"Conrad, Joseph - Chance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

CHANCE--A TALE IN TWO PARTS

by Joseph Conrad




PART I--THE DAMSEL




CHAPTER ONE--YOUNG POWELL AND HIS CHANCE



I believe he had seen us out of the window coming off to dine in the
dinghy of a fourteen-ton yawl belonging to Marlow my host and
skipper. We helped the boy we had with us to haul the boat up on
the landing-stage before we went up to the riverside inn, where we
found our new acquaintance eating his dinner in dignified loneliness
at the head of a long table, white and inhospitable like a snow
bank.

The red tint of his clear-cut face with trim short black whiskers
under a cap of curly iron-grey hair was the only warm spot in the
dinginess of that room cooled by the cheerless tablecloth. We knew
him already by sight as the owner of a little five-ton cutter, which
he sailed alone apparently, a fellow yachtsman in the unpretending
band of fanatics who cruise at the mouth of the Thames. But the
first time he addressed the waiter sharply as 'steward' we knew him
at once for a sailor as well as a yachtsman.

Presently he had occasion to reprove that same waiter for the
slovenly manner in which the dinner was served. He did it with
considerable energy and then turned to us.

"If we at sea," he declared, "went about our work as people ashore
high and low go about theirs we should never make a living. No one
would employ us. And moreover no ship navigated and sailed in the
happy-go-lucky manner people conduct their business on shore would
ever arrive into port."

Since he had retired from the sea he had been astonished to discover
that the educated people were not much better than the others. No
one seemed to take any proper pride in his work: from plumbers who
were simply thieves to, say, newspaper men (he seemed to think them
a specially intellectual class) who never by any chance gave a
correct version of the simplest affair. This universal inefficiency
of what he called "the shore gang" he ascribed in general to the