So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate--or rather he
understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not seem
to him adequate. He would have dismissed all this out of his mind with a
contemptuous: 'What the devil do I care?' if the captain's wife herself
had not been so young. To see her the first time had been something of a
shock to him. He had some preconceived ideas as to captain's wives
which, while he did not believe the testimony of his eyes, made him open
them very wide. He had stared till the captain's wife noticed it plainly
and turned her face away. Captain's wife! That girl covered with rugs
in a long chair. Captain's . . . ! He gasped mentally. It had never
occurred to him that a captain's wife could be anything but a woman to be
described as stout or thin, as jolly or crabbed, but always mature, and
even, in comparison with his own years, frankly old. But this! It was a
sort of moral upset as though he had discovered a case of abduction or
something as surprising as that. You understand that nothing is more
disturbing than the upsetting of a preconceived idea. Each of us
arranges the world according to his own notion of the fitness of things.
To behold a girl where your average mediocre imagination had placed a
comparatively old woman may easily become one of the strongest shocks
. . . "
Marlow paused, smiling to himself.
"Powell remained impressed after all these years by the very
recollection," he continued in a voice, amused perhaps but not mocking.
"He said to me only the other day with something like the first awe of
that discovery lingering in his tone--he said to me: "Why, she seemed so
young, so girlish, that I looked round for some woman which would be the
captain's wife, though of course I knew there was no other woman on board
that voyage." The voyage before, it seems, there had been the steward's
wife to act as maid to Mrs. Anthony; but she was not taken that time for
some reason he didn't know. Mrs. Anthony . . . ! If it hadn't been the
captain's wife he would have referred to her mentally as a kid, he said.
I suppose there must be a sort of divinity hedging in a captain's wife
(however incredible) which prevented him applying to her that
contemptuous definition in the secret of his thoughts.
I asked him when this had happened; and he told me that it was three days
after parting from the tug, just outside the channel--to be precise. A
head wind had set in with unpleasant damp weather. He had come up to
leeward of the poop, still feeling very much of a stranger, and an
untried officer, at six in the evening to take his watch. To see her was
quite as unexpected as seeing a vision. When she turned away her head he
recollected himself and dropped his eyes. What he could see then was
only, close to the long chair on which she reclined, a pair of long, thin
legs ending in black cloth boots tucked in close to the skylight seat.
Whence he concluded that the 'old gentleman,' who wore a grey cap like
the captain's, was sitting by her--his daughter. In his first
astonishment he had stopped dead short, with the consequence that now he
felt very much abashed at having betrayed his surprise. But he couldn't
very well turn tail and bolt off the poop. He had come there on duty.
So, still with downcast eyes, he made his way past them. Only when he
got as far as the wheel-grating did he look up. She was hidden from him
by the back of her deck-chair; but he had the view of the owner of the
thin, aged legs seated on the skylight, his clean-shaved cheek, his thin
compressed mouth with a hollow in each corner, the sparse grey locks
escaping from under the tweed cap, and curling slightly on the collar of
the coat. He leaned forward a little over Mrs. Anthony, but they were
not talking. Captain Anthony, walking with a springy hurried gait on the
other side of the poop from end to end, gazed straight before him. Young
Powell might have thought that his captain was not aware of his presence
either. However, he knew better, and for that reason spent a most
uncomfortable hour motionless by the compass before his captain stopped
in his swift pacing and with an almost visible effort made some remark to
him about the weather in a low voice. Before Powell, who was startled,
could find a word of answer, the captain swung off again on his endless
tramp with a fixed gaze. And till the supper bell rang silence dwelt
over that poop like an evil spell. The captain walked up and down
looking straight before him, the helmsman steered, looking upwards at the
sails, the old gent on the skylight looked down on his daughter--and Mr.
Powell confessed to me that he didn't know where to look, feeling as
though he had blundered in where he had no business--which was absurd. At
last he fastened his eyes on the compass card, took refuge, in spirit,
inside the binnacle. He felt chilled more than he should have been by
the chilly dusk falling on the muddy green sea of the soundings from a
smoothly clouded sky. A fitful wind swept the cheerless waste, and the
ship, hauled up so close as to check her way, seemed to progress by
languid fits and starts against the short seas which swept along her
sides with a snarling sound.