Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (405 page)

She told me all this with simplicity.  My voice had destroyed her poise — the suicide poise of her mind.  Every act of ours, the most criminal, the most mad presupposes a balance of thought, feeling and will, like a correct attitude for an effective stroke in a game.  And I had destroyed it.  She was no longer in proper form for the act.  She was not very much annoyed.  Next day would do.  She would have to slip away without attracting the notice of the dog.  She thought of the necessity almost tenderly.  She came down the path carrying her despair with lucid calmness.  But when she saw herself deserted by the dog, she had an impulse to turn round, go up again and be done with it.  Not even that animal cared for her — in the end.

“I really did think that he was attached to me.  What did he want to pretend for, like this?  I thought nothing could hurt me any more.  Oh yes.  I would have gone up, but I felt suddenly so tired.  So tired.  And then you were there.  I didn’t know what you would do.  You might have tried to follow me and I didn’t think I could run — not up hill — not then.”

She had raised her white face a little, and it was queer to hear her say these things.  At that time of the morning there are comparatively few people out in that part of the town.  The broad interminable perspective of the East India Dock Road, the great perspective of drab brick walls, of grey pavement, of muddy roadway rumbling dismally with loaded carts and vans lost itself in the distance, imposing and shabby in its spacious meanness of aspect, in its immeasurable poverty of forms, of colouring, of life — under a harsh, unconcerned sky dried by the wind to a clear blue.  It had been raining during the night.  The sunshine itself seemed poor.  From time to time a few bits of paper, a little dust and straw whirled past us on the broad flat promontory of the pavement before the rounded front of the hotel.

Flora de Barral was silent for a while.  I said:

“And next day you thought better of it.”

Again she raised her eyes to mine with that peculiar expression of informed innocence; and again her white cheeks took on the faintest tinge of pink — the merest shadow of a blush.

“Next day,” she uttered distinctly, “I didn’t think.  I remembered.  That was enough.  I remembered what I should never have forgotten.  Never.  And Captain Anthony arrived at the cottage in the evening.”

“Ah yes.  Captain Anthony,” I murmured.  And she repeated also in a murmur, “Yes!  Captain Anthony.”  The faint flush of warm life left her face.  I subdued my voice still more and not looking at her: “You found him sympathetic?” I ventured.

Her long dark lashes went down a little with an air of calculated discretion.  At least so it seemed to me.  And yet no one could say that I was inimical to that girl.  But there you are!  Explain it as you may, in this world the friendless, like the poor, are always a little suspect, as if honesty and delicacy were only possible to the privileged few.

“Why do you ask?” she said after a time, raising her eyes suddenly to mine in an effect of candour which on the same principle (of the disinherited not being to be trusted) might have been judged equivocal.

“If you mean what right I have . . . “  She move slightly a hand in a worn brown glove as much as to say she could not question anyone’s right against such an outcast as herself.

I ought to have been moved perhaps; but I only noted the total absence of humility . . . “No right at all,” I continued, “but just interest.  Mrs. Fyne — it’s too difficult to explain how it came about — has talked to me of you — well — extensively.”

No doubt Mrs. Fyne had told me the truth, Flora said brusquely with an unexpected hoarseness of tone.  This very dress she was wearing had been given her by Mrs. Fyne.  Of course I looked at it.  It could not have been a recent gift.  Close-fitting and black, with heliotrope silk facings under a figured net, it looked far from new, just on this side of shabbiness; in fact, it accentuated the slightness of her figure, it went well in its suggestion of half mourning with the white face in which the unsmiling red lips alone seemed warm with the rich blood of life and passion.

Little Fyne was staying up there an unconscionable time.  Was he arguing, preaching, remonstrating?  Had he discovered in himself a capacity and a taste for that sort of thing?  Or was he perhaps, in an intense dislike for the job, beating about the bush and only puzzling Captain Anthony, the providential man, who, if he expected the girl to appear at any moment, must have been on tenterhooks all the time, and beside himself with impatience to see the back of his brother-in-law.  How was it that he had not got rid of Fyne long before in any case?  I don’t mean by actually throwing him out of the window, but in some other resolute manner.

Surely Fyne had not impressed him.  That he was an impressionable man I could not doubt.  The presence of the girl there on the pavement before me proved this up to the hilt — and, well, yes, touchingly enough.

It so happened that in their wanderings to and fro our glances met.  They met and remained in contact more familiar than a hand-clasp, more communicative, more expressive.  There was something comic too in the whole situation, in the poor girl and myself waiting together on the broad pavement at a corner public-house for the issue of Fyne’s ridiculous mission.  But the comic when it is human becomes quickly painful.  Yes, she was infinitely anxious.  And I was asking myself whether this poignant tension of her suspense depended — to put it plainly — on hunger or love.

The answer would have been of some interest to Captain Anthony.  For my part, in the presence of a young girl I always become convinced that the dreams of sentiment — like the consoling mysteries of Faith — are invincible; that it is never never reason which governs men and women.

Yet what sentiment could there have been on her part?  I remembered her tone only a moment since when she said: “That evening Captain Anthony arrived at the cottage.”  And considering, too, what the arrival of Captain Anthony meant in this connection, I wondered at the calmness with which she could mention that fact.  He arrived at the cottage.  In the evening.  I knew that late train.  He probably walked from the station.  The evening would be well advanced.  I could almost see a dark indistinct figure opening the wicket gate of the garden.  Where was she?  Did she see him enter?  Was she somewhere near by and did she hear without the slightest premonition his chance and fateful footsteps on the flagged path leading to the cottage door?  In the shadow of the night made more cruelly sombre for her by the very shadow of death he must have appeared too strange, too remote, too unknown to impress himself on her thought as a living force — such a force as a man can bring to bear on a woman’s destiny.

She glanced towards the hotel door again; I followed suit and then our eyes met once more, this time intentionally.  A tentative, uncertain intimacy was springing up between us two.  She said simply: “You are waiting for Mr. Fyne to come out; are you?”

I admitted to her that I was waiting to see Mr. Fyne come out.  That was all.  I had nothing to say to him.

“I have said yesterday all I had to say to him,” I added meaningly.  “I have said it to them both, in fact.  I have also heard all they had to say.”

“About me?” she murmured.

“Yes.  The conversation was about you.”

“I wonder if they told you everything.”

If she wondered I could do nothing else but wonder too.  But I did not tell her that.  I only smiled.  The material point was that Captain Anthony should be told everything.  But as to that I was very certain that the good sister would see to it.  Was there anything more to disclose — some other misery, some other deception of which that girl had been a victim?  It seemed hardly probable.  It was not even easy to imagine.  What struck me most was her — I suppose I must call it — composure.  One could not tell whether she understood what she had done.  One wondered.  She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive butt of ferocious misfortune.

Looking back at the occasion when we first got on speaking terms on the road by the quarry, I had to admit that she presented some points of a problematic appearance.  I don’t know why I imagined Captain Anthony as the sort of man who would not be likely to take the initiative; not perhaps from indifference but from that peculiar timidity before women which often enough is found in conjunction with chivalrous instincts, with a great need for affection and great stability of feelings.  Such men are easily moved.  At the least encouragement they go forward with the eagerness, with the recklessness of starvation.  This accounted for the suddenness of the affair.  No!  With all her inexperience this girl could not have found any great difficulty in her conquering enterprise.  She must have begun it.  And yet there she was, patient, almost unmoved, almost pitiful, waiting outside like a beggar, without a right to anything but compassion, for a promised dole.

Every moment people were passing close by us, singly, in two and threes; the inhabitants of that end of the town where life goes on unadorned by grace or splendour; they passed us in their shabby garments, with sallow faces, haggard, anxious or weary, or simply without expression, in an unsmiling sombre stream not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered existences whose joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes were miserable, glamourless, and of no account in the world.  And when one thought of their reality to themselves one’s heart became oppressed.  But of all the individuals who passed by none appeared to me for the moment so pathetic in unconscious patience as the girl standing before me; none more difficult to understand.  It is perhaps because I was thinking of things which I could not ask her about.

In fact we had nothing to say to each other; but we two, strangers as we really were to each other, had dealt with the most intimate and final of subjects, the subject of death.  It had created a sort of bond between us.  It made our silence weighty and uneasy.  I ought to have left her there and then; but, as I think I’ve told you before, the fact of having shouted her away from the edge of a precipice seemed somehow to have engaged my responsibility as to this other leap.  And so we had still an intimate subject between us to lend more weight and more uneasiness to our silence.  The subject of marriage.  I use the word not so much in reference to the ceremony itself (I had no doubt of this, Captain Anthony being a decent fellow) or in view of the social institution in general, as to which I have no opinion, but in regard to the human relation.  The first two views are not particularly interesting.  The ceremony, I suppose, is adequate; the institution, I dare say, is useful or it would not have endured.  But the human relation thus recognized is a mysterious thing in its origins, character and consequences.  Unfortunately you can’t buttonhole familiarly a young girl as you would a young fellow.  I don’t think that even another woman could really do it.  She would not be trusted.  There is not between women that fund of at least conditional loyalty which men may depend on in their dealings with each other.  I believe that any woman would rather trust a man.  The difficulty in such a delicate case was how to get on terms.

So we held our peace in the odious uproar of that wide roadway thronged with heavy carts.  Great vans carrying enormous piled-up loads advanced swaying like mountains.  It was as if the whole world existed only for selling and buying and those who had nothing to do with the movement of merchandise were of no account.

“You must be tired,” I said.  One had to say something if only to assert oneself against that wearisome, passionless and crushing uproar.  She raised her eyes for a moment.  No, she was not.  Not very.  She had not walked all the way.  She came by train as far as Whitechapel Station and had only walked from there.

She had had an ugly pilgrimage; but whether of love or of necessity who could tell?  And that precisely was what I should have liked to get at.  This was not however a question to be asked point-blank, and I could not think of any effective circumlocution.  It occurred to me too that she might conceivably know nothing of it herself — I mean by reflection.  That young woman had been obviously considering death.  She had gone the length of forming some conception of it.  But as to its companion fatality — love, she, I was certain, had never reflected upon its meaning.

With that man in the hotel, whom I did not know, and this girl standing before me in the street I felt that it was an exceptional case.  He had broken away from his surroundings; she stood outside the pale.  One aspect of conventions which people who declaim against them lose sight of is that conventions make both joy and suffering easier to bear in a becoming manner.  But those two were outside all conventions.  They would be as untrammelled in a sense as the first man and the first woman.  The trouble was that I could not imagine anything about Flora de Barral and the brother of Mrs. Fyne.  Or, if you like, I could imagine anything which comes practically to the same thing.  Darkness and chaos are first cousins.  I should have liked to ask the girl for a word which would give my imagination its line.  But how was one to venture so far?  I can be rough sometimes but I am not naturally impertinent.  I would have liked to ask her for instance: “Do you know what you have done with yourself?”  A question like that.  Anyhow it was time for one of us to say something.  A question it must be.  And the question I asked was: “So he’s going to show you the ship?”

She seemed glad I had spoken at last and glad of the opportunity to speak herself.

“Yes.  He said he would — this morning.  Did you say you did not know Captain Anthony?”

“No.  I don’t know him.  Is he anything like his sister?”

She looked startled and murmured “Sister!” in a puzzled tone which astonished me.  “Oh!  Mrs. Fyne,” she exclaimed, recollecting herself, and avoiding my eyes while I looked at her curiously.

What an extraordinary detachment!  And all the time the stream of shabby people was hastening by us, with the continuous dreary shuffling of weary footsteps on the flagstones.  The sunshine falling on the grime of surfaces, on the poverty of tones and forms seemed of an inferior quality, its joy faded, its brilliance tarnished and dusty.  I had to raise my voice in the dull vibrating noise of the roadway.