But there was nothing improper in my observing to Fyne that, last night,
Mrs. Fyne seemed to have some idea where that enterprising young lady had
gone to. Fyne shook his head. No; his wife had been by no means so
certain as she had pretended to be. She merely had her reasons to think,
to hope, that the girl might have taken a room somewhere in London, had
buried herself in town--in readiness or perhaps in horror of the
approaching day--
He ceased and sat solemnly dejected, in a brown study. "What day?" I
asked at last; but he did not hear me apparently. He diffused such
portentous gloom into the atmosphere that I lost patience with him.
"What on earth are you so dismal about?" I cried, being genuinely
surprised and puzzled. "One would think the girl was a state prisoner
under your care."
And suddenly I became still more surprised at myself, at the way I had
somehow taken for granted things which did appear queer when one thought
them out.
"But why this secrecy? Why did they elope--if it is an elopement? Was
the girl afraid of your wife? And your brother-in-law? What on earth
possesses him to make a clandestine match of it? Was he afraid of your
wife too?"
Fyne made an effort to rouse himself.
"Of course my brother-in-law, Captain Anthony, the son of . . . " He
checked himself as if trying to break a bad habit. "He would be
persuaded by her. We have been most friendly to the girl!"
"She struck me as a foolish and inconsiderate little person. But why
should you and your wife take to heart so strongly mere folly--or even a
want of consideration?"
"It's the most unscrupulous action," declared Fyne weightily--and sighed.
"I suppose she is poor," I observed after a short silence. "But after
all . . . "
"You don't know who she is." Fyne had regained his average solemnity.
I confessed that I had not caught her name when his wife had introduced
us to each other. "It was something beginning with an S- wasn't it?" And
then with the utmost coolness Fyne remarked that it did not matter. The
name was not her name.
"Do you mean to say that you made a young lady known to me under a false
name?" I asked, with the amused feeling that the days of wonders and
portents had not passed away yet. That the eminently serious Fynes
should do such an exceptional thing was simply staggering. With a more
hasty enunciation than usual little Fyne was sure that I would not demand
an apology for this irregularity if I knew what her real name was. A
sort of warmth crept into his deep tone.
"We have tried to befriend that girl in every way. She is the daughter
and only child of de Barral."
Evidently he expected to produce a sensation; he kept his eyes fixed upon
me prepared for some sign of it. But I merely returned his intense,
awaiting gaze. For a time we stared at each other. Conscious of being
reprehensibly dense I groped in the darkness of my mind: De Barral, De
Barral--and all at once noise and light burst on me as if a window of my
memory had been suddenly flung open on a street in the City. De Barral!
But could it be the same? Surely not!
"The financier?" I suggested half incredulous.
"Yes," said Fyne; and in this instance his native solemnity of tone
seemed to be strangely appropriate. "The convict."
Marlow looked at me, significantly, and remarked in an explanatory tone:
"One somehow never thought of de Barral as having any children, or any
other home than the offices of the "Orb"; or any other existence,
associations or interests than financial. I see you remember the crash
. . . "
"I was away in the Indian Seas at the time," I said. "But of course--"
"Of course," Marlow struck in. "All the world . . . You may wonder at my
slowness in recognizing the name. But you know that my memory is merely
a mausoleum of proper names. There they lie inanimate, awaiting the
magic touch--and not very prompt in arising when called, either. The
name is the first thing I forget of a man. It is but just to add that
frequently it is also the last, and this accounts for my possession of a
good many anonymous memories. In de Barral's case, he got put away in my
mausoleum in company with so many names of his own creation that really
he had to throw off a monstrous heap of grisly bones before he stood
before me at the call of the wizard Fyne. The fellow had a pretty fancy
in names: the "Orb" Deposit Bank, the "Sceptre" Mutual Aid Society, the
"Thrift and Independence" Association. Yes, a very pretty taste in
names; and nothing else besides--absolutely nothing--no other merit. Well
yes. He had another name, but that's pure luck--his own name of de
Barral which he did not invent. I don't think that a mere Jones or Brown
could have fished out from the depths of the Incredible such a colossal
manifestation of human folly as that man did. But it may be that I am
underestimating the alacrity of human folly in rising to the bait. No
doubt I am. The greed of that absurd monster is incalculable,
unfathomable, inconceivable. The career of de Barral demonstrates that
it will rise to a naked hook. He didn't lure it with a fairy tale. He
hadn't enough imagination for it . . . "
"Was he a foreigner?" I asked. "It's clearly a French name. I suppose
it _was_ his name?"
"Oh, he didn't invent it. He was born to it, in Bethnal Green, as it
came out during the proceedings. He was in the habit of alluding to his
Scotch connections. But every great man has done that. The mother, I
believe, was Scotch, right enough. The father de Barral whatever his
origins retired from the Customs Service (tide-waiter I think), and
started lending money in a very, very small way in the East End to people
connected with the docks, stevedores, minor barge-owners, ship-chandlers,
tally clerks, all sorts of very small fry. He made his living at it. He
was a very decent man I believe. He had enough influence to place his
only son as junior clerk in the account department of one of the Dock
Companies. "Now, my boy," he said to him, "I've given you a fine start."
But de Barral didn't start. He stuck. He gave perfect satisfaction. At
the end of three years he got a small rise of salary and went out
courting in the evenings. He went courting the daughter of an old sea-
captain who was a churchwarden of his parish and lived in an old badly
preserved Georgian house with a garden: one of these houses standing in a
reduced bit of "grounds" that you discover in a labyrinth of the most
sordid streets, exactly alike and composed of six-roomed hutches.
Some of them were the vicarages of slum parishes. The old sailor had got
hold of one cheap, and de Barral got hold of his daughter--which was a
good bargain for him. The old sailor was very good to the young couple
and very fond of their little girl. Mrs. de Barral was an equable,
unassuming woman, at that time with a fund of simple gaiety, and with no
ambitions; but, woman-like, she longed for change and for something
interesting to happen now and then. It was she who encouraged de Barral
to accept the offer of a post in the west-end branch of a great bank. It
appears he shrank from such a great adventure for a long time. At last
his wife's arguments prevailed. Later on she used to say: 'It's the only
time he ever listened to me; and I wonder now if it hadn't been better
for me to die before I ever made him go into that bank.'
You may be surprised at my knowledge of these details. Well, I had them
ultimately from Mrs. Fyne. Mrs. Fyne while yet Miss Anthony, in her days
of bondage, knew Mrs. de Barral in her days of exile. Mrs. de Barral was
living then in a big stone mansion with mullioned windows in a large damp
park, called the Priory, adjoining the village where the refined poet had
built himself a house.
These were the days of de Barral's success. He had bought the place
without ever seeing it and had packed off his wife and child at once
there to take possession. He did not know what to do with them in
London. He himself had a suite of rooms in an hotel. He gave there
dinner parties followed by cards in the evening. He had developed the
gambling passion--or else a mere card mania--but at any rate he played
heavily, for relaxation, with a lot of dubious hangers on.
Meantime Mrs. de Barral, expecting him every day, lived at the Priory,
with a carriage and pair, a governess for the child and many servants.
The village people would see her through the railings wandering under the
trees with her little girl lost in her strange surroundings. Nobody ever
came near her. And there she died as some faithful and delicate animals
die--from neglect, absolutely from neglect, rather unexpectedly and
without any fuss. The village was sorry for her because, though
obviously worried about something, she was good to the poor and was
always ready for a chat with any of the humble folks. Of course they
knew that she wasn't a lady--not what you would call a real lady. And
even her acquaintance with Miss Anthony was only a cottage-door, a
village-street acquaintance. Carleon Anthony was a tremendous aristocrat
(his father had been a "restoring" architect) and his daughter was not
allowed to associate with anyone but the county young ladies.
Nevertheless in defiance of the poet's wrathful concern for undefiled
refinement there were some quiet, melancholy strolls to and fro in the
great avenue of chestnuts leading to the park-gate, during which Mrs. de
Barral came to call Miss Anthony 'my dear'--and even 'my poor dear.' The
lonely soul had no one to talk to but that not very happy girl. The
governess despised her. The housekeeper was distant in her manner.
Moreover Mrs. de Barral was no foolish gossiping woman. But she made
some confidences to Miss Anthony. Such wealth was a terrific thing to
have thrust upon one she affirmed. Once she went so far as to confess
that she was dying with anxiety. Mr. de Barral (so she referred to him)
had been an excellent husband and an exemplary father but "you see my
dear I have had a great experience of him. I am sure he won't know what
to do with all that money people are giving to him to take care of for
them. He's as likely as not to do something rash. When he comes here I
must have a good long serious talk with him, like the talks we often used
to have together in the good old times of our life." And then one day a
cry of anguish was wrung from her: 'My dear, he will never come here, he
will never, never come!'
She was wrong. He came to the funeral, was extremely cut up, and holding
the child tightly by the hand wept bitterly at the side of the grave.
Miss Anthony, at the cost of a whole week of sneers and abuse from the
poet, saw it all with her own eyes. De Barral clung to the child like a
drowning man. He managed, though, to catch the half-past five fast
train, travelling to town alone in a reserved compartment, with all the
blinds down . . . "
"Leaving the child?" I said interrogatively.
"Yes. Leaving . . . He shirked the problem. He was born that way. He
had no idea what to do with her or for that matter with anything or
anybody including himself. He bolted back to his suite of rooms in the
hotel. He was the most helpless . . . She might have been left in the
Priory to the end of time had not the high-toned governess threatened to
send in her resignation. She didn't care for the child a bit, and the
lonely, gloomy Priory had got on her nerves. She wasn't going to put up
with such a life and, having just come out of some ducal family, she
bullied de Barral in a very lofty fashion. To pacify her he took a
splendidly furnished house in the most expensive part of Brighton for
them, and now and then ran down for a week-end, with a trunk full of
exquisite sweets and with his hat full of money. The governess spent it
for him in extra ducal style. She was nearly forty and harboured a
secret taste for patronizing young men of sorts--of a certain sort. But
of that Mrs. Fyne of course had no personal knowledge then; she told me
however that even in the Priory days she had suspected her of being an
artificial, heartless, vulgar-minded woman with the lowest possible
ideals. But de Barral did not know it. He literally did not know
anything . . . "
"But tell me, Marlow," I interrupted, "how do you account for this
opinion? He must have been a personality in a sense--in some one sense
surely. You don't work the greatest material havoc of a decade at least,
in a commercial community, without having something in you."
Marlow shook his head.
"He was a mere sign, a portent. There was nothing in him. Just about
that time the word Thrift was to the fore. You know the power of words.
We pass through periods dominated by this or that word--it may be
development, or it may be competition, or education, or purity or
efficiency or even sanctity. It is the word of the time. Well just then
it was the word Thrift which was out in the streets walking arm in arm
with righteousness, the inseparable companion and backer up of all such
national catch-words, looking everybody in the eye as it were. The very
drabs of the pavement, poor things, didn't escape the fascination . . .
However! . . . Well the greatest portion of the press were screeching in
all possible tones, like a confounded company of parrots instructed by
some devil with a taste for practical jokes, that the financier de Barral
was helping the great moral evolution of our character towards the newly-
discovered virtue of Thrift. He was helping it by all these great
establishments of his, which made the moral merits of Thrift manifest to
the most callous hearts, simply by promising to pay ten per cent.
interest on all deposits. And you didn't want necessarily to belong to
the well-to-do classes in order to participate in the advantages of
virtue. If you had but a spare sixpence in the world and went and gave
it to de Barral it was Thrift! It's quite likely that he himself
believed it. He must have. It's inconceivable that he alone should
stand out against the infatuation of the whole world. He hadn't enough
intelligence for that. But to look at him one couldn't tell . . . "
"You did see him then?" I said with some curiosity.
"I did. Strange, isn't it? It was only once, but as I sat with the
distressed Fyne who had suddenly resuscitated his name buried in my
memory with other dead labels of the past, I may say I saw him again, I
saw him with great vividness of recollection, as he appeared in the days
of his glory or splendour. No! Neither of these words will fit his
success. There was never any glory or splendour about that figure. Well,
let us say in the days when he was, according to the majority of the
daily press, a financial force working for the improvement of the
character of the people. I'll tell you how it came about.
At that time I used to know a podgy, wealthy, bald little man having
chambers in the Albany; a financier too, in his way, carrying out
transactions of an intimate nature and of no moral character; mostly with
young men of birth and expectations--though I dare say he didn't withhold
his ministrations from elderly plebeians either. He was a true democrat;
he would have done business (a sharp kind of business) with the devil
himself. Everything was fly that came into his web. He received the
applicants in an alert, jovial fashion which was quite surprising. It
gave relief without giving too much confidence, which was just as well
perhaps. His business was transacted in an apartment furnished like a
drawing-room, the walls hung with several brown, heavily-framed, oil
paintings. I don't know if they were good, but they were big, and with
their elaborate, tarnished gilt-frames had a melancholy dignity. The man
himself sat at a shining, inlaid writing table which looked like a rare
piece from a museum of art; his chair had a high, oval, carved back,
upholstered in faded tapestry; and these objects made of the costly black
Havana cigar, which he rolled incessantly from the middle to the left
corner of his mouth and back again, an inexpressibly cheap and nasty
object. I had to see him several times in the interest of a poor devil
so unlucky that he didn't even have a more competent friend than myself
to speak for him at a very difficult time in his life.
I don't know at what hour my private financier began his day, but he used
to give one appointments at unheard of times: such as a quarter to eight
in the morning, for instance. On arriving one found him busy at that
marvellous writing table, looking very fresh and alert, exhaling a faint
fragrance of scented soap and with the cigar already well alight. You
may believe that I entered on my mission with many unpleasant
forebodings; but there was in that fat, admirably washed, little man such
a profound contempt for mankind that it amounted to a species of good
nature; which, unlike the milk of genuine kindness, was never in danger
of turning sour. Then, once, during a pause in business, while we were
waiting for the production of a document for which he had sent (perhaps
to the cellar?) I happened to remark, glancing round the room, that I had
never seen so many fine things assembled together out of a collection.
Whether this was unconscious diplomacy on my part, or not, I shouldn't
like to say--but the remark was true enough, and it pleased him
extremely. "It _is_ a collection," he said emphatically. "Only I live
right in it, which most collectors don't. But I see that you know what
you are looking at. Not many people who come here on business do. Stable
fittings are more in their way."
I don't know whether my appreciation helped to advance my friend's
business but at any rate it helped our intercourse. He treated me with a
shade of familiarity as one of the initiated.
The last time I called on him to conclude the transaction we were
interrupted by a person, something like a cross between a bookmaker and a
private secretary, who, entering through a door which was not the
anteroom door, walked up and stooped to whisper into his ear.
"Eh? What? Who, did you say?"
The nondescript person stooped and whispered again, adding a little
louder: "Says he won't detain you a moment."
My little man glanced at me, said "Ah! Well," irresolutely. I got up
from my chair and offered to come again later. He looked whimsically
alarmed. "No, no. It's bad enough to lose my money but I don't want to
waste any more of my time over your friend. We must be done with this to-
day. Just go and have a look at that _garniture de cheminee_ yonder.
There's another, something like it, in the castle of Laeken, but mine's
much superior in design."
I moved accordingly to the other side of that big room. The _garniture_
was very fine. But while pretending to examine it I watched my man going
forward to meet a tall visitor, who said, "I thought you would be
disengaged so early. It's only a word or two"--and after a whispered
confabulation of no more than a minute, reconduct him to the door and
shake hands ceremoniously. "Not at all, not at all. Very pleased to be
of use. You can depend absolutely on my information"--"Oh thank you,
thank you. I just looked in." "Certainly, quite right. Any time . . .
Good morning."
I had a good look at the visitor while they were exchanging these
civilities. He was clad in black. I remember perfectly that he wore a
flat, broad, black satin tie in which was stuck a large cameo pin; and a
small turn down collar. His hair, discoloured and silky, curled slightly
over his ears. His cheeks were hairless and round, and apparently soft.
He held himself very upright, walked with small steps and spoke gently in
an inward voice. Perhaps from contrast with the magnificent polish of
the room and the neatness of its owner, he struck me as dingy, indigent,
and, if not exactly humble, then much subdued by evil fortune.
I wondered greatly at my fat little financier's civility to that dubious
personage when he asked me, as we resumed our respective seats, whether I
knew who it was that had just gone out. On my shaking my head negatively
he smiled queerly, said "De Barral," and enjoyed my surprise. Then
becoming grave: "That's a deep fellow, if you like. We all know where he
started from and where he got to; but nobody knows what he means to do."
He became thoughtful for a moment and added as if speaking to himself, "I
wonder what his game is."
And, you know, there was no game, no game of any sort, or shape or kind.
It came out plainly at the trial. As I've told you before, he was a
clerk in a bank, like thousands of others. He got that berth as a second
start in life and there he stuck again, giving perfect satisfaction. Then
one day as though a supernatural voice had whispered into his ear or some
invisible fly had stung him, he put on his hat, went out into the street
and began advertising. That's absolutely all that there was to it. He
caught in the street the word of the time and harnessed it to his
preposterous chariot.
One remembers his first modest advertisements headed with the magic word
Thrift, Thrift, Thrift, thrice repeated; promising ten per cent. on all
deposits and giving the address of the Thrift and Independence Aid
Association in Vauxhall Bridge Road. Apparently nothing more was
necessary. He didn't even explain what he meant to do with the money he
asked the public to pour into his lap. Of course he meant to lend it out
at high rates of interest. He did so--but he did it without system,
plan, foresight or judgment. And as he frittered away the sums that
flowed in, he advertised for more--and got it. During a period of
general business prosperity he set up The Orb Bank and The Sceptre Trust,
simply, it seems for advertising purposes. They were mere names. He was
totally unable to organize anything, to promote any sort of enterprise if
it were only for the purpose of juggling with the shares. At that time
he could have had for the asking any number of Dukes, retired Generals,
active M.P.'s, ex-ambassadors and so on as Directors to sit at the
wildest boards of his invention. But he never tried. He had no real
imagination. All he could do was to publish more advertisements and open
more branch offices of the Thrift and Independence, of The Orb, of The
Sceptre, for the receipt of deposits; first in this town, then in that
town, north and south--everywhere where he could find suitable premises
at a moderate rent. For this was the great characteristic of the
management. Modesty, moderation, simplicity. Neither The Orb nor The
Sceptre nor yet their parent the Thrift and Independence had built for
themselves the usual palaces. For this abstention they were praised in
silly public prints as illustrating in their management the principle of
Thrift for which they were founded. The fact is that de Barral simply
didn't think of it. Of course he had soon moved from Vauxhall Bridge
Road. He knew enough for that. What he got hold of next was an old,
enormous, rat-infested brick house in a small street off the Strand.
Strangers were taken in front of the meanest possible, begrimed, yellowy,
flat brick wall, with two rows of unadorned window-holes one above the
other, and were exhorted with bated breath to behold and admire the
simplicity of the head-quarters of the great financial force of the day.
The word THRIFT perched right up on the roof in giant gilt letters, and
two enormous shield-like brass-plates curved round the corners on each
side of the doorway were the only shining spots in de Barral's business
outfit. Nobody knew what operations were carried on inside except
this--that if you walked in and tendered your money over the counter it
would be calmly taken from you by somebody who would give you a printed
receipt. That and no more. It appears that such knowledge is
irresistible. People went in and tendered; and once it was taken from
their hands their money was more irretrievably gone from them than if
they had thrown it into the sea. This then, and nothing else was being
carried on in there . . . "
"Come, Marlow," I said, "you exaggerate surely--if only by your way of
putting things. It's too startling."
"I exaggerate!" he defended himself. "My way of putting things! My dear
fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial
jargon off my statements. And you are startled! I am giving you the
naked truth. It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge
of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth. What comes with a
shock is admitted with difficulty. But what will you say to the end of
his career?
It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden. It began with the Orb
Deposit Bank. Under the name of that institution de Barral with the
frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian
prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the
government. It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs--a miserable
remnant of his ancestors' treasures--that sort of thing. And it was all
authentic enough. There was a real prince; and the claim too was
sufficiently real--only unfortunately it was not a valid claim. So the
prince lost his case on the last appeal and the beginning of de Barral's
end became manifest to the public in the shape of a half-sheet of note
paper wafered by the four corners on the closed door of The Orb offices
notifying that payment was stopped at that establishment.
Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week. I won't say in
American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de
Barral concerns. There never had been any bottom to it. It was like the
cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its
deposits. That they were gone was clear; and the bankruptcy proceedings
which followed were like a sinister farce, bursts of laughter in a
setting of mute anguish--that of the depositors; hundreds of thousands of
them. The laughter was irresistible; the accompaniment of the bankrupt's
public examination.
I don't know if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the
possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from
both--and the three alternatives are possible--but it was discovered that
this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of the
public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had been
the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even
lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone
in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of
Patagonia, quarries in Labrador--such like speculations. Fisheries to
feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them. A
principality to be bought in Madagascar was another. As the grotesque
details of these incredible transactions came out one by one ripples of
laughter ran over the closely packed court--each one a little louder than
the other. The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative
effect of absurdity. The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the
reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching
anxiously every word, laughed like one man. They laughed
hysterically--the poor wretches--on the verge of tears.
There was only one person who remained unmoved. It was de Barral
himself. He preserved his serene, gentle expression, I am told (for I
have not witnessed those scenes myself), and looked around at the people
with an air of placid sufficiency which was the first hint to the world
of the man's overweening, unmeasurable conceit, hidden hitherto under a
diffident manner. It could be seen too in his dogged assertion that if
he had been given enough time and a lot more money everything would have
come right. And there were some people (yes, amongst his very victims)
who more than half believed him, even after the criminal prosecution
which soon followed. When placed in the dock he lost his steadiness as
if some sustaining illusion had gone to pieces within him suddenly. He
ceased to be himself in manner completely, and even in disposition, in so
far that his faded neutral eyes matching his discoloured hair so well,
were discovered then to be capable of expressing a sort of underhand
hate. He was at first defiant, then insolent, then broke down and burst
into tears; but it might have been from rage. Then he calmed down,
returned to his soft manner of speech and to that unassuming quiet
bearing which had been usual with him even in his greatest days. But it
seemed as though in this moment of change he had at last perceived what a
power he had been; for he remarked to one of the prosecuting counsel who
had assumed a lofty moral tone in questioning him, that--yes, he had
gambled--he liked cards. But that only a year ago a host of smart people
would have been only too pleased to take a hand at cards with him. Yes--he
went on--some of the very people who were there accommodated with seats
on the bench; and turning upon the counsel "You yourself as well," he
cried. He could have had half the town at his rooms to fawn upon him if
he had cared for that sort of thing. "Why, now I think of it, it took me
most of my time to keep people, just of your sort, off me," he ended with
a good humoured--quite unobtrusive, contempt, as though the fact had
dawned upon him for the first time.
This was the moment, the only moment, when he had perhaps all the
audience in Court with him, in a hush of dreary silence. And then the
dreary proceedings were resumed. For all the outside excitement it was
the most dreary of all celebrated trials. The bankruptcy proceedings had
exhausted all the laughter there was in it. Only the fact of wide-spread
ruin remained, and the resentment of a mass of people for having been
fooled by means too simple to save their self-respect from a deep wound
which the cleverness of a consummate scoundrel would not have inflicted.
A shamefaced amazement attended these proceedings in which de Barral was
not being exposed alone. For himself his only cry was: Time! Time! Time
would have set everything right. In time some of these speculations of
his were certain to have succeeded. He repeated this defence, this
excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome iteration. Everything
he had done or left undone had been to gain time. He had hypnotized
himself with the word. Sometimes, I am told, his appearance was
ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing down the vista of
future ages. Time--and of course, more money. "Ah! If only you had
left me alone for a couple of years more," he cried once in accents of
passionate belief. "The money was coming in all right." The deposits
you understand--the savings of Thrift. Oh yes they had been coming in to
the very last moment. And he regretted them. He had arrived to regard
them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion. And yet it was a
perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel who was
beginning a question with the words "You have had all these immense sums
. . . " with the indignant retort "_What_ have I had out of them?"
"It was perfectly true. He had had nothing out of them--nothing of the
prestigious or the desirable things of the earth, craved for by predatory
natures. He had gratified no tastes, had known no luxury; he had built
no gorgeous palaces, had formed no splendid galleries out of these
"immense sums." He had not even a home. He had gone into these rooms in
an hotel and had stuck there for years, giving no doubt perfect
satisfaction to the management. They had twice raised his rent to show I
suppose their high sense of his distinguished patronage. He had bought
for himself out of all the wealth streaming through his fingers neither
adulation nor love, neither splendour nor comfort. There was something
perfect in his consistent mediocrity. His very vanity seemed to miss the
gratification of even the mere show of power. In the days when he was
most fully in the public eye the invincible obscurity of his origins
clung to him like a shadowy garment. He had handled millions without
ever enjoying anything of what is counted as precious in the community of
men, because he had neither the brutality of temperament nor the fineness
of mind to make him desire them with the will power of a masterful
adventurer . . . "
"You seem to have studied the man," I observed.
"Studied," repeated Marlow thoughtfully. "No! Not studied. I had no
opportunities. You know that I saw him only on that one occasion I told
you of. But it may be that a glimpse and no more is the proper way of
seeing an individuality; and de Barral was that, in virtue of his very
deficiencies for they made of him something quite unlike one's
preconceived ideas. There were also very few materials accessible to a
man like me to form a judgment from. But in such a case I verify believe
that a little is as good as a feast--perhaps better. If one has a taste
for that kind of thing the merest starting-point becomes a coign of
vantage, and then by a series of logically deducted verisimilitudes one
arrives at truth--or very near the truth--as near as any circumstantial
evidence can do. I have not studied de Barral but that is how I
understand him so far as he could be understood through the din of the
crash; the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the newspaper contents bills,
"The Thrift Frauds. Cross-examination of the accused. Extra
special"--blazing fiercely; the charitable appeals for the victims, the
grave tones of the dailies rumbling with compassion as if they were the
national bowels. All this lasted a whole week of industrious sittings. A
pressman whom I knew told me "He's an idiot." Which was possible. Before
that I overheard once somebody declaring that he had a criminal type of
face; which I knew was untrue. The sentence was pronounced by artificial
light in a stifling poisonous atmosphere. Something edifying was said by
the judge weightily, about the retribution overtaking the perpetrator of
"the most heartless frauds on an unprecedented scale." I don't
understand these things much, but it appears that he had juggled with
accounts, cooked balance sheets, had gathered in deposits months after he
ought to have known himself to be hopelessly insolvent, and done enough
of other things, highly reprehensible in the eyes of the law, to earn for
himself seven years' penal servitude. The sentence making its way
outside met with a good reception. A small mob composed mainly of people
who themselves did not look particularly clever and scrupulous, leavened
by a slight sprinkling of genuine pickpockets amused itself by cheering
in the most penetrating, abominable cold drizzle that I remember. I
happened to be passing there on my way from the East End where I had
spent my day about the Docks with an old chum who was looking after the
fitting out of a new ship. I am always eager, when allowed, to call on a
new ship. They interest me like charming young persons.
I got mixed up in that crowd seething with an animosity as senseless as
things of the street always are, and it was while I was laboriously
making my way out of it that the pressman of whom I spoke was jostled
against me. He did me the justice to be surprised. "What? You here!
The last person in the world . . . If I had known I could have got you
inside. Plenty of room. Interest been over for the last three days. Got
seven years. Well, I am glad."
"Why are you glad? Because he's got seven years?" I asked, greatly
incommoded by the pressure of a hulking fellow who was remarking to some
of his equally oppressive friends that the "beggar ought to have been
poleaxed." I don't know whether he had ever confided his savings to de
Barral but if so, judging from his appearance, they must have been the
proceeds of some successful burglary. The pressman by my side said 'No,'
to my question. He was glad because it was all over. He had suffered
greatly from the heat and the bad air of the court. The clammy, raw,
chill of the streets seemed to affect his liver instantly. He became
contemptuous and irritable and plied his elbows viciously making way for
himself and me.
A dull affair this. All such cases were dull. No really dramatic
moments. The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was
certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for
revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral--he grumbled. He
could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the
appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the
road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive snigger that, after
the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough
to make a sort of protest. 'You haven't given me time. If I had been
given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.'
And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in all these
days, raising a hard-clenched fist above his head.
The pressman disapproved of that manifestation. It was not his business
to understand it. Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand
anything? I guess not. It would lead him too far away from the
actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind. He probably
thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view;
the weak voice; the colourless personality as incapable of an attitude as
a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that
time and place--no, it wasn't worth much. And then, for him, an
accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly "bad
business." His business was to write a readable account. But I who had
nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our
still untouched glasses. And the disclosure which so often rewards a
moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill very
much approaching a shudder. I seemed to understand that, with the shock
of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the imagination of that
man, whose moods, notions and motives wore frequently an air of grotesque
mystery--that his imagination had been at last roused into activity. And
this was awful. Just try to enter into the feelings of a man whose
imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb . . . "
* * * * *
"You must not think," went on Marlow after a pause, "that on that morning
with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us call it
information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had, or
rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral. Information is
something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a
piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull. Whereas knowledge
comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in
its repose a fine resonant quality . . . But as such distinctions touch
upon the transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them.
There are limits to my cruelty. No! I didn't reckon up carefully in my
mind all this I have been telling you. How could I have done so, with
Fyne right there in the room? He sat perfectly still, statuesque in
homely fashion, after having delivered himself of his effective assent:
"Yes. The convict," and I, far from indulging in a reminiscent excursion
into the past, remained sufficiently in the present to muse in a vague,
absent-minded way on the respectable proportions and on the (upon the
whole) comely shape of his great pedestrian's calves, for he had thrown
one leg over his knee, carelessly, to conceal the trouble of his mind by
an air of ease. But all the same the knowledge was in me, the awakened
resonance of which I spoke just now; I was aware of it on that beautiful
day, so fresh, so warm and friendly, so accomplished--an exquisite
courtesy of the much abused English climate when it makes up its
meteorological mind to behave like a perfect gentleman. Of course the
English climate is never a rough. It suffers from spleen somewhat
frequently--but that is gentlemanly too, and I don't mind going to meet
him in that mood. He has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in
which he is very fascinating. How seldom he lapses into a blustering
manner, after all! And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately
enough, one may go out and kill something. But his fine days are the
best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse--even to dream; in
fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of
comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear,
luminous and serene weather.
That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the
weather's glory which would have lent enchantment to the most unpromising
of intellectual prospects. For a companion I had found a book, not
bemused with the cleverness of the day--a fine-weather book, simple and
sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend. But looking at little Fyne
seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of my
contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let in
for some form of severe exercise. Walking, it would be, I feared, since,
for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual impression
of Fyne. Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be brought in
helpful relation to the good Fyne's present trouble and perplexity I
could not imagine; except on the principle that senseless pedestrianism
was Fyne's panacea for all the ills and evils bodily and spiritual of the
universe. It could be of no use for me to say or do anything. It was
bound to come. Contemplating his muscular limb encased in a
golf-stocking, and under the strong impression of the information he had
just imparted I said wondering, rather irrationally:
"And so de Barral had a wife and child! That girl's his daughter. And
how . . . "
Fyne interrupted me by stating again earnestly, as though it were
something not easy to believe, that his wife and himself had tried to
befriend the girl in every way--indeed they had! I did not doubt him for
a moment, of course, but my wonder at this was more rational. At that
hour of the morning, you mustn't forget, I knew nothing as yet of Mrs.
Fyne's contact (it was hardly more) with de Barral's wife and child
during their exile at the Priory, in the culminating days of that man's
fame.
Fyne who had come over, it was clear, solely to talk to me on that
subject, gave me the first hint of this initial, merely out of doors,
connection. "The girl was quite a child then," he continued. "Later on
she was removed out of Mrs. Fyne's reach in charge of a governess--a very
unsatisfactory person," he explained. His wife had then--h'm--met him;
and on her marriage she lost sight of the child completely. But after
the birth of Polly (Polly was the third Fyne girl) she did not get on
very well, and went to Brighton for some months to recover her
strength--and there, one day in the street, the child (she wore her hair
down her back still) recognized her outside a shop and rushed, actually
rushed, into Mrs. Fyne's arms. Rather touching this. And so,
disregarding the cold impertinence of that . . . h'm . . . governess, his
wife naturally responded.
He was solemnly fragmentary. I broke in with the observation that it
must have been before the crash.