We were on our feet in the room by then, and Marlow, brown and
deliberate, approached the window where Mr Powell and I had retired.
“What was the name of your chance again?” he asked.
Mr Powell stared for a moment.
“Oh! The _Ferndale_. A Liverpool ship. Composite built.”
“_Ferndale_,” repeated Marlow thoughtfully. “_Ferndale_.”
“Know her?”
“Our friend,” I said, “knows something of every ship. He seems to have
gone about the seas prying into things considerably.”
Marlow smiled.
“I’ve seen her, at least once.”
“The finest sea-boat ever launched,” declared Mr Powell sturdily.
“Without exception.”
“She looked a stout, comfortable ship,” assented Marlow. “Uncommonly
comfortable. Not very fast tho’.”
“She was fast enough for any reasonable man—when I was in her,” growled
Mr Powell with his back to us.
“Any ship is that—for a reasonable man,” generalised Marlow in a
conciliatory tone. “A sailor isn’t a globetrotter.”
“No,” muttered Mr Powell.
“Time’s nothing to him,” advanced Marlow.
“I don’t suppose it’s much,” said Mr Powell. “All the same a quick
passage is a feather in a man’s cap.”
“True. But that ornament is for the use of the master only. And by the
by what was his name?”
“The master of the _Ferndale_? Anthony. Captain Anthony.”
“Just so. Quite right,” approved Marlow thoughtfully. Our new
acquaintance looked over his shoulder.
“What do you mean? Why is it more right than if it had been Brown?”
“He has known him probably,” I explained. “Marlow here appears to know
something of every soul that ever went afloat in a sailor’s body.”
Mr Powell seemed wonderfully amenable to verbal suggestions for looking
again out of the window, he muttered:
“He was a good soul.”
This clearly referred to Captain Anthony of the _Ferndale_. Marlow
addressed his protest to me.
“I did not know him. I really didn’t. He was a good soul. That’s
nothing very much out of the way—is it? And I didn’t even know that
much of him. All I knew of him was an accident called Fyne.”
At this Mr Powell who evidently could be rebellious too turned his back
squarely on the window.
“What on earth do you mean?” he asked. “An—accident—called Fyne,” he
repeated separating the words with emphasis.
Marlow was not disconcerted.
“I don’t mean accident in the sense of a mishap. Not in the least.
Fyne was a good little man in the Civil Service. By accident I mean
that which happens blindly and without intelligent design. That’s
generally the way a brother-in-law happens into a man’s life.”
Marlow’s tone being apologetic and our new acquaintance having again
turned to the window I took it upon myself to say:
“You are justified. There is very little intelligent design in the
majority of marriages; but they are none the worse for that.
Intelligence leads people astray as far as passion sometimes. I know
you are not a cynic.”
Marlow smiled his retrospective smile which was kind as though he bore
no grudge against people he used to know.
“Little Fyne’s marriage was quite successful. There was no design at
all in it. Fyne, you must know, was an enthusiastic pedestrian. He
spent his holidays tramping all over our native land. His tastes were
simple. He put infinite conviction and perseverance into his holidays.
At the proper season you would meet in the fields, Fyne, a
serious-faced, broad-chested, little man, with a shabby knap-sack on his
back, making for some church steeple. He had a horror of roads. He
wrote once a little book called the ‘Tramp’s Itinerary,’ and was
recognised as an authority on the footpaths of England. So one year, in
his favourite over-the-fields, back-way fashion he entered a pretty
Surrey village where he met Miss Anthony. Pure accident, you see. They
came to an understanding, across some stile, most likely. Little Fyne
held very solemn views as to the destiny of women on this earth, the
nature of our sublunary love, the obligations of this transient life and
so on. He probably disclosed them to his future wife. Miss Anthony’s
views of life were very decided too but in a different way. I don’t
know the story of their wooing. I imagine it was carried on
clandestinely and, I am certain, with portentous gravity, at the back of
copses, behind hedges....”
“Why was it carried on clandestinely?” I inquired.
“Because of the lady’s father. He was a savage sentimentalist who had
his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives. He was a terror;
but the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in
his wife’s parentage. It stimulated his ingenuity too. Difficult—is
it not?—to introduce one’s wife’s maiden name into general
conversation. But my simple Fyne made use of Captain Anthony for that
purpose, or else I would never even have heard of the man. ‘My wife’s
sailor-brother’ was the phrase. He trotted out the sailor-brother in a
pretty wide range of subjects: Indian and colonial affairs, matters of
trade, talk of travels, of seaside holidays and so on. Once I remember
‘My wife’s sailor-brother Captain Anthony’ being produced in connection
with nothing less recondite than a sunset. And little Fyne never failed
to add: ‘The son of Carleon Anthony, the poet—you know.’ He used to
lower his voice for that statement, and people were impressed or
pretended to be.”
The late Carleon Anthony, the poet, sang in his time of the domestic and
social amenities of our age with a most felicitous versification, his
object being, in his own words, “to glorify the result of six thousand
years’ evolution towards the refinement of thought, manners and
feelings.” Why he fixed the term at six thousand years I don’t know.
His poems read like sentimental novels told in verse of a really
superior quality. You felt as if you, were being taken out for a
delightful country drive by a charming lady in a pony carriage. But in
his domestic life that same Carleon Anthony showed traces of the
primitive cave-dweller’s temperament. He was a massive, implacable man
with a handsome face, arbitrary, and exacting with his dependants, but
marvellously suave in his manner to admiring strangers. These
contrasted displays must have been particularly exasperating to his
longsuffering family. After his second wife’s death his boy, whom he
persisted by a mere whim in educating at home, ran away in conventional
style and, as if disgusted with the amenities of civilisation, threw
himself, figuratively speaking, into the sea. The daughter (the elder
of the two children) either from compassion or because women are
naturally more enduring, remained in bondage to the poet for several
years, till she too seized a chance of escape by throwing herself into
the arms, the muscular arms, of the pedestrian Fyne. This was either
great luck or great sagacity. A civil servant is, I should imagine, the
last human being in the world to preserve those traits of the
cave-dweller from which she was fleeing. Her father would never consent
to see her after the marriage. Such unforgiving selfishness is
difficult to understand unless as a perverse sort of refinement. There
were also doubts as to Carleon Anthony’s complete sanity for some
considerable time before he died.
Most of the above I elicited from Marlow, for all I knew of Carleon
Anthony was his unexciting but fascinating verse. Marlow assured me
that the Fyne marriage was perfectly successful and even happy, in an
earnest, unplayful fashion, being blessed besides by three healthy,
active, self-reliant children, all girls. They were all pedestrians
too. Even the youngest would wander away for miles if not restrained.
Mrs Fyne had a ruddy out-of-doors complexion and wore blouses with a
starched front like a man’s shirt, a stand-up collar and a long necktie.
Marlow had made their acquaintance one summer in the country, where
they were accustomed to take a cottage for the holidays....
At this point we were interrupted by Mr Powell who declared that he
must leave us. The tide was on the turn, he announced coming away from
the window abruptly. He wanted to be on board his cutter before she
swung and of course he would sleep on board. Never slept away from the
cutter while on a cruise. He was gone in a moment, unceremoniously, but
giving us no offence and leaving behind an impression as though we had
known him for a long time. The ingenuous way he had told us of his
start in life had something to do with putting him on that footing with
us. I gave no thought to seeing him again. Marlow expressed a
confident hope of coming across him before long.
“He cruises about the mouth of the river all the summer. He will be
easy to find any week-end,” he remarked ringing the bell so that we
might settle up with the waiter.
Later on I asked Marlow why he wished to cultivate this chance
acquaintance. He confessed apologetically that it was the commonest
sort of curiosity. I flatter myself that I understand all sorts of
curiosity. Curiosity about daily facts, about daily things, about daily
men. It is the most respectable faculty of the human mind—in fact I
cannot conceive the uses of an incurious mind. It would be like a
chamber perpetually locked up. But in this particular case Mr Powell
seemed to have given us already a complete insight into his personality
such as it was; a personality capable of perception and with a feeling
for the vagaries of fate, but essentially simple in itself.
Marlow agreed with me so far. He explained however that his curiosity
was not excited by Mr Powell exclusively. It originated a good way
further back in the fact of his accidental acquaintance with the Fynes,
in the country. This chance meeting with a man who had sailed with
Captain Anthony had revived it. It had revived it to some purpose, to
such purpose that to me too was given the knowledge of its origin and of
its nature. It was given to me in several stages, at intervals which
are not indicated here. On this first occasion I remarked to Marlow
with some surprise:
“But, if I remember rightly you said you didn’t know Captain Anthony.”
“No. I never saw the man. It’s years ago now, but I seem to hear
solemn little Fyne’s deep voice announcing the approaching visit of his
wife’s brother ‘the son of the poet, you know.’ He had just arrived in
London from a long voyage, and, directly his occupations permitted, was
coming down to stay with his relatives for a few weeks. No doubt we two
should find many things to talk about by ourselves in reference to our
common calling, added little Fyne portentously in his grave undertones,
as if the Mercantile Marine were a secret society.
“You must understand that I cultivated the Fynes only in the country, in
their holiday time. This was the third year. Of their existence in
town I knew no more than may be inferred from analogy. I played chess
with Fyne in the late afternoon, and sometimes came over to the cottage
early enough to have tea with the whole family at a big round table.
They sat about it, an unsmiling, sunburnt company of very few words
indeed. Even the children were silent and as if contemptuous of each
other and of their elders. Fyne muttered sometimes deep down in his
chest some insignificant remark. Mrs Fyne smiled mechanically (she had
splendid teeth) while distributing tea and bread and butter. A
something which was not coldness, nor yet indifference, but a sort of
peculiar self-possession gave her the appearance of a very trustworthy,
very capable and excellent governess; as if Fyne were a widower and the
children not her own but only entrusted to her calm, efficient,
unemotional care. One expected her to address Fyne as Mr When she
called him John it surprised one like a shocking familiarity. The
atmosphere of that holiday was—if I may put it so—brightly dull.
Healthy faces, fair complexions, clear eyes, and never a frank smile in
the whole lot, unless perhaps from a girl-friend.
“The girl-friend problem exercised me greatly. How and where the Fynes
got all these pretty creatures to come and stay with them I can’t
imagine. I had at first the wild suspicion that they were obtained to
amuse Fyne. But I soon discovered that he could hardly tell one from
the other, though obviously their presence met with his solemn approval.
These girls in fact came for Mrs Fyne. They treated her with admiring
deference. She answered to some need of theirs. They sat at her feet.
They were like disciples. It was very curious. Of Fyne they took but
scanty notice. As to myself I was made to feel that I did not exist.
“After tea we would sit down to chess and then Fyne’s everlasting
gravity became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward
which resembled sly satisfaction. Of the divine frivolity of laughter
he was only capable over a chessboard. Certain positions of the game
struck him as humorous, which nothing else on earth could do....”
“He used to beat you,” I asserted with confidence.
“Yes. He used to beat me,” Marlow owned up hastily.
So he and Fyne played two games after tea. The children romped together
outside, gravely, unplayfully, as one would expect from Fyne’s children,
and Mrs Fyne would be gone to the bottom of the garden with the
girl-friend of the week. She always walked off directly after tea with
her arm round the girl-friend’s waist. Marlow said that there was only
one girl-friend with whom he had conversed at all. It had happened
quite unexpectedly, long after he had given up all hope of getting into
touch with these reserved girl-friends.
One day he saw a woman walking about on the edge of a high quarry, which
rose a sheer hundred feet, at least, from the road winding up the hill
out of which it had been excavated. He shouted warningly to her from
below where he happened to be passing. She was really in considerable
danger. At the sound of his voice she started back and retreated out of
his sight amongst some young Scotch firs growing near the very brink of
the precipice.
“I sat down on a bank of grass,” Marlow went on. “She had given me a
turn. The hem of her skirt seemed to float over that awful sheer drop,
she was so close to the edge. An absurd thing to do. A perfectly mad
trick—for no conceivable object! I was reflecting on the foolhardiness
of the average girl and remembering some other instances of the kind,
when she came into view walking down the steep curve of the road. She
had Mrs Fyne’s walking-stick and was escorted by the Fyne dog. Her
dead-white face struck me with astonishment, so that I forgot to raise
my hat. I just sat and stared. The dog, a vivacious and amiable animal
which for some inscrutable reason had bestowed his friendship on my
unworthy self, rushed up the bank demonstratively and insinuated himself
under my arm.
“The girl-friend (it was one of them) went past some way as though she
had not seen me, then stopped and called the dog to her several times;
but he only nestled closer to my side, and when I tried to push him away
developed that remarkable power of internal resistance by which a dog
makes himself practically immovable by anything short of a lack. She
looked over her shoulder and her arched eyebrows frowned above her
blanched face. It was almost a scowl. Then the expression changed.
She looked unhappy. ‘Come here!’ she cried once more in an angry and
distressed tone. I took off my hat at last, but the dog hanging out his
tongue with that cheerfully imbecile expression some dogs know so well
how to put on when it suits their purpose, pretended to be deaf.”
She cried from the distance desperately.
“Perhaps you will take him to the cottage then. I can’t wait.”
“I won’t be responsible for that dog,” I protested getting down the bank
and advancing towards her. She looked very hurt, apparently by the
desertion of the dog. “But: if you let me walk with you he will follow
us all right,” I suggested.
She moved on without answering me. The dog launched himself suddenly
full speed down the road receding from us in a small cloud of dust. It
vanished in the distance, and presently we came up with him lying on the
grass. He panted in the shade of the hedge with shining eyes but
pretended not to see us. We had not exchanged a word so far. The girl
by my side gave him a scornful glance in passing.
“He offered to come with me,” she remarked bitterly.
“And then abandoned you!” I sympathised. “It looks very unchivalrous.
But that’s merely his want of tact. I believe he meant to protest
against your reckless proceedings. What made you come so near the edge
of that quarry? The earth might have given way. Haven’t you noticed a
smashed fir tree at the bottom? Tumbled over only the other morning
after a night’s rain.”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be as reckless as I please.”
I was nettled by her brusque manner of asserting her folly, and I told
her that neither did I as far as that went, in a tone which almost
suggested that she was welcome to break her neck for all I cared. This
was considerably more than I meant, but I don’t like rude girls. I had
been introduced to her only the day before—at the round tea-table—and
she had barely acknowledged the introduction. I had not caught her name
but I had noticed her fine, arched eyebrows which, so the physiognomists
say, are a sign of courage.
I examined her appearance quietly. Her hair was nearly black, her eyes
blue, deeply shaded by long dark eyelashes. She had a little colour
now. She looked straight before her; the corner of her lip on my side
drooped a little; her chin was fine, somewhat pointed. I went on to say
that some regard for others should stand in the way of one’s playing
with danger. I urged playfully the distress of the poor Fynes in case
of accident, if nothing else. I told her that she did not know the
bucolic mind. Had she given occasion for a coroner’s inquest the
verdict would have been suicide, with the implication of unhappy love.
They would never be able to understand that she had taken the trouble to
climb over two post-and-rail fences only for the fun of being reckless.
Indeed even as I talked chaffingly I was greatly struck myself by the
fact.
She retorted that once one was dead what horrid people thought of one
did not matter. It was said with infinite contempt; but something like
a suppressed quaver in the voice made me look at her again. I perceived
then that her thick eyelashes were wet. This surprising discovery
silenced me as you may guess. She looked unhappy. And—I don’t know
how to say it—well—it suited her. The clouded brow, the pained mouth,
the vague fixed glance! A victim. And this characteristic aspect made
her attractive; an individual touch—you know.
The dog had run on ahead and now gazed at us by the side of the Fyne’s
garden-gate in a tense attitude and wagging his stumpy tail very, very
slowly, with an air of concentrated attention. The girl-friend of the
Fynes bolted violently through the aforesaid gate and into the cottage
leaving me on the road—astounded.
A couple of hours afterwards I returned to the cottage for chess as
usual. I saw neither the girl nor Mrs Fyne then. We had our two games
and on parting I warned Fyne that I was called to town on business and
might be away for some time. He regretted it very much. His
brother-in-law was expected next day but he didn’t know whether he was a
chess-player. Captain Anthony (“the son of the poet—you know”) was of
a retiring disposition, shy with strangers, unused to society and very
much devoted to his calling, Fyne explained. All the time they had been
married he could be induced only once before to come and stay, with them
for a few days. He had had a rather unhappy boyhood; and it made him a
silent man. But no doubt, concluded Fyne, as if dealing portentously
with a mystery, we two sailors should find much to say to one another.
This point was never settled. I was detained in town from week to week
till it seemed hardly worth while to go back. But as I had kept on my
rooms in the farmhouse I concluded to go down again for a few days.
It was late, deep dusk, when I got out at our little country station.
My eyes fell on the unmistakable broad back and the muscular legs in
cycling stockings of little Fyne. He passed along the carriages rapidly
towards the rear of the train, which presently pulled out and left him
solitary at the end of the rustic platform. When he came back to where
I waited I perceived that he was much perturbed, so perturbed as to
forget the convention of the usual greetings. He only exclaimed Oh! on
recognising me, and stopped irresolute. When I asked him if he had been
expecting somebody by that train he didn’t seem to know. He stammered
disconnectedly. I looked hard at him. To all appearances he was
perfectly sober; moreover to suspect Fyne of a lapse from the
proprieties high or low, great or small, was absurd. He was also a too
serious and deliberate person to go mad suddenly. But as he seemed to
have forgotten that he had a tongue in his head I concluded I would
leave him to his mystery. To my surprise he followed me out of the
station and kept by my side, though I did not encourage him. I did not
however repulse his attempts at conversation. He was no longer
expecting me, he said. He had given me up. The weather had been
uniformly fine—and so on. I gathered also that the son of the poet had
curtailed his stay somewhat and gone back to his ship the day before.
That information touched me but little. Believing in heredity in
moderation I knew well how sea-life fashions a man outwardly and stamps
his soul with the mark of a certain prosaic fitness—because a sailor is
not an adventurer. I expressed no regret at missing Captain Anthony and
we proceeded in silence till, on approaching the holiday cottage, Fyne
suddenly and unexpectedly broke it by the hurried declaration that he
would go on with me a little farther.
“Go with you to your door,” he mumbled and started forward to the little
gate where the shadowy figure of Mrs Fyne hovered, clearly on the
lookout for him. She was alone. The children must have been already in
bed and I saw no attending girl-friend shadow near her vague but
unmistakable form, half-lost in the obscurity of the little garden.
I heard Fyne exclaim “Nothing” and then Mrs Fyne’s well-trained,
responsible voice uttered the words, “It’s what I have said,” with
incisive equanimity. By that time I had passed on, raising my hat.
Almost at once Fyne caught me up and slowed down to my strolling gait
which must have been infinitely irksome to his high pedestrian
faculties. I am sure that all his muscular person must have suffered
from awful physical boredom; but he did not attempt to charm it away by
conversation. He preserved a portentous and dreary silence. And I was
bored too. Suddenly I perceived the menace of even worse boredom. Yes!
He was so silent because he had something to tell me.
I became extremely frightened. But man, reckless animal, is so made
that in him curiosity, the paltriest curiosity, will overcome all
terrors, every disgust, and even despair itself. To my laconic
invitation to come in for a drink he answered by a deep, gravely
accented: “Thanks, I will” as though it were a response in church. His
face as seen in the lamplight gave me no clue to the character of the
impending communication; as indeed from the nature of things it couldn’t
do, its normal expression being already that of the utmost possible
seriousness. It was perfect and immovable; and for a certainty if he
had something excruciatingly funny to tell me it would be all the same.
He gazed at me earnestly and delivered himself of some weighty remarks
on Mrs Fyne’s desire to befriend, counsel, and guide young girls of all
sorts on the path of life. It was a voluntary mission. He approved his
wife’s action and also her views and principles in general.
All this with a solemn countenance and in deep measured tones. Yet
somehow I got an irresistible conviction that he was exasperated by
something in particular. In the unworthy hope of being amused by the
misfortunes of a fellow-creature I asked him point-blank what was wrong
now.
What was wrong was that a girl-friend was missing. She had been missing
precisely since six o’clock that morning. The woman who did the work of
the cottage saw her going out at that hour, for a walk. The pedestrian
Fyne’s ideas of a walk were extensive, but the girl did not turn up for
lunch, nor yet for tea, nor yet for dinner. She had not turned up by
footpath, road or rail. He had been reluctant to make inquiries. It
would have set all the village talking. The Fynes had expected her to
reappear every moment, till the shades of the night and the silence of
slumber had stolen gradually over the wide and peaceful rural landscape
commanded by the cottage.
After telling me that much Fyne sat helpless in unconclusive agony.
Going to bed was out of the question—neither could any steps be taken
just then. What to do with himself he did not know!
I asked him if this was the same young lady I saw a day or two before I
went to town? He really could not remember. Was she a girl with dark
hair and blue eyes? I asked further. He really couldn’t tell what
colour her eyes were. He was very unobservant except as to the
peculiarities of footpaths, on which he was an authority.
I thought with amazement and some admiration that Mrs Fyne’s young
disciples were to her husband’s gravity no more than evanescent shadows.
However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that—yes,
her hair was of some dark shade.
“We had a good deal to do with that girl first and last,” he explained
solemnly; then getting up as if moved by a spring he snatched his cap
off the table. “She may be back in the cottage,” he cried in his bass
voice. I followed him out on the road.
It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness,
of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid
revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies.
Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart;
and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran
back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit
before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient,
phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the
other hand there was something fascinating in the very absurdity. He
cut along in his best pedestrian style and I found myself let in for a
spell of severe exercise at eleven o’clock at night.
In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the
vast obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was
like a bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer. Inside, at
the table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs Fyne sitting with folded arms
and not a hair of her head out of place. She looked exactly like a
governess who had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just
the neutral manner of a governess. To her husband, too, for that
matter.
Fyne told her that I was fully informed. Not a muscle of her ruddy
smooth handsome face moved. She had schooled herself into that sort of
thing. Having seen two successive wives of the delicate poet chivied
and worried into their graves, she had adopted that cool, detached
manner to meet her gifted father’s outbreaks of selfish temper. It had
now become a second nature. I suppose she was always like that; even in
the very hour of elopement with Fyne. That transaction when one
remembered it in her presence acquired a quaintly marvellous aspect to
one’s imagination. But somehow her self-possession matched very well
little Fyne’s invariable solemnity.
I was rather sorry for him. Wasn’t he worried! The agony of solemnity.
At the same time I was amused. I didn’t take a gloomy view of that
“vanishing girl” trick. Somehow I couldn’t. But I said nothing. None
of us said anything. We sat about that big round table as if assembled
for a conference and looked at each other in a sort of fatuous
consternation. I would have ended by laughing outright if I had not
been saved from that impropriety by poor Fyne becoming preposterous.
He began with grave anguish to talk of going to the police in the
morning, of printing descriptive bills, of setting people to drag the
ponds for miles around. It was extremely gruesome. I murmured
something about communicating with the young lady’s relatives. It
seemed to me a very natural suggestion; but Fyne and his wife exchanged
such a significant glance that I felt as though I had made a tactless
remark.
But I really wanted to help poor Fyne; and as I could see that, manlike,
he suffered from the present inability to act, the passive waiting, I
said: “Nothing of this can be done till to-morrow. But as you have
given me an insight into the nature of your thoughts I can tell you what
may be done at once. We may go and look at the bottom of the old quarry
which is on the level of the road, about a mile from here.”
The couple made big eyes at this, and then I told them of my meeting
with the girl. You may be surprised but I assure you I had not
perceived this aspect of it till that very moment. It was like a
startling revelation; the past throwing a sinister light on the future.
Fyne opened his mouth gravely and as gravely shut it. Nothing more.
Mrs Fyne said, “You had better go,” with an air as if her
self-possession had been pricked with a pin in some secret place.
And I—you know how stupid I can be at times—I perceived with dismay
for the first time that by pandering to Fyne’s morbid fancies I had let
myself in for some more severe exercise. And wasn’t I sorry I spoke!
You know how I hate walking—at least on solid, rural earth; for I can
walk a ship’s deck a whole foggy night through, if necessary, and think
little of it. There is some satisfaction too in playing the vagabond in
the streets of a big town till the sky pales above the ridges of the
roofs. I have done that repeatedly for pleasure—of a sort. But to
tramp the slumbering country-side in the dark is for me a wearisome
nightmare of exertion.
With perfect detachment Mrs Fyne watched me go out after her husband.
That woman was flint.
————————————————————————————————————
“The fresh night had a smell of soil, of turned-up sods like a grave—an
association particularly odious to a sailor by its idea of confinement
and narrowness; yes, even when he has given up the hope of being buried
at sea; about the last hope a sailor gives up consciously after he has
been, as it does happen, decoyed by some chance into the toils of the
land. A strong grave-like sniff. The ditch by the side of the road
must have been freshly dug in front of the cottage. Once clear of the
garden Fyne gathered way like a racing cutter. What was a mile to him—
or twenty miles? You think he might have gone shrinkingly on such an
errand. But not a bit of it. The force of pedestrian genius I suppose.
I raced by his side in a mood of profound self-derision, and infinitely
vexed with that minx. Because dead or alive I thought of her as a
minx....”
I smiled incredulously at Marlow’s ferocity; but Marlow pausing with a
whimsically retrospective air, never flinched.
“Yes, yes. Even dead. And now you are shocked. You see, you are such
a chivalrous masculine beggar. But there is enough of the woman in my
nature to free my judgment of women from glamorous reticency. And then,
why should I upset myself? A woman is not necessarily either a doll or
an angel to me. She is a human being, very much like myself. And I
have come across too many dead souls lying so to speak at the foot of
high unscaleable places for a merely possible dead body at the bottom of
a quarry to strike my sincerity dumb.”
The cliff-like face of the quarry looked forbiddingly impressive. I
will admit that Fyne and I hung back for a moment before we made a
plunge off the road into the bushes growing in a broad space at the foot
of the towering limestone wall. These bushes were heavy with dew.
There were also concealed mudholes in there. We crept and tumbled and
felt about with our hands along the ground. We got wet, scratched, and
plastered with mire all over our nether garments. Fyne fell suddenly
into a strange cavity—probably a disused lime-kiln. His voice uplifted
in grave distress sounded more than usually rich, solemn and profound.
This was the comic relief of an absurdly dramatic situation. While
hauling him out I permitted myself to laugh aloud at last. Fyne, of
course, didn’t.
I need not tell you that we found nothing after a most conscientious
search. Fyne even pushed his way into a decaying shed half-buried in
dew-soaked vegetation. He struck matches, several of them too, as if to
make absolutely sure that the vanished girl-friend of his wife was not
hiding there. The short flares illuminated his grave, immovable
countenance while I let myself go completely and laughed in peals.
I asked him if he really and truly supposed that any sane girl would go
and hide in that shed; and if so why?
Disdainful of my mirth he merely muttered his basso-profundo
thankfulness that we had not found her anywhere about there. Having
grown extremely sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I
may say, of this affair, I felt that it was only an imperfect, reserved,
thankfulness, with one eye still on the possibilities of the several
ponds in the neighbourhood. And I remember I snorted, I positively
snorted, at that poor Fyne.
What really jarred upon me was the rate of his walking. Differences in
politics, in ethics and even in aesthetics need not arouse angry
antagonism. One’s opinion may change; one’s tastes may alter—in fact
they do. One’s very conception of virtue is at the mercy of some
felicitous temptation which may be sprung on one any day. All these
things are perpetually on the swing. But a temperamental difference,
temperament being immutable, is the parent of hate. That’s why
religious quarrels are the fiercest of all. My temperament, in matters
pertaining to solid land, is the temperament of leisurely movement, of
deliberate gait. And there was that little Fyne pounding along the road
in a most offensive manner; a man wedded to thick-soled, laced boots;
whereas my temperament demands thin shoes of the lightest kind. Of
course there could never have been question of friendship between us;
but under the provocation of having to keep up with his pace I began to
dislike him actively. I begged sarcastically to know whether he could
tell me if we were engaged in a farce or in a tragedy. I wanted to
regulate my feelings which, I told him, were in an unbecoming state of
confusion.
But Fyne was as impervious to sarcasm as a turtle. He tramped on, and
all he did was to ejaculate twice out of his deep chest, vaguely,
doubtfully.
“I am afraid.—I am afraid....”
This was tragic. The thump of his boots was the only sound in a shadowy
world. I kept by his side with a comparatively ghostly, silent tread.
By a strange illusion the road appeared to run up against a lot of low
stars at no very great distance, but as we advanced new stretches of
whitey-brown ribbon seemed to come up from under the black ground. I
observed, as we went by, the lamp in my parlour in the farmhouse still
burning. But I did not leave Fyne to run in and put it out. The
impetus of his pedestrian excellence carried me past in his wake before
I could make up my mind.
“Tell me, Fyne,” I cried, “you don’t think the girl was mad—do you?”
He answered nothing. Soon the lighted beacon-like window of the cottage
came into view. Then Fyne uttered a solemn: “Certainly not,” with
profound assurance. But immediately after he added a “Very highly
strung young person indeed,” which unsettled me again. Was it a
tragedy?
“Nobody ever got up at six o’clock in the morning to commit suicide,” I
declared crustily. “It’s unheard of! This is a farce.”
As a matter of fact it was neither farce nor tragedy.
Coming up to the cottage we had a view of Mrs Fyne inside still sitting
in the strong light at the round table with folded arms. It looked as
though she had not moved her very head by as much as an inch since we
went away. She was amazing in a sort of unsubtle way; crudely amazing—
I thought. Why crudely? I don’t know. Perhaps because I saw her then
in a crude light. I mean this materially—in the light of an unshaded
lamp. Our mental conclusions depend so much on momentary physical
sensations—don’t they? If the lamp had been shaded I should perhaps
have gone home after expressing politely my concern at the Fynes’
unpleasant predicament.
Losing a girl-friend in that manner is unpleasant. It is also
mysterious. So mysterious that a certain mystery attaches to the people
to whom such a thing does happen. Moreover I had never really
understood the Fynes; he with his solemnity which extended to the very
eating of bread and butter; she with that air of detachment and
resolution in breasting the commonplace current of their unexciting
life, in which the cutting of bread and butter appeared to me, by a long
way, the most dangerous episode. Sometimes I amused myself by supposing
that to their minds this world of ours must be wearing a perfectly
overwhelming aspect, and that their heads contained respectively awfully
serious and extremely desperate thoughts—and trying to imagine what an
exciting time they must be having of it in the inscrutable depths of
their being. This last was difficult to a volatile person (I am sure
that to the Fynes I was a volatile person) and the amusement in itself
was not very great; but still—in the country—away from all mental
stimulants!... My efforts had invested them with a sort of amusing
profundity.
But when Fyne and I got back into the room, then in the searching,
domestic, glare of the lamp, inimical to the play of fancy, I saw these
two stripped of every vesture it had amused me to put on them for fun.
Queer enough they were. Is there a human being that isn’t that—more or
less secretly? But whatever their secret, it was manifest to me that it
was neither subtle nor profound. They were a good, stupid, earnest
couple and very much bothered. They were that—with the usual unshaded
crudity of average people. There was nothing in them that the lamplight
might not touch without the slightest risk of indiscretion.
Directly we had entered the room Fyne announced the result by saying
“Nothing” in the same tone as at the gate on his return from the railway
station. And as then Mrs Fyne uttered an incisive “It’s what I’ve
said,” which might have been the veriest echo of her words in the
garden. We three looked at each other as if on the brink of a
disclosure. I don’t know whether she was vexed at my presence. It
could hardly be called intrusion—could it? Little Fyne began it. It
had to go on. We stood before her, plastered with the same mud (Fyne
was a sight!), scratched by the same brambles, conscious of the same
experience. Yes. Before her. And she looked at us with folded arms,
with an extraordinary fulness of assumed responsibility. I addressed
her.
“You don’t believe in an accident, Mrs Fyne, do you?”
She shook her head in curt negation while, caked in mud and
inexpressibly serious-faced, Fyne seemed to be backing her up with all
the weight of his solemn presence. Nothing more absurd could be
conceived. It was delicious. And I went on in deferential accents: “Am
I to understand then that you entertain the theory of suicide?”
I don’t know that I am liable to fits of delirium but by a sudden and
alarming aberration while waiting for her answer I became mentally aware
of three trained dogs dancing on their hind legs. I don’t know why.
Perhaps because of the pervading solemnity. There’s nothing more solemn
on earth than a dance of trained dogs.
“She has chosen to disappear. That’s all.”
In these words Mrs Fyne answered me. The aggressive tone was too much
for my endurance. In an instant I found myself out of the dance and
down on all-fours so to speak, with liberty to bark and bite.
“The devil she has,” I cried. “Has chosen to.... Like this, all at
once, anyhow, regardless.... I’ve had the privilege of meeting that
reckless and brusque young lady and I must say that with her air of an
angry victim....”
“Precisely,” Mrs Fyne said very unexpectedly like a steel trap going
off. I stared at her. How provoking she was! So I went on to finish
my tirade. “She struck me at first sight as the most inconsiderate
wrongheaded girl that I ever....”
“Why should a girl be more considerate than anyone else? More than any
man, for instance?” inquired Mrs Fyne with a still greater assertion of
responsibility in her bearing.
Of course I exclaimed at this, not very loudly it is true, but forcibly.
Were then the feelings of friends, relations and even of strangers to
be disregarded? I asked Mrs Fyne if she did not think it was a sort of
duty to show elementary consideration not only for the natural feelings
but even for the prejudices of one’s fellow-creatures.
Her answer knocked me over.
“Not for a woman.”
Just like that. I confess that I went down flat. And while in that
collapsed state I learned the true nature of Mrs Fyne’s feminist
doctrine. It was not political, it was not social. It was a
knock-me-down doctrine—a practical individualistic doctrine. You would
not thank me for expounding it to you at large. Indeed I think that she
herself did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things not fit
for a man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed
me to grasp its naïve atrociousness, it was something like this: that no
consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in
the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined
victim of conditions created by men’s selfish passions, their vices and
their abominable tyranny) from taking the shortest cut towards securing
for herself the easiest possible existence. She had even the right to
go out of existence without considering anyone’s feelings or convenience
since some women’s existences were made impossible by the shortsighted
baseness of men.
I looked at her, sitting before the lamp at one o’clock in the morning,
with her mature, smooth-cheeked face of masculine shape robbed of its
freshness by fatigue; at her eyes dimmed by this senseless vigil. I
looked also at Fyne; the mud was drying on him; he was obviously tired.
The weariness of solemnity. But he preserved an unflinching, endorsing,
gravity of expression. Endorsing it all as became a good, convinced
husband.
“Oh! I see,” I said. “No consideration.—Well I hope you like it.”
They amused me beyond the wildest imaginings of which I was capable.
After the first shock, you understand, I recovered very quickly. The
order of the world was safe enough. He was a civil servant and she his
good and faithful wife. But when it comes to dealing with human beings
anything, anything may be expected. So even my astonishment did not
last very long. How far she developed and illustrated that
conscienceless and austere doctrine to the girl-friends, who were mere
transient shadows to her husband, I could not tell. Any length I
supposed. And he looked on, acquiesced, approved, just for that very
reason—because these pretty girls were but shadows to him. O! Most
virtuous Fyne! He cast his eyes down. He didn’t like it. But I eyed
him with hidden animosity for he had got me to run after him under
somewhat false pretences.
Mrs Fyne had only smiled at me very expressively, very
self-confidently. “Oh I quite understand that you accept the fullest
responsibility,” I said. “I am the only ridiculous person in this—
this—I don’t know how to call it—performance. However, I’ve nothing
more to do here, so I’ll say good-night—or good morning, for it must be
past one.”
“But before departing, in common decency, I offered to take any wires
they might write. My lodgings were nearer the post-office than the
cottage and I would send them off the first thing in the morning. I
supposed they would wish to communicate, if only as to the disposal of
the luggage, with the young lady’s relatives....”
Fyne, he looked rather downcast by then, thanked me and declined.
“There is really no one,” he said, very grave.
“No one,” I exclaimed.
“Practically,” said curt Mrs Fyne.
And my curiosity was aroused again.
“Ah! I see. An orphan.”
Mrs Fyne looked away weary and sombre, and Fyne said “Yes,” impulsively
and then qualified the affirmative by the quaint statement: “To a
certain extent.”
I became conscious of a languid, exhausted embarrassment, bowed to Mrs
Fyne, and went out of the cottage to be confronted outside its door by
the bespangled, cruel revelation of the Immensity of the Universe. The
night was not sufficiently advanced for the stars to have paled; and the
earth seemed to me more profoundly asleep—perhaps because I was alone
now. Not having Fyne with me to set the pace I let myself drift, rather
than walk, in the direction of the farmhouse. To drift is the only
reposeful sort of motion (ask any ship if it isn’t) and therefore
consistent with thoughtfulness. And I pondered: How is one an orphan
“to a certain extent”?
No amount of solemnity could make such a statement other than bizarre.
What a strange condition to be in. Very likely one of the parents only
was dead? But no; it couldn’t be, since Fyne had said just before that
“there was really no one” to communicate with. No one! And then
remembering Mrs Fyne’s snappy “Practically” my thoughts fastened upon
that lady as a more tangible object of speculation.
I wondered—and wondering I doubted—whether she really understood
herself the theory she had propounded to me. Everything may be said—
indeed ought to be said—providing we know how to say it. She probably
did not. She was not intelligent enough for that. She had no knowledge
of the world. She had got hold of words as a child might get hold of
some poisonous pills and play with them for “dear, tiny little marbles.”
No! The domestic-slave daughter of Carleon Anthony and the little Fyne
of the Civil Service (that flower of civilisation) were not intelligent
people. They were commonplace, earnest, without smiles and without
guile. But he had his solemnities and she had her reveries, her lurid,
violent, crude reveries. And I thought with some sadness that all these
revolts and indignations, all these protests, revulsions of feeling,
pangs of suffering and of rage, expressed but the uneasiness of sensual
beings trying for their share in the joys of form, colour, sensations—
the only riches of our world of senses. A poet may be a simple being
but he is bound to be various and full of wiles, ingenious and
irritable. I reflected on the variety of ways the ingenuity of the late
bard of civilisation would be able to invent for the tormenting of his
dependants. Poets not being generally foresighted in practical affairs,
no vision of consequences would restrain him. Yes. The Fynes were
excellent people, but Mrs Fyne wasn’t the daughter of a domestic tyrant
for nothing. There were no limits to her revolt. But they were
excellent people. It was clear that they must have been extremely good
to that girl whose position in the world seemed somewhat difficult, with
her face of a victim, her obvious lack of resignation and the bizarre
status of orphan “to a certain extent.”
Such were my thoughts, but in truth I soon ceased to trouble about all
these people. I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind an awful
smell. I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the dark. My
slumbers—I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise, confound it, is
that it helps our natural callousness—my slumbers were deep, dreamless
and refreshing.
My appetite at breakfast was not affected by my ignorance of the facts,
motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything
is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the
impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs
Fyne’s individualist woman-doctrine, naïvely unscrupulous, flitted
through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these
girl-friends’ heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent
mother (of the strict governess type), she was as guileless of
consequences as any determinist philosopher ever was.
“As to honour—you know—it’s a very fine medieval inheritance which
women never got hold of. It wasn’t theirs. Since it may be laid as a
general principle that women always get what they want we must suppose
they didn’t want it. In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean
masculine decency. Cautiousness too is foreign to them—the heavy
reasonable cautiousness which is our glory. And if they had it they
would make of it a thing of passion, so that its own mother—I mean the
mother of cautiousness—wouldn’t recognise it. Prudence with them is a
matter of thrill like the rest of sublunary contrivances. ‘Sensation at
any cost,’ is their secret device. All the virtues are not enough for
them; they want also all the crimes for their own. And why? Because in
such completeness there is power—the kind of thrill they love most....”
“Do you expect me to agree to all this?” I interrupted.
“No, it isn’t necessary,” said Marlow, feeling the check to his
eloquence but with a great effort at amiability. “You need not even
understand it. I continue: with such disposition what prevents women—
to use the phrase an old boatswain of my acquaintance applied
descriptively to his captain—what prevents them from ‘coming on deck
and playing hell with the ship’ generally, is that something in them
precise and mysterious, acting both as restraint and as inspiration;
their femininity in short which they think they can get rid of by trying
hard, but can’t, and never will. Therefore we may conclude that, for
all their enterprises, the world is and remains safe enough. Feeling,
in my character of a lover of peace, soothed by that conclusion I
prepared myself to enjoy a fine day.”
And it was a fine day; a delicious day, with the horror of the Infinite
veiled by the splendid tent of blue; a day innocently bright like a
child with a washed face, fresh like an innocent young girl, suave in
welcoming one’s respects like—like a Roman prelate. I love such days.
They are perfection for remaining indoors. And I enjoyed it
temperamentally in a chair, my feet up on the sill of the open window, a
book in my hands and the murmured harmonies of wind and sun in my heart
making an accompaniment to the rhythms of my author. Then looking up
from the page I saw outside a pair of grey eyes thatched by ragged
yellowy-white eyebrows gazing at me solemnly over the toes of my
slippers. There was a grave, furrowed brow surmounting that portentous
gaze, a brown tweed cap set far back on the perspiring head.
“Come inside,” I cried as heartily as my sinking heart would permit.
After a short but severe scuffle with his dog at the outer door, Fyne
entered. I treated him without ceremony and only waved my hand towards
a chair. Even before he sat down he gasped out:
“We’ve heard—midday post.”
Gasped out! The grave, immovable Fyne of the Civil Service, gasped!
This was enough, you’ll admit, to cause me to put my feet to the ground
swiftly. That fellow was always making me do things in subtle discord
with my meditative temperament. No wonder that I had but a qualified
liking for him. I said with just a suspicion of jeering tone:
“Of course. I told you last night on the road that it was a farce we
were engaged in.”
He made the little parlour resound to its foundations with a note of
anger positively sepulchral in its depth of tone. “Farce be hanged!
She has bolted with my wife’s brother, Captain Anthony.” This outburst
was followed by complete subsidence. He faltered miserably as he added
from force of habit: “The son of the poet, you know.”
A silence fell. Fyne’s several expressions were so many examples of
varied consistency. This was the discomfiture of solemnity. My
interest of course was revived.
“But hold on,” I said. “They didn’t go together. Is it a suspicion or
does she actually say that....”
“She has gone after him,” stated Fyne in comminatory tones. “By
previous arrangement. She confesses that much.”
He added that it was very shocking. I asked him whether he should have
preferred them going off together; and on what ground he based that
preference. This was sheer fun for me in regard of the fact that Fyne’s
too was a runaway match, which even got into the papers in its time,
because the late indignant poet had no discretion and sought to avenge
this outrage publicly in some absurd way before a bewigged judge. The
dejected gesture of little Fyne’s hand disarmed my mocking mood. But I
could not help expressing my surprise that Mrs Fyne had not detected at
once what was brewing. Women were supposed to have an unerring eye.
He told me that his wife had been very much engaged in a certain work.
I had always wondered how she occupied her time. It was in writing.
Like her husband she too published a little book. Much later on I came
upon it. It had nothing to do with pedestrianism. It was a sort of
hand-book for women with grievances (and all women had them), a sort of
compendious theory and practice of feminine free morality. It made you
laugh at its transparent simplicity. But that authorship was revealed
to me much later. I didn’t of course ask Fyne what work his wife was
engaged on; but I marvelled to myself at her complete ignorance of the
world, of her own sex and of the other kind of sinners. Yet, where
could she have got any experience? Her father had kept her strictly
cloistered. Marriage with Fyne was certainly a change but only to
another kind of claustration. You may tell me that the ordinary powers
of observation ought to have been enough. Why, yes! But, then, as she
had set up for a guide and teacher, there was nothing surprising for me
in the discovery that she was blind. That’s quite in order. She was a
profoundly innocent person; only it would not have been proper to tell
her husband so.