Chance

by Joseph Conrad

  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 stif
f 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.