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some notice of it, as if it refreshed him to see something
untouched, unscarred, unhardened by suffering, or perhaps
the very novelty of that face, on board a ship where he had
seen the same faces for years, attracted his attention.

Whether one day he dropped a word to his new second officer or only looked at him I don't know; but Mr. Powell seized the opportunity whatever it was. The Captain who had started and stopped in his everlasting rapid walk smoothed his brow very soon, heard him to the end and then laughed a little.

"Ah! That's the story. And you felt you must put me right as to this."

"Yes, sir."

"It doesn't matter how you came on board," said Anthony. And then showing that perhaps he was not so utterly absent from his ship as Franklin supposed: "That's all right. You seem to be getting on very well with everybody," he said in his curt hurried tone, as if talking hurt him, and his eyes already straying over the sea as usual.

"Yes sir."

Powell tells me that looking then at the strong face to which that haggard expression was returning, he had the impulse to add: "I am very happy on board here, sir."

The quickly returning glance, its steadiness, abashed Mr. Powell and made him even step back a little. The Captain

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looked hard at him as though he had forgotten the meaning of
the word.

"You -- what? Oh yes... You ... of course ... *Happy*...
Why not?"

This was merely muttered; and next moment Anthony
was off on his headlong tramp his eyes turned to the sea
away from his ship.

A sailor indeed looks generally into the great
distances but in Captain Anthony's case there was -- as Powell
expressed it -- something particular, something purposeful
like the avoidance of pain or temptation. It was very marked
once one had become aware of it. Before, one felt only a
pronounced strangeness. Not that the Captain -- ~~Powell~~
was careful to explain -- didn't see things as a shipmaster
should. The proof of it was that on that very occasion he
desired him suddenly after a period of silent pacing, to
~~have all the staysails sheets eased off~~; and was going on
with some other remarks on the subject of these staysails
when Mrs. Anthony followed by her father emerged from the
companion. She established herself in her chair to leeward of
the skylight as usual. Thereupon the Captain cut short
whatever he was going to say turned away and in a little while
went down-below.

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conversation with the mate and shortly after getting clear of
the channel. It was gloomy weather; dead head wind, blowing
quite half a gale; the Ferndale under reduced sail, was
stretching close hauled across the track of the homeward-
bound ships, just moving through the water and no more, since
there was no object in pressing her and the weather looked
threatening. About ten o'clock at night he was alone on
the poop in charge, keeping well aft by the weather rail
and staring to windward, when amongst the white, breaking
seas, under the black sky he made out the lights of a ship.
He watched them for some time. She was running dead before
the wind of course. She will pass jolly close - he said
to himself; and then suddenly he felt a great mistrust of
that approaching ship. She seems to be heading straight
for us - he thought. It was not his business to get out of
the way. On the contrary. And his uneasiness grew by
the recollection of the forty tons of dynamite in the body
of the Ferndale; not the sort of cargo one thinks of with
equanimity in connection with a threatened collision. He
gazed at the two small lights in the dark immensity filled
with the angry noise of the seas. They fascinated him till
their plainness to his sight gave him a conviction that there
was danger there. He knew in his mind what to do in the
emergency but very properly he felt that he must call the
captain out at once.

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He crossed the deck in one stride, as it were. By the immemorial custom and usage of the sea the Captain's room is on the starboard side. You would just as soon expect your captain to have his nose at the back of his head as to have his stateroom on the port side of the ship. Powell forgot all about the direction on that point given him by the chief. He flew over as I said, stamped with his foot and then putting his face to the cowl of the big ventilator shouted down there: "Please come on deck sir," in a voice which was not trembling or scared, but which we may call fairly expressive. There could not be a mistake as to the urgegence of the call. But instead of the expected alert "All right!" and the sound of a rush down there, he heard only a faint exclamation— then silence.

Think of his astonishment. he remained there, his ear in the cowl of the ventilator, his eyes fastened on those menacing sidelights dancing on the gusts of wind, swept by the angry darkness of the sea. It was as though he had waited an hour but it was something much less than a minute before he fairly bellowed into the wide tube "Captain Anthony". An agitated "what is this?" was what he heard down there in Mrs. Anthony's voice, light rapid footsteps— why didn't she try to wake him up! "I want the captain," he shouted, then gave it up, making a dash at the companion where a

87

blue light was kept, resolved to act for himself.

On the way he glanced at the helmsman whose face
lighted up by the binnacle lamps was calm. He said rapidly
to him: "Stand by to spin that helm up at the first word.
The answer "Ay, aye sir," was delivered in a steady voice.
Then Mr. Powell after a moment shout for the watch on deck
to come aft, ran to the side and struck the blue light on
the rail.

A sort of nasty little spitting of sparks was all
he got. The light (perhaps affected by damp) had failed to
ignite. The time of all these various acts must be counted
in seconds. Powell confessed to me that at this failure he
experienced a paralysis of thought, of voice, of limbs. The
unexpectedness of this misfire positively overcame his
faculties. It was the only thing for which his imagination
was not prepared. It was knocked clean over. When it got up
it was with the suggestion that he must do something at
once or there would be a broadside smash accompanied by the
explosion of dynamite, in which both ships would be blown up
and every soul on board of them would vanish off the earth in
an enormous flame and uproar.

He saw the catastrophe happening and at the same
moment, before he could open his mouth or stir a limb to ward
off the vision a voice very near his ear, the measured voice
of Captain Anthony said: "Wouldn't light -- eh? Throw it

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down! Jump for the flare-up."

The spring of activity in Mr. Powell was released with great force. He jumped. The flare-up was kept inside the companion with a box of matches ready to hand. Almost before he knew he had moved he was diving under the fully drawn slide. He got hold of the can in the dark and tried to strike a light. But he had to press the flare-holder to his breast with one arm, his fingers were damp and stiff, his hands trembled a little. One match broke. Another went out. In its place he saw the colourless face of Mrs. Anthony a little below him, standing on the cabin stairs. Her eyes which were very close to his (he was in a crouching posture on the top step) seemed to burn darkly in the vanishing light. On deck the captain's voice was heard sudden and unexpectedly sardonic: "You had better look sharp if you want to be in time"

matches."

"Let's have the can," said Mrs. Anthony in a hurried and familiar whisper which sounded amused as if they had been a couple of children up to some lark behind a wall. He was glad of the offer which seemed to him very natural, and without ceremony.

"Here you are. Catch hold."

Their hands touched in the dark and she took the box while he held the paraffin soaked torch in its iron holder. He thought of warning her: "Look out for yourself."

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But before he had the time to finish the sentence the flare blazed up violently between them and he saw her throw herself back with an arm across her face. "Hello," he exclaimed; only he could not stop a moment to ask if she was hurt. He bolted out of the companion straight into his captain who took the flare from him and held it high above his head.

The fierce flame fluttered like a silk flag throwing an angry swaying glare mingled with moving shadows over the poop, lighting up the concave surfaces of the sails, gleaming on the wet paint of the white rails. And young Powell turned his eyes to windward with a catch in his breath.

The strange ship, a darker shape in the night, did not seem to be moving onwards but only to grow more distinct right abeam, standing at the Ferndale with one green and one red eye which swayed and tossed as if they belonged to the restless head of some invisible monster ambushed in the night amongst the waves. A moment, long like eternity, elapsed, and, suddenly, the monster which seemed to take to itself the shape of a mountain shut its green eye without as much as a preparatory wink.

Mr. Powell drew a free breath. "All right now," said Captain Anthony in a quiet undertone. He gave the blazing flare to Powell and walked aft to watch the passing of that menace of destruction coming blindly with its parti-coloured stare out of a blind night on the wings of a

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imagination had got to her, till it was all over. He
measured it (for fear is a great tension) by the feeling of
slack weariness which came over him all at once.

He walked to the companion and stooping low to
put the flare in its usual place saw in the darkness the
motionless pale oval of Mrs. Anthony's face. She whispered
quietly:

"Is anything going to happen? What is it?"

"It's all over now," he whispered back.

He remained bent low, his head inside the cover
staring at that white ghostly oval. He wondered she had not
rushed out on deck. She had remained quietly there. This
was pluck. Wonderful self-restraint. And it was not
stupidity on her part. She knew there was imminent danger
and probably had some notion of its nature.

"You stayed here waiting for what would come," he
murmured admiringly.

"Wasn't that the best thing to do?" she asked.

He didn't know. Perhaps. He confessed he could not
have done it. Not he. His flesh and blood could not have
stood it. He would have felt he must see what was coming.
Then he remembered that the flare might have scorched
her face and expressed his concern.

"A bit. Nothing to hurt. Smell the singed hair?"

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There was a sort of gaiety in her tone. She might
have been frightened but she certainly was not overcome and
suffered from no reaction. This confirmed and augmented if
possible Mr. Powell's good opinion of her as a "jolly girl",
though it seemed to him positively monstrous to refer in such
terms to one's Captain's wife. "but she doesn't look it,"
he thought in extenuation and was going to say something more
to her about the lighting of that flare when another voice
was heard in the companion, saying some indistinct words. Its
tone was contemptuous; it came from below *c* from the
bottom of the stairs. It was a voice in the cabin. And the
only other voice which could be heard in the main cabin at
this time of the evening was the voice of Mrs. Anthony's
father. The indistinct white oval sank from Mr. Powell's
sight so swiftly as to take him by surprise. For a moment
he hung at the opening of the companion and now that her slight
from was no longer obstructing the narrow and winding
staircase the voices came up louder but the words were still
indistinct. The old gentleman was excited about something
and Mrs. Anthony was "managing him" as Powell expressed it.
They moved away from the bottom of the stairs and Powell went
away from the companion. Yet he fancied he heard the words
"Lost to me" before he withdrew his head. They had been
uttered *by* Mr. Smith.

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Captain Anthony had not moved from the taffrail. He remained in the very position he took up to watch the other ship go by rolling and swinging all shadowy in the uproar of the following seas. He stirred not; and Powell keeping near by did not dare speak to him, so enigmatic in its contemplation on the night did his figure appear to his young eyes; indistinct — and in its immobility staring into gloom, the prey of some incomprehensible grief, longing or regret.

Why is it that the stillness of a human being is often so impressive so suggestive of evil, as if our proper fate were a ceaseless agitation? The stillness of Captain Anthony became almost intolerable to his second officer. Mr. Powell loitering about the skylight wanted his Captain off the deck now. "Why doesn't he go below?" he asked himself impatiently. He ventured a cough.

Whether the effect of the cough or not Captain Anthony spoke. He did not move the least bit. With his back remaining turned to the whole length of the ship he asked Mr. Powell with some brusqueness if the chief mate had neglected to instruct him that the Captain was to be found on the port side.

"Yes sir," said Mr. Powell approaching his back. "The mate told me to stamp on the port side when I wanted you; but I didn't remember at the moment."

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mate

The second of the Ferndale walked aft peering about and addressed the seaman who steered.

"Captain gone below?"

"Yes sir," said the fellow, who with a quid of tobacco bulging out of his cheek kept his eyes on the compass card. "This minute. He laughed."

"Laughed," repeated Powell incredulously. "Do you mean the Captain did? You must be mistaken. What would he want to laugh for?"

"Don't know sir."

The elderly sailor displayed a profound indifference towards human emotions. However after a longish pause he conceded a few words more to the second officer's weakness. "Yes, he was walking the deck as usual when suddenly he laughed a little and made for the companion. Thought of something funny all at once."

Something funny, That Mr. Powell could not believe. He did not ask himself why at the time. Funny thoughts come to men, though, in all sorts of situations; they come to all sorts of men. Nevertheless Mr. Powell was shocked to learn that Captain Anthony had laughed without visible cause on a certain night. The impression for some reason was disagreeable. And it was then, while finishing his watch, with the chilly gusts of wind sweeping at him out of the darkness where the short sea of the soundings growled spitefully all round the ship, that it occurred to his unsophisticated mind that perhaps things are not what they are confidently expected

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to be; that it was possible that Captain Anthony was not
a happy man... In so far you will perceive he was to a certain
extent prepared for a poplectic and sensitive Franklin's
lamentations about his Captain. And though he treated them
with a contempt which was in a great measure sincere, yet he
admitted to me that deep down within him an inexplicable and
uneasy suspicion that all was not well in that cabin, so
unusually cut off from the rest of the ship came into being
and grew against his will..."

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CHAPTER Mr. Four.
---
ANTHONY AND FLORA.

Marlow emerged out of the shadow of the bookcase
to get himself a cigar from a box which stood on a little
table by my side. In the full light of the room I saw in
his eyes that slightly mocking expression with which he
habitually covers up his sympathetic impulses of mirth and
pity before the unreasonable ~~arbitrary~~ complications the
idealism of mankind puts into the simple but poignant
problem of conduct on this earth.

He selected and lit the cigar with affected care,
then turned upon me. I had been looking at him silently.

"I suppose," he said, the mockery of his eyes
giving a pellucid flavour to his tone, "that you think it's
high time I told you something definite. I mean something
about that psychological cabin-mystery of discomfort
(for it's obvious that it must be psychological) which affected
so profoundly Mr. Franklin the chief mate, and had even
disturbed the serene innocence of Mr. Powell, the second of
the ship Ferndale, commanded by ~~Roderick~~ Anthony ~
[Jon] ~~th]~~ the (poet, you know."

are not going to confide it now

"You don't think I can believe it, do you? you have failed to find
it out," I said in pretended dignation.

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"It would serve you right if I told you that I have. But I won't. I haven't failed. I own though that for a time, I was puzzled. However, I have now seen our Powell many times under the most favourable conditions - and besides I came upon a most unexpected source of information .... But never mind that. The means don't concern you except in so far as they belong to the story. I'll admit that for some time the old-maiden-lady-like occupation of putting two and two together failed to procure a coherent theory. I am speaking now as an investigator - a man of deductions. With what we know of Roderick Anthony and Flora de Barral I could not deduct an ordinary marital quarrel beautifully natured in less than a year -- could I. If you ask me what is an ordinary marital quarrel I will tell you, it is a difference about nothing; I mean, these nothings which, as Mr. Powell told us when we first met him, shore people are so prone to start a row about, and nurse into hatred from an idle sense of wrong, from perverted ambition, for spectacular reasons too. There are on earth no actors too humble and obscure to have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms the play by stealthy jeers, counsels of anger, amused comments or words of perfidious compassion. Yes, as Mr. Powell says, it's a queer crowd that mans this drifting globe of ours. However, the Anthony's were free from all demoralizing influences. At sea, you know, there is no gallery. You hear no tormenting echoes of your own

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littleness there, where either a great elemental voice roars defiantly at the sky or else an elemental silence seems to be part of the infinite stillness of the universe.

Remembering Flora De Barral in the depths of moral misery, Roderick Anthony carried away by a gust of tempestuous tenderness, I asked myself, Is it all forgotten already? What could they have found to estrange them from each other with this rapidity and this thoroughness, so far from all things, and in an isolation so complete, that if it had not been the jealous devotion of the preposterous Franklin stimulating the attention of Powell, our only witness as to facts, there would have been no record, no evidence of it at all.

I must confess at once that it was Flora De Barral whom I suspected. In this world, as at present organised, women are the suspected half of the population. There are good reasons for that. These reasons are so discoverable with a little reflection that it is not worth while to set them out. I will only mention this: that the part falling to women's share being all "influence" has an air of occult and mysterious action, something not altogether trustworthy, like all natural forces which, for us, work in the dark because of our imperfect comprehension.

If women were not a force of nature, blind in its strength and capricious in its power, they would not be

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mistrusted. As it is one can't help it. You will say that
this force having been in the person of Flora De Barral
captured by Anthony..... Why yes. He had dealt with her
masterfully. But man has captured electricity too. It lights
him on his way, it warms his home, it will even cook his
dinner for him -- very much like a woman. But what sort
of conquest would you call it? He knows nothing of it. He
has got to be mighty careful what he is about with it. And
the greater the demand he makes on it in the exultation of
his pride the more likely it is to turn on him and burn him
to a cinder...."

"A far-fetched enough parallel," I observed coldly
to Marlow. He had returned to the armchair in the shadow of
the bookcase. "But accepting the meaning you have in your
mind it reduces itself to the knowledge of how to use it. And
if you mean that this ravenous Anthony....."

"Ravenous is good," interrupted Marlow. "He was a-
hungering and a-thirsting for femininity ~~in~~ to enter his life in a
way no mere feminist could have the slightest conception of.
I reckon that it is this which accounts for much of Fyne's
disgust with him.. Good little Fyne. You have no idea
what infernal mischief he had worked during his call at the
hotel. But then who could have suspected Anthony of being
a heroic creature. There are several kinds of heroism and
one of them at least is idiotic. It is the one which wears

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the aspect of sublime delicacy. It is apparently the one of
which the son of the delicate poet was capable.

He certainly resembled his father, who, by the way
wore out two women without any satisfaction to himself, ~~we~~
meantwhile, because ~~and~~ they did not come up to his
supra-refined standard of the delicacy which is so perceptible
in his verses. That's your poet. He demands too much from
others as your man of self-expression is inclined to do. The
inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself with that
need for embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion, the
impulses the poet puts into arrangements of verses, which are
dearer to him than his own self—and may make his own self
appear sublime in the eyes of other people, and even in his own
eyes.

Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes?
I should not like to make that charge; though indeed there
are other, less noble, ambitions at which the world does not
dare to smile. But I don't think so; I do not even think
that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence
in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which
leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations.
Looked at abstractedly (the way in which truth is often seen
in its real shape) his life had been a life of solitude and
silence — and desire.

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Chance had thrown that girl in his way; and if we
may smile at his violent conquest of Flora De Barral we
must admit also that this eager appropriation was truly the
act of a man of solitude and desire, a man also, unless a
complete imbecile, must have been a man of long and ardent
reveries wherein the faculty of sincere passion matures
slowly in the unexplored recesses of the heart. And I know
also that a passion, dominating, tyrannical, invading the
whole man and subjugating all his faculties to its own
unique end, may conduct him whom it spurs and drives, into all
sorts of adventures; to the brink of unfathomable dangers, to
the limits of folly, and madness, and death.

To the man then of a silence made only more
impressive by the inarticulate thunders and mutters of the
great seas, an utter stranger to the clatter of tongues there
comes the muscular little Fyne, the most marked representative
of that mankind whose voice is so strange to him, the husband
of his sister, if not a personage, then at any rate a
personality standing out from the misty and remote multitude.
He comes and throws at him more talk than he had ever heard
boomed out in an hour, and certainly touching the deepest things
Anthony had ever discovered in himself; and flings words
like "unfair" whose very sound is abhorrent to him. Unfair!
Undue advantage! He! Unfair to that girl? Cruel to her!

No scorn could stand against the impression of

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such charges advanced with heat and conviction. They shook
him. They were yet vibrating in the air of that stuffy
hotel-room, terrific, disturbing, impossible to get rid of,
when the door opened and Flora De Barral entered.

He did not even notice that she was late. He was
sitting on a sofa plunged in gloom. Was it true? Having
himself always said what he meant he imagined that people
(unless they were liars, which of course his brother-in-law
could not be) never said more than they meant. The deep
chest voice of little Fyne was still in his ear. "He knows,"
Anthony said to himself. He thought he had better go away and
never see her again. But she stood there before him, accusing
and appealing. How could he abandon her? That was out of
the question. She had no one. Or rather she had someone.
That father. Anthony was willing to take him at her valuation.
This father
may have been the victim of the most atrocious injustice—
but what could a man coming out of jail do? An old man too.
And then — what sort of man? What would become of them
both? Anthony shuddered slightly and the faint smile with
which Flora had entered the room faded on her lips. She was
used to his impetuous tenderness. She was not afraid of him.
But she had never seen him look like this before, and
she suspected at once some new cruelty of life. He got up
with his usual ardour but as if sobered by a momentous
resolve and said:

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"No. I can't let you out of my sight. I have seen you. You have told me your story. You are honest. You have never told me you love me."

She waited, saying to herself that he had never given her time, that he had never asked her, and that, in truth, she did not know.

I am inclined to believe that she did not. To grasp the phenomenon of one's own personality in its most obscure movements requires the kind of imagination in which a young girl is deficient. And as abundance of experience is not precisely her lot in life a woman is seldom an expert in matters of sentiment. It is the man who can and generally does "see himself" pretty well inside and out. Women's self-possession is an outward thing; inwardly they flutter; perhaps because they are, or they feel themselves to be, engaged. All this, speaking generally. In Flora De Barral's particular case ever since Anthony had suddenly broken his way, even though, into her hopeless and cruel existence she lived like a person liberated from a condemned cell by a natural cataclysm, a tempest, an earthquake, not absolutely terrified, because nothing can be worse than the eve of execution, but stunned, bewildered — abandoning herself passively. She did not want to make a sound, to move a limb. She hadn't the strength. What was the good? And deep down, almost unconsciously she was seduced by the

105

feeling of being supported by this violence. A novel sensation which she had never experienced before in her life.

She felt as if this whirlwind were calming down somehow! As if this feeling of support, which was tempting her to close her eyes deliciously and let herself be carried on and on into the unknown undefiled by vile experiences, were less certain, had wavered threateningly. She tried to read something in his face, in that rugged, violent kindly face to which she had become accustomed so soon. But she was not yet capable of understanding its expression. Scared, discouraged on the threshold of adolescence; plunged in moral misery of the very worst kind, she had not learned to read — not that sort of language.

If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally it would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity — or of his generosity, if you like — and this could not have happened. He would not have hit upon that idea at which one does not know whether to grin or shudder. It is true too that then his love would not have fastened itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral. But it was a love born of that rare pity which is not akin to contempt because rooted in an overwhelmingly strong capacity for tenderness — the tenderness of the fiery predatory kind — the tenderness of silent solitary men who are like the

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voluntary passionate outcasts of their kind. At the same time
I am forced to think that his vanity must have been enormous.

"What big eyes she has," he said to himself amazed.

No wonder. She was staring at him with all the might of her
soul awakening slowly from a poisoned sleep, in which it could
only quiver with pain but could neither expand nor move.

He plunged into them breathless and tense, deep, deep,
like a mad sailor taking a desperate dive from the masthead
into the blue unfathomable sea so many men have execrated
and loved at the same time. And his vanity was immense.

It had been touched to the quick by that muscular
little feminist, Fyne. "I! I! Take advantage of her
helplessness. I! Unfair to that creature - that wisp of mist,
that white shadow homeless in an ugly dirty world. I could
blow her away with a breath." he was saying to himself with horror.

"Never!"

All the supremely refined delicacy of tenderness, expressed
in so many fine lines of verse by Carleon Anthony, grew
to the size of a passion filling with inward sobs the great
silent frame of the man who had never in his life read a
single one of those famous sonnets singing of the
most highly civilised, chivalrous love; of those sonnets
which... You know there's a volume of them. My edition
has the portrait of the author at thirty and when I showed it
to Mr. Powell the other day he exclaimed: "Wonderful! One

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It would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony
himself if" ......I wanted to know what if it was. But Powell
could not say. There was something -- a difference. No
doubt there was -- in fineness perhaps. The fastidious,
cerebral, morbidly shrinking from all contacts, could only
sing in harmonious numbers of what the other felt with a dumb
and reckless sincerity.

Possessed by most strong men's touching illusion
as to the frailness of women and their spiritual fragility,
it seemed to Anthony that he would be destroying, breaking
something very precious inside that being. In fact nothing
less than partly murdering her. This seems a very extreme
effect to flow from Fyne's words. But Anthony, unaccustomed
to the chatter of the firm earth, never stayed to ask himself
what value these words could have in Fyne's mouth. And indeed
the mere sound of them was utterly abhorrent to his native
rectitude, sea-salted, hardened in the winds of open horizons,
open as the day.

He wished to blurt out his indignation but she
regarded him with an expectant air which checked him. His
visible discomfort made her uneasy. He could only repeat:
"Oh yes. You are perfectly honest. You might have been but I
daresay you are right. At any rate you have never said anything
to me which you didn't mean."

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He seemed distracted and as if choking with an emotion
she could not understand because it resembled embarrassment, a
state of mind which seemed to her inconceivable in that man.

She wondered what it was she had said; remaining that
in very truth she had hardly spoken to him except when giving
him the bare outline of her story which he seemed to have hardly
had the patience to hear, waving it perpetually aside with
exclamations of horror and anger, with fiercely sombre mutters:
"Enough! Enough!" and with alarming starts from within of
forced stillness, as though he meant to rush out at once and
take vengeance on somebody. She was saying to herself that he
seemed to hear her words in the air, never letting her finish
her thought as if her speech were too precious to be wasted
on the obviousness, on the simplicity of his masterful passion.
Honest. Honest. Yes certainly, but her letter to Mrs. Fyne
seemed to have been that of a person of simple simplicity.
She had been prompted by honesty. But she reflected sadly that she
would not know what to say to him. That perhaps she had
nothing to say.

"But you'll find out that I can be honest too,"
he burst out in a menacing tone which she had learned to
appreciate, although an amused thrill.

She waited for what was coming. But for all his
reckless sincerity he hung in the wind. He looked round the
room with disgust as if he saw traces on the walls of all the

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casual tenants that had ever passed through it. People had
quarrelled in that room; they had been ill in it, there
had been misery in that room, wickedness, crime perhaps --
death most likely. This was not a fit place. He snatched
up his hat. He had made up his mind. The ship -- the ship
he had known ever since she came off the stocks, his home --
her shelter -- the uncontaminated honest ship, was the place.

"Let us go on board. We'll talk there," he said.
"And you will have to listen to me. For whatever happens,
no matter what they say, I cannot let you go."

You can't say that (misgivings or no misgivings)
she could have done anything else but go on board. It was
the appointed business of that morning. During the drive
he was silent. Anthony was the last man to condemn conven-
tionally any human being, to scorn and despise even deserved
misfortune. Delicacy in him took that shape. He was not
afraid of contamination, in the pride of his own virtue.
And besides he was ready to take old de Barral -- the
convict -- on his daughter's valuation without the slightest
reserve. But love like his, though it may drive one into
risky folly by the proud consciousness of its own strength,
has a sagacity of its own. And now, as if lifted up into a
higher and serene region by its purpose of renunciation, it
gave him leisure to reflect for the first time in these
last few days. He said to himself: "I don't know that man.

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She does not know him either. She was barely sixteen
when they locked him up. She was a child. What will he say?
What will he do? "No," he said to himself, "I cannot leave her
behind with that man who would come into the world as if out
of a grave."

They went on board in silence, and it was after
showing her round and when they had returned to the saloon
that he assailed her in his fiery, masterful fashion.
At first she did not understand. Then when she understood
that he was giving her her liberty she went stiff all over,
her hand resting on the edge of the table, her face set like
a carving of white marble. It was all over. It was as
that abominable governess had said. She was insignificant,
contemptible. Nobody could love her. Humiliation clung
to her like a cold shroud -- never to be shaken off, unwarmed
by this madness of generosity.

"Yes. Here. Your home. I can't give it to you
and go away, but it is big enough for us two. You need
not be afraid. If you say so I shall not even look at you.
Remember that grey head of which you have been thinking night
and day. Where is it going to rest? Where else if not here.
When nothing evil can touch it. Don't you understand that I won't
let you buy it from me at the cost of your very soul. I won't.
You are too much part of me. I have found myself since I
came upon you and I would rather sell my own soul to the

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devil than let you go out of my keeping. But I must have
the right."

He went away brusquely to shut the door leading
on deck and came back the whole length of the cabin repeating:

"I must have the legal right. Are you ashamed of
letting people think you are my wife."

He opened his arms as if to clasp her to his breast
but mastered the impulse and shook his clenched hands at her
repeating: "I must have the right if only for your father's
sake. I must have the right. Where would you take him?
To that infernal cardboard box maker. I don't know what
keeps me from hunting him up in his virtuous home and bashing
his head in. I can't bear the thought. Listen, Flora.
Do you hear what I am saying to you? You are not so proud
that you can't understand that I am a man and have my
pride too?"

He saw a tear glide down her white cheek from
under each lowered eyelid. Then, she interrelated abruptly,
she walked out of the cabin. He stood for a moment,
concentrated, reckoning his own strength, interrogating his
heart, before he followed her hastily. Already she had
reached the wharf.

At the sound of his pursuing footsteps her strength
failed her. Where could she escape from this? From this

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new perfidy of life taking upon itself the form of
magnanimity. His very voice was changed. The sustaining
whirlwind had let her down, bruised afresh, to stumble
on again, weakened by the fresh stab, as ever, bereft of moral
support which is wanted in life more than all the charities
of material help. She had never had it. Never. Not from
the Fynes. But where to go? Oh yes, this dock -- a placid
sheet of water close at hand. But there was that old man with
whom she had walked hand in hand on the parade by the sea.
She seemed to see him coming to meet her, a little
greyer, with an appealing look and an extended, tremulous
It was for her now to take the hand of that wronged man
more helpless than a child. But where could she be?
And what to say to him? What words of cheer, of courage
and of hope? There were none. Heaven and earth were
so mute, unconcerned at their meeting. But this
other man was coming up behind her. He was
very close now. His fiery person seemed to radiate heat,
vibration and penetrating atmosphere. She fancied she could
hear his breathing. She was exhausted, careless, afraid
to stumble, ready to fall. A wave of languid warmth overtook
her; she seemed to lose touch with the ground under her feet;
and when she felt him slip his hand under her arm she made
no attempt to disengage herself from that grasp which closed
upon her limb, insinuating and firm.

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He conducted her through the dangers of the quayside. Her sight was dim. A moving truck was like a mountain gliding by. Men passed by as if in a mist; and the buildings, the sheds, the unexpected open spaces, the ships, had strange, distorted, dangerous shapes. She said to herself that it was good not to be bothered with what all these things meant in the scheme of creation if indeed anything had a meaning) or were just piled-up matter without any sense. She felt how she had always been unrelated to this world. She was hanging on to it merely by that one arm grasped firmly just above the elbow. It was a captivity. So be it. Till they got out into the street and saw the hansom waiting outside the gates antony spoke only once, beginning brusquely but in a much gentler tone than she had ever heard from his lips.

"Of course I ought to have known that you could not care for a man like me; a stranger. Silence gives consent. Yes? Eh? I don't want any of that sort of consent. And unless some day you find you can speak ... No! No! I shall never ask you. For all the sign I will give you you may go to your grave with sealed lips. But what I have said you must do !"

He bent his head over her with a tender annat. At the same time she felt her arm pressed and shaken inconspicuously, but in an undeniable manner. "You must do it." A little shake that no passer by could notice;

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and this was going on in a deserted part of the dock. "It
must be done. You are listening to me — Eh? Or would
you go again to my sister?"

She did not recognise his voice but took him at his word.
His tone, however, perhaps from want of use, had an awful
grating ferocity.

"Would you go? he pursued in the same strange
voice. "Your best friend! Heavens! And say nicely: I
am sorry. Would you? No! You couldn't. There are things
that even you, poor dear lost girl, couldn't stand. Eh?
Die rather. That's it. Of course. Or can you be thinking
of taking your father to that infernal cousin's house.
No! Say nothing. I can't bear to think of it. I would
follow you there and smash the door!"

The woman catch in his voice which astonished
her by its resemblance to a sob. It frightened her too.
The thought that came to her head was: "He mustn't. He
was putting her into the hansom. "Oh! He mustn't, he
mustn't." She was still more frightened by the discovery
that he was shaking all over. As she turned round she
looked at him reason for the first time really since he had
assailed her with his hands in the saloon of the
Fondale, and bewildered, shrinking into the far off corner,
avoiding his eyes, she saw the quivering of his mouth and
made a wild attempt at a smile, which broke the rigidity of

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her lips and set her teeth chattering suddenly.

"I am not coming" he was saying. "I'll tell the man... I can't. Better not. What is it? Are you cold? Come! What is it? Only to go to a confounded stuffy room, a hole of an office. Not a quarter of an hour. I'll come for you — in a fortnight. Don't think of it too much. Think of no man, woman or child of all that silly crowd ... cumbering the ground. Don't think of me either. Think of yourself. Ha! Nothing will be able to touch you then — at last. Say nothing. Don't move. I'll have everything arranged and as long as you don't hate the sight of me — and you don't — there's nothing to be frightened about. One of their silly offices with a couple of ink-slingers ... of no consequence; poor, scribbling devils."

The hansom drove away with Flora De Barral inside, without movement, without thought, only too glad to rest, to be alone and still moving away without effort, in solitude and silence.

Anthony roamed the streets for hours without being able to remember in the evening where he had been — in the manner of a happy and exulting lover. But nobody could have thought so from his face which bore no signs of blissful anticipation. Exulting indeed he was but it was a special sort of exultation which seemed to take him by the throat like an enemy.

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How much hope there was in him besides -- it is
hard to say? No man can live without it any more than a
fish can live out of water. It pervades like a
vivifying fluid the nooks and crannies of all our sentiments.
The rashest counsels of despair contain something of it; for
no man can be certain that there is rest to be found anywhere
in or out of the world. He can only hope.

Anthony's last words to Flora referred to the
registry office where they were married a fortnight later.
During that time Anthony saw no one or anything, though
he went about restlessly, here and there, amongst men and
things. This special state is peculiar to common lovers,
who are known to have no eyes for anything except for the
contemplation, actual or inward, of one human form which he
for them contains the soul of the whole world in all its
beauty, perfection, variety and infinity. It must be
extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick
Anthony's contemplation. He was not a common sort of
lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is
said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor
every sort of exceptional conduct. Roderick Anthony had
begun already to suffer. That is why perhaps he was so
industrious in going about amongst his fellowmen who would
have been surprised and humiliated, had they known how little

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solidity and even existence they had in his eyes. But they
could not suspect anything so queer. They saw nothing
extraordinary in him during that fortnight. The proof of
this is that they were willing to transact business with
him. Obviously they were; since it is then that the offer
of chartering his ship for the special purpose of proceeding
to the Western Islands was put in his way by a firm of
ship-brokers who had no doubt of his sanity.

He probably looked sane enough for all practical
purposes of commercial life. But I am not so certain that
he really was quite sane at that time.

However he jumped at the offer. Providence itself
was offering him this opportunity to accustom the girl to
sea-life by a comparatively short trip. This was the time
when everything that happened, everything he heard, casual
words, unrelated phrases seemed a provocation or an
encouragement, confirmed him in his resolution. And indeed
to be busy with material affairs is the best preservative
against reflection, fears, doubts - all these things which
stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing
to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while
occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

And Anthony was extremely careful in preparing
for himself and for the luckless Flora an impossible
existence. He went about it with no more tremors than if he

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infinite

had been stuffed with rags or made of iron instead of flesh
and blood. An existence, mind you, which, on shore, in the
thick of mankind, of varied interests, distractions and almost
infinite opportunities to preserve your distance from each other's
but on board ship, at sea, en tête à tête for days and weeks
and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture,
which, in its course, an exquisite absurdity of torment. He was
a simple soul. His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is
displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some
woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed,
perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought.
When he remembered suddenly his steward's wife he must
have exclaimed eureka with particular exultation. One does
not like to call Anthony an ass. But really to put any
woman within scenting distance of such a secret and suppose
that she would not track it out!

No woman, however simple, could be as ingenuous as
that. I don't know how Flora De Barral qualified him in her
thoughts when he told her of having done this amongst other
things which I intended to make her comfortable. I
should think that, for all her simplicity, she must have been
appalled. He stood before her on the appointed day outwardly
calmer than she had ever seen him before. And this very
calmness that scrupulous attitude which he felt bound in
honour to assume then and for ever, unless she would

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condescend to make a sign at some future time, added to
the heaviness of her heart innocent of the most pardonable
guile.

The night before she had slept better than she
had done for the past ten nights. Both youth and weariness
will assert themselves in the end against the tyranny of
nerve-racking stress. She had slept but she woke up with her
eyes full of tears. There were no traces of them when she
met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs. She had
swallowed them up. She was not going to let him see.
She felt bound in honour to accept the situation for ever and
ever unless... Ah, unless... She disassembled all her
sentiments but it was not duplicity on her part. All she
wanted was to get at the truth; to see what would come of
it. Curiosity is by no means the weakest of our passions
since it is the one that leads us into so many temptations.

She beat him at his own honourable game and the
thoroughness of her serenity disconcerted Anthony a bit. It
was he who stammered when it came to talking. That suppressed
fierceness of his character carried him on after the first
word or two masterfully enough. But it was as if they both
had taken a bite of the same bitter fruit. He was thinking
with mournful regret not unmixed with surprise: "That fellow
Fyne has been telling me the truth. She does not care for
me a bit." It humiliated him so much and also increased

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his compassion for the girl who in this darkness of life,
buffeted and despairing, had fallen into the grip of his
stronger will, abandoning herself to his arms as on a
night of shipwreck. Flora on her side with partial insight
(for women are never blind with the complete masculine
blindness) looked on him with some pity; and she felt some
for
without any understanding clearly the cause of that
sentiment. It was a rejection, a casting out; the fulfilment
of the dying foretold with anger and scorn by her government,
in an unforgettable and mysterious scene in which all the
world had appeared a traitor to her newly opened eyes.
nothing new to her. But she, who supposed all her sensibility
dead by this time, discovered in herself a resentment of
this ultimate betrayal. She had no resignation for this
one. With a sort of mental sullenness she said to herself:
"Well, I am here. I am here without any nonsense. It is not
my fault that I am a mere worthless object of pity."

And these things which she could tell herself
with a clear conscience served her better than the passionate
obstinacy of purpose could serve Roderick Anthony. She was
much more sure of herself than he was. Such are the
advantages of mere rectitude over the most exalted generosity.

And so they went out to get married, the people
of the house having no suspicion of anything of the sort.
They were only excited at a "gentleman friend" (a very fine

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man too) calling on Miss Smith for the first time since
she had come to live in the house. When she got back,
for she did come back alone, there were allusions made to
that outing. She had to take her meals with these rather
vulgar people. The woman of the house, a scraggy genteel
person, tried even to provoke confidences. Her white face
with the deep blue eyes did not strike their hearts, as it
did the heart of Captain Anthony, as the very face of the
suffering world. Her pain reserve had no power to awe
them into decency.

Well, now she returned alone — as in fact
might have been expected. After leaving the Registry office
Flora de Barral and Roderick Anthony had gone for a walk in a
park. It must have been an East-end park but I am not
sure. Anyway that's what they did. It was a sunny day.
To her:
He said "Everything I have in the world belongs to you.
I have seen to that without troubling my brother-in-law.
They have no call to interfere."

She walked with her hand resting
lightly on his arm. He had offered it to her on coming out
of the Republi of the Office, and she had accepted it silently
with her head drooped, she seemed to be turning matters over
in her mind. She said, alluding to the Fynes: "They have
been very good to me." She said at that he explained.

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"They have never understood you. Well, not
properly. My sister is not a bad woman, but ..."

Flora didn't protest; asking herself whether he
imagined that he himself understood her so much better.
and he dismissing his family out of his thoughts went on: "Yes.
Everything is yours. I have kept nothing back. As to the
piece of paper we have just got from that miserable quill-driver
if it wasn't for the law, I wouldn't mind if you tore it up
here, now, on this spot. But don't you do it. Unless you
should some day feel that ..."

He choked, unexpectedly. She hesitated a moment then making up her
mind bravely.

"Neither am I keeping anything back from you."
He had said it! But he was a man of great generosity and
enduring love for his love, and he chose to tell her all.

that she was alluding to her deplorable history and hastened to mutter:

"Of course! Of course! Say no more. I have
been lying awake thinking of it all so end of times."

He made a movement with his other arm as if
restraining himself from shaking an indignant fist at the
universe; and she never even attempted to look at him. His
voice sounded strangely, incredibly lifeless in comparison
with these tempestuous accents that in the broad fields,

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in the dark garden had seemed to shake
the very earth under
her weary and hopeless feet.

She regretted them. Hearing the sigh which escaped
her Anthony instead of shaking his fist at the universe began to
pat little her hand resting on his arm and then desisted, suddenly,
as though he had burnt himself. Then after a silence:

"You will have to go by yourself tomorrow. I ..."
No, I think I mustn't come. Better not. What you two will
have to say to each other ..."

She interrupted him quickly:

"Father is an innocent man. He was cruelly wronged."

"Yes. That's why," Anthony insisted earnestly. "And
you are the only human being that can make it up for him.
You alone must reconcile him with the world, if anything can.
But of course you shall. You'll have to find words. Oh you'll
know. And then the sight of you, alone, would soothe ..."

"He's the gentlest of men," she interrupted again.

Anthony shook his head. "It would take no end
of generosity, no end of gentleness to forgive such a dead set.
For my part I would have liked better to have been killed and
done with it once. It could not have been worse for you — and
I suppose it was of you that he was thinking most while those
infernal lawyers were badgering him in court. Of you. And
now I think of it perhaps the sight of you may bring it all
back to him. All these years, all these years — and you his

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child left behind. I would have gone crazy. For even if he had done wrong...."

"But he hasn't," insisted Flora de Barral with a quite unexpected ferocity. "You mustn't even suppose it. Haven't you read the accounts of the trial?"

"I am not supposing anything," Anthony defended himself. He just remembered hearing of the trial. He assured her that he was away from England, the very first voyage of the Ferndale under his command. He was crossing the Pacific from Australia at the time and didn't see any papers for four months. He interrupted himself to suggest:

"You had better tell him at once that you are happy."

He had stammered a little, and Flora de Barral uttered a deliberate and concise "Yes."

A short silence ensued. She withdrew her hand from his arm. They stopped. Anthony looked as if a totally unexpected catastrophe had happened.

"Ah," he said. "You mind..."

"No!" I think I was better," she murmured.

"I dare say. I dare say. I'll take him along straight on board tomorrow. Stop nowhere."

She had a movement of vague gratitude, a momentary feeling of peace which she referred to the man before her.

125

She looked up at Anthony. His face was sombre. He was miles away and muttered as if to himself:

"Where could he want to stop though?"

"There's not a single being on earth that I would want to look at his dear face now, to whom I would willingly take him—" she said extending her hand frankly and with a slight break in her voice - "but you — Roderick."

He took that hand, felt it very small and delicate in his broad palm.

"That's right. That's right," he said with a conscious and hasty heartiness and, as if suddenly ashamed of the sound of his voice, turned half round and absolutely walked away from the motionless girl. He even resisted the temptation to look back till it was too late. The gravel path lay empty to the very gate of the park. She was gone — vanished. He had an impression that he had missed a last chance to make her happy. He felt sad.

It was dark now. He knew very well that she would have to take her father somewhere at once, out of the streets, away from the influences and the degrading contacts she feared for him — if not for herself. But it was a disenchanted sort of feeling. That excited sense of his own conduct which had kept him up for the last ten or more days buoyed him no more. He had succeeded.

126

The tension had been greater than he had been aware
of; and now in the reaction it seemed to him that his life
work was done. He strolled aimlessly a prey to gentle
melancholy. He walked and walked. There were but few people
about in this breathing space of a poor neighbourhood. Under
certain conditions of life there is precious little time left
for mere breathing. But still a few here and there were
indulging in that luxury; yet few as they were Captain Anthony,
though the least exclusive of men, resented their presence.
Solitude had been his best friend. He wanted some place
where he could sit down and be alone. And in his need his
thoughts turned to the sea which had given him so much of that
congenial solitude. There if always with his ship (but that
was an integral part of him) he could always be as solitary as
he chose. Yes. Get out to sea!

The night of the town with its strings of lights,
rigid and crossed like a net of flame, thrown over the
sombre immensity of walls, closed round him, with its
artificial brilliance, overhung by an emphatic blackness,
its unnatural animation of a restless, overdriven humanity.
His thoughts which somehow were inclined to pity every
passing figure, every single person glimpsed under the
street lamp, fixed themselves at last upon a figure which

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And then Anthony, at the end of the day in which he
had gone out through a marriage ceremony with Flora de Barral, ceased
to think of Flora's father except as in some sort, the captive
of his triumph. He turned to the mental contemplation of
the white, delicate and appealing face with great blue eyes
which he had seen weep and wonder and look profoundly at him;
sometimes with incredulity, sometimes with doubt and pain, but
always irresistible in the power to find their way right
into his breast, to stir there a deep response which was something
more than love - he said to himself, - as men understand it. More?
Or was it only something other? Yes. It was something other.
More or less. Something as incredible as the fulfilment of
an amazing and startling dream in which he could take the
world in his arms - all the suffering world - not to possess
its pathetic fairness but to console and cherish its sorrow.

Anthony walked slowly to the ship and that night
slept without dreams.

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CHAPTER V.

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 stateroom made of
two knocked into one. It was very well furnished and had
instead of the usual bedplace 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

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thought occurred to him obvious under the circumstances but
strangely enough presenting itself for the first time.
"Jove! Won't he be surprised," 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

3

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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 reditude 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.

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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 first 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 in the same way, 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. Not that they knew anything. They hadn't of course the slightest idea.

We know how he arrived on board. For my part I know so little of prisons that I haven't the faintest idea how one leaves them. It seems as abominable an operation

133.

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 change; 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

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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 ..."

135

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, over-
powering like a dream, penetrating and mortal like poison.

136

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
some
once there was reproduced at a distance of years as if by
mock-
ing witchcraft the sight so familiar on the Parade at Hove
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 some-
thing 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 gaol you are thrown back wholly upon your-
self—for God and faith are not there. The people out-
side 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 monstrous 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
Nothing keeps them

10

138

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 chatter-ed, 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.

139

"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 gar-
bled 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 & 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.

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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
just out of his童 of which the girl 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

141.

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
fixed 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

142.

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 forwards 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

143.

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 and the use he made of it was to say:

"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 around 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... He never did he cease to think of her, he said with as much sinister emphasis as he was capable of.

144.

"But Papa," she cried, "I haven't been shut up like
you." She didn't mind speaking 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 there. But I was alone 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, vision, obsess
with particular force men withdrawn from the sights and
sounds of active life. "And did nothing but think of you!" he exclaimed under
his breath, contemnuously. "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.

145.

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 were 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 shock 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".

146.

He leaned towards her his mouth open, but meeting
the 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 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 mov-
ing power of passion... "My girl, I looked at them making
up to me and said 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 what came
out of them was 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

147.

It was a tall hat. The hat of the trial. The hat of the thumb-nail sketches in the illustrated papers. As I have said before, 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 mostonously, his thin lips hardly moving 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 understand this, for everything's in that : he is the most

148.

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 I
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 murmured, "On a road," and closed his eyes.

149.

"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 must believe in him?"

"Who the devil is he?"

"He's the brother of the lady — you know, Mrs. Fyne, who she knew mother — who was kind to me. I was staying in the country, in a cottage, with 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 for her 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

150

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 really 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 said 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

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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 shaven 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! 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

152

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.

25

153

"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, nor no one in all this town, nor one in all the world, 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 recent 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, which flowed quietly easing her overstrained nerves. Suddenly he pushed her away, 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.

154

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. <u>uh-uh</u>

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 his guidance.

"Of course I could not come forward in my own name, or person. But 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..."

155

He turned his face away. "After all I am still
de Barral, <u>the</u> de Barral. Didn't you remember that?

"Papa," said Flora; "listen. You 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 yet. 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. "Well, 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."

156

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

30

158

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 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 it 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 is 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... which mothers of course it is different. Women are more loyal, not to each other, but to their feminity which they behold

159

triumphant with a secret and proud satisfaction.

The various 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, 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 him 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 жonně "I am here under protest. I have been locked up in a conspiracy. I —"

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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 was standing by the side of her father.

"Oh, well! 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 life-time. A particularly merciful lot they are too. You ask Flora. I am alluding to my own sister; in 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 captain silenced him 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

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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 on.

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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 daresay. 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 him a little. "I told him I
had been very lucky," she said, despondent, missing his masterful manner, that something arbitrary and tender which,
after the first scare, she had accustomed herself to look
forward to with a somewhat pleasurable apprehension. He was
contemplating her rather blankly. She had not taken off her
outdoor things, hat, gloves. She was like a caller. And

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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 de-
voted Franklin (he had his cap in his hand) gazing sentimen-
tally from the saloon doorway with his lobster eyes. He was
heard from the distance in a tone of injured innocence report-
ing 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."

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"Oh yes. I forgot. You cannot live without me.
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
unparalled 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 thenPAGEBREAK 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, Dir."

And again he was alone in the cabin 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

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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 cabin 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 seagoing 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 dis-

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166.

turbed by passions, jealousies, loves, hates and the troubles
of transcendental good intentions, which, though ethically
valuable, I have no doubt, in the tendency of the plots of the
most evil character. 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,
except 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, to be pronounced with dread and
anxiety. 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 redining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship and investigation at the same time.

considered

It is almost impossible to say if he ever had looked
into the event rationally. The avatar of de Barral into Mr.
Smith had not been effected without a shock - that much one

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must recognise. It may be that it drove all practical considerations out of his mind, making an empty vessel and info which that obsession rushed in unopposed, grew, expanded to precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards. And it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent someht that invested the 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 Barrel trial in Court during a few foggy, gloomy days amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of laughter. For it is in the Courts abode of social machinery where more laughter is heard than in The Law Courts, where the secret thoughts and acts of humanity are exposed. This goes far to prove that the common citizen in his hope and manoeuvres is a ridiculous creature but not in his duties, for who ever heard a laugh in the Ireland Revenue Office, for instance? Yes, there was a good deal of audible hilarity within the walls of Justice, where comedy finds its last refuge in our deadly serious world, during the de Barrel trial. A host of tears and lamentations, witnesses or two who lost their lives in the trial, 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 the it.

Thrift.

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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

169.

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.

170.

And Mr. Smith with a slight backward jerk of his
small head at the footsteps on the other side of the sky-
light 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 look 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

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did not want to quarrel with her father, the only human being that really cared for her, absolutely, evidently, completely in him to the end. There was no pity, no generosity, nothing whatever of these 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 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 was a game of cards now and then in the evening, 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 whenever she would, whether he was pleased or disappointed. Indeed, she did even when her girlish head about that. And now she couldn't say whether. Neither did she chatter. Anthony with a forced friendly smile as if frozen to his lips seemed only too thankful at not being made to speak. "Mr.

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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.

Generally he would be the first to retire. He was not infirm any longer. With him too the life on board ship seemed to agree; but from a sense of duty, of affection, or to placate his anguished 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 goodnight 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; mummur a conciliatory "How absurd". But once, out of patience, she said quite sharply

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"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 I think, I think, if I saw that you loved that man, 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:

Anthony

"Goodnight, 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, unwavering sound. And so this short trip - to the Western Islands only - came to an end. It was so short that when Mr. Powell joined the Ferndale by a memorable stroke of chance, no more than seven months had elapsed since the - let us say the liberation

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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 up more than one 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

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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 up-
stairs 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 such 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,

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she got up and walked into the cottage. Mr. Smith followed her carrying the chair. He banged the head time to turn to him 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 white 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 bit of 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 hand resting on the arm of the wooden armchair. His hair had grown long, his head was set stiffly, there was something fatuously venerable in his attitude.

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"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 not yet come 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! After all 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."

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"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 could have had 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 get-
ting 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 eyes, 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

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clear out before it is too late. Do a bolt - 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 and looked to the door. 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 was 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

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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 re-
marked to his daughter after a long period of brooding and weeping
that "there was no point in it."

"A will is nothing. One tears it up. One makes an-
other." Then after reflecting for a minute he added unemotionally:
"One tells lies about it."

Flora, patient, steeled against every hurt and every dis-
gust 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.

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"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 son
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.

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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."

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"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 stateroom 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

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her, for her imperfections and for her troubles.

Mr. Sliles here

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.

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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?"

Young
Mr. Powell.

"What the devil do you mean by this?" exclaimed

"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."

That I

"Oh, it isn't what you think. It isn't what you think." Mr. Franklin looked more apoplectic than ever, "If it comes to it, 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.

186

"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 in a way 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."

187

Old seadog 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 musn'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.