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