"Upon my word, Marlow," I cried, "what are you flying out at me for like
this? I wouldn't use an ill-sounding word about women, but what right
have you to imagine that I am looking for gratitude?"
Marlow raised a soothing hand.
"There! There! I take back the ill-sounding word, with the remark,
though, that cynicism seems to me a word invented by hypocrites. But let
that pass. As to women, they know that the clamour for opportunities for
them to become something which they cannot be is as reasonable as if
mankind at large started asking for opportunities of winning immortality
in this world, in which death is the very condition of life. You must
understand that I am not talking here of material existence. That
naturally is implied; but you won't maintain that a woman who, say,
enlisted, for instance (there have been cases) has conquered her place in
the world. She has only got her living in it--which is quite
meritorious, but not quite the same thing.
All these reflections which arise from my picking up the thread of Flora
de Barral's existence did not, I am certain, present themselves to Mr.
Powell--not the Mr. Powell we know taking solitary week-end cruises in
the estuary of the Thames (with mysterious dashes into lonely creeks) but
to the young Mr. Powell, the chance second officer of the ship
Ferndale, commanded (and for the most part owned) by Roderick Anthony,
the son of the poet--you know. A Mr. Powell, much slenderer than our
robust friend is now, with the bloom of innocence not quite rubbed off
his smooth cheeks, and apt not only to be interested but also to be
surprised by the experience life was holding in store for him. This
would account for his remembering so much of it with considerable
vividness. For instance, the impressions attending his first breakfast
on board the Ferndale, both visual and mental, were as fresh to him as
if received yesterday.
The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability to
interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in
itself) makes to our understanding and emotions. For it is never more
than that. Our experience never gets into our blood and bones. It
always remains outside of us. That's why we look with wonder at the
past. And this persists even when from practice and through growing
callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in
that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine--which our life
is--nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more. Not at
the time, I mean. If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such
exclamation: 'Well! Well! I'll be hanged if I ever, . . . ' it is
probably because this very thing that there should be a past to look back
upon, other people's, is very astounding in itself when one has the time,
a fleeting and immense instant to think of it . . . "