Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (420 page)

His ironic tone, perhaps from want of use, had an awful grating ferocity.

“Would you go to her?” he pursued in the same strange voice.  “Your best friend!  And say nicely — I am sorry.  Would you?  No!  You couldn’t.  There are things that even you, poor dear lost girl, couldn’t stand.  Eh?  Die rather.  That’s it.  Of course.  Or can you be thinking of taking your father to that infernal cousin’s house.  No!  Don’t speak.  I can’t bear to think of it.  I would follow you there and smash the door!”

The catch in his voice astonished her by its resemblance to a sob.  It frightened her too.  The thought that came to her head was: “He mustn’t.”  He was putting her into the hansom.  “Oh!  He mustn’t, he mustn’t.”  She was still more frightened by the discovery that he was shaking all over.  Bewildered, shrinking into the far off corner, avoiding his eyes, she yet saw the quivering of his mouth and made a wild attempt at a smile, which broke the rigidity of her lips and set her teeth chattering suddenly.

“I am not coming with you,” he was saying.  “I’ll tell the man . . . I can’t.  Better not.  What is it?  Are you cold?  Come!  What is it?  Only to go to a confounded stuffy room, a hole of an office.  Not a quarter of an hour.  I’ll come for you — in ten days.  Don’t think of it too much.  Think of no man, woman or child of all that silly crowd cumbering the ground.  Don’t think of me either.  Think of yourself.  Ha!  Nothing will be able to touch you then — at last.  Say nothing.  Don’t move.  I’ll have everything arranged; and as long as you don’t hate the sight of me — and you don’t — there’s nothing to be frightened about.  One of their silly offices with a couple of ink-slingers of no consequence; poor, scribbling devils.”

The hansom drove away with Flora de Barral inside, without movement, without thought, only too glad to rest, to be alone and still moving away without effort, in solitude and silence.

Anthony roamed the streets for hours without being able to remember in the evening where he had been — in the manner of a happy and exulting lover.  But nobody could have thought so from his face, which bore no signs of blissful anticipation.  Exulting indeed he was but it was a special sort of exultation which seemed to take him by the throat like an enemy.

Anthony’s last words to Flora referred to the registry office where they were married ten days later.  During that time Anthony saw no one or anything, though he went about restlessly, here and there, amongst men and things.  This special state is peculiar to common lovers, who are known to have no eyes for anything except for the contemplation, actual or inward, of one human form which for them contains the soul of the whole world in all its beauty, perfection, variety and infinity.  It must be extremely pleasant.  But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony’s contemplation.  He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor every sort of exceptional conduct.  Roderick Anthony had begun already to suffer.  That is why perhaps he was so industrious in going about amongst his fellowmen who would have been surprised and humiliated, had they known how little solidity and even existence they had in his eyes.  But they could not suspect anything so queer.  They saw nothing extraordinary in him during that fortnight.  The proof of this is that they were willing to transact business with him.  Obviously they were; since it is then that the offer of chartering his ship for the special purpose of proceeding to the Western Islands was put in his way by a firm of shipbrokers who had no doubt of his sanity.

He probably looked sane enough for all the practical purposes of commercial life.  But I am not so certain that he really was quite sane at that time.

However, he jumped at the offer.  Providence itself was offering him this opportunity to accustom the girl to sea-life by a comparatively short trip.  This was the time when everything that happened, everything he heard, casual words, unrelated phrases, seemed a provocation or an encouragement, confirmed him in his resolution.  And indeed to be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts — all these things which stand in the way of achievement.  I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

And Anthony was extremely careful in preparing for himself and for the luckless Flora, an impossible existence.  He went about it with no more tremors than if he had been stuffed with rags or made of iron instead of flesh and blood.  An existence, mind you, which, on shore, in the thick of mankind, of varied interests, of distractions, of infinite opportunities to preserve your distance from each other, is hardly conceivable; but on board ship, at sea, en tête-à-tête for days and weeks and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture, an exquisite absurdity of torment.  He was a simple soul.  His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some woman to attend on Flora.  The condition of guaranteed perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought.  When he remembered suddenly his steward’s wife he must have exclaimed eureka with particular exultation.  One does not like to call Anthony an ass.  But really to put any woman within scenting distance of such a secret and suppose that she would not track it out!

No woman, however simple, could be as ingenuous as that.  I don’t know how Flora de Barral qualified him in her thoughts when he told her of having done this amongst other things intended to make her comfortable.  I should think that, for all her simplicity, she must have been appalled.  He stood before her on the appointed day outwardly calmer than she had ever seen him before.  And this very calmness, that scrupulous attitude which he felt bound in honour to assume then and for ever, unless she would condescend to make a sign at some future time, added to the heaviness of her heart innocent of the most pardonable guile.

The night before she had slept better than she had done for the past ten nights.  Both youth and weariness will assert themselves in the end against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress.  She had slept but she woke up with her eyes full of tears.  There were no traces of them when she met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs.  She had swallowed them up.  She was not going to let him see.  She felt bound in honour to accept the situation for ever and ever unless . . . Ah, unless . . . She dissembled all her sentiments but it was not duplicity on her part.  All she wanted was to get at the truth; to see what would come of it.

She beat him at his own honourable game and the thoroughness of her serenity disconcerted Anthony a bit.  It was he who stammered when it came to talking.  The suppressed fierceness of his character carried him on after the first word or two masterfully enough.  But it was as if they both had taken a bite of the same bitter fruit.  He was thinking with mournful regret not unmixed with surprise: “That fellow Fyne has been telling me the truth.  She does not care for me a bit.”  It humiliated him and also increased his compassion for the girl who in this darkness of life, buffeted and despairing, had fallen into the grip of his stronger will, abandoning herself to his arms as on a night of shipwreck.  Flora on her side with partial insight (for women are never blind with the complete masculine blindness) looked on him with some pity; and she felt pity for herself too.  It was a rejection, a casting out; nothing new to her.  But she who supposed all her sensibility dead by this time, discovered in herself a resentment of this ultimate betrayal.  She had no resignation for this one.  With a sort of mental sullenness she said to herself: “Well, I am here.  I am here without any nonsense.  It is not my fault that I am a mere worthless object of pity.”

And these things which she could tell herself with a clear conscience served her better than the passionate obstinacy of purpose could serve Roderick Anthony.  She was much more sure of herself than he was.  Such are the advantages of mere rectitude over the most exalted generosity.

And so they went out to get married, the people of the house where she lodged having no suspicion of anything of the sort.  They were only excited at a “gentleman friend” (a very fine man too) calling on Miss Smith for the first time since she had come to live in the house.  When she returned, for she did come back alone, there were allusions made to that outing.  She had to take her meals with these rather vulgar people.  The woman of the house, a scraggy, genteel person, tried even to provoke confidences.  Flora’s white face with the deep blue eyes did not strike their hearts as it did the heart of Captain Anthony, as the very face of the suffering world.  Her pained reserve had no power to awe them into decency.

Well, she returned alone — as in fact might have been expected.  After leaving the Registry Office Flora de Barral and Roderick Anthony had gone for a walk in a park.  It must have been an East-End park but I am not sure.  Anyway that’s what they did.  It was a sunny day.  He said to her: “Everything I have in the world belongs to you.  I have seen to that without troubling my brother-in-law.  They have no call to interfere.”

She walked with her hand resting lightly on his arm.  He had offered it to her on coming out of the Registry Office, and she had accepted it silently.  Her head drooped, she seemed to be turning matters over in her mind.  She said, alluding to the Fynes: “They have been very good to me.”  At that he exclaimed:

“They have never understood you.  Well, not properly.  My sister is not a bad woman, but . . . “

Flora didn’t protest; asking herself whether he imagined that he himself understood her so much better.  Anthony dismissing his family out of his thoughts went on: “Yes.  Everything is yours.  I have kept nothing back.  As to the piece of paper we have just got from that miserable quill-driver if it wasn’t for the law, I wouldn’t mind if you tore it up here, now, on this spot.  But don’t you do it.  Unless you should some day feel that — ”

He choked, unexpectedly.  She, reflective, hesitated a moment then making up her mind bravely.

“Neither am I keeping anything back from you.”

She had said it!  But he in his blind generosity assumed that she was alluding to her deplorable history and hastened to mutter:

“Of course!  Of course!  Say no more.  I have been lying awake thinking of it all no end of times.”

He made a movement with his other arm as if restraining himself from shaking an indignant fist at the universe; and she never even attempted to look at him.  His voice sounded strangely, incredibly lifeless in comparison with these tempestuous accents that in the broad fields, in the dark garden had seemed to shake the very earth under her weary and hopeless feet.

She regretted them.  Hearing the sigh which escaped her Anthony instead of shaking his fist at the universe began to pat her hand resting on his arm and then desisted, suddenly, as though he had burnt himself.  Then after a silence:

“You will have to go by yourself to-morrow.  I . . . No, I think I mustn’t come.  Better not.  What you two will have to say to each other — ”

She interrupted him quickly:

“Father is an innocent man.  He was cruelly wronged.”

“Yes.  That’s why,” Anthony insisted earnestly.  “And you are the only human being that can make it up to him.  You alone must reconcile him with the world if anything can.  But of course you shall.  You’ll have to find words.  Oh you’ll know.  And then the sight of you, alone, would soothe — ”

“He’s the gentlest of men,” she interrupted again.

Anthony shook his head.  “It would take no end of generosity, no end of gentleness to forgive such a dead set.  For my part I would have liked better to have been killed and done with at once.  It could not have been worse for you — and I suppose it was of you that he was thinking most while those infernal lawyers were badgering him in court.  Of you.  And now I think of it perhaps the sight of you may bring it all back to him.  All these years, all these years — and you his child left alone in the world.  I would have gone crazy.  For even if he had done wrong — ”

“But he hasn’t,” insisted Flora de Barral with a quite unexpected fierceness.  “You mustn’t even suppose it.  Haven’t you read the accounts of the trial?”

“I am not supposing anything,” Anthony defended himself.  He just remembered hearing of the trial.  He assured her that he was away from England, the second voyage of the Ferndale.  He was crossing the Pacific from Australia at the time and didn’t see any papers for weeks and weeks.  He interrupted himself to suggest:

“You had better tell him at once that you are happy.”

He had stammered a little, and Flora de Barral uttered a deliberate and concise “Yes.”

A short silence ensued.  She withdrew her hand from his arm.  They stopped.  Anthony looked as if a totally unexpected catastrophe had happened.

“Ah,” he said.  “You mind . . . “

“No!  I think I had better,” she murmured.

“I dare say.  I dare say.  Bring him along straight on board to-morrow.  Stop nowhere.”

She had a movement of vague gratitude, a momentary feeling of peace which she referred to the man before her.  She looked up at Anthony.  His face was sombre.  He was miles away and muttered as if to himself:

“Where could he want to stop though?”

“There’s not a single being on earth that I would want to look at his dear face now, to whom I would willingly take him,” she said extending her hand frankly and with a slight break in her voice, “but you — Roderick.”

He took that hand, felt it very small and delicate in his broad palm.

“That’s right.  That’s right,” he said with a conscious and hasty heartiness and, as if suddenly ashamed of the sound of his voice, turned half round and absolutely walked away from the motionless girl.  He even resisted the temptation to look back till it was too late.  The gravel path lay empty to the very gate of the park.  She was gone — vanished.  He had an impression that he had missed some sort of chance.  He felt sad.  That excited sense of his own conduct which had kept him up for the last ten days buoyed him no more.  He had succeeded!