Renovated certainly the saloon of the _Ferndale_ was to receive the
"strange woman." The mellowness of its old-fashioned, tarnished
decoration was gone. And Anthony looking round saw the glitter, the
gleams, the colour of new things, untried, unused, very bright--too
bright. The workmen had gone only last night; and the last piece of work
they did was the hanging of the heavy curtains which looped midway the
length of the saloon--divided it in two if released, cutting off the
after end with its companion-way leading direct on the poop, from the
forepart with its outlet on the deck; making a privacy within a privacy,
as though Captain Anthony could not place obstacles enough between his
new happiness and the men who shared his life at sea. He inspected that
arrangement with an approving eye then made a particular visitation of
the whole, ending by opening a door which led into a large state-room
made of two knocked into one. It was very well furnished and had,
instead of the usual bedplace of such cabins, an elaborate swinging cot
of the latest pattern. Anthony tilted it a little by way of trial. "The
old man will be very comfortable in here," he said to himself, and
stepped back into the saloon closing the door gently. Then another
thought occurred to him obvious under the circumstances but strangely
enough presenting itself for the first time. "Jove! Won't he get a
shock," thought Roderick Anthony.
He went hastily on deck. "Mr. Franklin, Mr. Franklin." The mate was not
very far. "Oh! Here you are. Miss . . . Mrs. Anthony'll be coming on
board presently. Just give me a call when you see the cab."
Then, without noticing the gloominess of the mate's countenance he went
in again. Not a friendly word, not a professional remark, or a small
joke, not as much as a simple and inane "fine day." Nothing. Just
turned about and went in.
We know that, when the moment came, he thought better of it and decided
to meet Flora's father in that privacy of the main cabin which he had
been so careful to arrange. Why Anthony appeared to shrink from the
contact, he who was sufficiently self-confident not only to face but to
absolutely create a situation almost insane in its audacious generosity,
is difficult to explain. Perhaps when he came on the poop for a glance
he found that man so different outwardly from what he expected that he
decided to meet him for the first time out of everybody's sight. Possibly
the general secrecy of his relation to the girl might have influenced
him. Truly he may well have been dismayed. That man's coming brought
him face to face with the necessity to speak and act a lie; to appear
what he was not and what he could never be, unless, unless--
In short, we'll say if you like that for various reasons, all having to
do with the delicate rectitude of his nature, Roderick Anthony (a man of
whom his chief mate used to say: he doesn't know what fear is) was
frightened. There is a Nemesis which overtakes generosity too, like all
the other imprudences of men who dare to be lawless and proud . . . "
"Why do you say this?" I inquired, for Marlow had stopped abruptly and
kept silent in the shadow of the bookcase.
"I say this because that man whom chance had thrown in Flora's way was
both: lawless and proud. Whether he knew anything about it or not it
does not matter. Very likely not. One may fling a glove in the face of
nature and in the face of one's own moral endurance quite innocently,
with a simplicity which wears the aspect of perfectly Satanic conceit.
However, as I have said it does not matter. It's a transgression all the
same and has got to be paid for in the usual way. But never mind that. I
paused because, like Anthony, I find a difficulty, a sort of dread in
coming to grips with old de Barral.
You remember I had a glimpse of him once. He was not an imposing
personality: tall, thin, straight, stiff, faded, moving with short steps
and with a gliding motion, speaking in an even low voice. When the sea
was rough he wasn't much seen on deck--at least not walking. He caught
hold of things then and dragged himself along as far as the after
skylight where he would sit for hours. Our, then young, friend offered
once to assist him and this service was the first beginning of a sort of
friendship. He clung hard to one--Powell says, with no figurative
intention. Powell was always on the lookout to assist, and to assist
mainly Mrs. Anthony, because he clung so jolly hard to her that Powell
was afraid of her being dragged down notwithstanding that she very soon
became very sure-footed in all sorts of weather. And Powell was the only
one ready to assist at hand because Anthony (by that time) seemed to be
afraid to come near them; the unforgiving Franklin always looked
wrathfully the other way; the boatswain, if up there, acted likewise but
sheepishly; and any hands that happened to be on the poop (a feeling
spreads mysteriously all over a ship) shunned him as though he had been
the devil.
We know how he arrived on board. For my part I know so little of prisons
that I haven't the faintest notion how one leaves them. It seems as
abominable an operation as the other, the shutting up with its mental
suggestions of bang, snap, crash and the empty silence outside--where an
instant before you were--you _were_--and now no longer are. Perfectly
devilish. And the release! I don't know which is worse. How do they do
it? Pull the string, door flies open, man flies through: Out you go!
_Adios_! And in the space where a second before you were not, in the
silent space there is a figure going away, limping. Why limping? I
don't know. That's how I see it. One has a notion of a maiming,
crippling process; of the individual coming back damaged in some subtle
way. I admit it is a fantastic hallucination, but I can't help it. Of
course I know that the proceedings of the best machine-made humanity are
employed with judicious care and so on. I am absurd, no doubt, but still
. . . Oh yes it's idiotic. When I pass one of these places . . . did you
notice that there is something infernal about the aspect of every
individual stone or brick of them, something malicious as if matter were
enjoying its revenge of the contemptuous spirit of man. Did you notice?
You didn't? Eh? Well I am perhaps a little mad on that point. When I
pass one of these places I must avert my eyes. I couldn't have gone to
meet de Barral. I should have shrunk from the ordeal. You'll notice
that it looks as if Anthony (a brave man indubitably) had shirked it too.
Little Fyne's flight of fancy picturing three people in the fatal four
wheeler--you remember?--went wide of the truth. There were only two
people in the four wheeler. Flora did not shrink. Women can stand
anything. The dear creatures have no imagination when it comes to solid
facts of life. In sentimental regions--I won't say. It's another thing
altogether. There they shrink from or rush to embrace ghosts of their
own creation just the same as any fool-man would.
No. I suppose the girl Flora went on that errand reasonably. And then,
why! This was the moment for which she had lived. It was her only point
of contact with existence. Oh yes. She had been assisted by the Fynes.
And kindly. Certainly. Kindly. But that's not enough. There is a kind
way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their
hearts while it saves their outer envelope. How cold, how infernally
cold she must have felt--unless when she was made to burn with
indignation or shame. Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone but hang
me if I don't believe that some women could live by love alone. If there
be a flame in human beings fed by varied ingredients earthly and
spiritual which tinge it in different hues, then I seem to see the colour
of theirs. It is azure . . . What the devil are you laughing at . . . "
Marlow jumped up and strode out of the shadow as if lifted by indignation
but there was the flicker of a smile on his lips. "You say I don't know
women. Maybe. It's just as well not to come too close to the shrine.
But I have a clear notion of _woman_. In all of them, termagant, flirt,
crank, washerwoman, blue-stocking, outcast and even in the ordinary fool
of the ordinary commerce there is something left, if only a spark. And
when there is a spark there can always be a flame . . . "
He went back into the shadow and sat down again.
"I don't mean to say that Flora de Barral was one of the sort that could
live by love alone. In fact she had managed to live without. But still,
in the distrust of herself and of others she looked for love, any kind of
love, as women will. And that confounded jail was the only spot where
she could see it--for she had no reason to distrust her father.
She was there in good time. I see her gazing across the road at these
walls which are, properly speaking, awful. You do indeed seem to feel
along the very lines and angles of the unholy bulk, the fall of time,
drop by drop, hour by hour, leaf by leaf, with a gentle and implacable
slowness. And a voiceless melancholy comes over one, invading,
overpowering like a dream, penetrating and mortal like poison.
When de Barral came out she experienced a sort of shock to see that he
was exactly as she remembered him. Perhaps a little smaller. Otherwise
unchanged. You come out in the same clothes, you know. I can't tell
whether he was looking for her. No doubt he was. Whether he recognized
her? Very likely. She crossed the road and at once there was reproduced
at a distance of years, as if by some mocking witchcraft, the sight so
familiar on the Parade at Brighton of the financier de Barral walking
with his only daughter. One comes out of prison in the same clothes one
wore on the day of condemnation, no matter how long one has been put away
there. Oh, they last! They last! But there is something which is
preserved by prison life even better than one's discarded clothing. It
is the force, the vividness of one's sentiments. A monastery will do
that too; but in the unholy claustration of a jail you are thrown back
wholly upon yourself--for God and Faith are not there. The people
outside disperse their affections, you hoard yours, you nurse them into
intensity. What they let slip, what they forget in the movement and
changes of free life, you hold on to, amplify, exaggerate into a rank
growth of memories. They can look with a smile at the troubles and pains
of the past; but you can't. Old pains keep on gnawing at your heart, old
desires, old deceptions, old dreams, assailing you in the dead stillness
of your present where nothing moves except the irrecoverable minutes of
your life.
De Barral was out and, for a time speechless, being led away almost
before he had taken possession of the free world, by his daughter. Flora
controlled herself well. They walked along quickly for some distance.
The cab had been left round the corner--round several corners for all I
know. He was flustered, out of breath, when she helped him in and
followed herself. Inside that rolling box, turning towards that
recovered presence with her heart too full for words she felt the desire
of tears she had managed to keep down abandon her suddenly, her
half-mournful, half-triumphant exultation subside, every fibre of her
body, relaxed in tenderness, go stiff in the close look she took at his
face. He _was_ different. There was something. Yes, there was
something between them, something hard and impalpable, the ghost of these
high walls.
How old he was, how unlike!
She shook off this impression, amazed and frightened by it of course. And
remorseful too. Naturally. She threw her arms round his neck. He
returned that hug awkwardly, as if not in perfect control of his arms,
with a fumbling and uncertain pressure. She hid her face on his breast.
It was as though she were pressing it against a stone. They released
each other and presently the cab was rolling along at a jog-trot to the
docks with those two people as far apart as they could get from each
other, in opposite corners.
After a silence given up to mutual examination he uttered his first
coherent sentence outside the walls of the prison.
"What has done for me was envy. Envy. There was a lot of them just
bursting with it every time they looked my way. I was doing too well. So
they went to the Public Prosecutor--"
She said hastily "Yes! Yes! I know," and he glared as if resentful that
the child had turned into a young woman without waiting for him to come
out. "What do you know about it?" he asked. "You were too young." His
speech was soft. The old voice, the old voice! It gave her a thrill.
She recognized its pointless gentleness always the same no matter what he
had to say. And she remembered that he never had much to say when he
came down to see her. It was she who chattered, chattered, on their
walks, while stiff and with a rigidly-carried head, he dropped a gentle
word now and then.
Moved by these recollections waking up within her, she explained to him
that within the last year she had read and studied the report of the
trial.
"I went through the files of several papers, papa."
He looked at her suspiciously. The reports were probably very
incomplete. No doubt the reporters had garbled his evidence. They were
determined to give him no chance either in court or before the public
opinion. It was a conspiracy . . . "My counsel was a fool too," he
added. "Did you notice? A perfect fool."
She laid her hand on his arm soothingly. "Is it worth while talking
about that awful time? It is so far away now." She shuddered slightly
at the thought of all the horrible years which had passed over her young
head; never guessing that for him the time was but yesterday. He folded
his arms on his breast, leaned back in his corner and bowed his head. But
in a little while he made her jump by asking suddenly:
"Who has got hold of the Lone Valley Railway? That's what they were
after mainly. Somebody has got it. Parfitts and Co. grabbed it--eh? Or
was it that fellow Warner . . . "
"I--I don't know," she said quite scared by the twitching of his lips.
"Don't know!" he exclaimed softly. Hadn't her cousin told her? Oh yes.
She had left them--of course. Why did she? It was his first question
about herself but she did not answer it. She did not want to talk of
these horrors. They were impossible to describe. She perceived though
that he had not expected an answer, because she heard him muttering to
himself that: "There was half a million's worth of work done and material
accumulated there."
"You mustn't think of these things, papa," she said firmly. And he asked
her with that invariable gentleness, in which she seemed now to detect
some rather ugly shades, what else had he to think about? Another year
or two, if they had only left him alone, he and everybody else would have
been all right, rolling in money; and she, his daughter, could have
married anybody--anybody. A lord.
All this was to him like yesterday, a long yesterday, a yesterday gone
over innumerable times, analysed, meditated upon for years. It had a
vividness and force for that old man of which his daughter who had not
been shut out of the world could have no idea. She was to him the only
living figure out of that past, and it was perhaps in perfect good faith
that he added, coldly, inexpressive and thin-lipped: "I lived only for
you, I may say. I suppose you understand that. There were only you and
me."
Moved by this declaration, wondering that it did not warm her heart more,
she murmured a few endearing words while the uppermost thought in her
mind was that she must tell him now of the situation. She had expected
to be questioned anxiously about herself--and while she desired it she
shrank from the answers she would have to make. But her father seemed
strangely, unnaturally incurious. It looked as if there would be no
questions. Still this was an opening. This seemed to be the time for
her to begin. And she began. She began by saying that she had always
felt like that. There were two of them, to live for each other. And if
he only knew what she had gone through!
Ensconced in his corner, with his arms folded, he stared out of the cab
window at the street. How little he was changed after all. It was the
unmovable expression, the faded stare she used to see on the esplanade
whenever walking by his side hand in hand she raised her eyes to his
face--while she chattered, chattered. It was the same stiff, silent
figure which at a word from her would turn rigidly into a shop and buy
her anything it occurred to her that she would like to have. Flora de
Barral's voice faltered. He bent on her that well-remembered glance in
which she had never read anything as a child, except the consciousness of
her existence. And that was enough for a child who had never known
demonstrative affection. But she had lived a life so starved of all
feeling that this was no longer enough for her. What was the good of
telling him the story of all these miseries now past and gone, of all
those bewildering difficulties and humiliations? What she must tell him
was difficult enough to say. She approached it by remarking cheerfully:
"You haven't even asked me where I am taking you." He started like a
somnambulist awakened suddenly, and there was now some meaning in his
stare; a sort of alarmed speculation. He opened his mouth slowly. Flora
struck in with forced gaiety. "You would never, guess."
He waited, still more startled and suspicious. "Guess! Why don't you
tell me?"
He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward towards her. She got hold of
one of his hands. "You must know first . . . " She paused, made an
effort: "I am married, papa."
For a moment they kept perfectly still in that cab rolling on at a steady
jog-trot through a narrow city street full of bustle. Whatever she
expected she did not expect to feel his hand snatched away from her grasp
as if from a burn or a contamination. De Barral fresh from the stagnant
torment of the prison (where nothing happens) had not expected that sort
of news. It seemed to stick in his throat. In strangled low tones he
cried out, "You--married? You, Flora! When? Married! What for? Who
to? Married!"
His eyes which were blue like hers, only faded, without depth, seemed to
start out of their orbits. He did really look as if he were choking. He
even put his hand to his collar . . . "
* * * * *
"You know," continued Marlow out of the shadow of the bookcase and nearly
invisible in the depths of the arm-chair, "the only time I saw him he had
given me the impression of absolute rigidity, as though he had swallowed
a poker. But it seems that he could collapse. I can hardly picture this
to myself. I understand that he did collapse to a certain extent in his
corner of the cab. The unexpected had crumpled him up. She regarded him
perplexed, pitying, a little disillusioned, and nodded at him gravely:
Yes. Married. What she did not like was to see him smile in a manner
far from encouraging to the devotion of a daughter. There was something
unintentionally savage in it. Old de Barral could not quite command his
muscles, as yet. But he had recovered command of his gentle voice.
"You were just saying that in this wide world there we were, only you and
I, to stick to each other."
She was dimly aware of the scathing intention lurking in these soft low
tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly. She defended
herself. Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of
him. Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much
sinister emphasis as he was capable of.
"But, papa," she cried, "I haven't been shut up like you." She didn't
mind speaking of it because he was innocent. He hadn't been understood.
It was a misfortune of the most cruel kind but no more disgraceful than
an illness, a maiming accident or some other visitation of blind fate. "I
wish I had been too. But I was alone out in the world, the horrid world,
that very world which had used you so badly."
"And you couldn't go about in it without finding somebody to fall in love
with?" he said. A jealous rage affected his brain like the fumes of
wine, rising from some secret depths of his being so long deprived of all
emotions. The hollows at the corners of his lips became more pronounced
in the puffy roundness of his cheeks. Images, visions, obsess with
particular force, men withdrawn from the sights and sounds of active
life. "And I did nothing but think of you!" he exclaimed under his
breath, contemptuously. "Think of you! You haunted me, I tell you."
Flora said to herself that there was a being who loved her. "Then we
have been haunting each other," she declared with a pang of remorse. For
indeed he had haunted her nearly out of the world, into a final and
irremediable desertion. "Some day I shall tell you . . . No. I don't
think I can ever tell you. There was a time when I was mad. But what's
the good? It's all over now. We shall forget all this. There shall be
nothing to remind us."
De Barral moved his shoulders.
"I should think you were mad to tie yourself to . . . How long is it
since you are married?"
She answered "Not long" that being the only answer she dared to make.
Everything was so different from what she imagined it would be. He
wanted to know why she had said nothing of it in any of her letters; in
her last letter. She said:
"It was after."
"So recently!" he wondered. "Couldn't you wait at least till I came out?
You could have told me; asked me; consulted me! Let me see--"
She shook her head negatively. And he was appalled. He thought to
himself: Who can he be? Some miserable, silly youth without a penny. Or
perhaps some scoundrel? Without making any expressive movement he wrung
his loosely-clasped hands till the joints cracked. He looked at her. She
was pretty. Some low scoundrel who will cast her off. Some plausible
vagabond . . . "You couldn't wait--eh?"
Again she made a slight negative sign.
"Why not? What was the hurry?" She cast down her eyes. "It had to be.
Yes. It was sudden, but it had to be."
He leaned towards her, his mouth open, his eyes wild with virtuous anger,
but meeting the absolute candour of her raised glance threw himself back
into his corner again.
"So tremendously in love with each other--was that it? Couldn't let a
father have his daughter all to himself even for a day after--after such
a separation. And you know I never had anyone, I had no friends. What
did I want with those people one meets in the City. The best of them are
ready to cut your throat. Yes! Business men, gentlemen, any sort of men
and women--out of spite, or to get something. Oh yes, they can talk fair
enough if they think there's something to be got out of you . . . " His
voice was a mere breath yet every word came to Flora as distinctly as if
charged with all the moving power of passion . . . "My girl, I looked at
them making up to me and I would say to myself: What do I care for all
that! I am a business man. I am the great Mr. de Barral (yes, yes, some
of them twisted their mouths at it, but I _was_ the great Mr. de Barral)
and I have my little girl. I wanted nobody and I have never had
anybody."
A true emotion had unsealed his lips but the words that came out of them
were no louder than the murmur of a light wind. It died away.
"That's just it," said Flora de Barral under her breath. Without
removing his eyes from her he took off his hat. It was a tall hat. The
hat of the trial. The hat of the thumb-nail sketches in the illustrated
papers. One comes out in the same clothes, but seclusion counts! It is
well known that lurid visions haunt secluded men, monks, hermits--then
why not prisoners? De Barral the convict took off the silk hat of the
financier de Barral and deposited it on the front seat of the cab. Then
he blew out his cheeks. He was red in the face.
"And then what happens?" he began again in his contained voice. "Here I
am, overthrown, broken by envy, malice and all uncharitableness. I come
out--and what do I find? I find that my girl Flora has gone and married
some man or other, perhaps a fool, how do I know; or perhaps--anyway not
good enough."
"Stop, papa."
"A silly love affair as likely as not," he continued monotonously, his
thin lips writhing between the ill-omened sunk corners. "And a very
suspicious thing it is too, on the part of a loving daughter."
She tried to interrupt him but he went on till she actually clapped her
hand on his mouth. He rolled his eyes a bit but when she took her hand
away he remained silent.
"Wait. I must tell you . . . And first of all, papa, understand this,
for everything's in that: he is the most generous man in the world. He
is . . . "
De Barral very still in his corner uttered with an effort "You are in
love with him."
"Papa! He came to me. I was thinking of you. I had no eyes for
anybody. I could no longer bear to think of you. It was then that he
came. Only then. At that time when--when I was going to give up."
She gazed into his faded blue eyes as if yearning to be understood, to be
given encouragement, peace--a word of sympathy. He declared without
animation "I would like to break his neck."
She had the mental exclamation of the overburdened.
"Oh my God!" and watched him with frightened eyes. But he did not appear
insane or in any other way formidable. This comforted her. The silence
lasted for some little time. Then suddenly he asked:
"What's your name then?"
For a moment in the profound trouble of the task before her she did not
understand what the question meant. Then, her face faintly flushing, she
whispered: "Anthony."
Her father, a red spot on each cheek, leaned his head back wearily in the
corner of the cab.
"Anthony. What is he? Where did he spring from?"
"Papa, it was in the country, on a road--"
He groaned, "On a road," and closed his eyes.
"It's too long to explain to you now. We shall have lots of time. There
are things I could not tell you now. But some day. Some day. For now
nothing can part us. Nothing. We are safe as long as we live--nothing
can ever come between us."
"You are infatuated with the fellow," he remarked, without opening his
eyes. And she said: "I believe in him," in a low voice. "You and I must
believe in him."
"Who the devil is he?"
"He's the brother of the lady--you know Mrs. Fyne, she knew mother--who
was so kind to me. I was staying in the country, in a cottage, with Mr.
and Mrs. Fyne. It was there that we met. He came on a visit. He
noticed me. I--well--we are married now."
She was thankful that his eyes were shut. It made it easier to talk of
the future she had arranged, which now was an unalterable thing. She did
not enter on the path of confidences. That was impossible. She felt he
would not understand her. She felt also that he suffered. Now and then
a great anxiety gripped her heart with a mysterious sense of guilt--as
though she had betrayed him into the hands of an enemy. With his eyes
shut he had an air of weary and pious meditation. She was a little
afraid of it. Next moment a great pity for him filled her heart. And in
the background there was remorse. His face twitched now and then just
perceptibly. He managed to keep his eyelids down till he heard that the
'husband' was a sailor and that he, the father, was being taken straight
on board ship ready to sail away from this abominable world of
treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over the blue
sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and spacious refuge
for wounded souls.
Something like that. Not the very words perhaps but such was the general
sense of her overwhelming argument--the argument of refuge.
I don't think she gave a thought to material conditions. But as part of
that argument set forth breathlessly, as if she were afraid that if she
stopped for a moment she could never go on again, she mentioned that
generosity of a stormy type, which had come to her from the sea, had
caught her up on the brink of unmentionable failure, had whirled her away
in its first ardent gust and could be trusted now, implicitly trusted, to
carry them both, side by side, into absolute safety.
She believed it, she affirmed it. He understood thoroughly at last, and
at once the interior of that cab, of an aspect so pacific in the eyes of
the people on the pavements, became the scene of a great agitation. The
generosity of Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet--affected the
ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have brought home to Flora
de Barral the extreme arduousness of the business of being a woman. Being
a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of
dealings with men. This man--the man inside the cab--cast oft his stiff
placidity and behaved like an animal. I don't mean it in an offensive
sense. What he did was to give way to an instinctive panic. Like some
wild creature scared by the first touch of a net falling on its back, old
de Barral began to struggle, lank and angular, against the empty air--as
much of it as there was in the cab--with staring eyes and gasping mouth
from which his daughter shrank as far as she could in the confined space.
"Stop the cab. Stop him I tell you. Let me get out!" were the strangled
exclamations she heard. Why? What for? To do what? He would hear
nothing. She cried to him "Papa! Papa! What do you want to do?" And
all she got from him was: "Stop. I must get out. I want to think. I
must get out to think."
It was a mercy that he didn't attempt to open the door at once. He only
stuck his head and shoulders out of the window crying to the cabman. She
saw the consequences, the cab stopping, a crowd collecting around a
raving old gentleman . . . In this terrible business of being a woman so
full of fine shades, of delicate perplexities (and very small rewards)
you can never know what rough work you may have to do, at any moment.
Without hesitation Flora seized her father round the body and pulled
back--being astonished at the ease with which she managed to make him
drop into his seat again. She kept him there resolutely with one hand
pressed against his breast, and leaning across him, she, in her turn put
her head and shoulders out of the window. By then the cab had drawn up
to the curbstone and was stopped. "No! I've changed my mind. Go on
please where you were told first. To the docks."
She wondered at the steadiness of her own voice. She heard a grunt from
the driver and the cab began to roll again. Only then she sank into her
place keeping a watchful eye on her companion. He was hardly anything
more by this time. Except for her childhood's impressions he was just--a
man. Almost a stranger. How was one to deal with him? And there was
the other too. Also almost a stranger. The trade of being a woman was
very difficult. Too difficult. Flora closed her eyes saying to herself:
"If I think too much about it I shall go mad." And then opening them she
asked her father if the prospect of living always with his daughter and
being taken care of by her affection away from the world, which had no
honour to give to his grey hairs, was such an awful prospect.
"Tell me, is it so bad as that?"
She put that question sadly, without bitterness. The famous--or
notorious--de Barral had lost his rigidity now. He was bent. Nothing
more deplorably futile than a bent poker. He said nothing. She added
gently, suppressing an uneasy remorseful sigh:
"And it might have been worse. You might have found no one, no one in
all this town, no one in all the world, not even me! Poor papa!"
She made a conscience-stricken movement towards him thinking: "Oh! I am
horrible, I am horrible." And old de Barral, scared, tired, bewildered
by the extraordinary shocks of his liberation, swayed over and actually
leaned his head on her shoulder, as if sorrowing over his regained
freedom.
The movement by itself was touching. Flora supporting him lightly
imagined that he was crying; and at the thought that had she smashed in a
quarry that shoulder, together with some other of her bones, this grey
and pitiful head would have had nowhere to rest, she too gave way to
tears. They flowed quietly, easing her overstrained nerves. Suddenly he
pushed her away from him so that her head struck the side of the cab,
pushing himself away too from her as if something had stung him.
All the warmth went out of her emotion. The very last tears turned cold
on her cheek. But their work was done. She had found courage,
resolution, as women do, in a good cry. With his hand covering the upper
part of his face whether to conceal his eyes or to shut out an unbearable
sight, he was stiffening up in his corner to his usual poker-like
consistency. She regarded him in silence. His thin obstinate lips
moved. He uttered the name of the cousin--the man, you remember, who did
not approve of the Fynes, and whom rightly or wrongly little Fyne
suspected of interested motives, in view of de Barral having possibly put
away some plunder, somewhere before the smash.
I may just as well tell you at once that I don't know anything more of
him. But de Barral was of the opinion, speaking in his low voice from
under his hand, that this relation would have been only too glad to have
secured his guidance.
"Of course I could not come forward in my own name, or person. But the
advice of a man of my experience is as good as a fortune to anybody
wishing to venture into finance. The same sort of thing can be done
again."
He shuffled his feet a little, let fall his hand; and turning carefully
toward his daughter his puffy round cheeks, his round chin resting on his
collar, he bent on her the faded, resentful gaze of his pale eyes, which
were wet.
"The start is really only a matter of judicious advertising. There's no
difficulty. And here you go and . . . "
He turned his face away. "After all I am still de Barral, _the_ de
Barral. Didn't you remember that?"
"Papa," said Flora; "listen. It's you who must remember that there is no
longer a de Barral . . . " He looked at her sideways anxiously. "There
is Mr. Smith, whom no harm, no trouble, no wicked lies of evil people can
ever touch."
"Mr. Smith," he breathed out slowly. "Where does he belong to? There's
not even a Miss Smith."
"There is your Flora."
"My Flora! You went and . . . I can't bear to think of it. It's
horrible."
"Yes. It was horrible enough at times," she said with feeling, because
somehow, obscurely, what this man said appealed to her as if it were her
own thought clothed in an enigmatic emotion. "I think with shame
sometimes how I . . . No not yet. I shall not tell you. At least not
now."
The cab turned into the gateway of the dock. Flora handed the tall hat
to her father. "Here, papa. And please be good. I suppose you love me.
If you don't, then I wonder who--"
He put the hat on, and stiffened hard in his corner, kept a sidelong
glance on his girl. "Try to be nice for my sake. Think of the years I
have been waiting for you. I do indeed want support--and peace. A
little peace."
She clasped his arm suddenly with both hands pressing with all her might
as if to crush the resistance she felt in him. "I could not have peace
if I did not have you with me. I won't let you go. Not after all I went
through. I won't." The nervous force of her grip frightened him a
little. She laughed suddenly. "It's absurd. It's as if I were asking
you for a sacrifice. What am I afraid of? Where could you go? I mean
now, to-day, to-night? You can't tell me. Have you thought of it? Well
I have been thinking of it for the last year. Longer. I nearly went mad
trying to find out. I believe I was mad for a time or else I should
never have thought . . . "
* * * * *
"This was as near as she came to a confession," remarked Marlow in a
changed tone. "The confession I mean of that walk to the top of the
quarry which she reproached herself with so bitterly. And he made of it
what his fancy suggested. It could not possibly be a just notion. The
cab stopped alongside the ship and they got out in the manner described
by the sensitive Franklin. I don't know if they suspected each other's
sanity at the end of that drive. But that is possible. We all seem a
little mad to each other; an excellent arrangement for the bulk of
humanity which finds in it an easy motive of forgiveness. Flora crossed
the quarter-deck with a rapidity born of apprehension. It had grown
unbearable. She wanted this business over. She was thankful on looking
back to see he was following her. "If he bolts away," she thought, "then
I shall know that I am of no account indeed! That no one loves me, that
words and actions and protestations and everything in the world is
false--and I shall jump into the dock. _That_ at least won't lie."
Well I don't know. If it had come to that she would have been most
likely fished out, what with her natural want of luck and the good many
people on the quay and on board. And just where the _Ferndale_ was
moored there hung on a wall (I know the berth) a coil of line, a pole,
and a life-buoy kept there on purpose to save people who tumble into the
dock. It's not so easy to get away from life's betrayals as she thought.
However it did not come to that. He followed her with his quick gliding
walk. Mr. Smith! The liberated convict de Barral passed off the solid
earth for the last time, vanished for ever, and there was Mr. Smith added
to that world of waters which harbours so many queer fishes. An old
gentleman in a silk hat, darting wary glances. He followed, because mere
existence has its claims which are obeyed mechanically. I have no doubt
he presented a respectable figure. Father-in-law. Nothing more
respectable. But he carried in his heart the confused pain of dismay and
affection, of involuntary repulsion and pity. Very much like his
daughter. Only in addition he felt a furious jealousy of the man he was
going to see.
A residue of egoism remains in every affection--even paternal. And this
man in the seclusion of his prison had thought himself into such a sense
of ownership of that single human being he had to think about, as may
well be inconceivable to us who have not had to serve a long (and
wickedly unjust) sentence of penal servitude. She was positively the
only thing, the one point where his thoughts found a resting-place, for
years. She was the only outlet for his imagination. He had not much of
that faculty to be sure, but there was in it the force of concentration.
He felt outraged, and perhaps it was an absurdity on his part, but I
venture to suggest rather in degree than in kind. I have a notion that
no usual, normal father is pleased at parting with his daughter. No. Not
even when he rationally appreciates "Jane being taken off his hands" or
perhaps is able to exult at an excellent match. At bottom, quite deep
down, down in the dark (in some cases only by digging), there is to be
found a certain repugnance . . . With mothers of course it is different.
Women are more loyal, not to each other, but to their common femininity
which they behold triumphant with a secret and proud satisfaction.
The circumstances of that match added to Mr. Smith's indignation. And if
he followed his daughter into that ship's cabin it was as if into a house
of disgrace and only because he was still bewildered by the suddenness of
the thing. His will, so long lying fallow, was overborne by her
determination and by a vague fear of that regained liberty.
You will be glad to hear that Anthony, though he did shirk the welcome on
the quay, behaved admirably, with the simplicity of a man who has no
small meannesses and makes no mean reservations. His eyes did not flinch
and his tongue did not falter. He was, I have it on the best authority,
admirable in his earnestness, in his sincerity and also in his restraint.
He was perfect. Nevertheless the vital force of his unknown
individuality addressing him so familiarly was enough to fluster Mr.
Smith. Flora saw her father trembling in all his exiguous length, though
he held himself stiffer than ever if that was possible. He muttered a
little and at last managed to utter, not loud of course but very
distinctly: "I am here under protest," the corners of his mouth sunk
disparagingly, his eyes stony. "I am here under protest. I have been
locked up by a conspiracy. I--"
He raised his hands to his forehead--his silk hat was on the table rim
upwards; he had put it there with a despairing gesture as he came in--he
raised his hands to his forehead. "It seems to me unfair. I--" He
broke off again. Anthony looked at Flora who stood by the side of her
father.
"Well, sir, you will soon get used to me. Surely you and she must have
had enough of shore-people and their confounded half-and-half ways to
last you both for a life-time. A particularly merciful lot they are too.
You ask Flora. I am alluding to my own sister, her best friend, and not
a bad woman either as they go."
The captain of the _Ferndale_ checked himself. "Lucky thing I was there
to step in. I want you to make yourself at home, and before long--"
The faded stare of the Great de Barral silenced Anthony by its
inexpressive fixity. He signalled with his eyes to Flora towards the
door of the state-room fitted specially to receive Mr. Smith, the free
man. She seized the free man's hat off the table and took him
caressingly under the arm. "Yes! This is home, come and see your room,
papa!"
Anthony himself threw open the door and Flora took care to shut it
carefully behind herself and her father. "See," she began but desisted
because it was clear that he would look at none of the contrivances for
his comfort. She herself had hardly seen them before. He was looking
only at the new carpet and she waited till he should raise his eyes.
He didn't do that but spoke in his usual voice. "So this is your
husband, that . . . And I locked up!"
"Papa, what's the good of harping on that," she remonstrated no louder.
"He is kind."
"And you went and . . . married him so that he should be kind to me. Is
that it? How did you know that I wanted anybody to be kind to me?"
"How strange you are!" she said thoughtfully.
"It's hard for a man who has gone through what I have gone through to
feel like other people. Has that occurred to you? . . . " He looked up
at last . . . "Mrs. Anthony, I can't bear the sight of the fellow." She
met his eyes without flinching and he added, "You want to go to him now."
His mild automatic manner seemed the effect of tremendous
self-restraint--and yet she remembered him always like that. She felt
cold all over.
"Why, of course, I must go to him," she said with a slight start.
He gnashed his teeth at her and she went out.
Anthony had not moved from the spot. One of his hands was resting on the
table. She went up to him, stopped, then deliberately moved still
closer. "Thank you, Roderick."
"You needn't thank me," he murmured. "It's I who . . . "
"No, perhaps I needn't. You do what you like. But you are doing it
well."
He sighed then hardly above a whisper because they were near the state-
room door, "Upset, eh?"
She made no sign, no sound of any kind. The thorough falseness of the
position weighed on them both. But he was the braver of the two. "I
dare say. At first. Did you think of telling him you were happy?"
"He never asked me," she smiled faintly at him. She was disappointed by
his quietness. "I did not say more than I was absolutely obliged to
say--of myself." She was beginning to be irritated with this man a
little. "I told him I had been very lucky," she said suddenly
despondent, missing Anthony's masterful manner, that something arbitrary
and tender which, after the first scare, she had accustomed herself to
look forward to with pleasurable apprehension. He was contemplating her
rather blankly. She had not taken off her outdoor things, hat, gloves.
She was like a caller. And she had a movement suggesting the end of a
not very satisfactory business call. "Perhaps it would be just as well
if we went ashore. Time yet."
He gave her a glimpse of his unconstrained self in the low vehement "You
dare!" which sprang to his lips and out of them with a most menacing
inflexion.
"You dare . . . What's the matter now?"
These last words were shot out not at her but at some target behind her
back. Looking over her shoulder she saw the bald head with black bunches
of hair of the congested and devoted Franklin (he had his cap in his
hand) gazing sentimentally from the saloon doorway with his lobster eyes.
He was heard from the distance in a tone of injured innocence reporting
that the berthing master was alongside and that he wanted to move the
ship into the basin before the crew came on board.
His captain growled "Well, let him," and waved away the ulcerated and
pathetic soul behind these prominent eyes which lingered on the offensive
woman while the mate backed out slowly. Anthony turned to Flora.
"You could not have meant it. You are as straight as they make them."
"I am trying to be."
"Then don't joke in that way. Think of what would become of--me."
"Oh yes. I forgot. No, I didn't mean it. It wasn't a joke. It was
forgetfulness. You wouldn't have been wronged. I couldn't have gone.
I--I am too tired."
He saw she was swaying where she stood and restrained himself violently
from taking her into his arms, his frame trembling with fear as though he
had been tempted to an act of unparalleled treachery. He stepped aside
and lowering his eyes pointed to the door of the stern-cabin. It was
only after she passed by him that he looked up and thus he did not see
the angry glance she gave him before she moved on. He looked after her.
She tottered slightly just before reaching the door and flung it to
behind her nervously.
Anthony--he had felt this crash as if the door had been slammed inside
his very breast--stood for a moment without moving and then shouted for
Mrs. Brown. This was the steward's wife, his lucky inspiration to make
Flora comfortable. "Mrs. Brown! Mrs. Brown!" At last she appeared from
somewhere. "Mrs. Anthony has come on board. Just gone into the cabin.
Hadn't you better see if you can be of any assistance?"
"Yes, sir."
And again he was alone with the situation he had created in the hardihood
and inexperience of his heart. He thought he had better go on deck. In
fact he ought to have been there before. At any rate it would be the
usual thing for him to be on deck. But a sound of muttering and of faint
thuds somewhere near by arrested his attention. They proceeded from Mr.
Smith's room, he perceived. It was very extraordinary. "He's talking to
himself," he thought. "He seems to be thumping the bulkhead with his
fists--or his head."
Anthony's eyes grew big with wonder while he listened to these noises. He
became so attentive that he did not notice Mrs. Brown till she actually
stopped before him for a moment to say:
"Mrs. Anthony doesn't want any assistance, sir."
* * * * *
This was you understand the voyage before Mr. Powell--young Powell
then--joined the _Ferndale_; chance having arranged that he should get
his start in life in that particular ship of all the ships then in the
port of London. The most unrestful ship that ever sailed out of any port
on earth. I am not alluding to her sea-going qualities. Mr. Powell
tells me she was as steady as a church. I mean unrestful in the sense,
for instance in which this planet of ours is unrestful--a matter of an
uneasy atmosphere disturbed by passions, jealousies, loves, hates and the
troubles of transcendental good intentions, which, though ethically
valuable, I have no doubt cause often more unhappiness than the plots of
the most evil tendency. For those who refuse to believe in chance he, I
mean Mr. Powell, must have been obviously predestined to add his native
ingenuousness to the sum of all the others carried by the honest ship
_Ferndale_. He was too ingenuous. Everybody on board was, exception
being made of Mr. Smith who, however, was simple enough in his way, with
that terrible simplicity of the fixed idea, for which there is also
another name men pronounce with dread and aversion. His fixed idea was
to save his girl from the man who had possessed himself of her (I use
these words on purpose because the image they suggest was clearly in Mr.
Smith's mind), possessed himself unfairly of her while he, the father,
was locked up.
"I won't rest till I have got you away from that man," he would murmur to
her after long periods of contemplation. We know from Powell how he used
to sit on the skylight near the long deck-chair on which Flora was
reclining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship
and investigation at the same time.
It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event
rationally. The avatar of de Barral into Mr. Smith had not been effected
without a shock--that much one must recognize. It may be that it drove
all practical considerations out of his mind, making room for awful and
precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards.
And it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent tenacity, of the
man who had persisted in throwing millions of other people's thrift into
the Lone Valley Railway, the Labrador Docks, the Spotted Leopard Copper
Mine, and other grotesque speculations exposed during the famous de
Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of
laughter. For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy finds its last
refuge in our deadly serious world. As to tears and lamentations, these
were not heard in the august precincts of comedy, because they were
indulged in privately in several thousand homes, where, with a fine
dramatic effect, hunger had taken the place of Thrift.
But there was one at least who did not laugh in court. That person was
the accused. The notorious de Barral did not laugh because he was
indignant. He was impervious to words, to facts, to inferences. It
would have been impossible to make him see his guilt or his folly--either
by evidence or argument--if anybody had tried to argue.
Neither did his daughter Flora try to argue with him. The cruelty of her
position was so great, its complications so thorny, if I may express
myself so, that a passive attitude was yet her best refuge--as it had
been before her of so many women.
For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore
menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an
agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply
stupid. But she is never dense. She's never made of wood through and
through as some men are. There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring.
Whatever men don't know about women (and it may be a lot or it may be
very little) men and even fathers do know that much. And that is why so
many men are afraid of them.
Mr. Smith I believe was afraid of his daughter's quietness though of
course he interpreted it in his own way.
He would, as Mr. Powell depicts, sit on the skylight and bend over the
reclining girl, wondering what there was behind the lost gaze under the
darkened eyelids in the still eyes. He would look and look and then he
would say, whisper rather, it didn't take much for his voice to drop to a
mere breath--he would declare, transferring his faded stare to the
horizon, that he would never rest till he had "got her away from that
man."
"You don't know what you are saying, papa."
She would try not to show her weariness, the nervous strain of these two
men's antagonism around her person which was the cause of her languid
attitudes. For as a matter of fact the sea agreed with her.
As likely as not Anthony would be walking on the other side of the deck.
The strain was making him restless. He couldn't sit still anywhere. He
had tried shutting himself up in his cabin; but that was no good. He
would jump up to rush on deck and tramp, tramp up and down that poop till
he felt ready to drop, without being able to wear down the agitation of
his soul, generous indeed, but weighted by its envelope of blood and
muscle and bone; handicapped by the brain creating precise images and
everlastingly speculating, speculating--looking out for signs, watching
for symptoms.
And Mr. Smith with a slight backward jerk of his small head at the
footsteps on the other side of the skylight would insist in his awful,
hopelessly gentle voice that he knew very well what he was saying. Hadn't
she given herself to that man while he was locked up.
"Helpless, in jail, with no one to think of, nothing to look forward to,
but my daughter. And then when they let me out at last I find her
gone--for it amounts to this. Sold. Because you've sold yourself; you
know you have."
With his round unmoved face, a lot of fine white hair waving in the wind-
eddies of the spanker, his glance levelled over the sea he seemed to be
addressing the universe across her reclining form. She would protest
sometimes.
"I wish you would not talk like this, papa. You are only tormenting me,
and tormenting yourself."
"Yes, I am tormented enough," he admitted meaningly. But it was not
talking about it that tormented him. It was thinking of it. And to sit
and look at it was worse for him than it possibly could have been for her
to go and give herself up, bad as that must have been.
"For of course you suffered. Don't tell me you didn't? You must have."
She had renounced very soon all attempts at protests. It was useless. It
might have made things worse; and she did not want to quarrel with her
father, the only human being that really cared for her, absolutely,
evidently, completely--to the end. There was in him no pity, no
generosity, nothing whatever of these fine things--it was for her, for
her very own self such as it was, that this human being cared. This
certitude would have made her put up with worse torments. For, of
course, she too was being tormented. She felt also helpless, as if the
whole enterprise had been too much for her. This is the sort of
conviction which makes for quietude. She was becoming a fatalist.
What must have been rather appalling were the necessities of daily life,
the intercourse of current trifles. That naturally had to go on. They
wished good morning to each other, they sat down together to meals--and I
believe there would be a game of cards now and then in the evening,
especially at first. What frightened her most was the duplicity of her
father, at least what looked like duplicity, when she remembered his
persistent, insistent whispers on deck. However her father was a
taciturn person as far back as she could remember him best--on the
Parade. It was she who chattered, never troubling herself to discover
whether he was pleased or displeased. And now she couldn't fathom his
thoughts. Neither did she chatter to him. Anthony with a forced
friendly smile as if frozen to his lips seemed only too thankful at not
being made to speak. Mr. Smith sometimes forgot himself while studying
his hand so long that Flora had to recall him to himself by a murmured
"Papa--your lead." Then he apologized by a faint as if inward
ejaculation "Beg your pardon, Captain." Naturally she addressed Anthony
as Roderick and he addressed her as Flora. This was all the acting that
was necessary to judge from the wincing twitch of the old man's mouth at
every uttered "Flora." On hearing the rare "Rodericks" he had sometimes
a scornful grimace as faint and faded and colourless as his whole stiff
personality.
He would be the first to retire. He was not infirm. With him too the
life on board ship seemed to agree; but from a sense of duty, of
affection, or to placate his hidden fury, his daughter always accompanied
him to his state-room "to make him comfortable." She lighted his lamp,
helped him into his dressing-gown or got him a book from a bookcase
fitted in there--but this last rarely, because Mr. Smith used to declare
"I am no reader" with something like pride in his low tones. Very often
after kissing her good-night on the forehead he would treat her to some
such fretful remark: "It's like being in jail--'pon my word. I suppose
that man is out there waiting for you. Head jailer! Ough!"
She would smile vaguely; murmur a conciliatory "How absurd." But once,
out of patience, she said quite sharply "Leave off. It hurts me. One
would think you hate me."
"It isn't you I hate," he went on monotonously breathing at her. "No, it
isn't you. But if I saw that you loved that man I think I could hate you
too."
That word struck straight at her heart. "You wouldn't be the first
then," she muttered bitterly. But he was busy with his fixed idea and
uttered an awfully equable "But you don't! Unfortunate girl!"