Chance

Chance: A Tale in Two Parts

Part 1’Chapter 1.

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.

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.

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 want of responsibility and to a sense of security.

“They see, — he went on, —that no matter what they do this tight little island won’t turn turtle with them or spring a leak and go to the bottom with their wives and children. —

“That day I wouldn’t have called the Queen my cousin, — declared our new acquaintance enthusiastically.

This was the part of the world, he said, his eyes first took notice of, on the finest day of his life. He had emerged from the main entrance of Saint Katherine’s Dock House a full-fledged second mate after the hottest time of his life with Captain R—, the most dreaded of the three seamanship Examiners who at the time were responsible for the merchant service officers qualifying in the Port of London. “We all who were preparing to pass, — he said, —used to shake in our shoes at the idea of going before him. He kept me for an hour and a half in the torture chamber and behaved as though he hated me. He kept his eyes shaded with one of his hands.

——Thank you, sir, — says I, grabbing the paper.

——Good morning, good luck to you, — he growls at me.

Less than twenty minutes each: that’s about his usual time. — “I found myself downstairs without being aware of the steps as if I had floated down the staircase. The finest day in my life. The day you get your first command is nothing to it. For one thing a man is not so young then and for another with us, you know, there is nothing much more to expect. Yes, the finest day of one’s life, no doubt, but then it is just a day and no more. What comes after is about the most unpleasant time for a youngster, the trying to get an officer’s berth with nothing much to show but a brand-new certificate. It is surprising how useless you find that piece of ass’s skin that you have been putting yourself in such a state about.

It didn’t strike me at the time that a Board of Trade certificate does not make an officer, not by a long long way. But the skippers of the ships I was haunting with demands for a job knew that very well. I don’t wonder at them now, and I don’t blame them either. But this —trying to get a ship’ is pretty hard on a youngster all the same.... — He went on then to tell us how tired he was and how discouraged by this lesson of disillusion following swiftly upon the finest day of his life. He told us how he went the round of all the ship-owners’ offices in the City where some junior clerk would furnish him with printed forms of application which he took home to fill up in the evening.

Then one day, as he was wending his weary way to the docks, he met a friend and former shipmate a little older than himself outside the Fenchurch Street Railway Station.