Chance

"Upon my word, Marlow," I cried, "what are you flying out at me for like

this? I wouldn't use an ill-sounding word about women, but what right

have you to imagine that I am looking for gratitude?"

Marlow raised a soothing hand.

"There! There! I take back the ill-sounding word, with the remark,

though, that cynicism seems to me a word invented by hypocrites. But let

that pass. As to women, they know that the clamour for opportunities for

them to become something which they cannot be is as reasonable as if

mankind at large started asking for opportunities of winning immortality

in this world, in which death is the very condition of life. You must

understand that I am not talking here of material existence. That

naturally is implied; but you won't maintain that a woman who, say,

enlisted, for instance (there have been cases) has conquered her place in

the world. She has only got her living in it--which is quite

meritorious, but not quite the same thing.

All these reflections which arise from my picking up the thread of Flora

de Barral's existence did not, I am certain, present themselves to Mr.

Powell--not the Mr. Powell we know taking solitary week-end cruises in

the estuary of the Thames (with mysterious dashes into lonely creeks) but

to the young Mr. Powell, the chance second officer of the ship

Ferndale, commanded (and for the most part owned) by Roderick Anthony,

the son of the poet--you know. A Mr. Powell, much slenderer than our

robust friend is now, with the bloom of innocence not quite rubbed off

his smooth cheeks, and apt not only to be interested but also to be

surprised by the experience life was holding in store for him. This

would account for his remembering so much of it with considerable

vividness. For instance, the impressions attending his first breakfast

on board the Ferndale, both visual and mental, were as fresh to him as

if received yesterday.

The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability to

interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in

itself) makes to our understanding and emotions. For it is never more

than that. Our experience never gets into our blood and bones. It

always remains outside of us. That's why we look with wonder at the

past. And this persists even when from practice and through growing

callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in

that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine--which our life

is--nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more. Not at

the time, I mean. If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such

exclamation: 'Well! Well! I'll be hanged if I ever, . . . ' it is

probably because this very thing that there should be a past to look back

upon, other people's, is very astounding in itself when one has the time,

a fleeting and immense instant to think of it . . . "