Marlow emerged out of the shadow of the book-case to get himself a cigar from a box
which stood on a little table by my side. In the full light of the room I saw in his eyes that
slightly mocking expression with which he habitually covers up his sympathetic impulses
of mirth and pity before the unreasonable complications the idealism of mankind puts
into the simple but poignant problem of conduct on this earth.
He selected and lit the cigar with affected care, then turned upon me, I had been looking
at him silently.
"I suppose," he said, the mockery of his eyes giving a pellucid quality to his tone, "that
you think it's high time I told you something definite. I mean something about that
psychological cabin mystery of discomfort (for it's obvious that it must be psychological)
which affected so profoundly Mr. Franklin the chief mate, and had even disturbed the
serene innocence of Mr. Powell, the second of the ship Ferndale, commanded by
Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet, you know."
"You are going to confess now that you have failed to find it out," I said in pretended
indignation.
"It would serve you right if I told you that I have. But I won't. I haven't failed. I own
though that for a time, I was puzzled. However, I have now seen our Powell many times
under the most favourable conditions--and besides I came upon a most unexpected
source of information . . . But never mind that. The means don't concern you except in
so far as they belong to the story. I'll admit that for some time the old-maiden-lady-like
occupation of putting two and two together failed to procure a coherent theory. I am
speaking now as an investigator--a man of deductions. With what we know of Roderick
Anthony and Flora de Barral I could not deduct an ordinary marital quarrel beautifully
matured in less than a year--could I? If you ask me what is an ordinary marital quarrel I
will tell you, that it is a difference about nothing; I mean, these nothings which, as Mr.
Powell told us when we first met him, shore people are so prone to start a row about,
and nurse into hatred from an idle sense of wrong, from perverted ambition, for
spectacular reasons too. There are on earth no actors too humble and obscure not to
have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms the play by stealthy jeers, counsels of
anger, amused comments or words of perfidious compassion. However, the Anthonys
were free from all demoralizing influences. At sea, you know, there is no gallery. You
hear no tormenting echoes of your own littleness there, where either a great elemental
voice roars defiantly under the sky or else an elemental silence seems to be part of the
infinite stillness of the universe.
Remembering Flora de Barral in the depths of moral misery, and Roderick Anthony
carried away by a gust of tempestuous tenderness, I asked myself, Is it all forgotten
already? What could they have found to estrange them from each other with this rapidity
