Fyne was not willing to talk; but as I had been already let into the
secret, the fair-minded little man recognised that I had some right to
information if I insisted on it. And I did insist, after the third
game. We were yet some way from the end of our journey.
“Oh, if you want to know,” was his somewhat impatient opening. And then
he talked rather volubly. First of all his wife had not given him to
read the letter received from Flora (I had suspected him of having it in
his pocket), but had told him all about the contents. It was not at all
what it should have been even if the girl had wished to affirm her right
to disregard the feelings of all the world. Her own had been trampled
in the dirt out of all shape. Extraordinary thing to say—I would
admit, for a young girl of her age. The whole tone of that letter was
wrong, quite wrong. It was certainly not the product of a—say, of a
well-balanced mind.
“If she were given some sort of footing in this world,” I said, “if only
no bigger than the palm of my hand, she would probably learn to keep a
better balance.”
Fyne ignored this little remark. His wife, he said, was not the sort of
person to be addressed mockingly on a serious subject. There was an
unpleasant strain of levity in that letter, extending even to the
references to Captain Anthony himself. Such a disposition was enough,
his wife had pointed out to him, to alarm one for the future, had all
the circumstances of that preposterous project been as satisfactory as
in fact they were not. Other parts of the letter seemed to have a
challenging tone—as if daring them (the Fynes) to approve her conduct.
And at the same time implying that she did not care, that it was for
their own sakes that she hoped they would “go against the world—the
horrid world which had crushed poor papa.”
Fyne called upon me to admit that this was pretty cool—considering.
And there was another thing, too. It seems that for the last six months
(she had been assisting two ladies who kept a kindergarten school in
Bayswater—a mere pittance), Flora had insisted on devoting all her
spare time to the study of the trial. She had been looking up files of
old newspapers, and working herself up into a state of indignation with
what she called the injustice and the hypocrisy of the prosecution. Her
father, Fyne reminded me, had made some palpable hits in his answers in
Court, and she had fastened on them triumphantly. She had reached the
conclusion of her father’s innocence, and had been brooding over it.
Mrs Fyne had pointed out to him the danger of this.
The train ran into the station and Fyne, jumping out directly it came to
a standstill, seemed glad to cut short the conversation. We walked in
silence a little way, boarded a bus, then walked again. I don’t suppose
that since the days of his childhood, when surely he was taken to see
the Tower, he had been once east of Temple Bar. He looked about him
sullenly; and when I pointed out in the distance the rounded front of
the Eastern Hotel at the bifurcation of two very broad, mean, shabby
thoroughfares, rising like a grey stucco tower above the lowly roofs of
the dirty-yellow, two-storey houses, he only grunted disapprovingly.
“I wouldn’t lay too much stress on what you have been telling me,” I
observed quietly as we approached that unattractive building. “No man
will believe a girl who has just accepted his suit to be not
well-balanced,—you know.”
“Oh, accepted his suit,” muttered Fyne, who seemed to have been very
thoroughly convinced indeed. “It may have been the other way about.”
And then he added: “I am going through with it.”
I said that this was very praiseworthy but that a certain moderation of
statement—He waved his hand at me and mended his pace. I guessed that
he was anxious to get his mission over as quickly as possible. He
barely gave himself time to shake hands with me and made a rush at the
narrow glass door with the words Hotel Entrance on it. It swung to
behind his back with no more noise than the snap of a toothless jaw.
The absurd temptation to remain and see what would come of it got over
my better judgment. I hung about irresolute, wondering how long an
embassy of that sort would take, and whether Fyne on coming out would
consent to be communicative. I feared he would be shocked at finding me
there, would consider my conduct incorrect, conceivably treat me with
contempt. I walked off a few paces. Perhaps it would be possible to
read something on Fyne’s face as he came out; and, if necessary, I could
always eclipse myself discreetly through the door of one of the bars.
The ground floor of the Eastern Hotel was an unabashed pub, with
plate-glass fronts, a display of brass rails, and divided into many
compartments each having its own entrance.
But of course all this was silly. The marriage, the love, the affairs
of Captain Anthony were none of my business. I was on the point of
moving down the street for good when my attention was attracted by a
girl approaching the hotel entrance from the west. She was dressed very
modestly in black. It was the white straw hat of a good form and
trimmed with a bunch of pale roses which had caught my eye. The whole
figure seemed familiar. Of course! Flora de Barral. She was making
for the hotel, she was going in. And Fyne was with Captain Anthony! To
meet him could not be pleasant for her. I wished to save her from the
awkwardness, and as I hesitated what to do she looked up and our eyes
happened to meet just as she was turning off the pavement into the hotel
doorway. Instinctively I extended my arm. It was enough to make her
stop. I suppose she had some faint notion that she had seen me before
somewhere. She walked slowly forward, prudent and attentive, watching
my faint smile.
“Excuse me,” I said directly she had approached me near enough.
“Perhaps you would like to know that Mr Fyne is upstairs with Captain
Anthony at this moment.”
She uttered a faint “Ah! Mr Fyne!” I could read in her eyes that she
had recognised me now. Her serious expression extinguished the imbecile
grin of which I was conscious. I raised my hat. She responded with a
slow inclination of the head while her luminous, mistrustful, maiden’s
glance seemed to whisper, “What is this one doing here?”
“I came up to town with Fyne this morning,” I said in a businesslike
tone. “I have to see a friend in East India Dock. Fyne and I parted
this moment at the door here....” The girl regarded me with darkening
eyes.... “Mrs Fyne did not come with her husband,” I went on, then
hesitated before that white face so still in the pearly shadow thrown
down by the hat-brim. “But she sent him,” I murmured by way of warning.
Her eyelids fluttered slowly over the fixed stare. I imagine she was
not much disconcerted by this development. “I live a long way from
here,” she whispered.
I said perfunctorily, “Do you?” And we remained gazing at each other.
The uniform paleness of her complexion was not that of an anaemic girl.
It had a transparent vitality and at that particular moment the faintest
possible rosy tinge, the merest suspicion of colour; an equivalent, I
suppose, in any other girl to blushing like a peony, while she told me
that Captain Anthony had arranged to show her the ship that morning.
It was easy to understand that she did not want to meet Fyne. And when
I mentioned in a discreet murmur that he had come because of her letter
she glanced at the hotel door quickly, and moved off a few steps to a
position where she could watch the entrance without being seen. I
followed her. At the junction of the two thoroughfares she stopped in
the thin traffic of the broad pavement and turned to me with an air of
challenge. “And so you know.”
I told her that I had not seen the letter. I had only heard of it. She
was a little impatient. “I mean all about me.”
Yes. I knew all about her. The distress of Mr and Mrs Fyne—
especially of Mrs Fyne—was so great that they would have shared it
with anybody almost—not belonging to their circle of friends. I
happened to be at hand—that was all.
“You understand that I am not their friend. I am only a holiday
acquaintance.”
“She was not very much upset?” queried Flora de Barral, meaning, of
course, Mrs Fyne. And I admitted that she was less so than her
husband—and even less than myself. Mrs Fyne was a very self-possessed
person whom nothing could startle out of her extreme theoretical
position. She did not seem startled when Fyne and I proposed going to
the quarry.
“You put that notion into their heads,” the girl said.
I advanced that the notion was in their heads already. But it was much
more vividly in my head since I had seen her up there with my own eyes,
tempting Providence.
She was looking at me with extreme attention, and murmured:
“Is that what you called it to them? Tempting....”
“No. I told them that you were making up your mind and I came along
just then. I told them that you were saved by me. My shout checked
you....” She moved her head gently from right to left in negation.—“No?
Well, have it your own way.”
I thought to myself: She has found another issue. She wants to forget
now. And no wonder. She wants to persuade herself that she had never
known such an ugly and poignant minute in her life. “After all,” I
conceded aloud, “things are not always what they seem.”
Her little head with its deep blue eyes, eyes of tenderness and anger
under the black arch of fine eyebrows was very still. The mouth looked
very red in the white face peeping from under the veil, the little
pointed chin had in its form something aggressive. Slight and even
angular in her modest black dress she was an appealing and—yes—she was
a desirable little figure.
Her lips moved very fast asking me:
“And they believed you at once?”
“Yes, they believed me at once. Mrs Fyne’s word to us was ‘Go!’”
A white gleam between the red lips was so short that I remained
uncertain whether it was a smile or a ferocious baring of little even
teeth. The rest of the face preserved its innocent, tense and
enigmatical expression. She spoke rapidly.
“No, it wasn’t your shout. I had been there some time before you saw
me. And I was not there to tempt Providence, as you call it. I went up
there for—for what you thought I was going to do. Yes. I climbed two
fences. I did not mean to leave anything to Providence. There seem to
be people for whom Providence can do nothing. I suppose you are shocked
to hear me talk like that?”
I shook my head. I was not shocked. What had kept her back all that
time, till I appeared on the scene below, she went on, was neither fear
nor any other kind of hesitation. One reaches a point, she said with
appalling youthful simplicity, where nothing that concerns one matters
any longer. But something did keep her back. I should have never
guessed what it was. She herself confessed that it seemed absurd to
say. It was the Fyne dog.
Flora de Barral paused, looking at me with a peculiar expression and
then went on. You see, she imagined the dog had become extremely
attached to her. She took it into her head that he might fall over or
jump down after her. She tried to drive him away. She spoke sternly to
him. It only made him more frisky. He barked and jumped about her
skirt in his usual, idiotic, high spirits. He scampered away in circles
between the pines charging upon her and leaping as high as her waist.
She commanded, “Go away. Go home.” She even picked up from the ground
a bit of a broken branch and threw it at him. At this his delight knew
no bounds; his rushes became faster, his yapping louder; he seemed to be
having the time of his life. She was convinced that the moment she
threw herself down he would spring over after her as if it were part of
the game. She was vexed almost to tears. She was touched too. And
when he stood still at some distance as if suddenly rooted to the ground
wagging his tail slowly and watching her intensely with his shining eyes
another fear came to her. She imagined herself gone and the creature
sitting on the brink, its head thrown up to the sky and howling for
hours. This thought was not to be borne. Then my shout reached her
ears.
She told me all this with simplicity. My voice had destroyed her
poise—the suicide poise of her mind. Every act of ours, the most
criminal, the most mad, presupposes a balance of thought, feeling and
will, like a correct attitude for an effective stroke in a game. And I
had destroyed it. She was no longer in proper form for the act. She
was not very much annoyed. Next day would do. She would have to slip
away without attracting the notice of the dog. She thought of the
necessity almost tenderly. She came down the path carrying her despair
with lucid calmness. But when she saw herself deserted by the dog, she
had an impulse to turn round, go up again and be done with it. Not even
that animal cared for her—in the end.
“I really did think that he was attached to me. What did he want to
pretend for, like this? I thought nothing could hurt me any more. Oh
yes. I would have gone up, but I felt suddenly so tired. So tired.
And then you were there. I didn’t know what you would do. You might
have tried to follow me and I didn’t think I could run—not up hill—not
then.”
She had raised her white face a little, and it was queer to hear her say
these things. At that time of the morning there are comparatively few
people out in that part of the town. The broad interminable perspective
of the East India Dock Road, the great perspective of drab brick walls,
of grey pavement, of muddy roadway rumbling dismally with loaded carts
and vans lost itself in the distance, imposing and shabby in its
spacious meanness of aspect, in its immeasurable poverty of forms, of
colouring, of life—under a harsh, unconcerned sky dried by the wind to
a clear blue. It had been raining during the night. The sunshine
itself seemed poor. From time to time a few bits of paper, a little
dust and straw whirled past us on the broad flat promontory of the
pavement before the rounded front of the hotel.
Flora de Barral was silent for a while. I said:
“And next day you thought better of it.”
Again she raised her eyes to mine with that peculiar expression of
informed innocence; and again her white cheeks took on the faintest
tinge of pink—the merest shadow of a blush.
“Next day,” she uttered distinctly, “I didn’t think. I remembered.
That was enough. I remembered what I should never have forgotten.
Never. And Captain Anthony arrived at the cottage in the evening.”
“Ah yes. Captain Anthony,” I murmured. And she repeated also in a
murmur, “Yes! Captain Anthony.” The faint flush of warm life left her
face. I subdued my voice still more and not looking at her: “You found
him sympathetic?” I ventured.
Her long dark lashes went down a little with an air of calculated
discretion. At least so it seemed to me. And yet no one could say that
I was inimical to that girl. But there you are! Explain it as you may,
in this world the friendless, like the poor, are always a little
suspect, as if honesty and delicacy were only possible to the privileged
few.
“Why do you ask?” she said after a time, raising her eyes suddenly to
mine in an effect of candour which on the same principle (of the
disinherited not being to be trusted) might have been judged equivocal.
“If you mean what right I have....” She moved slightly a hand in a worn
brown glove as much as to say she could not question anyone’s right
against such an outcast as herself.
I ought to have been moved perhaps; but I only noted the total absence
of humility.—“No right at all,” I continued, “but just interest. Mrs
Fyne—it’s too difficult to explain how it came about—has talked to me
of you—well—extensively.”
No doubt Mrs Fyne had told me the truth, Flora said brusquely with an
unexpected hoarseness of tone. This very dress she was wearing had been
given her by Mrs Fyne. Of course I looked at it. It could not have
been a recent gift. Close-fitting and black, with heliotrope silk
facings under a figured net, it looked far from new, just on this side
of shabbiness; in fact, it accentuated the slightness of her figure, it
went well in its suggestion of half mourning with the white face in
which the unsmiling red lips alone seemed warm with the rich blood of
life and passion.
Little Fyne was staying up there an unconscionable time. Was he
arguing, preaching, remonstrating? Had he discovered in himself a
capacity and a taste for that sort of thing? Or was he perhaps, in an
intense dislike for the job, beating about the bush and only puzzling
Captain Anthony, the providential man, who, if he expected the girl to
appear at any moment, must have been on tenterhooks all the time, and
beside himself with impatience to see the back of his brother-in-law.
How was it that he had not got rid of Fyne long before in any case? I
don’t mean by actually throwing him out of the window, but in some other
resolute manner.
Surely Fyne had not impressed him. That he was an impressionable man I
could not doubt. The presence of the girl there on the pavement before
me proved this up to the hilt—and, well, yes, touchingly enough.
It so happened that in their wanderings to and fro our glances met.
They met and remained in contact more familiar than a hand-clasp, more
communicative, more expressive. There was something comic too in the
whole situation, in the poor girl and myself waiting together on the
broad pavement at a corner public-house for the issue of Fyne’s
ridiculous mission. But the comic when it is human becomes quickly
painful. Yes, she was infinitely anxious. And I was asking myself
whether this poignant tension of her suspense depended—to put it
plainly—on hunger or love.
The answer would have been of some interest to Captain Anthony. For my
part, in the presence of a young girl I always become convinced that the
dreams of sentiment—like the consoling mysteries of Faith—are
invincible; that it is never never reason which governs men and women.
Yet what sentiment could there have been on her part? I remembered her
tone only a moment since when she said: “That evening Captain Anthony
arrived at the cottage.” And considering, too, what the arrival of
Captain Anthony meant in this connection, I wondered at the calmness
with which she could mention that fact. He arrived at the cottage. In
the evening. I knew that late train. He probably walked from the
station. The evening would be well advanced. I could almost see a dark
indistinct figure opening the wicket gate of the garden. Where was she?
Did she see him enter? Was she somewhere near by and did she hear
without the slightest premonition his chance and fateful footsteps on
the flagged path leading to the cottage door? In the shadow of the
night made more cruelly sombre for her by the very shadow of death he
must have appeared too strange, too remote, too unknown to impress
himself on her thought as a living force—such a force as a man can
bring to bear on a woman’s destiny.
She glanced towards the hotel door again; I followed suit and then our
eyes met once more, this time intentionally. A tentative, uncertain
intimacy was springing up between us two. She said simply: “You are
waiting for Mr Fyne to come out; are you?”
I admitted to her that I was waiting to see Mr Fyne come out. That was
all. I had nothing to say to him.
“I have said yesterday all I had to say to him,” I added meaningly. “I
have said it to them both, in fact. I have also heard all they had to
say.”
“About me?” she murmured.
“Yes. The conversation was about you.”
“I wonder if they told you everything.”
If she wondered I could do nothing else but wonder too. But I did not
tell her that. I only smiled. The material point was that Captain
Anthony should be told everything. But as to that I was very certain
that the good sister would see to it. Was there anything more to
disclose—some other misery, some other deception of which that girl had
been a victim? It seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to
imagine. What struck me most was her—I suppose I must call it—
composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done.
One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not
know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a
passive butt of ferocious misfortune.
Looking back at the occasion when we first got on speaking terms on the
road by the quarry, I had to admit that she presented some points of a
problematic appearance. I don’t know why I imagined Captain Anthony as
the sort of man who would not be likely to take the initiative; not
perhaps from indifference but from that peculiar timidity before women
which often enough is found in conjunction with chivalrous instincts,
with a great need for affection and great stability of feelings. Such
men are easily moved. At the least encouragement they go forward with
the eagerness, with the recklessness of starvation. This accounted for
the suddenness of the affair. No! With all her inexperience this girl
could not have found any great difficulty in her conquering enterprise.
She must have begun it. And yet there she was, patient, almost unmoved,
almost pitiful, waiting outside like a beggar, without a right to
anything but compassion, for a promised dole.
Every moment people were passing close by us, singly, in two and threes;
the inhabitants of that end of the town where life goes on unadorned by
grace or splendour; they passed us in their shabby garments, with sallow
faces, haggard, anxious or weary, or simply without expression, in an
unsmiling sombre stream not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered
existences whose joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes
were miserable, glamourless, and of no account in the world. And when
one thought of their reality to themselves one’s heart became oppressed.
But of all the individuals who passed by none appeared to me for the
moment so pathetic in unconscious patience as the girl standing before
me; none more difficult to understand. It is perhaps because I was
thinking of things which I could not ask her about.
In fact we had nothing to say to each other; but we two, strangers as we
really were to each other, had dealt with the most intimate and final of
subjects, the subject of death. It had created a sort of bond between
us. It made our silence weighty and uneasy. I ought to have left her
there and then; but, as I think I’ve told you before, the fact of having
shouted her away from the edge of a precipice seemed somehow to have
engaged my responsibility as to this other leap. And so we had still an
intimate subject between us to lend more weight and more uneasiness to
our silence. The subject of marriage. I use the word not so much in
reference to the ceremony itself (I had no doubt of this, Captain
Anthony being a decent fellow) or in view of the social institution in
general, as to which I have no opinion, but in regard to the human
relation. The first two views are not particularly interesting. The
ceremony, I suppose, is adequate; the institution, I dare say, is useful
or it would not have endured. But the human relation thus recognised is
a mysterious thing in its origins, character and consequences.
Unfortunately you can’t buttonhole familiarly a young girl as you would
a young fellow. I don’t think that even another woman could really do
it. She would not be trusted. There is not between women that fund of
at least conditional loyalty which men may depend on in their dealings
with each other. I believe that any woman would rather trust a man.
The difficulty in such a delicate case was how to get on terms.
So we held our peace in the odious uproar of that wide roadway thronged
with heavy carts. Great vans carrying enormous piled-up loads advanced
swaying like mountains. It was as if the whole world existed only for
selling and buying and those who had nothing to do with the movement of
merchandise were of no account.
“You must be tired,” I said. One had to say something if only to assert
oneself against that wearisome, passionless and crushing uproar. She
raised her eyes for a moment. No, she was not. Not very. She had not
walked all the way. She came by train as far as Whitechapel Station and
had only walked from there.
She had had an ugly pilgrimage; but whether of love or of necessity who
could tell? And that precisely was what I should have liked to get at.
This was not however a question to be asked point-blank, and I could not
think of any effective circumlocution. It occurred to me too that she
might conceivably know nothing of it herself—I mean by reflection.
That young woman had been obviously considering death. She had gone the
length of forming some conception of it. But as to its companion
fatality—love, she, I was certain, had never reflected upon its
meaning.
With that man in the hotel, whom I did not know, and this girl standing
before me in the street I felt that it was an exceptional case. He had
broken away from his surroundings; she stood outside the pale. One
aspect of conventions which people who declaim against them lose sight
of is that conventions make both joy and suffering easier to bear in a
becoming manner. But those two were outside all conventions. They
would be as untrammelled in a sense as the first man and the first
woman. The trouble was that I could not imagine anything about Flora de
Barral and the brother of Mrs Fyne. Or, if you like, I could imagine
_anything_ which comes practically to the same thing. Darkness and
chaos are first cousins. I should have liked to ask the girl for a word
which would give my imagination its line. But how was one to venture so
far? I can be rough sometimes but I am not naturally impertinent. I
would have liked to ask her for instance: “Do you know what you have
done with yourself?” A question like that. Anyhow it was time for one
of us to say something. A question it must be. And the question I
asked was: “So he’s going to show you the ship?”
She seemed glad I had spoken at last and glad of the opportunity to
speak herself.
“Yes. He said he would—this morning. Did you say you did not know
Captain Anthony?”
“No. I don’t know him. Is he anything like his sister?”
She looked startled and murmured “Sister!” in a puzzled tone which
astonished me. “Oh! Mrs Fyne,” she exclaimed, recollecting herself,
and avoiding my eyes while I looked at her curiously.
What an extraordinary detachment! And all the time the stream of shabby
people was hastening by us, with the continuous dreary shuffling of
weary footsteps on the flagstones. The sunshine falling on the grime of
surfaces, on the poverty of tones and forms seemed of an inferior
quality, its joy faded, its brilliance tarnished and dusty. I had to
raise my voice in the dull vibrating noise of the roadway.
“You don’t mean to say you have forgotten the connection?”
She cried readily enough: “I wasn’t thinking.” And then, while I
wondered what could have been the images occupying her brain at this
time, she asked me: “You didn’t see my letter to Mrs Fyne—did you?”
“No. I didn’t,” I shouted. Just then the racket was distracting, a
pair-horse trolly lightly loaded with loose rods of iron passing slowly
very near us. “I wasn’t trusted so far.” And remembering Mrs Fyne’s
hints that the girl was unbalanced, I added: “Was it an unreserved
confession you wrote?”
She did not answer me for a time, and as I waited I thought that there’s
nothing like a confession to make one look mad; and that of all
confessions a written one is the most detrimental all round. Never
confess! Never, never! An untimely joke is a source of bitter regret
always. Sometimes it may ruin a man; not because it is a joke, but
because it is untimely. And a confession of whatever sort is always
untimely. The only thing which makes it supportable for a while is
curiosity. You smile? Ah, but it is so, or else people would be sent
to the rightabout at the second sentence. How many sympathetic souls
can you reckon on in the world? One in ten, one in a hundred—in a
thousand—in ten thousand? Ah! What a sell these confessions are!
What a horrible sell! You seek sympathy, and all you get is the most
evanescent sense of relief—if you get that much. For a confession,
whatever it may be, stirs the secret depths of the hearer’s character.
Often depths that he himself is but dimly aware of. And so the
righteous triumph secretly, the lucky are amused, the strong are
disgusted, the weak either upset or irritated with you according to the
measure of their sincerity with themselves. And all of them in their
hearts brand you for either mad or impudent....
I had seldom seen Marlow so vehement, so pessimistic, so earnestly
cynical before. I cut his declamation short by asking what answer Flora
de Barral had given to his question. “Did the poor girl admit firing
off her confidences at Mrs Fyne—eight pages of close writing—that
sort of thing?”
Marlow shook his head.
She did not tell me. I accepted her silence, as a kind of answer and
remarked that it would have been better if she had simply announced the
fact to Mrs Fyne at the cottage. “Why didn’t you do it?” I asked
point-blank.
She said: “I am not a very plucky girl.” She looked up at me and added
meaningly: “And _you_ know it. And you know why.”
I must remark that she seemed to have become very subdued since our
first meeting at the quarry. Almost a different person from the
defiant, angry and despairing girl with quivering lips and resentful
glances.
“I thought it was very sensible of you to get away from that sheer
drop,” I said.
She looked up with something of that old expression.
“That’s not what I mean. I see you will have it that you saved my life.
Nothing of the kind. I was concerned for that vile little beast of a
dog. No! It was the idea of—of doing away with myself which was
cowardly. That’s what I meant by saying I am not a very plucky girl.”
“Oh!” I retorted airily. “That little dog. He isn’t really a bad
little dog.” But she lowered her eyelids and went on:
“I was so miserable that I could think only of myself. This was mean.
It was cruel too. And besides I had _not_ given it up—not then.”
Marlow changed his tone.
“I don’t know much of the psychology of self-destruction. It’s a sort
of subject one has few opportunities to study closely. I knew a man
once who came to my rooms one evening, and while smoking a cigar
confessed to me moodily that he was trying to discover some graceful way
of retiring out of Existence. I didn’t study his case, but I had a
glimpse of him the other day at a cricket match, with some women, having
a good time. That seems a fairly reasonable attitude. Considered as a
sin, it is a case for repentance before the throne of a merciful God.
But I imagine that Flora de Barral’s religion under the care of the
distinguished governess could have been nothing but outward formality.
Remorse in the sense of gnawing shame and unavailing regret is only
understandable to me when some wrong had been done to a fellow-creature.
But why she, that girl who existed on sufferance, so to speak—why she
should writhe inwardly with remorse because she had once thought of
getting rid of a life which was nothing in every respect but a curse—
that I could not understand. I thought it was very likely some obscure
influence of common forms of speech, some traditional or inherited
feeling—a vague notion that suicide is a legal crime; words of old
moralists and preachers which remain in the air and help to form all the
authorised moral conventions. Yes, I was surprised at her remorse. But
lowering her glance unexpectedly till her dark eyelashes seemed to rest
against her white cheeks she presented a perfectly demure aspect. It
was so attractive that I could not help a faint smile. That Flora de
Barral should ever, in any aspect, have the power to evoke a smile was
the very last thing I should have believed. She went on after a slight
hesitation:—
“One day I started for there, for that place.”
Look at the influence of a mere play of physiognomy! If you remember
what we were talking about you will hardly believe that I caught myself
grinning down at that demure little girl. I must say too that I felt
more friendly to her at the moment than ever before.
“Oh, you did? To take that jump? You are a determined young person.
Well, what happened that time?”
An almost imperceptible alteration in her bearing; a slight droop of her
head perhaps—a mere nothing—made her look more demure than ever.
“I had left the cottage,” she began a little hurriedly. “I was walking
along the road—you know, _the_ road. I had made up my mind I was not
coming back this time.”
I won’t deny that these words spoken from under the brim of her hat (oh
yes, certainly, her head was down—she had put it down) gave me a
thrill; for indeed I had never doubted her sincerity. It could never
have been a make-believe despair.
“Yes,” I whispered. “You were going along the road.”
“When....” Again she hesitated with an effect of innocent shyness worlds
asunder from tragic issues; then glided on—“When suddenly Captain
Anthony came through a gate out of a field.”
I coughed down the beginning of a most improper fit of laughter, and
felt ashamed of myself. Her eyes raised for a moment seemed full of
innocent suffering and unexpressed menace in the depths of the dilated
pupils within the rings of sombre blue. It was—how shall I say it?—a
night effect when you seem to see vague shapes and don’t know what
reality you may come upon at any time. Then she lowered her eyelids
again, shutting all mysteriousness out of the situation except for the
sobering memory of that glance, nightlike in the sunshine, expressively
still in the brutal unrest of the street.
“So Captain Anthony joined you—did he?”
“He opened a field-gate and walked out on the road. He crossed to my
side and went on with me. He had his pipe in his hand. He said: ‘Are
you going far this morning?’”
These words (I was watching her white face as she spoke) gave me a
slight shudder. She remained demure, almost prim. And I remarked:
“You have been talking together before, of course.”
“Not more than twenty words altogether since he arrived,” she declared
without emphasis. “That day he had said ‘Good morning’ to me when we
met at breakfast two hours before. And I said good morning to him. I
did not see him afterwards till he came out on the road.”
I thought to myself that this was not accidental. He had been observing
her. I felt certain also that he had not been asking any questions of
Mrs Fyne.
“I wouldn’t look at him,” said Flora de Barral. “I had done with
looking at people. He said to me: ‘My sister does not put herself out
much for us. We had better keep each other company. I have read every
book there is in that cottage.’ I walked on. He did not leave me. I
thought he ought to. But he didn’t. He didn’t seem to notice that I
would not talk to him.”
She was now perfectly still. The wretched little parasol hung down
against her dress from her joined hands. I was rigid with attention.
It isn’t every day that one culls such a volunteered tale on a girl’s
lips. The ugly street-noises swelling up for a moment covered the next
few words she said. It was vexing. The next word I heard was
“worried.”
“It worried you to have him there, walking by your side.”
“Yes. Just that,” she went on with downcast eyes. There was something
prettily comical in her attitude and her tone, while I pictured to
myself a poor white-faced girl walking to her death with an unconscious
man striding by her side. Unconscious? I don’t know. First of all, I
felt certain that this was no chance meeting. Something had happened
before. Was he a man for a _coup-de-foudre_, the lightning stroke of
love? I don’t think so. That sort of susceptibility is luckily rare.
A world of inflammable lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type would very
soon end in barbarism and misery. But it is a fact that in every man
(not in every woman) there lives a lover; a lover who is called out in
all his potentialities often by the most insignificant little things—as
long as they come at the psychological moment: the glimpse of a face at
an unusual angle, an evanescent attitude, the curve of a cheek often
looked at before, perhaps, but then, at the moment, charged with
astonishing significance. These are great mysteries, of course. Magic
signs.
I don’t know in what the sign consisted in this case. It might have
been her pallor (it wasn’t pasty nor yet papery) that white face with
eyes like blue gleams of fire and lips like red coals. In certain
lights, in certain poises of head it suggested tragic sorrow. Or it
might have been her wavy hair. Or even just that pointed chin stuck out
a little, resentful and not particularly distinguished, doing away with
the mysterious aloofness of her fragile presence. But any way at a
given moment Anthony must have suddenly _seen_ the girl. And then, that
something had happened to him. Perhaps nothing more than the thought
coming into his head that this was “a possible woman.”
Followed this waylaying! Its resolute character makes me think it was
the chin’s doing; that “common mortal” touch which stands in such good
stead to some women. Because men, I mean really masculine men, those
whose generations have evolved an ideal woman, are often very timid.
Who wouldn’t be before the ideal? It’s your sentimental trifler, who
has just missed being nothing at all, who is enterprising, simply
because it is easy to appear enterprising when one does not mean to put
one’s belief to the test.
Well, whatever it was that encouraged him, Captain Anthony stuck to
Flora de Barral in a manner which in a timid man might have been called
heroic if it had not been so simple. Whether policy, diplomacy,
simplicity, or just inspiration, he kept up his talk, rather deliberate,
with very few pauses. Then suddenly as if recollecting himself:
“It’s funny. I don’t think you are annoyed with me for giving you my
company unasked. But why don’t you say something?”