Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (419 page)

No scorn could stand against the impression of such charges advanced with heat and conviction.  They shook him.  They were yet vibrating in the air of that stuffy hotel-room, terrific, disturbing, impossible to get rid of, when the door opened and Flora de Barral entered.

He did not even notice that she was late.  He was sitting on a sofa plunged in gloom.  Was it true?  Having himself always said exactly what he meant he imagined that people (unless they were liars, which of course his brother-in-law could not be) never said more than they meant.  The deep chest voice of little Fyne was still in his ear.  “He knows,” Anthony said to himself.  He thought he had better go away and never see her again.  But she stood there before him accusing and appealing.  How could he abandon her?  That was out of the question.  She had no one.  Or rather she had someone.  That father.  Anthony was willing to take him at her valuation.  This father may have been the victim of the most atrocious injustice.  But what could a man coming out of jail do?  An old man too.  And then — what sort of man?  What would become of them both?  Anthony shuddered slightly and the faint smile with which Flora had entered the room faded on her lips.  She was used to his impetuous tenderness.  She was no longer afraid of it.  But she had never seen him look like this before, and she suspected at once some new cruelty of life.  He got up with his usual ardour but as if sobered by a momentous resolve and said:

“No.  I can’t let you out of my sight.  I have seen you.  You have told me your story.  You are honest.  You have never told me you loved me.”

She waited, saying to herself that he had never given her time, that he had never asked her!  And that, in truth, she did not know!

I am inclined to believe that she did not.  As abundance of experience is not precisely her lot in life, a woman is seldom an expert in matters of sentiment.  It is the man who can and generally does “see himself” pretty well inside and out.  Women’s self-possession is an outward thing; inwardly they flutter, perhaps because they are, or they feel themselves to be, engaged.  All this speaking generally.  In Flora de Barral’s particular case ever since Anthony had suddenly broken his way into her hopeless and cruel existence she lived like a person liberated from a condemned cell by a natural cataclysm, a tempest, an earthquake; not absolutely terrified, because nothing can be worse than the eve of execution, but stunned, bewildered — abandoning herself passively.  She did not want to make a sound, to move a limb.  She hadn’t the strength.  What was the good?  And deep down, almost unconsciously she was seduced by the feeling of being supported by this violence.  A sensation she had never experienced before in her life.

She felt as if this whirlwind were calming down somehow!  As if this feeling of support, which was tempting her to close her eyes deliciously and let herself be carried on and on into the unknown undefiled by vile experiences, were less certain, had wavered threateningly.  She tried to read something in his face, in that energetic kindly face to which she had become accustomed so soon.  But she was not yet capable of understanding its expression.  Scared, discouraged on the threshold of adolescence, plunged in moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not learned to read — not that sort of language.

If Anthony’s love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity — or of his generosity, if you like — and all this could not have happened.  He would not have hit upon that renunciation at which one does not know whether to grin or shudder.  It is true too that then his love would not have fastened itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral.  But it was a love born of that rare pity which is not akin to contempt because rooted in an overwhelmingly strong capacity for tenderness — the tenderness of the fiery kind — the tenderness of silent solitary men, the voluntary, passionate outcasts of their kind.  At the time I am forced to think that his vanity must have been enormous.

“What big eyes she has,” he said to himself amazed.  No wonder.  She was staring at him with all the might of her soul awakening slowly from a poisoned sleep, in which it could only quiver with pain but could neither expand nor move.  He plunged into them breathless and tense, deep, deep, like a mad sailor taking a desperate dive from the masthead into the blue unfathomable sea so many men have execrated and loved at the same time.  And his vanity was immense.  It had been touched to the quick by that muscular little feminist, Fyne.  “I!  I!  Take advantage of her helplessness.  I!  Unfair to that creature — that wisp of mist, that white shadow homeless in an ugly dirty world.  I could blow her away with a breath,” he was saying to himself with horror.  “Never!”  All the supremely refined delicacy of tenderness, expressed in so many fine lines of verse by Carleon Anthony, grew to the size of a passion filling with inward sobs the big frame of the man who had never in his life read a single one of those famous sonnets singing of the most highly civilized, chivalrous love, of those sonnets which . . . You know there’s a volume of them.  My edition has the portrait of the author at thirty, and when I showed it to Mr. Powell the other day he exclaimed: “Wonderful!  One would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony himself if . . .”  I wanted to know what that if was.  But Powell could not say.  There was something — a difference.  No doubt there was — in fineness perhaps.  The father, fastidious, cerebral, morbidly shrinking from all contacts, could only sing in harmonious numbers of what the son felt with a dumb and reckless sincerity.

* * * * *

Possessed by most strong men’s touching illusion as to the frailness of women and their spiritual fragility, it seemed to Anthony that he would be destroying, breaking something very precious inside that being.  In fact nothing less than partly murdering her.  This seems a very extreme effect to flow from Fyne’s words.  But Anthony, unaccustomed to the chatter of the firm earth, never stayed to ask himself what value these words could have in Fyne’s mouth.  And indeed the mere dark sound of them was utterly abhorrent to his native rectitude, sea-salted, hardened in the winds of wide horizons, open as the day.

He wished to blurt out his indignation but she regarded him with an expectant air which checked him.  His visible discomfort made her uneasy.  He could only repeat “Oh yes.  You are perfectly honest.  You might have, but I dare say you are right.  At any rate you have never said anything to me which you didn’t mean.”

“Never,” she whispered after a pause.

He seemed distracted, choking with an emotion she could not understand because it resembled embarrassment, a state of mind inconceivable in that man.

She wondered what it was she had said; remembering that in very truth she had hardly spoken to him except when giving him the bare outline of her story which he seemed to have hardly had the patience to hear, waving it perpetually aside with exclamations of horror and anger, with fiercely sombre mutters “Enough!  Enough!” and with alarming starts from a forced stillness, as though he meant to rush out at once and take vengeance on somebody.  She was saying to herself that he caught her words in the air, never letting her finish her thought.  Honest.  Honest.  Yes certainly she had been that.  Her letter to Mrs. Fyne had been prompted by honesty.  But she reflected sadly that she had never known what to say to him.  That perhaps she had nothing to say.

“But you’ll find out that I can be honest too,” he burst out in a menacing tone, she had learned to appreciate with an amused thrill.

She waited for what was coming.  But he hung in the wind.  He looked round the room with disgust as if he could see traces on the walls of all the casual tenants that had ever passed through it.  People had quarrelled in that room; they had been ill in it, there had been misery in that room, wickedness, crime perhaps — death most likely.  This was not a fit place.  He snatched up his hat.  He had made up his mind.  The ship — the ship he had known ever since she came off the stocks, his home — her shelter — the uncontaminated, honest ship, was the place.

“Let us go on board.  We’ll talk there,” he said.  “And you will have to listen to me.  For whatever happens, no matter what they say, I cannot let you go.”

You can’t say that (misgivings or no misgivings) she could have done anything else but go on board.  It was the appointed business of that morning.  During the drive he was silent.  Anthony was the last man to condemn conventionally any human being, to scorn and despise even deserved misfortune.  He was ready to take old de Barral — the convict — on his daughter’s valuation without the slightest reserve.  But love like his, though it may drive one into risky folly by the proud consciousness of its own strength, has a sagacity of its own.  And now, as if lifted up into a higher and serene region by its purpose of renunciation, it gave him leisure to reflect for the first time in these last few days.  He said to himself: “I don’t know that man.  She does not know him either.  She was barely sixteen when they locked him up.  She was a child.  What will he say?  What will he do?  No, he concluded, I cannot leave her behind with that man who would come into the world as if out of a grave.

They went on board in silence, and it was after showing her round and when they had returned to the saloon that he assailed her in his fiery, masterful fashion.  At first she did not understand.  Then when she understood that he was giving her her liberty she went stiff all over, her hand resting on the edge of the table, her face set like a carving of white marble.  It was all over.  It was as that abominable governess had said.  She was insignificant, contemptible.  Nobody could love her.  Humiliation clung to her like a cold shroud — never to be shaken off, unwarmed by this madness of generosity.

“Yes.  Here.  Your home.  I can’t give it to you and go away, but it is big enough for us two.  You need not be afraid.  If you say so I shall not even look at you.  Remember that grey head of which you have been thinking night and day.  Where is it going to rest?  Where else if not here, where nothing evil can touch it.  Don’t you understand that I won’t let you buy shelter from me at the cost of your very soul.  I won’t.  You are too much part of me.  I have found myself since I came upon you and I would rather sell my own soul to the devil than let you go out of my keeping.  But I must have the right.”

He went away brusquely to shut the door leading on deck and came back the whole length of the cabin repeating:

“I must have the legal right.  Are you ashamed of letting people think you are my wife?”

He opened his arms as if to clasp her to his breast but mastered the impulse and shook his clenched hands at her, repeating: “I must have the right if only for your father’s sake.  I must have the right.  Where would you take him?  To that infernal cardboard box-maker.  I don’t know what keeps me from hunting him up in his virtuous home and bashing his head in.  I can’t bear the thought.  Listen to me, Flora!  Do you hear what I am saying to you?  You are not so proud that you can’t understand that I as a man have my pride too?”

He saw a tear glide down her white cheek from under each lowered eyelid.  Then, abruptly, she walked out of the cabin.  He stood for a moment, concentrated, reckoning his own strength, interrogating his heart, before he followed her hastily.  Already she had reached the wharf.

At the sound of his pursuing footsteps her strength failed her.  Where could she escape from this?  From this new perfidy of life taking upon itself the form of magnanimity.  His very voice was changed.  The sustaining whirlwind had let her down, to stumble on again, weakened by the fresh stab, bereft of moral support which is wanted in life more than all the charities of material help.  She had never had it.  Never.  Not from the Fynes.  But where to go?  Oh yes, this dock — a placid sheet of water close at hand.  But there was that old man with whom she had walked hand in hand on the parade by the sea.  She seemed to see him coming to meet her, pitiful, a little greyer, with an appealing look and an extended, tremulous arm.  It was for her now to take the hand of that wronged man more helpless than a child.  But where could she lead him?  Where?  And what was she to say to him?  What words of cheer, of courage and of hope?  There were none.  Heaven and earth were mute, unconcerned at their meeting.  But this other man was coming up behind her.  He was very close now.  His fiery person seemed to radiate heat, a tingling vibration into the atmosphere.  She was exhausted, careless, afraid to stumble, ready to fall.  She fancied she could hear his breathing.  A wave of languid warmth overtook her, she seemed to lose touch with the ground under her feet; and when she felt him slip his hand under her arm she made no attempt to disengage herself from that grasp which closed upon her limb, insinuating and firm.

He conducted her through the dangers of the quayside.  Her sight was dim.  A moving truck was like a mountain gliding by.  Men passed by as if in a mist; and the buildings, the sheds, the unexpected open spaces, the ships, had strange, distorted, dangerous shapes.  She said to herself that it was good not to be bothered with what all these things meant in the scheme of creation (if indeed anything had a meaning), or were just piled-up matter without any sense.  She felt how she had always been unrelated to this world.  She was hanging on to it merely by that one arm grasped firmly just above the elbow.  It was a captivity.  So be it.  Till they got out into the street and saw the hansom waiting outside the gates Anthony spoke only once, beginning brusquely but in a much gentler tone than she had ever heard from his lips.

“Of course I ought to have known that you could not care for a man like me, a stranger.  Silence gives consent.  Yes?  Eh?  I don’t want any of that sort of consent.  And unless some day you find you can speak . . . No!  No!  I shall never ask you.  For all the sign I will give you you may go to your grave with sealed lips.  But what I have said you must do!”

He bent his head over her with tender care.  At the same time she felt her arm pressed and shaken inconspicuously, but in an undeniable manner.  “You must do it.”  A little shake that no passer-by could notice; and this was going on in a deserted part of the dock.  “It must be done.  You are listening to me — eh? or would you go again to my sister?”