“And then the marriage in most cases turns out no worse than the
average, to say the least of it.”
Mrs Fyne was disappointed by the optimistic turn of my sagacity. She
rested her eyes on my face as though in doubt whether I had enough
femininity in my composition to understand the case.
I waited for her to speak. She seemed to be asking herself; Is it after
all, worth while to talk to that man? You understand how provoking this
was. I looked in my mind for something appallingly stupid to say, with
the object of distressing and teasing Mrs Fyne. It is humiliating to
confess a failure. One would think that a man of average intelligence
could command stupidity at will. But it isn’t so. I suppose it’s a
special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant.
Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to
the next best thing; a platitude. I advanced, in a common sense tone,
that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had only himself to
please.
Mrs Fyne received this without the flutter of an eyelid. Fyne’s
masculine breast, as might have been expected, was pierced by that old,
regulation shaft. He grunted most feelingly. I turned to him with
false simplicity. “Don’t you agree with me?”
“The very thing I’ve been telling my wife,” he exclaimed in his
extra-manly bass. “We have been discussing—”
A discussion in the Fyne menage! How portentous! Perhaps the very
first difference they had ever had: Mrs Fyne unflinching and ready for
any responsibility, Fyne solemn and shrinking—the children in bed
upstairs; and outside the dark fields, the shadowy contours of the land
on the starry background of the universe, with the crude light of the
open window like a beacon for the truant who would never come back now;
a truant no longer but a downright fugitive. Yet a fugitive carrying
off spoils. It was the flight of a raider—or a tractor? This affair
of the purloined brother, as I had named it to myself, had a very
puzzling physiognomy. The girl must have been desperate, I thought,
hearing the grave voice of Fyne well enough but catching the sense of
his words not at all, except the very last words which were:
“Of course, it’s extremely distressing.”
I looked at him inquisitively. What was distressing him? The
purloining of the son of the poet-tyrant by the daughter of the
financier-convict. Or only, if I may say so, the wind of their flight
disturbing the solemn placidity of the Fynes’ domestic atmosphere. My
incertitude did not last long, for he added:
“Mrs Fyne urges me to go to London at once.”
One could guess at, almost see, his profound distaste for the journey,
his distress at a difference of feeling with his wife. With his serious
view of the sublunary comedy Fyne suffered from not being able to agree
solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed to do, in recognition
of having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made her elope
with him—the most momentous step imaginable in a young lady’s life. He
had been really trying to acknowledge it by taking the rightness of her
feeling for granted on every other occasion. It had become a sort of
habit at last. And it is never pleasant to break a habit. The man was
deeply troubled. I said: “Really! To go to London!”
He looked dumbly into my eyes. It was pathetic and funny. “And you of
course feel it would be useless,” I pursued.
He evidently felt that, though he said nothing. He only went on
blinking at me with a solemn and comical slowness. “Unless it be to
carry there the family’s blessing,” I went on, indulging my chaffing
humour steadily, in a rather sneaking fashion, for I dared not look at
Mrs Fyne, to my right. No sound or movement came from, that direction.
“You think very naturally that to match mere good, sound reasons,
against the passionate conclusions of love is a waste of intellect
bordering on the absurd.”
He looked surprised as if I had discovered something very clever. He,
dear man, had thought of nothing at all. He simply knew that he did not
want to go to London on that mission. Mere masculine delicacy. In a
moment he became enthusiastic.
“Yes! Yes! Exactly. A man in love.... You hear, my dear? Here you
have an independent opinion—”
“Can anything be more hopeless,” I insisted to the fascinated little
Fyne, “than to pit reason against love. I must confess however that in
this case when I think of that poor girl’s sharp chin I wonder if....”
My levity was too much for Mrs Fyne. Still leaning back in her chair
she exclaimed:
“Mr Marlow!”
“As if mysteriously affected by her indignation the absurd Fyne dog
began to bark in the porch. It might have been at a trespassing
bumble-bee however. That animal was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne
got up quickly and went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us
alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of
anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, had confidence in my
sagacity. It was touching, this confidence. It was at any rate more
genuine than the confidence his wife pretended to have in her husband’s
chess-player, of three successive holidays. Confidence be hanged!
Sagacity—indeed! She had simply marched in without a shadow of
misgiving to make me back her up. But she had delivered herself into my
hands....”
Interrupting his narrative Marlow addressed me in his tone between grim
jest and grim earnest:
“Perhaps you didn’t know that my character is upon the whole rather
vindictive.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said with a grin. “That’s rather unusual for a
sailor. They always seemed to me the least vindictive body of men in
the world.”
“H’m! Simple souls,” Marlow muttered moodily. “Want of opportunity.
The world leaves them alone for the most part. For myself it’s towards
women that I feel vindictive mostly, in my small way. I admit that it
is small. But then the occasions in themselves are not great. Mainly.
I resent that pretence of winding us round their dear little fingers, as
of right. Not that the result ever amounts to much generally. There
are so very few momentous opportunities. It is the assumption that each
of us is a combination of a kid and an imbecile which I find provoking—
in a small way; in a very small way. You needn’t stare as though I were
breathing fire and smoke out of my nostrils. I am not a women-devouring
monster. I am not even what is technically called ‘a brute.’ I hope
there’s enough of a kid and an imbecile in me to answer the requirements
of some really good woman eventually—some day.... Some day. Why do you
gasp? You don’t suppose I should be afraid of getting married? That
supposition would be offensive....”
“I wouldn’t dream of offending you,” I said.
“Very well. But meantime please remember that I was not married to Mrs
Fyne. That lady’s little finger was none of my legal property. I had
not run off with it. It was Fyne who had done that thing. Let him be
wound round as much as his backbone could stand—or even more, for all I
cared. His rushing away from the discussion on the transparent pretence
of quieting the dog confirmed my notion of there being a considerable
strain on his elasticity. I confronted Mrs Fyne resolved not to assist
her in her eminently feminine occupation of thrusting a stick in the
spokes of another woman’s wheel.
“She tried to preserve her calm-eyed superiority. She was familiar and
olympian, fenced in by the tea-table, that excellent symbol of domestic
life in its lighter hour and its perfect security. In a few severely
unadorned words she gave me to understand that she had ventured to hope
for some really helpful suggestion from me. To this almost chiding
declaration—because my vindictiveness seldom goes further than a bit of
teasing—I said that I was really doing my best. And being a
physiognomist....”
“Being what?” she interrupted me.
“A physiognomist,” I repeated raising my voice a little. “A
physiognomist, Mrs Fyne. And on the principles of that science a
pointed little chin is a sufficient ground for interference. You want
to interfere—do you not?”
Her eyes grew distinctly bigger. She had never been bantered before in
her life. The late subtle poet’s method of making himself unpleasant
was merely savage and abusive. Fyne had been always solemnly
subservient. What other men she knew I cannot tell but I assume they
must have been gentlemanly creatures. The girl-friends sat at her feet.
How could she recognise my intention. She didn’t know what to make of
my tone.
“Are you serious in what you say?” she asked slowly. And it was
touching. It was as if a very young, confiding girl had spoken. I felt
myself relenting.
“No. I am not, Mrs Fyne,” I said. “I didn’t know I was expected to be
serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and
therefore I am not serious. It’s true that most sciences are farcical
except those which teach us how to put things together.”
“The question is how to keep these two people apart,” she struck in.
She had recovered. I admired the quickness of women’s wit. Mental
agility is a rare perfection. And aren’t they agile! Aren’t they—
just! And tenacious! When they once get hold you may uproot the tree
but you won’t shake them off the branch. In fact the more you shake....
But only look at the charm of contradictory perfections! No wonder men
give in—generally. I won’t say I was actually charmed by Mrs Fyne. I
was not delighted with her. What affected me was not what she displayed
but something which she could not conceal. And that was emotion—
nothing less. The form of her declaration was dry, almost peremptory—
but not its ton. Her voice faltered just the least bit, she smiled
faintly; and as we were looking straight at each other I observed that
her eyes were glistening in a peculiar manner. She was distressed.
And indeed that Mrs Fyne should have appealed to me at all was in
itself the evidence of her profound distress. “By Jove she’s desperate
too,” I thought. This discovery was followed by a movement of
instinctive shrinking from this unreasonable and unmasculine affair.
They were all alike, with their supreme interest aroused only by
fighting with each other about some man: a lover, a son, a brother.
“But do you think there’s time yet to do anything?” I asked.
She had an impatient movement of her shoulders without detaching herself
from the back of the chair. Time! Of course? It was less than
forty-eight hours since she had followed him to London.—I am no great
clerk at those matters but I murmured vaguely an allusion to special
licences. We couldn’t tell what might have happened to-day already.
But she knew better, scornfully. Nothing had happened.
“Nothing’s likely to happen before next Friday week,—if then.”
This was wonderfully precise. Then after a pause she added that she
should never forgive herself if some effort were not made, an appeal.
“To your brother?” I asked.
“Yes. John ought to go to-morrow. Nine o’clock train.”
“So early as that!” I said. But I could not find it in my heart to
pursue this discussion in a jocular tone. I submitted to her several
obvious arguments, dictated apparently by common sense but in reality by
my secret compassion. Mrs Fyne brushed them aside, with the
semi-conscious egoism of all safe, established, existences. They had
known each other so little. Just three weeks. And of that time, too
short for the birth of any serious sentiment, the first week had to be
deducted. They would hardly look at each other to begin with. Flora
barely consented to acknowledge Captain Anthony’s presence. Good
morning—good-night—that was all—absolutely the whole extent of their
intercourse. Captain Anthony was a silent man, completely unused to the
society of girls of any sort and so shy in fact that he avoided raising
his eyes to her face at the table. It was perfectly absurd. It was
even inconvenient, embarrassing to her—Mrs Fyne. After breakfast
Flora would go off by herself for a long walk and Captain Anthony (Mrs
Fyne referred to him at times also as Roderick) joined the children.
But he was actually too shy to get on terms with his own nieces.
This would have sounded pathetic if I hadn’t known the Fyne children who
were at the same time solemn and malicious, and nursed a secret contempt
for all the world. No one could get on terms with those fresh and
comely young monsters! They just tolerated their parents and seemed to
have a sort of mocking understanding among themselves against all
outsiders, yet with no visible affection for each other. They had the
habit of exchanging derisive glances which to a shy man must have been
very trying. They thought their uncle no doubt a bore and perhaps an
ass.
I was not surprised to hear that very soon Anthony formed the habit of
crossing the two neighbouring fields to seek the shade of a clump of
elms at a good distance from the cottage. He lay on the grass and
smoked his pipe all the morning. Mrs Fyne wondered at her brother’s
indolent habits. He had asked for books it is true but there were but
few in the cottage. He read them through in three days and then
continued to lie contentedly on his back with no other companion but his
pipe. Amazing indolence! The live-long morning, Mrs Fyne, busy
writing upstairs in the cottage, could see him out of the window. She
had a very long sight, and these elms were grouped on a rise of the
ground. His indolence was plainly exposed to her criticism on a gentle
green slope. Mrs Fyne wondered at it; she was disgusted too. But
having just then ‘commenced author,’ as you know, she could not tear
herself away from the fascinating novelty. She let him wallow in his
vice. I imagine Captain Anthony must have had a rather pleasant time in
a quiet way. It was, I remember, a hot dry summer, favourable to
contemplative life out of doors. And Mrs Fyne was scandalised. Women
don’t understand the force of a contemplative temperament. It simply
shocks them. They feel instinctively that it is the one which escapes
best the domination of feminine influences. The dear girls were
exchanging jeering remarks about “lazy uncle Roderick” openly, in her
indulgent hearing. And it was so strange, she told me, because as a boy
he was anything but indolent. On the contrary. Always active.
I remarked that a man of thirty-five was no longer a boy. It was an
obvious remark but she received it without favour. She told me
positively that the best, the nicest men remained boys all their lives.
She was disappointed not to be able to detect anything boyish in her
brother. Very, very sorry. She had not seen him for fifteen years or
thereabouts, except on three or four occasions for a few hours at a
time. No. Not a trace of the boy, he used to be, left in him.
She fell silent for a moment and I mused idly on the boyhood of little
Fyne. I could not imagine what it might have been like. His dominant
trait was clearly the remnant of still earlier days, because I’ve never
seen such staring solemnity as Fyne’s except in a very young baby. But
where was he all that time? Didn’t he suffer contamination from the
indolence of Captain Anthony, I inquired. I was told that Mr Fyne was
very little at the cottage at the time. Some colleague of his was
convalescing after a severe illness in a little seaside village in the
neighbourhood and Fyne went off every morning by train to spend the day
with the elderly invalid who had no one to look after him. It was a
very praiseworthy excuse for neglecting his brother-in-law “the son of
the poet, you know,” with whom he had nothing in common even in the
remotest degree. If Captain Anthony (Roderick) had been a pedestrian it
would have been sufficient; but he was not. Still, in the afternoon, he
went sometimes for a slow casual stroll, by himself of course, the
children having definitely cold-shouldered him, and his only sister
being busy with that inflammatory book which was to blaze upon the world
a year or more afterwards. It seems however that she was capable of
detaching her eyes from her task now and then, if only for a moment,
because it was from that garret fitted out for a study that one
afternoon she observed her brother and Flora de Barral coming down the
road side by side. They had met somewhere accidentally (which of them
crossed the other’s path, as the saying is, I don’t know), and were
returning to tea together. She noticed that they appeared to be
conversing without constraint.
“I had the simplicity to be pleased,” Mrs Fyne commented with a dry
little laugh. “Pleased for both their sakes.” Captain Anthony shook
off his indolence from that day forth, and accompanied Miss Flora
frequently on her morning walks. Mrs Fyne remained pleased. She could
now forget them comfortably and give herself up to the delights of
audacious thought and literary composition. Only a week before the blow
fell, she, happening to raise her eyes from the paper, saw two figures
seated on the grass under the shade of the elms. She could make out the
white blouse. There could be no mistake.
“I suppose they imagined themselves concealed by the hedge. They forgot
no doubt I was working in the garret,” she said bitterly. “Or perhaps
they didn’t care. They were right. I am rather a simple person....”
She laughed again.... “I was incapable of suspecting such duplicity.”
“Duplicity is a strong word, Mrs Fyne—isn’t it?” I expostulated.
“And considering that Captain Anthony himself....”
“Oh well—perhaps,” she interrupted me. Her eyes which never strayed
away from mine, her set features, her whole immovable figure, how well I
knew those appearances of a person who has “made up her mind.” A very
hopeless condition that, specially in women. I mistrusted her
concession so easily, so stonily made. She reflected a moment. “Yes.
I ought to have said—ingratitude, perhaps.”
After having thus disengaged her brother and pushed the poor girl a
little further off as it were—isn’t women’s cleverness perfectly
diabolic when they are really put on their mettle?—after having done
these things and also made me feel that I was no match for her, she went
on scrupulously: “One doesn’t like to use that word either. The claim
is very small. It’s so little one could do for her. Still....”
“I dare say,” I exclaimed, throwing diplomacy to the winds. “But
really, Mrs Fyne, it’s impossible to dismiss your brother like this out
of the business....”
“She threw herself at his head,” Mrs Fyne uttered firmly.
“He had no business to put his head in the way, then,” I retorted with
an angry laugh. I didn’t restrain myself because her fixed stare seemed
to express the purpose to daunt me. I was not afraid of her, but it
occurred to me that I was within an ace of drifting into a downright
quarrel with a lady and, besides, my guest. There was the cold teapot,
the emptied cups, emblems of hospitality. It could not be. I cut short
my angry laugh while Mrs Fyne murmured with a slight movement of her
shoulders, “He! Poor man! Oh come....”
By a great effort of will I found myself able to smile amiably, to speak
with proper softness.
“My dear Mrs Fyne, you forget that I don’t know him—not even by sight.
It’s difficult to imagine a victim as passive as all that; but granting
you the (I very nearly said: imbecility, but checked myself in time)
innocence of Captain Anthony, don’t you think now, frankly, that there
is a little of your own fault in what has happened. ‘You bring them
together, you leave your brother to himself!’
“She sat up and leaning her elbow on the table sustained her head in her
open palm casting down her eyes. Compunction? It was indeed a very
off-hand way of treating a brother come to stay for the first time in
fifteen years. I suppose she discovered very soon that she had nothing
in common with that sailor, that stranger, fashioned and marked by the
sea of long voyages. In her strong-minded way she had scorned
pretences, had gone to her writing which interested her immensely. A
very praiseworthy thing your sincere conduct,—if it didn’t at times
resemble brutality so much. But I don’t think it was compunction. That
sentiment is rare in women....”
“Is it?” I interrupted indignantly.
“You know more women than I do,” retorted the unabashed Marlow. “You
make it your business to know them—don’t you? You go about a lot
amongst all sorts of people. You are a tolerably honest observer.
Well, just try to remember how many instances of compunction you have
seen. I am ready to take your bare word for it. Compunction! Have you
ever seen as much as its shadow? Have you ever? Just a shadow—a
passing shadow! I tell you it is so rare that you may call it
non-existent. They are too passionate. Too pedantic. Too courageous
with themselves—perhaps. No I don’t think for a moment that Mrs Fyne
felt the slightest compunction at her treatment of her sea-going
brother. What _he_ thought of it who can tell? It is possible that he
wondered why he had been so insistently urged to come. It is possible
that he wondered bitterly—or contemptuously—or humbly. And it may be
that he was only surprised and bored. Had he been as sincere in his
conduct as his only sister he would have probably taken himself off at
the end of the second day. But perhaps he was afraid of appearing
brutal. I am not far removed from the conviction that between the
sincerities of his sister and of his dear nieces, Captain Anthony of the
_Ferndale_ must have had his loneliness brought home to his bosom for
the first time of his life, at an age, thirty-five or thereabouts, when
one is mature enough to feel the pang of such a discovery. Angry or
simply sad but certainly disillusioned he wanders about and meets the
girl one afternoon and under the sway of a strong feeling forgets his
shyness. This is no supposition. It is a fact. There was such a
meeting in which the shyness must have perished before we don’t know
what encouragement, or in the community of mood made apparent by some
casual word. You remember that Mrs Fyne saw them one afternoon coming
back to the cottage together. Don’t you think that I have hit on the
psychology of the situation?...”
“Doubtless....” I began to ponder.
“I was very certain of my conclusions at the time,” Marlow went on
impatiently. “But don’t think for a moment that Mrs Fyne in her new
attitude and toying thoughtfully with a teaspoon was about to surrender.
She murmured:—
“It’s the last thing I should have thought could happen.”
“You didn’t suppose they were romantic enough,” I suggested dryly.
She let it pass and with great decision but as if speaking to herself,
“Roderick really must be warned.”
She didn’t give me the time to ask of what precisely. She raised her
head and addressed me.
“I am surprised and grieved more than I can tell you at Mr Fyne’s
resistance. We have been always completely at one on every question.
And that we should differ now on a point touching my brother so closely
is a most painful surprise to me.” Her hand rattled the teaspoon
brusquely by an involuntary movement. “It is intolerable,” she added
tempestuously—for Mrs Fyne that is. I suppose she had nerves of her
own like any other woman.
Under the porch where Fyne had sought refuge with the dog there was
silence. I took it for a proof of deep sagacity. I don’t mean on the
part of the dog. He was a confirmed fool.