Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (401 page)

Mrs. Fyne heard all this without turning her head away from the window.  Fyne on the hearthrug had to listen and to look on too.  I shall not try to form a surmise as to the real nature of the suspense.  Their very goodness must have made it very anxious.  The girl’s hands were lying in her lap; her head was lowered as if in deep thought; and the other went on delivering a sort of homily.  Ingratitude was condemned in it, the sinfulness of pride was pointed out — together with the proverbial fact that it “goes before a fall.”  There were also some sound remarks as to the danger of nonsensical notions and the disadvantages of a quick temper.  It sets one’s best friends against one.  “And if anybody ever wanted friends in the world it’s you, my girl.”  Even respect for parental authority was invoked.  “In the first hour of his trouble your father wrote to me to take care of you — don’t forget it.  Yes, to me, just a plain man, rather than to any of his fine West-End friends.  You can’t get over that.  And a father’s a father no matter what a mess he’s got himself into.  You ain’t going to throw over your own father — are you?”

It was difficult to say whether he was more absurd than cruel or more cruel than absurd.  Mrs. Fyne, with the fine ear of a woman, seemed to detect a jeering intention in his meanly unctuous tone, something more vile than mere cruelty.  She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw the girl raise her two hands to her head, then let them fall again on her lap.  Fyne in front of the fire was like the victim of an unholy spell — bereft of motion and speech but obviously in pain.  It was a short pause of perfect silence, and then that “odious creature” (he must have been really a remarkable individual in his way) struck out into sarcasm.

“Well? . . . “  Again a silence.  “If you have fixed it up with the lady and gentleman present here for your board and lodging you had better say so.  I don’t want to interfere in a bargain I know nothing of.  But I wonder how your father will take it when he comes out . . . or don’t you expect him ever to come out?”

At that moment, Mrs. Fyne told me she met the girl’s eyes.  There was that in them which made her shut her own.  She also felt as though she would have liked to put her fingers in her ears.  She restrained herself, however; and the “plain man” passed in his appalling versatility from sarcasm to veiled menace.

“You have — eh?  Well and good.  But before I go home let me ask you, my girl, to think if by any chance you throwing us over like this won’t be rather bad for your father later on?  Just think it over.”

He looked at his victim with an air of cunning mystery.  She jumped up so suddenly that he started back.  Mrs. Fyne rose too, and even the spell was removed from her husband.  But the girl dropped again into the chair and turned her head to look at Mrs. Fyne.  This time it was no accidental meeting of fugitive glances.  It was a deliberate communication.  To my question as to its nature Mrs. Fyne said she did not know.  “Was it appealing?” I suggested.  “No,” she said.  “Was it frightened, angry, crushed, resigned?”  “No!  No!  Nothing of these.”  But it had frightened her.  She remembered it to this day.  She had been ever since fancying she could detect the lingering reflection of that look in all the girl’s glances.  In the attentive, in the casual — even in the grateful glances — in the expression of the softest moods.

“Has she her soft moods, then?” I asked with interest.

Mrs Fyne, much moved by her recollections, heeded not my inquiry.  All her mental energy was concentrated on the nature of that memorable glance.  The general tradition of mankind teaches us that glances occupy a considerable place in the self-expression of women.  Mrs. Fyne was trying honestly to give me some idea, as much perhaps to satisfy her own uneasiness as my curiosity.  She was frowning in the effort as you see sometimes a child do (what is delightful in women is that they so often resemble intelligent children — I mean the crustiest, the sourest, the most battered of them do — at times).  She was frowning, I say, and I was beginning to smile faintly at her when all at once she came out with something totally unexpected.

“It was horribly merry,” she said.

I suppose she must have been satisfied by my sudden gravity because she looked at me in a friendly manner.

“Yes, Mrs. Fyne,” I said, smiling no longer.  “I see.  It would have been horrible even on the stage.”

“Ah!” she interrupted me — and I really believe her change of attitude back to folded arms was meant to check a shudder.  “But it wasn’t on the stage, and it was not with her lips that she laughed.”

“Yes.  It must have been horrible,” I assented.  “And then she had to go away ultimately — I suppose.  You didn’t say anything?”

“No,” said Mrs. Fyne.  “I rang the bell and told one of the maids to go and bring the hat and coat out of the cab.  And then we waited.”

I don’t think that there ever was such waiting unless possibly in a jail at some moment or other on the morning of an execution.  The servant appeared with the hat and coat, and then, still as on the morning of an execution, when the condemned, I believe, is offered a breakfast, Mrs. Fyne, anxious that the white-faced girl should swallow something warm (if she could) before leaving her house for an interminable drive through raw cold air in a damp four-wheeler — Mrs. Fyne broke the awful silence: “You really must try to eat something,” in her best resolute manner.  She turned to the “odious person” with the same determination.  “Perhaps you will sit down and have a cup of coffee, too.”

The worthy “employer of labour” sat down.  He might have been awed by Mrs. Fyne’s peremptory manner — for she did not think of conciliating him then.  He sat down, provisionally, like a man who finds himself much against his will in doubtful company.  He accepted ungraciously the cup handed to him by Mrs. Fyne, took an unwilling sip or two and put it down as if there were some moral contamination in the coffee of these “swells.”  Between whiles he directed mysteriously inexpressive glances at little Fyne, who, I gather, had no breakfast that morning at all.  Neither had the girl.  She never moved her hands from her lap till her appointed guardian got up, leaving his cup half full.

“Well.  If you don’t mean to take advantage of this lady’s kind offer I may just as well take you home at once.  I want to begin my day — I do.”

After a few more dumb, leaden-footed minutes while Flora was putting on her hat and jacket, the Fynes without moving, without saying anything, saw these two leave the room.

“She never looked back at us,” said Mrs. Fyne.  “She just followed him out.  I’ve never had such a crushing impression of the miserable dependence of girls — of women.  This was an extreme case.  But a young man — any man — could have gone to break stones on the roads or something of that kind — or enlisted — or — ”

It was very true.  Women can’t go forth on the high roads and by-ways to pick up a living even when dignity, independence, or existence itself are at stake.  But what made me interrupt Mrs. Fyne’s tirade was my profound surprise at the fact of that respectable citizen being so willing to keep in his home the poor girl for whom it seemed there was no place in the world.  And not only willing but anxious.  I couldn’t credit him with generous impulses.  For it seemed obvious to me from what I had learned that, to put it mildly, he was not an impulsive person.

“I confess that I can’t understand his motive,” I exclaimed.

“This is exactly what John wondered at, at first,” said Mrs. Fyne.  By that time an intimacy — if not exactly confidence — had sprung up between us which permitted her in this discussion to refer to her husband as John.  “You know he had not opened his lips all that time,” she pursued.  “I don’t blame his restraint.  On the contrary.  What could he have said?  I could see he was observing the man very thoughtfully.”

“And so, Mr. Fyne listened, observed and meditated,” I said.  “That’s an excellent way of coming to a conclusion.  And may I ask at what conclusion he had managed to arrive?  On what ground did he cease to wonder at the inexplicable?  For I can’t admit humanity to be the explanation.  It would be too monstrous.”

It was nothing of the sort, Mrs. Fyne assured me with some resentment, as though I had aspersed little Fyne’s sanity.  Fyne very sensibly had set himself the mental task of discovering the self-interest.  I should not have thought him capable of so much cynicism.  He said to himself that for people of that sort (religious fears or the vanity of righteousness put aside) money — not great wealth, but money, just a little money — is the measure of virtue, of expediency, of wisdom — of pretty well everything.  But the girl was absolutely destitute.  The father was in prison after the most terribly complete and disgraceful smash of modern times.  And then it dawned upon Fyne that this was just it.  The great smash, in the great dust of vanishing millions!  Was it possible that they all had vanished to the last penny?  Wasn’t there, somewhere, something palpable; some fragment of the fabric left?

“That’s it,” had exclaimed Fyne, startling his wife by this explosive unseating of his lips less than half an hour after the departure of de Barral’s cousin with de Barral’s daughter.  It was still in the dining-room, very near the time for him to go forth affronting the elements in order to put in another day’s work in his country’s service.  All he could say at the moment in elucidation of this breakdown from his usual placid solemnity was:

“The fellow imagines that de Barral has got some plunder put away somewhere.”

This being the theory arrived at by Fyne, his comment on it was that a good many bankrupts had been known to have taken such a precaution.  It was possible in de Barral’s case.  Fyne went so far in his display of cynical pessimism as to say that it was extremely probable.

He explained at length to Mrs. Fyne that de Barral certainly did not take anyone into his confidence.  But the beastly relative had made up his low mind that it was so.  He was selfish and pitiless in his stupidity, but he had clearly conceived the notion of making a claim on de Barral when de Barral came out of prison on the strength of having “looked after” (as he would have himself expressed it) his daughter.  He nursed his hopes, such as they were, in secret, and it is to be supposed kept them even from his wife.

I could see it very well.  That belief accounted for his mysterious air while he interfered in favour of the girl.  He was the only protector she had.  It was as though Flora had been fated to be always surrounded by treachery and lies stifling every better impulse, every instinctive aspiration of her soul to trust and to love.  It would have been enough to drive a fine nature into the madness of universal suspicion — into any sort of madness.  I don’t know how far a sense of humour will stand by one.  To the foot of the gallows, perhaps.  But from my recollection of Flora de Barral I feared that she hadn’t much sense of humour.  She had cried at the desertion of the absurd Fyne dog.  That animal was certainly free from duplicity.  He was frank and simple and ridiculous.  The indignation of the girl at his unhypocritical behaviour had been funny but not humorous.

As you may imagine I was not very anxious to resume the discussion on the justice, expediency, effectiveness or what not, of Fyne’s journey to London.  It isn’t that I was unfaithful to little Fyne out in the porch with the dog.  (They kept amazingly quiet there.  Could they have gone to sleep?)  What I felt was that either my sagacity or my conscience would come out damaged from that campaign.  And no man will willingly put himself in the way of moral damage.  I did not want a war with Mrs. Fyne.  I much preferred to hear something more of the girl.  I said:

“And so she went away with that respectable ruffian.”

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders slightly — ”What else could she have done?”  I agreed with her by another hopeless gesture.  It isn’t so easy for a girl like Flora de Barral to become a factory hand, a pathetic seamstress or even a barmaid.  She wouldn’t have known how to begin.  She was the captive of the meanest conceivable fate.  And she wasn’t mean enough for it.  It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.  As I don’t want you to think that I am unduly partial to the girl we shall say that she failed decidedly to endear herself to that simple, virtuous and, I believe, teetotal household.  It’s my conviction that an angel would have failed likewise.  It’s no use going into details; suffice it to state that before the year was out she was again at the Fynes’ door.

This time she was escorted by a stout youth.  His large pale face wore a smile of inane cunning soured by annoyance.  His clothes were new and the indescribable smartness of their cut, a genre which had never been obtruded on her notice before, astonished Mrs. Fyne, who came out into the hall with her hat on; for she was about to go out to hear a new pianist (a girl) in a friend’s house.  The youth addressing Mrs. Fyne easily begged her not to let “that silly thing go back to us any more.”  There had been, he said, nothing but “ructions” at home about her for the last three weeks.  Everybody in the family was heartily sick of quarrelling.  His governor had charged him to bring her to this address and say that the lady and gentleman were quite welcome to all there was in it.  She hadn’t enough sense to appreciate a plain, honest English home and she was better out of it.

The young, pimply-faced fellow was vexed by this job his governor had sprung on him.  It was the cause of his missing an appointment for that afternoon with a certain young lady.  The lady he was engaged to.  But he meant to dash back and try for a sight of her that evening yet “if he were to burst over it.”  “Good-bye, Florrie.  Good luck to you — and I hope I’ll never see your face again.”

With that he ran out in lover-like haste leaving the hall-door wide open.  Mrs. Fyne had not found a word to say.  She had been too much taken aback even to gasp freely.  But she had the presence of mind to grab the girl’s arm just as she, too, was running out into the street — with the haste, I suppose, of despair and to keep I don’t know what tragic tryst.

“You stopped her with your own hand, Mrs. Fyne,” I said.  “I presume she meant to get away.  That girl is no comedian — if I am any judge.”