Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (430 page)

“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.  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 realize 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 awfulest 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.