Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Chance Encounters
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (October 29, 1910) : 21
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Chance encounters seem so little a matter of chance that the term can only serve to show them as classified among games of chance and sports in general because of their tremendous uncertain possibilities, not because the vague laws under which they act are not strongly felt. Their air of being almost too accidental arouses suspicion at once, the carelessness of their arrangement making it pretty plain to any one with a grain of observation that the entire matter was planned by a master hand so facile in quaint situations that the haphazard appearance was added as a final patina of finish.
Chance encounters are big with meaning, and the mystery of their being brought about, the inexplicableness of their perfect timing, helps to make them the really stimulating adventures they are. It sometimes seems as though Providence upset laws, derailed trains, burst tires, imbued us with sudden inconsequence, and tricked us into complete aberrations, that two people might land at the same hour at the same crowded inn and be forced to dine at the same small table. A belief in the meaningfulness of chance encounters is but properly respectful to Providence, and the elegant young man who once declared superciliously that he never read passenger lists because, after all, one hardly depended for one’s friends on the people one met while travelling, though he intended to reflect damagingly on the social position of any one who was so loose as to disagree with him, only showed that the genuine charm of a chance encounter was not for all, and that he, for one, would never be heir to the great good fortune sometimes brought about by a casual rencontre. If we are not precisely dependent for our friends on the accidents of travelling, we are made triumphantly independent of the occasional dulness of holidays by the chance of making friends. The world is so full of personalities, and they are so carelessly scattered about. The world is so full of personalities, and they are so carelessly scattered about.
The mousy little woman who offers you a wise suggestion on overhearing your laughing plans may be any one at all. The possibilities of mousy little women with well-bred mouths and human eyes are bewildering. She may be your favorite author, or your future sister-in-law, or a friend of all your friends whom you have always been on the verge of meeting and now discover because of a lost umbrella or a proffered orange, or she may live in an idyl of a villa that you have long gazed up at from the sea below and are finally, by the absurdity of juxtaposition of steamer chairs, invited to visit, and end by spending the happiest months of your life in.
One can never tell, and it is the complete doubt you are in that necessitates a salute, a friendly joust at arms, in order that the person encountered may at least prove himself as having no future connection with you, and let you ride on your way satisfied that you have not passed carelessly by a life-long friend.
Some of the most precious of relationships have started at a table d'hôte where the choice of humans is so varied that to draw up one’s chair is to plunge one’s hand into a gaping grab-bag with the possibility of anything coming out.
It is dreadful not to be given time to decipher a character, to have it disclose itself as an alluring labyrinth and then betake itself off before you have as much as formed a theory as to the clue, but it was still a rare glimpse...
The fact that she only had time to nod to you makes your gazing down the path she took last all the longer. If the second and the third meeting fail to take place, and the pleasant, always surprising, process of seeing an apparently pointless acquaintanceship take on design and unfold slowly its pattern of permanent intention — if this never happens, and the character that stopped but for a minute rides on, finally to disappear, it is still something gained; the event is not less, it is only complete. It is dreadful not to be given time to decipher a character, to have it disclose itself as an alluring labyrinth and then betake itself off before you have as much as formed a theory as to the clue, but it was still a rare glimpse, an exquisite whiff lasting but a single breath and remaining in your memory half because of your baffled inability to name it. The fact that she only had time to nod to you makes your gazing down the path she took last all the longer. It was such a cryptic little nod. It was either a wave, just a salutation to a fellow roamer of the high seas, or it was intended to convey the belief that a dip over the horizon would show your routes as crossing again and again. And when they do, and those who were strangers become familiars, there is cause for such gay congratulation. Because, of course, either or both might have been crass or wasteful or blind, the opportunity might never have been recognized as such; in fact, there might so easily have been a mutual dulness and there wasn’t. You both knew you were delightful, and knew the other would be so interested to know it, and so, with a frank disclosure of your good points, which amounts to nothing so much as a hearty faith that they will be matched by the other degree for degree, you snatched a railway journey from the commonplace and with a concerted pull upward made it an occasion.
In comparison with these clearly intended and wholly meet encounters, an introduction becomes the emptiest of forms, entirely beside the mark, frequently to be disregarded afterward and seldom productive of anything.
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