Chapter 4 — Tomorrow

"Tomorrow" is set in the seaport of Colebrook, where retired coasting-skipper Captain Hagberd lives in an unshakeable delusion that his long-lost son Harry will return home the next day. The story follows Hagberd's neighbour Bessie Carvil, who humours this fixed hope while enduring her blind, tyrannical father. When Harry actually arrives — seeking money, not reunion — Hagberd fails to recognise him and drives him away, leaving Bessie heartbroken as the old man cheerfully shouts that Harry is still coming "one day more".

Captain Hagberd is convinced that his runaway son Harry will return home "tomorrow". He has harboured this belief for years: first it was "next week", then "next month", and finally it collapsed into the unchanging word "tomorrow". He prepares obsessively — filling the second cottage with furniture, keeping boxfuls of flower-seeds, digging his garden every day but planting nothing "till our Harry comes home tomorrow". Only Bessie Carvil knows the delusion has reached this absolute, unreachable word.

Bessie Carvil is Captain Hagberd's next-door tenant and the story's central figure. She lives with her blind father Josiah Carvil — a retired boat-builder described as "gross and unwieldy like a hippopotamus" — who makes her life a drudgery, calling and howling for her constantly. She befriends Hagberd across the garden railing, humours his hope about Harry's return "because it was easier to half believe it myself", and comes to be seen by Hagberd as the intended wife for Harry. The ten best years of her life have been spent nursing her father, and her face is described as "tired, unrefreshed" with a "heavy-lidded, grey, and unexpectant glance".

Hagberd came to Colebrook because of a letter — "a hoax probably" — suggesting a seafaring man named Harry Hagberd had been seen near the town. He sold his old home in Colchester, moved to Colebrook, bought a plot of land, and had two cottages built. He searched the surrounding area exhaustively at first, then, finding nothing, settled down to wait, reasoning that his son had once shown a preference for Colebrook and would therefore return there.

Harry arrives one evening, leans over the gate, and speaks to his father, who is digging in the yard. When Harry knocks and calls out "Hey, dad! Let me in. I am Harry, I am. Straight! Come back home a day too soon", old Hagberd opens a window and dismisses him as "a grinning information fellow", telling Bessie to have nothing to do with him, and throws a shovel at him. He cannot accept that the man standing at his gate is the very son he has waited years for, because in his fixed delusion Harry will only arrive tomorrow — not today.

Harry comes not out of love or reconciliation but purely for money. His chum spotted the newspaper advertisement Captain Hagberd had been running for years and said, "Go on, Harry: loving parent. That's five quid sure." The two of them scraped together their last pennies for the railway fare. Harry himself says, "What's five quid to him — once in sixteen hard years?" He has no intention of staying and leaves after taking a half-sovereign from Bessie.

The story's central theme is the destructive grip of false hope. Hagberd's "tomorrow" is a hope so absolute it has become madness — an idea that, as Conrad writes, "blinded his mind to truth and probability, just as the other old man in the other cottage had been made blind, by another disease, to the light and beauty of the world". Bessie is ensnared in this hope too, half-believing it herself and enduring her colourless life by tending Hagberd's dream. When Harry — the actual tomorrow — arrives and leaves, the story ends with Hagberd jubilant, Bessie in tears, and the tomorrow still deferred forever.

Hagberd prepares with obsessive thoroughness. He buys a second cottage, fills it with new furniture — tables wrapped in sacking, rolled carpets, marble-topped pieces — and guards it so jealously that no human eye, not even Bessie's, may see inside before Harry does. He digs his front garden daily but plants nothing, keeping boxfuls of flower-seeds in readiness. He even plans to remove the fence between the cottages so that Bessie can have a drying-line — all deferred to the moment Harry arrives. The yard is to be concreted over, and everything else is "after tomorrow".

Harry is a restless, footloose wanderer who ran away from home sixteen years before the story's action to escape his father, who wanted to make him a lawyer's clerk. Since then, as he tells Bessie, he has been "a boundary rider, sheared sheep, humped my swag, harpooned a whale, rigged ships, prospected for gold, and skinned dead bullocks". He explicitly compares himself to the Gambusinos — roaming Mexican prospectors — saying "sometimes I think I am a sort of Gambusino myself". He is charming and impulsive, but cannot stay anywhere for long, and he leaves Colebrook without achieving any reconciliation.

Once, early on, Bessie tried gently to cast doubt on Hagberd's hope, and the effect terrified her: "over that man's face there came an expression of horror and incredulity, as though he had seen a crack open out in the firmament." He nearly went "out of his mind on the spot". After that she never tried again. She tells Harry, "It would only have made him miserable. He would have gone out of his mind." She also admits, "it was easier to half believe it myself" — the gentle delusion had become a kind of shared comfort against her own hopeless life.

After Harry takes money from Bessie and kisses her passionately before disappearing into the night, she runs out into the dark street shouting "Stop! Don't go!" and finally calls "Harry!" into the silence. There is no reply — "not even the dying echo of a footstep". She returns to her cottage, which Conrad describes as her "stuffy little inferno", while above her Hagberd shouts jubilantly that he has driven away the "information fellow" and promises "one day more". Bessie is left utterly abandoned — by Harry, by hope, and by any prospect of change.

Yes. The NCERT Class 12 English Kaleidoscope PDF, including Chapter 4 "Tomorrow", is available free to download on CBSE PrepMaster. No sign-up or account is required — just open the chapter page and download directly.