Description
Chance
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 co