To-morrow | Page 3

Joseph Conrad
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TO-MORROW
by Joseph Conrad
What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook
was not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place. He had
come to settle there under circumstances not at all myste- rious--he
used to be very communicative about them at the time--but extremely
morbid and un- reasonable. He was possessed of some little money
evidently, because he bought a plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly
yellow brick cottages run up very cheaply. He occupied one of them
himself and let the other to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil, the retired
boat-builder--a man of evil repute as a domestic tyrant.
These cottages had one wall in common, shared in a line of iron railing
dividing their front gar- dens; a wooden fence separated their back
gardens. Miss Bessie Carvil was allowed, as it were of right, to throw
over it the tea-cloths, blue rags, or an apron that wanted drying.
"It rots the wood, Bessie my girl," the captain would remark mildly,
from his side of the fence, each time he saw her exercising that
privilege.
She was a tall girl; the fence was low, and she could spread her elbows
on the top. Her hands would be red with the bit of washing she had

done, but her forearms were white and shapely, and she would look at
her father's landlord in silence--in an informed silence which had an air
of knowledge, expectation and desire.
"It rots the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd. "It is the only unthrifty,
careless habit I know in you. Why don't you have a clothes line out in
your back yard?"
Miss Carvil would say nothing to this--she only shook her head
negatively. The tiny back yard on her side had a few stone-bordered
little beds of black earth, in which the simple flowers she found time to
cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly overgrown, as if belonging
to an exotic clime; and Captain Hagberd's upright, hale person, clad in
No. 1 sail-cloth from head to foot, would be emer- ging knee-deep out
of rank grass and the tall weeks on his side of the fence. He appeared,
with the col- our and uncouth stiffness of the extraordinary ma- terial in
which he chose to clothe himself--"for the time being," would be his
mumbled remark to any observation on the subject--like a man
roughened out of granite, standing in a wilderness not big enough for a
decent billiard-room. A heavy figure of a man of stone, with a red
handsome face, a blue wandering eye, and a great white beard flowing
to his waist and never trimmed as far as Colebrook knew.
Seven years before, he had seriously answered, "Next month, I think,"
to the chaffing attempt to secure his custom made by that distinguished
local wit, the Colebrook barber, who happened to be sit- ting insolently
in the tap-room of the New Inn near the harbour, where the captain had
entered to buy an ounce of tobacco. After paying for his pur- chase
with three half-pence extracted from the cor- ner of a handkerchief
which he carried in the cuff of his sleeve, Captain Hagberd went out.
As soon as the door was shut the barber laughed. "The old one and the
young one will be strolling arm in arm to get shaved in my place
presently. The tailor shall be set to work, and the barber, and the
candlestick maker; high old times are coming for Colebrook, they are
coming, to be sure. It used to be 'next week,' now it has come to 'next
month,' and so on--soon it will be next spring, for all I know."
Noticing a stranger listening to him with a va- cant grin, he explained,

stretching out his legs cyn- ically, that this queer old Hagberd, a retired
coast- ing-skipper, was waiting for the return of a son of his. The boy
had been driven away from home, he shouldn't wonder; had run away
to sea and had never been heard of since. Put to rest in Davy Jones's
locker this many a day, as likely as not. That old man came flying to
Colebrook three years ago all in black broadcloth (had lost his wife
lately then), getting out of a third-class smoker as if the devil
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