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.