Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (397 page)

Fyne got up suddenly with a muttered “No, evidently not.”  He was gloomy, hesitating.  I supposed that he would not wish to play chess that afternoon.  This would dispense me from leaving my rooms on a day much too fine to be wasted in walking exercise.  And I was disappointed when picking up his cap he intimated to me his hope of seeing me at the cottage about four o’clock — as usual.

“It wouldn’t be as usual.”  I put a particular stress on that remark.  He admitted, after a short reflection, that it would not be.  No.  Not as usual.  In fact it was his wife who hoped, rather, for my presence.  She had formed a very favourable opinion of my practical sagacity.

This was the first I ever heard of it.  I had never suspected that Mrs. Fyne had taken the trouble to distinguish in me the signs of sagacity or folly.  The few words we had exchanged last night in the excitement — or the bother — of the girl’s disappearance, were the first moderately significant words which had ever passed between us.  I had felt myself always to be in Mrs. Fyne’s view her husband’s chess-player and nothing else — a convenience — almost an implement.

“I am highly flattered,” I said.  “I have always heard that there are no limits to feminine intuition; and now I am half inclined to believe it is so.  But still I fail to see in what way my sagacity, practical or otherwise, can be of any service to Mrs. Fyne.  One man’s sagacity is very much like any other man’s sagacity.  And with you at hand — ”

Fyne, manifestly not attending to what I was saying, directed straight at me his worried solemn eyes and struck in:

“Yes, yes.  Very likely.  But you will come — won’t you?”

I had made up my mind that no Fyne of either sex would make me walk three miles (there and back to their cottage) on this fine day.  If the Fynes had been an average sociable couple one knows only because leisure must be got through somehow, I would have made short work of that special invitation.  But they were not that.  Their undeniable humanity had to be acknowledged.  At the same time I wanted to have my own way.  So I proposed that I should be allowed the pleasure of offering them a cup of tea at my rooms.

A short reflective pause — and Fyne accepted eagerly in his own and his wife’s name.  A moment after I heard the click of the gate-latch and then in an ecstasy of barking from his demonstrative dog his serious head went past my window on the other side of the hedge, its troubled gaze fixed forward, and the mind inside obviously employed in earnest speculation of an intricate nature.  One at least of his wife’s girl-friends had become more than a mere shadow for him.  I surmised however that it was not of the girl-friend but of his wife that Fyne was thinking.  He was an excellent husband.

I prepared myself for the afternoon’s hospitalities, calling in the farmer’s wife and reviewing with her the resources of the house and the village.  She was a helpful woman.  But the resources of my sagacity I did not review.  Except in the gross material sense of the afternoon tea I made no preparations for Mrs. Fyne.

It was impossible for me to make any such preparations.  I could not tell what sort of sustenance she would look for from my sagacity.  And as to taking stock of the wares of my mind no one I imagine is anxious to do that sort of thing if it can be avoided.  A vaguely grandiose state of mental self-confidence is much too agreeable to be disturbed recklessly by such a delicate investigation.  Perhaps if I had had a helpful woman at my elbow, a dear, flattering acute, devoted woman . . . There are in life moments when one positively regrets not being married.  No!  I don’t exaggerate.  I have said — moments, not years or even days.  Moments.  The farmer’s wife obviously could not be asked to assist.  She could not have been expected to possess the necessary insight and I doubt whether she would have known how to be flattering enough.  She was being helpful in her own way, with an extraordinary black bonnet on her head, a good mile off by that time, trying to discover in the village shops a piece of eatable cake.  The pluck of women!  The optimism of the dear creatures!

And she managed to find something which looked eatable.  That’s all I know as I had no opportunity to observe the more intimate effects of that comestible.  I myself never eat cake, and Mrs. Fyne, when she arrived punctually, brought with her no appetite for cake.  She had no appetite for anything.  But she had a thirst — the sign of deep, of tormenting emotion.  Yes it was emotion, not the brilliant sunshine — more brilliant than warm as is the way of our discreet self-repressed, distinguished, insular sun, which would not turn a real lady scarlet — not on any account.  Mrs. Fyne looked even cool.  She wore a white skirt and coat; a white hat with a large brim reposed on her smoothly arranged hair.  The coat was cut something like an army mess-jacket and the style suited her.  I dare say there are many youthful subalterns, and not the worst-looking too, who resemble Mrs. Fyne in the type of face, in the sunburnt complexion, down to that something alert in bearing.  But not many would have had that aspect breathing a readiness to assume any responsibility under Heaven.  This is the sort of courage which ripens late in life and of course Mrs. Fyne was of mature years for all her unwrinkled face.

She looked round the room, told me positively that I was very comfortable there; to which I assented, humbly, acknowledging my undeserved good fortune.

“Why undeserved?” she wanted to know.

“I engaged these rooms by letter without asking any questions.  It might have been an abominable hole,” I explained to her.  “I always do things like that.  I don’t like to be bothered.  This is no great proof of sagacity — is it?  Sagacious people I believe like to exercise that faculty.  I have heard that they can’t even help showing it in the veriest trifles.  It must be very delightful.  But I know nothing of it.  I think that I have no sagacity — no practical sagacity.”

Fyne made an inarticulate bass murmur of protest.  I asked after the children whom I had not seen yet since my return from town.  They had been very well.  They were always well.  Both Fyne and Mrs. Fyne spoke of the rude health of their children as if it were a result of moral excellence; in a peculiar tone which seemed to imply some contempt for people whose children were liable to be unwell at times.  One almost felt inclined to apologize for the inquiry.  And this annoyed me; unreasonably, I admit, because the assumption of superior merit is not a very exceptional weakness.  Anxious to make myself disagreeable by way of retaliation I observed in accents of interested civility that the dear girls must have been wondering at the sudden disappearance of their mother’s young friend.  Had they been putting any awkward questions about Miss Smith.  Wasn’t it as Miss Smith that Miss de Barral had been introduced to me?

Mrs. Fyne, staring fixedly but also colouring deeper under her tan, told me that the children had never liked Flora very much.  She hadn’t the high spirits which endear grown-ups to healthy children, Mrs. Fyne explained unflinchingly.  Flora had been staying at the cottage several times before.  Mrs. Fyne assured me that she often found it very difficult to have her in the house.

“But what else could we do?” she exclaimed.

That little cry of distress quite genuine in its inexpressiveness, altered my feeling towards Mrs. Fyne.  It would have been so easy to have done nothing and to have thought no more about it.  My liking for her began while she was trying to tell me of the night she spent by the girl’s bedside, the night before her departure with her unprepossessing relative.  That Mrs. Fyne found means to comfort the child I doubt very much.  She had not the genius for the task of undoing that which the hate of an infuriated woman had planned so well.

You will tell me perhaps that children’s impressions are not durable.  That’s true enough.  But here, child is only a manner of speaking.  The girl was within a few days of her sixteenth birthday; she was old enough to be matured by the shock.  The very effort she had to make in conveying the impression to Mrs. Fyne, in remembering the details, in finding adequate words — or any words at all — was in itself a terribly enlightening, an ageing process.  She had talked a long time, uninterrupted by Mrs. Fyne, childlike enough in her wonder and pain, pausing now and then to interject the pitiful query: “It was cruel of her.  Wasn’t it cruel, Mrs. Fyne?”

For Charley she found excuses.  He at any rate had not said anything, while he had looked very gloomy and miserable.  He couldn’t have taken part against his aunt — could he?  But after all he did, when she called upon him, take “that cruel woman away.”  He had dragged her out by the arm.  She had seen that plainly.  She remembered it.  That was it!  The woman was mad.  “Oh!  Mrs. Fyne, don’t tell me she wasn’t mad.  If you had only seen her face . . . “

But Mrs. Fyne was unflinching in her idea that as much truth as could be told was due in the way of kindness to the girl, whose fate she feared would be to live exposed to the hardest realities of unprivileged existences.  She explained to her that there were in the world evil-minded, selfish people.  Unscrupulous people . . . These two persons had been after her father’s money.  The best thing she could do was to forget all about them.

“After papa’s money?  I don’t understand,” poor Flora de Barral had murmured, and lay still as if trying to think it out in the silence and shadows of the room where only a night-light was burning.  Then she had a long shivering fit while holding tight the hand of Mrs. Fyne whose patient immobility by the bedside of that brutally murdered childhood did infinite honour to her humanity.  That vigil must have been the more trying because I could see very well that at no time did she think the victim particularly charming or sympathetic.  It was a manifestation of pure compassion, of compassion in itself, so to speak, not many women would have been capable of displaying with that unflinching steadiness.  The shivering fit over, the girl’s next words in an outburst of sobs were, “Oh!  Mrs. Fyne, am I really such a horrid thing as she has made me out to be?”

“No, no!” protested Mrs. Fyne.  “It is your former governess who is horrid and odious.  She is a vile woman.  I cannot tell you that she was mad but I think she must have been beside herself with rage and full of evil thoughts.  You must try not to think of these abominations, my dear child.”

They were not fit for anyone to think of much, Mrs. Fyne commented to me in a curt positive tone.  All that had been very trying.  The girl was like a creature struggling under a net.

“But how can I forget? she called my father a cheat and a swindler!  Do tell me Mrs. Fyne that it isn’t true.  It can’t be true.  How can it be true?”

She sat up in bed with a sudden wild motion as if to jump out and flee away from the sound of the words which had just passed her own lips.  Mrs. Fyne restrained her, soothed her, induced her at last to lay her head on her pillow again, assuring her all the time that nothing this woman had had the cruelty to say deserved to be taken to heart.  The girl, exhausted, cried quietly for a time.  It may be she had noticed something evasive in Mrs. Fyne’s assurances.  After a while, without stirring, she whispered brokenly:

“That awful woman told me that all the world would call papa these awful names.  Is it possible?  Is it possible?”

Mrs. Fyne kept silent.

“Do say something to me, Mrs. Fyne,” the daughter of de Barral insisted in the same feeble whisper.

Again Mrs. Fyne assured me that it had been very trying.  Terribly trying.  “Yes, thanks, I will.”  She leaned back in the chair with folded arms while I poured another cup of tea for her, and Fyne went out to pacify the dog which, tied up under the porch, had become suddenly very indignant at somebody having the audacity to walk along the lane.  Mrs. Fyne stirred her tea for a long time, drank a little, put the cup down and said with that air of accepting all the consequences:

“Silence would have been unfair.  I don’t think it would have been kind either.  I told her that she must be prepared for the world passing a very severe judgment on her father . . . “

* * * * *

“Wasn’t it admirable,” cried Marlow interrupting his narrative.  “Admirable!”  And as I looked dubiously at this unexpected enthusiasm he started justifying it after his own manner.

“I say admirable because it was so characteristic.  It was perfect.  Nothing short of genius could have found better.  And this was nature!  As they say of an artist’s work: this was a perfect Fyne.  Compassion — judiciousness — something correctly measured.  None of your dishevelled sentiment.  And right!  You must confess that nothing could have been more right.  I had a mind to shout “Brava!  Brava!” but I did not do that.  I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into some sort of self-control.  His sharp comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one’s brain, and Fyne’s deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on a popular beach.  Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low, sepulchral tones when I appeared.  The dog became at once wildly demonstrative, half strangling himself in his collar, his eyes and tongue hanging out in the excess of his incomprehensible affection for me.  This was before he caught sight of the cake in my hand.  A series of vertical springs high up in the air followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his interest in everything else.

Fyne was slightly vexed with me.  As kind a master as any dog could wish to have, he yet did not approve of cake being given to dogs.  The Fyne dog was supposed to lead a Spartan existence on a diet of repulsive biscuits with an occasional dry, hygienic, bone thrown in.  Fyne looked down gloomily at the appeased animal, I too looked at that fool-dog; and (you know how one’s memory gets suddenly stimulated) I was reminded visually, with an almost painful distinctness, of the ghostly white face of the girl I saw last accompanied by that dog — deserted by that dog.  I almost heard her distressed voice as if on the verge of resentful tears calling to the dog, the unsympathetic dog.  Perhaps she had not the power of evoking sympathy, that personal gift of direct appeal to the feelings.  I said to Fyne, mistrusting the supine attitude of the dog: