Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (404 page)

And musing thus on the general inclination of our instincts towards injustice I met unexpectedly, at the turn of the road, as it were, a shape of duplicity.  It might have been unconscious on Mrs. Fyne’s part, but her leading idea appeared to me to be not to keep, not to preserve her brother, but to get rid of him definitely.  She did not hope to stop anything.  She had too much sense for that.  Almost anyone out of an idiot asylum would have had enough sense for that.  She wanted the protest to be made, emphatically, with Fyne’s fullest concurrence in order to make all intercourse for the future impossible.  Such an action would estrange the pair for ever from the Fynes.  She understood her brother and the girl too.  Happy together, they would never forgive that outspoken hostility — and should the marriage turn out badly . . . Well, it would be just the same.  Neither of them would be likely to bring their troubles to such a good prophet of evil.

Yes.  That must have been her motive.  The inspiration of a possibly unconscious Machiavellism!  Either she was afraid of having a sister-in-law to look after during the husband’s long absences; or dreaded the more or less distant eventuality of her brother being persuaded to leave the sea, the friendly refuge of his unhappy youth, and to settle on shore, bringing to her very door this undesirable, this embarrassing connection.  She wanted to be done with it — maybe simply from the fatigue of continuous effort in good or evil, which, in the bulk of common mortals, accounts for so many surprising inconsistencies of conduct.

I don’t know that I had classed Mrs. Fyne, in my thoughts, amongst common mortals.  She was too quietly sure of herself for that.  But little Fyne, as I spied him next morning (out of the carriage window) speeding along the platform, looked very much like a common, flustered mortal who has made a very near thing of catching his train: the starting wild eyes, the tense and excited face, the distracted gait, all the common symptoms were there, rendered more impressive by his native solemnity which flapped about him like a disordered garment.  Had he — I asked myself with interest — resisted his wife to the very last minute and then bolted up the road from the last conclusive argument, as though it had been a loaded gun suddenly produced?  I opened the carriage door, and a vigorous porter shoved him in from behind just as the end of the rustic platform went gliding swiftly from under his feet.  He was very much out of breath, and I waited with some curiosity for the moment he would recover his power of speech.  That moment came.  He said “Good morning” with a slight gasp, remained very still for another minute and then pulled out of his pocket the travelling chessboard, and holding it in his hand, directed at me a glance of inquiry.

“Yes.  Certainly,” I said, very much disappointed.

CHAPTER SEVEN — ON THE PAVEMENT

Fyne was not willing to talk; but as I had been already let into the secret, the fair-minded little man recognized that I had some right to information if I insisted on it.  And I did insist, after the third game.  We were yet some way from the end of our journey.

“Oh, if you want to know,” was his somewhat impatient opening.  And then he talked rather volubly.  First of all his wife had not given him to read the letter received from Flora (I had suspected him of having it in his pocket), but had told him all about the contents.  It was not at all what it should have been even if the girl had wished to affirm her right to disregard the feelings of all the world.  Her own had been trampled in the dirt out of all shape.  Extraordinary thing to say — I would admit, for a young girl of her age.  The whole tone of that letter was wrong, quite wrong.  It was certainly not the product of a — say, of a well-balanced mind.

“If she were given some sort of footing in this world,” I said, “if only no bigger than the palm of my hand, she would probably learn to keep a better balance.”

Fyne ignored this little remark.  His wife, he said, was not the sort of person to be addressed mockingly on a serious subject.  There was an unpleasant strain of levity in that letter, extending even to the references to Captain Anthony himself.  Such a disposition was enough, his wife had pointed out to him, to alarm one for the future, had all the circumstances of that preposterous project been as satisfactory as in fact they were not.  Other parts of the letter seemed to have a challenging tone — as if daring them (the Fynes) to approve her conduct.  And at the same time implying that she did not care, that it was for their own sakes that she hoped they would “go against the world — the horrid world which had crushed poor papa.”

Fyne called upon me to admit that this was pretty cool — considering.  And there was another thing, too.  It seems that for the last six months (she had been assisting two ladies who kept a kindergarten school in Bayswater — a mere pittance), Flora had insisted on devoting all her spare time to the study of the trial.  She had been looking up files of old newspapers, and working herself up into a state of indignation with what she called the injustice and the hypocrisy of the prosecution.  Her father, Fyne reminded me, had made some palpable hits in his answers in Court, and she had fastened on them triumphantly.  She had reached the conclusion of her father’s innocence, and had been brooding over it.  Mrs. Fyne had pointed out to him the danger of this.

The train ran into the station and Fyne, jumping out directly it came to a standstill, seemed glad to cut short the conversation.  We walked in silence a little way, boarded a bus, then walked again.  I don’t suppose that since the days of his childhood, when surely he was taken to see the Tower, he had been once east of Temple Bar.  He looked about him sullenly; and when I pointed out in the distance the rounded front of the Eastern Hotel at the bifurcation of two very broad, mean, shabby thoroughfares, rising like a grey stucco tower above the lowly roofs of the dirty-yellow, two-storey houses, he only grunted disapprovingly.

“I wouldn’t lay too much stress on what you have been telling me,” I observed quietly as we approached that unattractive building.  “No man will believe a girl who has just accepted his suit to be not well balanced, — you know.”

“Oh!  Accepted his suit,” muttered Fyne, who seemed to have been very thoroughly convinced indeed.  “It may have been the other way about.”  And then he added: “I am going through with it.”

I said that this was very praiseworthy but that a certain moderation of statement . . . He waved his hand at me and mended his pace.  I guessed that he was anxious to get his mission over as quickly as possible.  He barely gave himself time to shake hands with me and made a rush at the narrow glass door with the words Hotel Entrance on it.  It swung to behind his back with no more noise than the snap of a toothless jaw.

The absurd temptation to remain and see what would come of it got over my better judgment.  I hung about irresolute, wondering how long an embassy of that sort would take, and whether Fyne on coming out would consent to be communicative.  I feared he would be shocked at finding me there, would consider my conduct incorrect, conceivably treat me with contempt.  I walked off a few paces.  Perhaps it would be possible to read something on Fyne’s face as he came out; and, if necessary, I could always eclipse myself discreetly through the door of one of the bars.  The ground floor of the Eastern Hotel was an unabashed pub, with plate-glass fronts, a display of brass rails, and divided into many compartments each having its own entrance.

But of course all this was silly.  The marriage, the love, the affairs of Captain Anthony were none of my business.  I was on the point of moving down the street for good when my attention was attracted by a girl approaching the hotel entrance from the west.  She was dressed very modestly in black.  It was the white straw hat of a good form and trimmed with a bunch of pale roses which had caught my eye.  The whole figure seemed familiar.  Of course!  Flora de Barral.  She was making for the hotel, she was going in.  And Fyne was with Captain Anthony!  To meet him could not be pleasant for her.  I wished to save her from the awkwardness, and as I hesitated what to do she looked up and our eyes happened to meet just as she was turning off the pavement into the hotel doorway.  Instinctively I extended my arm.  It was enough to make her stop.  I suppose she had some faint notion that she had seen me before somewhere.  She walked slowly forward, prudent and attentive, watching my faint smile.

“Excuse me,” I said directly she had approached me near enough.  “Perhaps you would like to know that Mr. Fyne is upstairs with Captain Anthony at this moment.”

She uttered a faint “Ah!  Mr. Fyne!”  I could read in her eyes that she had recognized me now.  Her serious expression extinguished the imbecile grin of which I was conscious.  I raised my hat.  She responded with a slow inclination of the head while her luminous, mistrustful, maiden’s glance seemed to whisper, “What is this one doing here?”

“I came up to town with Fyne this morning,” I said in a businesslike tone.  “I have to see a friend in East India Dock.  Fyne and I parted this moment at the door here . . . “   The girl regarded me with darkening eyes . . . “Mrs. Fyne did not come with her husband,” I went on, then hesitated before that white face so still in the pearly shadow thrown down by the hat-brim.  “But she sent him,” I murmured by way of warning.

Her eyelids fluttered slowly over the fixed stare.  I imagine she was not much disconcerted by this development.  “I live a long way from here,” she whispered.

I said perfunctorily, “Do you?”  And we remained gazing at each other.  The uniform paleness of her complexion was not that of an anaemic girl.  It had a transparent vitality and at that particular moment the faintest possible rosy tinge, the merest suspicion of colour; an equivalent, I suppose, in any other girl to blushing like a peony while she told me that Captain Anthony had arranged to show her the ship that morning.

It was easy to understand that she did not want to meet Fyne.  And when I mentioned in a discreet murmur that he had come because of her letter she glanced at the hotel door quickly, and moved off a few steps to a position where she could watch the entrance without being seen.  I followed her.  At the junction of the two thoroughfares she stopped in the thin traffic of the broad pavement and turned to me with an air of challenge.  “And so you know.”

I told her that I had not seen the letter.  I had only heard of it.  She was a little impatient.  “I mean all about me.”

Yes.  I knew all about her.  The distress of Mr. and Mrs. Fyne — especially of Mrs. Fyne — was so great that they would have shared it with anybody almost — not belonging to their circle of friends.  I happened to be at hand — that was all.

“You understand that I am not their friend.  I am only a holiday acquaintance.”

“She was not very much upset?” queried Flora de Barral, meaning, of course, Mrs. Fyne.  And I admitted that she was less so than her husband — and even less than myself.  Mrs. Fyne was a very self-possessed person which nothing could startle out of her extreme theoretical position.  She did not seem startled when Fyne and I proposed going to the quarry.

“You put that notion into their heads,” the girl said.

I advanced that the notion was in their heads already.  But it was much more vividly in my head since I had seen her up there with my own eyes, tempting Providence.

She was looking at me with extreme attention, and murmured:

“Is that what you called it to them?  Tempting . . . “

“No.  I told them that you were making up your mind and I came along just then.  I told them that you were saved by me.  My shout checked you . . . “  She moved her head gently from right to left in negation . . . “No?  Well, have it your own way.”

I thought to myself: She has found another issue.  She wants to forget now.  And no wonder.  She wants to persuade herself that she had never known such an ugly and poignant minute in her life.  “After all,” I conceded aloud, “things are not always what they seem.”

Her little head with its deep blue eyes, eyes of tenderness and anger under the black arch of fine eyebrows was very still.  The mouth looked very red in the white face peeping from under the veil, the little pointed chin had in its form something aggressive.  Slight and even angular in her modest black dress she was an appealing and — yes — she was a desirable little figure.

Her lips moved very fast asking me:

“And they believed you at once?”

“Yes, they believed me at once.  Mrs. Fyne’s word to us was “Go!”

A white gleam between the red lips was so short that I remained uncertain whether it was a smile or a ferocious baring of little even teeth.  The rest of the face preserved its innocent, tense and enigmatical expression.  She spoke rapidly.

“No, it wasn’t your shout.  I had been there some time before you saw me.  And I was not there to tempt Providence, as you call it.  I went up there for — for what you thought I was going to do.  Yes.  I climbed two fences.  I did not mean to leave anything to Providence.  There seem to be people for whom Providence can do nothing.  I suppose you are shocked to hear me talk like that?”

I shook my head.  I was not shocked.  What had kept her back all that time, till I appeared on the scene below, she went on, was neither fear nor any other kind of hesitation.  One reaches a point, she said with appalling youthful simplicity, where nothing that concerns one matters any longer.  But something did keep her back.  I should have never guessed what it was.  She herself confessed that it seemed absurd to say.  It was the Fyne dog.

Flora de Barral paused, looking at me, with a peculiar expression and then went on.  You see, she imagined the dog had become extremely attached to her.  She took it into her head that he might fall over or jump down after her.  She tried to drive him away.  She spoke sternly to him.  It only made him more frisky.  He barked and jumped about her skirt in his usual, idiotic, high spirits.  He scampered away in circles between the pines charging upon her and leaping as high as her waist.  She commanded, “Go away.  Go home.”  She even picked up from the ground a bit of a broken branch and threw it at him.  At this his delight knew no bounds; his rushes became faster, his yapping louder; he seemed to be having the time of his life.  She was convinced that the moment she threw herself down he would spring over after her as if it were part of the game.  She was vexed almost to tears.  She was touched too.  And when he stood still at some distance as if suddenly rooted to the ground wagging his tail slowly and watching her intensely with his shining eyes another fear came to her.  She imagined herself gone and the creature sitting on the brink, its head thrown up to the sky and howling for hours.  This thought was not to be borne.  Then my shout reached her ears.