Chance

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