And
Mr. Powell, being young, thought naively that the captain being married,
there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition. I suppose
that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was
something still in the nature of a fairy-tale with a 'they lived happy
ever after' termination. We are the creatures of our light literature
much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on
being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible
theories. Powell felt in that way the more because the captain of a ship
at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a
fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to
account except by powers practically invisible and so distant, that they
might well be looked upon as supernatural for all that the rest of the
crew knows of them, as a rule.
So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate--or rather he
understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not seem
to him adequate. He would have dismissed all this out of his mind with a
contemptuous: 'What the devil do I care?' if the captain's wife herself
had not been so young.
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