,
puckered at the corners, like a man perceiving something coming at him
from a great distance. And Mrs Anthony’s voice reached Powell’s ears,
entreating and indignant.
“You can’t cast me off like this, Roderick. I won’t go away from you.
I won’t—”
Powell turned about and discovered then that what Mr Smith was
puckering his eyes at, was the sight of his daughter clinging round
Captain Anthony’s neck—a sight not in itself improper, but which had
the power to move young Powell with a bashfully profound emotion. It
was different from his emotion while spying at the revelations of the
skylight, but in this case too he felt the discomfort, if not the guilt,
of an unseen beholder. Experience was being piled-up on his young
shoulders. Mrs Anthony’s hair hung back in a dark mass like the hair
of a drowned woman. She looked as if she would let go and sink to the
floor if the captain were to withhold his sustaining arm. But the
captain obviously had no such intention. Standing firm and still he
gazed with sombre eyes at Mr Smith. For a time the low convulsive
sobbing of Mr Smith’s daughter was the only sound to trouble the
silence. The strength of Anthony’s clasp pressing Flora to his breast
could not be doubted even at that distance, and suddenly, awakening to
his opportunity, he began to partly support her, partly carry her in the
direction of her cabin. His head was bent over her solicitously, then
recollecting himself, with a glance full of unwonted fire, his voice
ringing in a note unknown to Mr Powell, he cried to him, “Don’t you go
on deck yet. I want you to stay down here till I come back. There are
some instructions I want to give you.”
And before the young man could answer, Anthony had disappeared in the
stern-cabin, burdened and exulting.
“Instructions,” commented Mr Powell. “That was all right. Very
likely; but they would be such instructions as, I thought to myself, no
ship’s officer perhaps had ever been given before. It made me feel a
little sick to think what they would be dealing with, probably. But
there! Everything that happens on board ship on the high seas has got
to be dealt with somehow. There are no special people to fly to for
assistance. And there I was with that old man left in my charge. When
he noticed me looking at him he started to shuffle again athwart the
saloon. He kept his hands rammed in his pockets, he was as stiff-backed
as ever, only his head hung down. After a bit he says in his gentle
soft tone: ‘Did you see it?’”
There were in Powell’s head no special words to fit the horror of his
feelings. So he said—he had to say something, “Good God! What were
you thinking of, Mr Smith, to try to....” And then he left off. He
dared not utter the awful word poison. Mr Smith stopped his prowl.
“Think! What do you know of thinking? I don’t think. There is
something in my head that thinks. The thoughts in men, it’s like being
drunk with liquor or—You can’t stop them. A man who thinks will think
anything. No. But have you seen it. Have you?”
“I tell you I have! I am certain!” said Powell forcibly. “I was
looking at you all the time. You’ve done something to the drink in that
glass.”
Then Powell lost his breath somehow. Mr Smith looked at him curiously,
with mistrust.
“My good young man, I don’t know what you are talking about. I ask
you—have you seen? Who would have believed it? with her arms round his
neck. When! Oh! Ha! Ha! You did see! Didn’t you? It wasn’t a
delusion—was it? Her arms round.... But I have never wholly trusted
her.”
“Then I flew out at him, said Mr Powell. I told him he was jolly lucky
to have fallen upon Captain Anthony. A man in a million. He started
again shuffling to and fro. ‘You too,’ he said mournfully, keeping his
eyes down. ‘Eh? Wonderful man? But have you a notion who I am?
Listen! I have been the Great Mr de Barral. So they printed it in the
papers while they were getting up a conspiracy. And I have been doing
time. And now I am brought low.’ His voice died down to a mere breath.
‘Brought low.’”
He took his hands out of his pocket, dragged the cap down on his head
and stuck them back into his pockets, exactly as if preparing himself to
go out into a great wind. “But not so low as to put up with this
disgrace, to see her, fast in this fellow’s clutches, without doing
something. She wouldn’t listen to me. Frightened? Silly? I had to
think of some way to get her out of this. Did _you_ think she cared for
him? No! Would anybody have thought so? No! She pretended it was for
my sake. She couldn’t understand that if I hadn’t been an old man I
would have flown at his throat months ago. As it was I was tempted
every time he looked at her. My girl. Ough! Any man but this. And
all the time the wicked little fool was lying to me. It was their plot,
their conspiracy! These conspiracies are the devil. She has been
leading me on, till she has fairly put my head under the heel of that
jailer, of that scoundrel, of her husband.... Treachery! Bringing me
low. Lower than herself. In the dirt. That’s what it means. Doesn’t
it? Under his heel!”
He paused in his restless shuffle and again, seizing his cap with both
hands, dragged it furiously right down on his ears. Powell had lost
himself in listening to these broken ravings, in looking at that old
feverish face when, suddenly, quick as lightning, Mr Smith spun round,
snatched up the captain’s glass and with a stifled, hurried exclamation,
“Here’s luck,” tossed the liquor down his throat.
“I know now the meaning of the word ‘Consternation,’” went on Mr
Powell. “That was exactly my state of mind. I thought to myself
directly: There’s nothing in that drink. I have been dreaming, I have
made the awfullest mistake!”
Mr Smith put the glass down. He stood before Powell unharmed, quieted
down, in a listening attitude, his head inclined on one side, chewing
his thin lips. Suddenly he blinked queerly, grabbed Powell’s shoulder
and collapsed, subsiding all at once as though he had gone soft all
over, as a piece of silk stuff collapses. Powell seized his arm
instinctively and checked his fall; but as soon as Mr Smith was fairly
on the floor he jerked himself free and backed away. Almost as quick he
rushed forward again and tried to lift up the body. But directly he
raised his shoulders he knew that the man was dead! Dead!
He lowered him down gently. He stood over him without fear or any other
feeling, almost indifferent, far away, as it were. And then he made
another start and, if he had not kept Mrs Anthony always in his mind,
he would have let out a yell for help. He staggered to her cabin door,
and, as it was, his call for “Captain Anthony” burst out of him much too
loud; but he made a great effort of self-control. “I am waiting for my
orders, sir,” he said outside that door distinctly, in a steady tone.
It was very still in there; still as death. Then he heard a shuffle of
feet and the captain’s voice “All right. Coming.” He leaned his back
against the bulkhead as you see a drunken man sometimes propped up
against a wall, half doubled up. In that attitude the captain found
him, when he came out, pulling the door to after him quickly. At once
Anthony let his eyes run all over the cabin. Powell, without a word,
clutched his forearm, led him round the end of the table and began to
justify himself. “I couldn’t stop him,” he whispered shakily. “He was
too quick for me. He drank it up and fell down.” But the captain was
not listening. He was looking down at Mr Smith, thinking perhaps that
it was a mere chance his own body was not lying there. They did not
want to speak. They made signs to each other with their eyes. The
captain grasped Powell’s shoulder as if in a vice and glanced at Mrs
Anthony’s cabin door, and it was enough. He knew that the young man
understood him. Rather! Silence! Silence for ever about this. Their
very glances became stealthy. Powell looked from the body to the door
of the dead man’s state-room. The captain nodded and let him go; and
then Powell crept over, hooked the door open and crept back with fearful
glances towards Mrs Anthony’s cabin. They stooped over the corpse.
Captain Anthony lifted up the shoulders.
Mr Powell shuddered. “I’ll never forget that interminable journey
across the saloon, step by step, holding our breath. For part of the
way the drawn half of the curtain concealed us from view had Mrs
Anthony opened her door; but I didn’t draw a free breath till after we
laid the body down on the swinging cot. The reflection of the saloon
light left most of the cabin in the shadow. Mr Smith’s rigid, extended
body looked shadowy too, shadowy and alive. You know he always carried
himself as stiff as a poker. We stood by the cot as though waiting for
him to make us a sign that he wanted to be left alone. The captain
threw his arm over my shoulder and said in my very ear: ‘The steward’ll
find him in the morning.’
“I made no answer. It was for him to say. It was perhaps the best way.
It’s no use talking about my thoughts. They were not concerned with
myself, nor yet with that old man who terrified me more now than when he
was alive. Him whom I pitied was the captain. He whispered: ‘I am
certain of you, Mr Powell. You had better go on deck now. As to
me...’ and I saw him raise his hands to his head as if distracted. But
his last words before we stole out that cabin stick to my mind with the
very tone of his mutter—to himself, not to me:—
“No! No! I am not going to stumble now over that corpse.”
“This is what our Mr Powell had to tell me,” said Marlow, changing his
tone. I was glad to learn that Flora de Barral had been saved from
_that_ sinister shadow at least falling upon her path.
We sat silent then, my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the
irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience,
scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and
venomous irony in the obsession which had mastered that old man.
“Well,” I said.
“The steward found him,” Mr Powell roused himself. “He went in there
with a cup of tea at five and of course dropped it. I was on watch
again. He reeled up to me on deck pale as death. I had been expecting
it; and yet I could hardly speak. ‘Go and tell the captain quietly,’ I
managed to say. He ran off muttering ‘My God! My God!’ and I’m hanged
if he didn’t get hysterical while trying to tell the captain, and start
screaming in the saloon, ‘Fully dressed! Dead! Fully dressed!’ Mrs
Anthony ran out of course but she didn’t get hysterical. Franklin, who
was there too, told me that she hid her face on the captain’s breast and
then he went out and left them there. It was days before Mrs Anthony
was seen on deck. The first time I spoke to her she gave me her hand
and said, ‘My poor father was quite fond of you, Mr Powell.’ She
started wiping her eyes and I fled to the other side of the deck. One
would like to forget all this had ever come near her.”
But clearly he could not, because after lighting his pipe he began
musing aloud: “Very strong stuff it must have been. I wonder where he
got it. It could hardly be at a common chemist. Well, he had it from
somewhere—a mere pinch it must have been, no more.”
“I have my theory,” observed Marlow, “which to a certain extent does
away with the added horror of a coldly premeditated crime. Chance had
stepped in there too. It was not Mr Smith who obtained the poison. It
was the Great de Barral. And it was not meant for the obscure,
magnanimous conqueror of Flora de Barral; it was meant for the notorious
financier whose enterprises had nothing to do with magnanimity. He had
his physician in his days of greatness. I even seem to remember that
the man was called at the trial on some small point or other. I can
imagine that de Barral went to him when he saw, as he could hardly help
seeing, the possibility of a ‘triumph of envious rivals’—a heavy
sentence.”
I doubt if for love or even for money, but I think possibly, from pity
that man provided him with what Mr Powell called “strong stuff.” From
what Powell saw of the very act I am fairly certain it must have been
contained in a capsule and that he had it about him on the last day of
his trial, perhaps secured by a stitch in his waistcoat pocket. He
didn’t use it. Why? Did he think of his child at the last moment? Was
it want of courage? We can’t tell. But he found it in his clothes when
he came out of jail. It had escaped investigation if there was any.
Chance had armed him. And chance alone, the chance of Mr Powell’s
life, forced him to turn the abominable weapon against himself.
I imparted my theory to Mr Powell who accepted it at once as, in a
sense, favourable to the father of Mrs Anthony. Then he waved his
hand. “Don’t let us think of it.”