Chance is Conrad’s last novel to feature Marlow and a great showcase for Marlow’s particular passion: finding out the secret fulcrum behind an otherwise unexplained psychological situation. For Marlow these things are mysteries; for many other people they are not. “I am like a puzzle-headed chief-mate we had once in the dear old Samarcand when I was a youngster. The fellow went gravely about trying to ‘account to himself’—his favorite expression—for a lot of things no one would care to bother one’s head about,” Marlow tells the young friend who (actually) narrates Chance. “He was an old idiot but he was also an accomplished practical seaman. I was quite a boy and he impressed me. I must have caught the disposition from him.”
It takes quite a long time to find out a particular unstated fact behind the actions of Marlow’s acquaintances. We learn a lot about Mr. and Mrs. Fyne, his holiday-friends; we learn a lot about Flora de Barral, a friend of Mrs. Fyne’s and the daughter of a disgraced and convicted financier. It seems to make sense that Miss de Barral would be suicidal, with the extremely difficult life she’s led for years; it seems to make sense that despite their friendship, Mrs. Fyne wouldn’t want Miss de Barral marrying her brother. But the urgency of Miss de Barral’s feelings, and the heat of Mrs. Fyne’s, make much, much more sense when Marlow learns at length that Flora’s father, the (formerly) Great de Barral, is about to be released from prison to pose an immediate, material problem to Flora and anyone closely involved with her.
This isn’t the only little secret Marlow finds out or figures out. A good one is the secret of Miss de Barral’s governess. This one is speculative—but I dare you not to believe it. What is known of the governess are the superficial information of Mrs. Fyne, who found the woman unsuitable and untrustworthy, and the report from Flora herself of her last morning with the governess (whose name Marlow can’t recall). The governess did not have Flora’s best interests at heart; she was out for personal gain. The question is, what sort? The typical idea for a grasping governess working for a wealthy widower would be to insinuate herself as the next wife, but Marlow knows that doesn’t make sense for the type of man de Barral was nor does it fit with the specific venom the governess has for Flora. The governess gets intelligence that de Barral is ruined. She spends one final night in his home in Brighton, arguing with her accomplice and preparing to flee with anything that isn’t nailed down. “Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there must be such places in any statement dealing with life. In what I am telling you of now—an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the green country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our meeting a man who has been a blue-water sailor—this evening confabulation is a dark, inscrutable spot. And we may conjecture what we like,” Marlow says to his interlocutor, and proceeds to so conjecture. Rather than aiming to become the next Mrs. de Barral, the governess was instead setting up her young lover to marry the heiress. Marlow’s sordid idea seems clearly correct. “I was struck by the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion,” our narrator tells us. Marlow expounds further, and:
I couldn’t refuse Marlow the tribute of a prolonged whistle “Phew! So you suppose that…”
He waved his hand impatiently.
“I don’t suppose. It was so. And anyhow why shouldn’t you accept the supposition.”
There’s no reason not to, except that it’s exactly that, a supposition (that is to say, made up). But it does perfectly explain things, like nothing else would.
There’s a lot in this novel about thinking, and people or types of people who think or don’t think, or do or don’t understand. I will have to read it again to get at all of the thinking. But we do learn early on that journalists don’t, or at least shouldn’t, think. Marlow has a drink with one who covered the trial of de Barral, just after he was convicted.
Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not. It would lead him too far away from the actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind. …And then, for him, an accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly ‘bad business.’ His business was to write a readable account. But I who had nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our still untouched glasses. And the disclosure which so often rewards a moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill very much approaching a shudder. I seemed to understand that, with the shock of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the imagination of that man, whose moods, notions and motives wore frequently an air of grotesque mystery—that his imagination had been at last roused into activity.
Much later, the Great de Barral is also asked about thinking, and imagining. One could take his response as a comment on Marlow. “Think! What do you know of thinking. I don’t think. There is something in my head that thinks. The thoughts in men, it’s like being drunk with liquor or—You can’t stop them. A man who thinks will think anything.”
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