Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (391 page)

This was the moment, the only moment, when he had perhaps all the audience in Court with him, in a hush of dreary silence.  And then the dreary proceedings were resumed.  For all the outside excitement it was the most dreary of all celebrated trials.  The bankruptcy proceedings had exhausted all the laughter there was in it.  Only the fact of wide-spread ruin remained, and the resentment of a mass of people for having been fooled by means too simple to save their self-respect from a deep wound which the cleverness of a consummate scoundrel would not have inflicted.  A shamefaced amazement attended these proceedings in which de Barral was not being exposed alone.  For himself his only cry was: Time! Time!  Time would have set everything right.  In time some of these speculations of his were certain to have succeeded.  He repeated this defence, this excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome iteration.  Everything he had done or left undone had been to gain time.  He had hypnotized himself with the word.  Sometimes, I am told, his appearance was ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing down the vista of future ages.  Time — and of course, more money.  “Ah!  If only you had left me alone for a couple of years more,” he cried once in accents of passionate belief.  “The money was coming in all right.”  The deposits you understand — the savings of Thrift.  Oh yes they had been coming in to the very last moment.  And he regretted them.  He had arrived to regard them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion.  And yet it was a perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel who was beginning a question with the words “You have had all these immense sums . . . “ with the indignant retort “What have I had out of them?”

“It was perfectly true.  He had had nothing out of them — nothing of the prestigious or the desirable things of the earth, craved for by predatory natures.  He had gratified no tastes, had known no luxury; he had built no gorgeous palaces, had formed no splendid galleries out of these “immense sums.”  He had not even a home.  He had gone into these rooms in an hotel and had stuck there for years, giving no doubt perfect satisfaction to the management.  They had twice raised his rent to show I suppose their high sense of his distinguished patronage.  He had bought for himself out of all the wealth streaming through his fingers neither adulation nor love, neither splendour nor comfort.  There was something perfect in his consistent mediocrity.  His very vanity seemed to miss the gratification of even the mere show of power.  In the days when he was most fully in the public eye the invincible obscurity of his origins clung to him like a shadowy garment.  He had handled millions without ever enjoying anything of what is counted as precious in the community of men, because he had neither the brutality of temperament nor the fineness of mind to make him desire them with the will power of a masterful adventurer . . . “

“You seem to have studied the man,” I observed.

“Studied,” repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  “No!  Not studied.  I had no opportunities.  You know that I saw him only on that one occasion I told you of.  But it may be that a glimpse and no more is the proper way of seeing an individuality; and de Barral was that, in virtue of his very deficiencies for they made of him something quite unlike one’s preconceived ideas.  There were also very few materials accessible to a man like me to form a judgment from.  But in such a case I verify believe that a little is as good as a feast — perhaps better.  If one has a taste for that kind of thing the merest starting-point becomes a coign of vantage, and then by a series of logically deducted verisimilitudes one arrives at truth — or very near the truth — as near as any circumstantial evidence can do.  I have not studied de Barral but that is how I understand him so far as he could be understood through the din of the crash; the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the newspaper contents bills, “The Thrift Frauds.  Cross-examination of the accused.  Extra special” — blazing fiercely; the charitable appeals for the victims, the grave tones of the dailies rumbling with compassion as if they were the national bowels.  All this lasted a whole week of industrious sittings.  A pressman whom I knew told me “He’s an idiot.”  Which was possible.  Before that I overheard once somebody declaring that he had a criminal type of face; which I knew was untrue.  The sentence was pronounced by artificial light in a stifling poisonous atmosphere.  Something edifying was said by the judge weightily, about the retribution overtaking the perpetrator of “the most heartless frauds on an unprecedented scale.”  I don’t understand these things much, but it appears that he had juggled with accounts, cooked balance sheets, had gathered in deposits months after he ought to have known himself to be hopelessly insolvent, and done enough of other things, highly reprehensible in the eyes of the law, to earn for himself seven years’ penal servitude.  The sentence making its way outside met with a good reception.  A small mob composed mainly of people who themselves did not look particularly clever and scrupulous, leavened by a slight sprinkling of genuine pickpockets amused itself by cheering in the most penetrating, abominable cold drizzle that I remember.  I happened to be passing there on my way from the East End where I had spent my day about the Docks with an old chum who was looking after the fitting out of a new ship.  I am always eager, when allowed, to call on a new ship.  They interest me like charming young persons.

I got mixed up in that crowd seething with an animosity as senseless as things of the street always are, and it was while I was laboriously making my way out of it that the pressman of whom I spoke was jostled against me.  He did me the justice to be surprised.  “What?  You here!  The last person in the world . . . If I had known I could have got you inside.  Plenty of room.  Interest been over for the last three days.  Got seven years.  Well, I am glad.”

“Why are you glad?  Because he’s got seven years?” I asked, greatly incommoded by the pressure of a hulking fellow who was remarking to some of his equally oppressive friends that the “beggar ought to have been poleaxed.”  I don’t know whether he had ever confided his savings to de Barral but if so, judging from his appearance, they must have been the proceeds of some successful burglary.  The pressman by my side said ‘No,’ to my question.  He was glad because it was all over.  He had suffered greatly from the heat and the bad air of the court.  The clammy, raw, chill of the streets seemed to affect his liver instantly.  He became contemptuous and irritable and plied his elbows viciously making way for himself and me.

A dull affair this.  All such cases were dull.  No really dramatic moments.  The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for revelations of that kind.  Dull dog that de Barral — he grumbled.  He could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive snigger that, after the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough to make a sort of protest.  ‘You haven’t given me time.  If I had been given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.’  And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in all these days, raising a hard-clenched fist above his head.

The pressman disapproved of that manifestation.  It was not his business to understand it.  Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything?  I guess not.  It would lead him too far away from the actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind.  He probably thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view; the weak voice; the colourless personality as incapable of an attitude as a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that time and place — no, it wasn’t worth much.  And then, for him, an accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly “bad business.”  His business was to write a readable account.  But I who had nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our still untouched glasses.  And the disclosure which so often rewards a moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill very much approaching a shudder.  I seemed to understand that, with the shock of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the imagination of that man, whose moods, notions and motives wore frequently an air of grotesque mystery — that his imagination had been at last roused into activity.  And this was awful.  Just try to enter into the feelings of a man whose imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb . . . “

* * * * *

“You must not think,” went on Marlow after a pause, “that on that morning with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us call it information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had, or rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral.  Information is something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull.  Whereas knowledge comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in its repose a fine resonant quality . . . But as such distinctions touch upon the transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them.  There are limits to my cruelty.  No!  I didn’t reckon up carefully in my mind all this I have been telling you.  How could I have done so, with Fyne right there in the room?  He sat perfectly still, statuesque in homely fashion, after having delivered himself of his effective assent: “Yes.  The convict,” and I, far from indulging in a reminiscent excursion into the past, remained sufficiently in the present to muse in a vague, absent-minded way on the respectable proportions and on the (upon the whole) comely shape of his great pedestrian’s calves, for he had thrown one leg over his knee, carelessly, to conceal the trouble of his mind by an air of ease.  But all the same the knowledge was in me, the awakened resonance of which I spoke just now; I was aware of it on that beautiful day, so fresh, so warm and friendly, so accomplished — an exquisite courtesy of the much abused English climate when it makes up its meteorological mind to behave like a perfect gentleman.  Of course the English climate is never a rough.  It suffers from spleen somewhat frequently — but that is gentlemanly too, and I don’t mind going to meet him in that mood.  He has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in which he is very fascinating.  How seldom he lapses into a blustering manner, after all!  And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately enough, one may go out and kill something.  But his fine days are the best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse — even to dream; in fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear, luminous and serene weather.

That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the weather’s glory which would have lent enchantment to the most unpromising of intellectual prospects.  For a companion I had found a book, not bemused with the cleverness of the day — a fine-weather book, simple and sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend.  But looking at little Fyne seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of my contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let in for some form of severe exercise.  Walking, it would be, I feared, since, for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual impression of Fyne.  Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be brought in helpful relation to the good Fyne’s present trouble and perplexity I could not imagine; except on the principle that senseless pedestrianism was Fyne’s panacea for all the ills and evils bodily and spiritual of the universe.  It could be of no use for me to say or do anything.  It was bound to come.  Contemplating his muscular limb encased in a golf-stocking, and under the strong impression of the information he had just imparted I said wondering, rather irrationally:

“And so de Barral had a wife and child!  That girl’s his daughter.  And how . . . “

Fyne interrupted me by stating again earnestly, as though it were something not easy to believe, that his wife and himself had tried to befriend the girl in every way — indeed they had!  I did not doubt him for a moment, of course, but my wonder at this was more rational.  At that hour of the morning, you mustn’t forget, I knew nothing as yet of Mrs. Fyne’s contact (it was hardly more) with de Barral’s wife and child during their exile at the Priory, in the culminating days of that man’s fame.

Fyne who had come over, it was clear, solely to talk to me on that subject, gave me the first hint of this initial, merely out of doors, connection.  “The girl was quite a child then,” he continued.  “Later on she was removed out of Mrs. Fyne’s reach in charge of a governess — a very unsatisfactory person,” he explained.  His wife had then — h’m — met him; and on her marriage she lost sight of the child completely.  But after the birth of Polly (Polly was the third Fyne girl) she did not get on very well, and went to Brighton for some months to recover her strength — and there, one day in the street, the child (she wore her hair down her back still) recognized her outside a shop and rushed, actually rushed, into Mrs. Fyne’s arms.  Rather touching this.  And so, disregarding the cold impertinence of that . . . h’m . . . governess, his wife naturally responded.

He was solemnly fragmentary.  I broke in with the observation that it must have been before the crash.

Fyne nodded with deepened gravity, stating in his bass tone —

“Just before,” and indulged himself with a weighty period of solemn silence.

De Barral, he resumed suddenly, was not coming to Brighton for week-ends regularly, then.  Must have been conscious already of the approaching disaster.  Mrs. Fyne avoided being drawn into making his acquaintance, and this suited the views of the governess person, very jealous of any outside influence.  But in any case it would not have been an easy matter.  Extraordinary, stiff-backed, thin figure all in black, the observed of all, while walking hand-in-hand with the girl; apparently shy, but — and here Fyne came very near showing something like insight — probably nursing under a diffident manner a considerable amount of secret arrogance.  Mrs. Fyne pitied Flora de Barral’s fate long before the catastrophe.  Most unfortunate guidance.  Very unsatisfactory surroundings.  The girl was known in the streets, was stared at in public places as if she had been a sort of princess, but she was kept with a very ominous consistency, from making any acquaintances — though of course there were many people no doubt who would have been more than willing to — h’m — make themselves agreeable to Miss de Barral.  But this did not enter into the plans of the governess, an intriguing person hatching a most sinister plot under her severe air of distant, fashionable exclusiveness.  Good little Fyne’s eyes bulged with solemn horror as he revealed to me, in agitated speech, his wife’s more than suspicions, at the time, of that, Mrs., Mrs. What’s her name’s perfidious conduct.  She actually seemed to have — Mrs. Fyne asserted — formed a plot already to marry eventually her charge to an impecunious relation of her own — a young man with furtive eyes and something impudent in his manner, whom that woman called her nephew, and whom she was always having down to stay with her.