Chance

They had the funny, regretful glances, intonations, nods of men who had

seen other, better times. What difference it could have made to the

bo'sun and the carpenter Powell could not very well understand. Yet

these two pulled long faces and even gave hostile glances to the poop.

The cook and the steward might have been more directly concerned. But

the steward used to remark on occasion, 'Oh, she gives no extra trouble,'

with scrupulous fairness of the most gloomy kind. He was rather a silent

man with a great sense of his personal worth which made his speeches

guarded. The cook, a neat man with fair side whiskers, who had been only

three years in the ship, seemed the least concerned. He was even known

to have inquired once or twice as to the success of some of his dishes

with the captain's wife. This was considered a sort of disloyal falling

away from the ruling feeling.

The mate's annoyance was yet the easiest to understand. As he let it out

to Powell before the first week of the passage was over: 'You can't

expect me to be pleased at being chucked out of the saloon as if I

weren't good enough to sit down to meat with that woman.' But he

hastened to add: 'Don't you think I'm blaming the captain. He isn't a

man to be found fault with. You, Mr. Powell, are too young yet to

understand such matters.'

Some considerable time afterwards, at the end of a conversation of that

aggrieved sort, he enlarged a little more by repeating: 'Yes! You are

too young to understand these things. I don't say you haven't plenty of

sense. You are doing very well here. Jolly sight better than I

expected, though I liked your looks from the first.'

It was in the trade-winds, at night, under a velvety, bespangled sky; a

great multitude of stars watching the shadows of the sea gleaming

mysteriously in the wake of the ship; while the leisurely swishing of the

water to leeward was like a drowsy comment on her progress. Mr. Powell

expressed his satisfaction by a half-bashful laugh. The mate mused on:

'And of course you haven't known the ship as she used to be. She was

more than a home to a man. She was not like any other ship; and Captain

Anthony was not like any other master to sail with. Neither is she now.

But before one never had a care in the world as to her--and as to him,

too. No, indeed, there was never anything to worry about.'

Young Powell couldn't see what there was to worry about even then. The

serenity of the peaceful night seemed as vast as all space, and as

enduring as eternity itself. It's true the sea is an uncertain element,

but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its bewitching power any

more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial inconstancy of women. And

Mr. Powell, being young, thought naively that the captain being married,

there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition. I suppose

that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was

something still in the nature of a fairy-tale with a 'they lived happy

ever after' termination. We are the creatures of our light literature

much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on

being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible

theories. Powell felt in that way the more because the captain of a ship

at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a

fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to

account except by powers practically invisible and so distant, that they

might well be looked upon as supernatural for all that the rest of the

crew knows of them, as a rule.