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 sea-going 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 disturbed by passions, jealousies, loves, hates and the

troubles of transcendental good intentions, which, though ethically

valuable, I have no doubt cause often more unhappiness than the plots of

the most evil tendency. 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, exception

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 men pronounce with dread and aversion. 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

reclining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship

and investigation at the same time.

It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event

rationally. The avatar of de Barral into Mr. Smith had not been effected

without a shock--that much one must recognize. It may be that it drove

all practical considerations out of his mind, making room for awful and

precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards.

And it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent 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

Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of

laughter. For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy finds its last

refuge in our deadly serious world. As to tears and lamentations, 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 Thrift.




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