“I made no answer,” she said in that even, unemotional low voice which
seemed to be her voice for delicate confidences. “I walked on. He did
not seem to mind. We came to the foot of the quarry where the road
winds up hill, past the place where you were sitting by the roadside
that day. I began to wonder what I should do. After we reached the top
Captain Anthony said that he had not been for a walk with a lady for
years and years—almost since he was a boy. We had then come to where I
ought to have turned off and struck across a field. I thought of
making a run of it. But he would have caught me up. I knew he would;
and, of course, he would not have allowed me. I couldn’t give him the
slip.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to leave you?” I inquired curiously.
“He would not have taken any notice,” she went on steadily. “And what
could I have done then? I could not have started quarrelling with him—
could I? I hadn’t enough energy to get angry. I felt very tired
suddenly. I just stumbled on straight along the road. Captain Anthony
told me that the family—some relations of his mother—he used to know
in Liverpool was broken up now, and he had never made any friends since.
All gone their different ways. All the girls married. Nice girls they
were and very friendly to him when he was but little more than a boy.
He repeated: ‘Very nice, cheery, clever girls.’ I sat down on a bank
against a hedge and began to cry.”
“You must have astonished him not a little,” I observed.
Anthony, it seems, remained on the road looking down at her. He did not
offer to approach her, neither did he make any other movement or
gesture. Flora de Barral told me all this. She could see him through
her tears, blurred to a mere shadow on the white road, and then again
becoming more distinct, but always absolutely still and as if lost in
thought before a strange phenomenon which demanded the closest possible
attention.
Flora learned later that he had never seen a woman cry; not in that way,
at least. He was impressed and interested by the mysteriousness of the
effect. She was very conscious of being looked at, but was not able to
stop herself crying. In fact, she was not capable of any effort.
Suddenly he advanced two steps, stooped, caught hold of her hands lying
on her lap and pulled her up to her feet; she found herself standing
close to him almost before she realised what he had done. Some people
were coming briskly along the road and Captain Anthony muttered: “You
don’t want to be stared at. What about that stile over there? Can we
go back across the fields?”
She snatched her hands out of his grasp (it seems he had omitted to let
them go), marched away from him and got over the stile. It was a big
field sprinkled profusely with white sheep. A trodden path crossed it
diagonally. After she had gone more than half-way she turned her head
for the first time. Keeping five feet or so behind, Captain Anthony was
following her with an air of extreme interest. Interest or eagerness.
At any rate she caught an expression on his face which frightened her.
But not enough to make her run. And indeed it would have had to be
something incredibly awful to scare into a run a girl who had come to
the end of her courage to live.
As if encouraged by this glance over the shoulder Captain Anthony came
up boldly, and now that he was by her side, she felt his nearness
intimately, like a touch. She tried to disregard this sensation. But
she was not angry with him now. It wasn’t worth while. She was
thankful that he had the sense not to ask questions as to this crying.
Of course he didn’t ask because he didn’t care. No one in the world
cared for her, neither those who pretended nor yet those who did not
pretend. She preferred the latter.
Captain Anthony opened for her a gate into another field; when they got
through he kept walking abreast, elbow to elbow almost. His voice
growled pleasantly in her very ear. Staying in this dull place was
enough to give anyone the blues. His sister scribbled all day. It was
positively unkind. He alluded to his nieces as rude, selfish monkeys,
without either feelings or manners. And he went on to talk about his
ship being laid up for a month and dismantled for repairs. The worst
was that on arriving in London he found he couldn’t get the rooms he was
used to, where they made him as comfortable as such a confirmed sea-dog
as himself could be anywhere on shore.
In the effort to subdue by dint of talking and to keep in check the
mysterious, the profound attraction he felt already for that delicate
being of flesh and blood, with pale cheeks, with, darkened eyelids and
eyes scalded with hot tears, he went on speaking of himself as a
confirmed enemy of life on shore—a perfect terror to a simple man, what
with the fads and proprieties and the ceremonies and affectations. He
hated all that. He wasn’t fit for it. There was no rest and peace and
security but on the sea.
This gave one a view of Captain Anthony as a hermit withdrawn from a
wicked world. It was amusingly unexpected to me and nothing more. But
it must have appealed straight to that bruised and battered young soul.
Still shrinking from his nearness she had ended by listening to him with
avidity. His deep murmuring voice soothed her. And she thought
suddenly that there was peace and rest in the grave too.
She heard him say: “Look at my sister. She isn’t a bad woman by any
means. She asks me here because it’s right and proper, I suppose, but
she has no use for me. There you have your shore people. I quite
understand anybody crying. I would have been gone already, only, truth
to say, I haven’t any friends to go to.” He added brusquely: “And you?”
She made a slight negative sign. He must have been observing her,
putting two and two together. After a pause he said simply: “When I
first came here I thought you were governess to these girls. My sister
didn’t say a word about you to me.”
Then Flora spoke for the first time.
“Mrs Fyne is my best friend.”
“So she is mine,” he said without the slightest irony or bitterness, but
added with conviction: “That shows you what life ashore is. Much better
be out of it.”
As they were approaching the cottage he was heard again as though a long
silent walk had not intervened: “But anyhow I shan’t ask her anything
about you.”
He stopped short and she went on alone. His last words had impressed
her. Everything he had said seemed somehow to have a special meaning
under its obvious conversational sense. Till she went in at the door of
the cottage she felt his eyes resting on her.
That is it. He had made himself felt. That girl was, one may say,
washing about with slack limbs in the ugly surf of life with no
opportunity to strike out for herself, when suddenly she had been made
to feel that there was somebody beside her in the bitter water. A most
considerable moral event for her; whether she was aware of it or not.
They met again at the one o’clock dinner. I am inclined to think that,
being a healthy girl under her frail appearance, and fast walking and
what I may call relief-crying (there are many kinds of crying) making
one hungry, she made a good meal. It was Captain Anthony who had no
appetite. His sister commented on it in a curt, businesslike manner,
and the eldest of his delightful nieces said mockingly: “You have been
taking too much exercise this morning, Uncle Roderick.” The mild Uncle
Roderick turned upon her with a “What do you know about it, young lady?”
so charged with suppressed savagery that the whole round table gave one
gasp and went dumb for the rest of the meal. He took no notice whatever
of Flora de Barral. I don’t think it was from prudence or any
calculated motive. I believe he was so full of her aspects that he did
not want to look in her direction when there were other people to hamper
his imagination.
You understand I am piecing here bits of disconnected statements. Next
day Flora saw him leaning over the field-gate. When she told me this, I
didn’t of course ask her how it was she was there. Probably she could
not have told me how it was she was there. The difficulty here is to
keep steadily in view the then conditions of her existence, a
combination of dreariness and horror.
That hermit-like but not exactly misanthropic sailor was leaning over
the gate moodily. When he saw the white-faced restless Flora drifting
like a lost thing along the road he put his pipe in his pocket and
called out “Good morning, Miss Smith” in a tone of amazing happiness.
She, with one foot in life and the other in a nightmare, was at the same
time inert and unstable, and very much at the mercy of sudden impulses.
She swerved, came distractedly right up to the gate and looking straight
into his eyes: “I am not Miss Smith. That’s not my name. Don’t call me
by it.”
She was shaking as if in a passion. His eyes expressed nothing; he only
unlatched the gate in silence, grasped her arm and drew her in. Then
closing it with a kick—
“Not your name? That’s all one to me. Your name’s the least thing
about you I care for.” He was leading her firmly away from the gate
though she resisted slightly. There was a sort of joy in his eyes which
frightened her. “You are not a princess in disguise,” he said with an
unexpected laugh she found blood-curdling. “And that’s all I care for.
You had better understand that I am not blind and not a fool. And then
it’s plain for even a fool to see that things have been going hard with
you. You are on a lee shore and eating your heart out with worry.”
What seemed most awful to her was the elated light in his eyes, the
rapacious smile that would come and go on his lips as if he were
gloating over her misery. But her misery was his opportunity and he
rejoiced while the tenderest pity seemed to flood his whole being. He
pointed out to her that she knew who he was. He was Mrs Fyne’s
brother. And, well, if his sister was the best friend she had in the
world, then, by Jove, it was about time somebody came along to look
after her a little.
Flora had tried more than once to free herself, but he tightened his
grasp of her arm each time and even shook it a little without ceasing to
speak. The nearness of his face intimidated her. He seemed striving to
look her through. It was obvious the world had been using her ill. And
even as he spoke with indignation the very marks and stamp of this
ill-usage of which he was so certain seemed to add to the inexplicable
attraction he felt for her person. It was not pity alone, I take it.
It was something more spontaneous, perverse and exciting. It gave him
the feeling that if only he could get hold of her, no woman would belong
to him so completely as this woman.
“Whatever your troubles,” he said, “I am the man to take you away from
them; that is, if you are not afraid. You told me you had no friends.
Neither have I. Nobody ever cared for me as far as I can remember.
Perhaps you could. Yes, I live on the sea. But who would you be
parting from? No one. You have no one belonging to you.”
At this point she broke away from him and ran. He did not pursue her.
The tall hedges tossing in the wind, the wide fields, the clouds driving
over the sky and the sky itself wheeled about her in masses of green and
white and blue as if the world were breaking up silently in a whirl, and
her foot at the next step were bound to find the void. She reached the
gate all right, got out, and, once on the road, discovered that she had
not the courage to look back. The rest of that day she spent with the
Fyne girls who gave her to understand that she was a slow and
unprofitable person. Long after tea, nearly at dusk, Captain Anthony
(the son of the poet) appeared suddenly before her in the little garden
in front of the cottage. They were alone for the moment. The wind had
dropped. In the calm evening air the voices of Mrs Fyne and the girls
strolling aimlessly on the road could be heard. He said to her
severely:
“You have understood?”
She looked at him in silence.
“That I love you,” he finished.
She shook her head the least bit.
“Don’t you believe me?” he asked in a low, infuriated voice.
“Nobody would love me,” she answered in a very quiet tone. “Nobody
could.”
He was dumb for a time, astonished beyond measure, as he well might have
been. He doubted his ears. He was outraged.
“Eh? What? Can’t love you? What do you know about it? It’s my
affair, isn’t it? You dare say _that_ to a man who has just told you!
You must be mad!”
“Very nearly,” she said with the accent of pent-up sincerity, and even
relieved because she was able to say something which she felt was true.
For the last few days she had felt herself several times near that
madness which is but an intolerable lucidity of apprehension.
The clear voices of Mrs Fyne and the girls were coming nearer, sounding
affected in the peace of the passion-laden earth. He began storming at
her hastily.
“Nonsense! Nobody can.... Indeed! Pah! You’ll have to be shown that
somebody can. I can. Nobody....” He made a contemptuous hissing noise.
“More likely _you_ can’t. They have done something to you.
Something’s crushed your pluck. You can’t face a man—that’s what it
is. What made you like this? Where do you come from? You have been
put upon. The scoundrels—whoever they are, men or women, seem to have
robbed you of your very name. You say you are not Miss Smith. Who are
you, then?”
She did not answer. He muttered, “Not that I care,” and fell silent,
because the fatuous self-confident chatter of the Fyne girls could be
heard at the very gate. But they were not going to bed yet. They
passed on. He waited a little in silence and immobility, then stamped
his foot and lost control of himself. He growled at her in a savage
passion. She felt certain that he was threatening her and calling her
names. She was no stranger to abuse, as we know, but there seemed to be
a particular kind of ferocity in this which was new to her. She began
to tremble. The especially terrifying thing was that she could not make
out the nature of these awful menaces and names. Not a word. Yet it
was not the shrinking anguish of her other experiences of angry scenes.
She made a mighty effort, though her knees were knocking together, and
in an expiring voice demanded that he should let her go indoors. “Don’t
stop me. It’s no use. It’s no use,” she repeated faintly, feeling an
invincible obstinacy rising within her, yet without anger against that
raging man.
He became articulate suddenly, and, without raising his voice, perfectly
audible.
“No use? No use! You dare stand here and tell me that—you white-faced
wisp, you wreath of mist, you little ghost of all the sorrow in the
world. You dare! Haven’t I been looking at you? You are all eyes.
What makes your cheeks always so white as if you had seen something....
Don’t speak. I love it—No use! And you really think that I can now go
to sea for a year or more, to the other side of the world somewhere,
leaving you behind. Why! You would vanish ... what little there is of
you. Some rough wind will blow you away altogether. You have no
holding ground on earth. Well, then trust yourself to me—to the sea—
which is deep like your eyes.”
She said: “Impossible.” He kept quiet for a while, then asked in a
totally changed tone, a tone of gloomy curiosity:
“You can’t stand me then? Is that it?”
“No,” she said, more steady herself. “I am not thinking of you at all.”
The inane voices of the Fyne girls were heard over the sombre fields
calling to each other, thin and clear. He muttered: “You could try to.
Unless you are thinking of somebody else.”
“Yes. I am thinking of somebody else, of someone who has nobody to
think of him but me.”
His shadowy form stepped out of her way, and suddenly leaned sideways
against the wooden support of the porch. And as she stood still,
surprised by this staggering movement, his voice spoke up in a tone
quite strange to her.
“Go in then. Go out of my sight—I thought you said nobody could love
you.”
She was passing him when suddenly he struck her as so forlorn that she
was inspired to say: “No one has ever loved me—not in that way—if
that’s what you mean. Nobody, would.”
He detached himself brusquely from the post, and she did not shrink; but
Mrs Fyne and the girls were already at the gate.
All he understood was that everything was not over yet. There was no
time to lose; Mrs Fyne and the girls had come in at the gate. He
whispered “Wait” with such authority (he was the son of Carleon Anthony,
the domestic autocrat) that it did arrest her for a moment, long enough
to hear him say that he could not be left like this to puzzle over her
nonsense all night. She was to slip down again into the garden later
on, as soon as she could do so without being heard. He would be there
waiting for her till—till daylight. She didn’t think he could go to
sleep, did she? And she had better come, or—he broke off on an
unfinished threat.
She vanished into the unlighted cottage just as Mrs Fyne came up to the
porch. Nervous, holding her breath in the darkness of the living-room,
she heard her best friend say: “You ought to have joined us, Roderick.”
And then: “Have you seen Miss Smith anywhere?”
Flora shuddered, expecting Anthony to break out into betraying
imprecations on Miss Smith’s head, and cause a painful and humiliating
explanation. She imagined him full of his mysterious ferocity. To her
great surprise, Anthony’s voice sounded very much as usual, with perhaps
a slight tinge of grimness. “Miss Smith! No. I’ve seen no Miss
Smith.”
Mrs Fyne seemed satisfied—and not much concerned really.
Flora, relieved, got clear away to her room upstairs, and shutting her
door quietly, dropped into a chair. She was used to reproaches, abuse,
to all sorts of wicked ill-usage—short of actual beating on her body.
Otherwise inexplicable angers had cut and slashed and trampled down her
youth without mercy—and mainly, it appeared, because she was the
financier de Barral’s daughter and also condemned to a degrading sort of
poverty through the action of treacherous men who had turned upon her
father in his hour of need. And she thought with the tenderest possible
affection of that upright figure buttoned up in a long frock-coat,
soft-voiced and having but little to say to his girl. She seemed to
feel his hand closed round hers. On his flying visits to Brighton he
would always walk hand in hand with her. People stared covertly at
them; the band was playing; and there was the sea—the blue gaiety of
the sea. They were quietly happy together.—It was all over!
An immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, and she nearly cried
aloud. That dread of what was before her which had been eating up her
courage slowly in the course of odious years, flamed up into an access
of panic, that sort of headlong panic which had already driven her out
twice to the top of the cliff-like quarry. She jumped up saying to
herself: “Why not now? At once! Yes. I’ll do it now—in the dark!”
The very horror of it seemed to give her additional resolution.
She came down the staircase quietly, and only on the point of opening
the door and because of the discovery that it was unfastened, she
remembered Captain Anthony’s threat to stay in the garden all night.
She hesitated. She did not understand the mood of that man clearly. He
was violent. But she had gone beyond the point where things matter.
What would he think of her coming down to him—as he would naturally
suppose. And even that didn’t matter. He could not despise her more
than she despised herself. She must have been light-headed because the
thought came into her mind that should he get into ungovernable fury
from disappointment, and perchance strangle her, it would be as good a
way to be done with it as any.
“You had that thought,” I exclaimed in wonder.
With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost painstaking precision
(her very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and
no more), she said that, yes, the thought came into her head. This
makes one shudder at the mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For
this was a thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come
from the depths of that sort of experience which she had not had, and
went far beyond a young girl’s possible conception of the strongest and
most veiled of human emotions.
“He was there, of course?” I said.
“Yes, he was there.” She saw him on the path directly she stepped
outside the porch. He was very still. It was as though he had been
standing there with his face to the door for hours.
Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tenderness, he must have
been ready for any extravagance of conduct. Knowing the profound
silence each night brought to that nook of the country, I could imagine
them having the feeling of being the only two people on the wide earth.
A row of six or seven lofty elms just across the road opposite the
cottage made the night more obscure in that little garden. If these two
could just make out each other that was all.
“Well! And were you very much terrified?” I asked.
She made me wait a little before she said, raising her eyes: “He was
gentleness itself.”
I noticed three abominable, drink-sodden loafers, sallow and dirty, who
had come to range themselves in a row within ten feet of us against the
front of the public-house. They stared at Flora de Barral’s back with
unseeing, mournful fixity. “Let’s move this way a little,” I proposed.
She turned at once and we made a few paces; not too far to take us out
of sight of the hotel door, but very nearly. I could just keep my eyes
on it. After all, I had not been so very long with the girl. If you
were to disentangle the words we actually exchanged from my comments you
would see that they were not so very many, including everything she had
so unexpectedly told me of her story. No, not so very many. And now it
seemed as though there would be no more. No! I could expect no more.
The confidence was wonderful enough in its nature as far as it went, and
perhaps not to have been expected from any other girl under the sun.
And I felt a little ashamed. The origin of our intimacy was too
gruesome. It was as if listening to her I had taken advantage of having
seen her poor bewildered, scared soul without its veils. But I was
curious, too; or, to render myself justice without false modesty—I was
anxious; anxious to know a little more.
I felt like a blackmailer all the same when I made my attempt with a
light-hearted remark.
“And so you gave up that walk you proposed to take?”
“Yes, I gave up the walk,” she said slowly before raising her downcast
eyes. When she did so it was with an extraordinary effect. It was like
catching sight of a piece of blue sky, of a stretch of open water. And
for a moment I understood the desire of that man to whom the sea and sky
of his solitary life had appeared suddenly incomplete without that
glance which seemed to belong to them both. He was not for nothing the
son of a poet. I looked into those unabashed eyes while the girl went
on, her demure appearance and precise tone changed to a very earnest
expression. Woman is various indeed.
“But I want you to understand, Mr,” she had actually to think of my
name.... “Mr Marlow, that I have written to Mrs Fyne that I haven’t
been—that I have done nothing to make Captain Anthony behave to me as
he had behaved. I haven’t. I haven’t. It isn’t my doing. It isn’t my
fault—if she likes to put it in that way. But she, with her ideas,
ought to understand that I couldn’t, that I couldn’t—I know she hates
me now. I think she never liked me. I think nobody ever cared for me.
I was told once nobody could care for me; and I think it is true. At
any rate I can’t forget it.”
Her abominable experience with the governess had implanted in her
unlucky breast a lasting doubt, an ineradicable suspicion of herself and
of others. I said:
“Remember, Miss de Barral, that to be fair you must trust a man
altogether—or not at all.”
She dropped her eyes suddenly. I thought I heard a faint sigh. I tried
to take a light tone again, and yet it seemed impossible to get off the
ground which gave me my standing with her.
“Mrs Fyne is absurd. She’s an excellent woman, but really you could
not be expected to throw away your chance of life simply that she might
cherish a good opinion of your memory. That would be excessive.”
“It was not of my life that I was thinking while Captain Anthony was—
was speaking to me,” said Flora de Barral with an effort.
I told her that she was wrong then. She ought to have been thinking of
her life, and not only of her life but of the life of the man who was
speaking to her too. She let me finish, then shook her head
impatiently.
“I mean—death.”
“Well,” I said, “when he stood before you there, outside the cottage, he
really stood between you and that. I have it out of your own mouth.
You can’t deny it.”
“If you will have it that he saved my life, then he has got it. It was
not for me. Oh no! It was not for me that I—It was not fear! There!”
She finished petulantly: “And you may just as well know it.”
She hung her head and swung the parasol slightly to and fro. I thought
a little.
“Do you know French, Miss de Barral?” I asked.
She made a sign with her head that she did, but without showing any
surprise at the question and without ceasing to swing her parasol.
“Well then, somehow or other I have the notion that Captain Anthony is
what the French call _un galant homme_. I should like to think he is
being treated as he deserves.”
The form of her lips (I could see them under the brim of her hat) was
suddenly altered into a line of seriousness. The parasol stopped
swinging.
“I have given him what he wanted—that’s myself,” she said without a
tremor and with a striking dignity of tone.
Impressed by the manner and the directness of the words, I hesitated for
a moment what to say. Then made up my mind to clear up the point.
“And you have got what you wanted? Is that it?”
The daughter of the egregious financier de Barral did not answer at once
this question going to the heart of things. Then raising her head and
gazing wistfully across the street noisy with the endless transit of
innumerable bargains, she said with intense gravity:
“He has been most generous.”
I was pleased to hear these words. Not that I doubted the infatuation
of Roderick Anthony, but I was pleased to hear something which proved
that she was sensible and open to the sentiment of gratitude which in
this case was significant. In the face of man’s desire a girl is
excusable if she thinks herself priceless. I mean a girl of our
civilisation which has established a dithyrambic phraseology for the
expression of love. A man in love will accept any convention exalting
the object of his passion and in this indirect way his passion itself.
In what way the captain of the ship _Ferndale_ gave proofs of lover-like
lavishness I could not guess very well. But I was glad she was
appreciative. It is lucky that small things please women. And it is
not silly of them to be thus pleased. It is in small things that the
deepest loyalty, that which they need most, the loyalty of the passing
moment, is best expressed.
She had remained thoughtful, letting her deep motionless eyes rest on
the streaming jumble of traffic. Suddenly she said:
“And I wanted to ask you—I was really glad when I saw you actually
here. Who would have expected you here, at this spot, before this
hotel! I certainly never.... You see it meant a lot to me. You are
the only person who knows ... who knows for certain....”
“Knows what?” I said, not discovering at first what she had in her
mind. Then I saw it. “Why can’t you leave that alone?” I
remonstrated, rather annoyed at the invidious position she was forcing
on me in a sense. “It’s true that I was the only person to see,” I
added. “But, as it happens, after your mysterious disappearance I told
the Fynes the story of our meeting.”
Her eyes raised to mine had an expression of dreamy, unfathomable
candour, if I dare say so. And if you wonder what I mean I can only say
that I have seen the sea wear such an expression on one or two occasions
shortly before sunrise on a calm, fresh day. She said as if meditating
aloud that she supposed the Fynes were not likely to talk about that.
She couldn’t imagine any connection in which.... Why should they?
As her tone had become interrogatory I assented. “To be sure. There’s
no reason whatever”—thinking to myself that they would be more likely
indeed to keep quiet about it. They had other things to talk of. And
then remembering little Fyne stuck upstairs for an unconscionable time,
enough to blurt out everything he ever knew in his life, I reflected
that he would assume naturally that Captain Anthony had nothing to learn
from him about Flora de Barral. It had been up to now my assumption
too. I saw my mistake. The sincerest of women will make no unnecessary
confidences to a man. And this is as it should be.
“No—no!” I said reassuringly. “It’s most unlikely. Are you much
concerned?”
“Well, you see, when I came down,” she said again in that precise demure
tone, “when I came down—into the garden Captain Anthony
misunderstood—”
“Of course he would. Men are so conceited,” I said.
I saw it well enough that he must have thought she had come down to him.
What else could he have thought? And then he had been “gentleness
itself.” A new experience for that poor, delicate, and yet so resisting
creature. Gentleness in passion! What could have been more seductive
to the scared, starved heart of that girl? Perhaps had he been violent,
she might have told him that what she came down to keep was the tryst of
death—not of love. It occurred to me as I looked at her, young,
fragile in aspect, and intensely alive in her quietness, that perhaps
she did not know herself then what sort of tryst she was coming down to
keep.
She smiled faintly, almost awkwardly as if she were totally unused to
smiling, at my cheap jocularity. Then she said with that forced
precision, a sort of conscious primness:
“I didn’t want him to know.”
I approved heartily. Quite right. Much better. Let him ever remain
under his misapprehension which was so much more flattering for him.
I tried to keep it in the tone of comedy; but she was, I believe, too
simple to understand my intention. She went on, looking down.
“Oh! You think so? When I saw you I didn’t know why you were here. I
was glad when you spoke to me because this is exactly what I wanted to
ask you for. I wanted to ask you if you ever meet Captain Anthony—by
any chance—anywhere—you are a sailor too, are you not?—that you,
would never mention—never—that—that you had seen me over there.”
“My dear young lady,” I cried, horror-struck at the supposition. “Why
should I? What makes you think I should dream of....”
She had raised her head at my vehemence. She did not understand it.
The world had treated her so dishonourably that she had no notion even
of what mere decency of feeling is like. It was not her fault. Indeed,
I don’t know why she should have put her trust in anybody’s promises.
But I thought it would be better to promise. So I assured her that she
could depend on my absolute silence.
“I am not likely to ever set eyes on Captain Anthony,” I added with
conviction—as a further guarantee.
She accepted my assurance in silence, without a sign. Her gravity had
in it something acute, perhaps because of that chin. While we were
still looking at each other she declared:
“There’s no deception in it really. I want you to believe that if I am
here, like this, to-day, it is not from fear. It is not!”
“I quite understand,” I said. But her firm yet self-conscious gaze
became doubtful. “I do,” I insisted. “I understand perfectly that it
was not of death that you were afraid.”
She lowered her eyes slowly, and I went on:
“As to life, that’s another thing. And I don’t know that one ought to
blame you very much—though it seemed rather an excessive step. I
wonder now if it isn’t the ugliness rather than the pain of the struggle
which....”
She shuddered visibly: “But I do blame myself,” she exclaimed with
feeling. “I am ashamed.” And, dropping her head, she looked in a
moment the very picture of remorse and shame.
“Well, you will be going away from all its horrors,” I said. “And
surely you are not afraid of the sea. You are a sailor’s granddaughter,
I understand.”
She sighed deeply. She remembered her grandfather only a little. He
was a clean-shaven man with a ruddy complexion and long, perfectly white
hair. He used to take her on his knee, and putting his face near hers,
talk to her in loving whispers. If only he were alive now....
She remained silent for a while.
“Aren’t you anxious to see the ship?” I asked.
She lowered her head still more so that I could not see anything of her
face.
“I don’t know,” she murmured.
I had already the suspicion that she did not know her own feelings. All
this work of the merest chance had been so unexpected, so sudden. And
she had nothing to fall back upon, no experience but such as to shake
her belief in every human being. She was dreadfully and pitifully
forlorn. It was almost in order to comfort my own depression that I
remarked cheerfully:
“Well, I know of somebody who must be growing extremely anxious to see
you.”
“I am before my time,” she confessed simply, rousing herself. “I had
nothing to do. So I came out.”
I had the sudden vision of a shabby, lonely little room at the other end
of the town. It had grown intolerable to her restlessness. The mere
thought of it oppressed her. Flora de Barral was looking frankly at her
chance confidant.
“And I came this way,” she went on. “I appointed the time myself
yesterday, but Captain Anthony would not have minded. He told me he was
going to look over some business papers till I came.”
The idea of the son of the poet, the rescuer of the most forlorn damsel
of modern times, the man of violence, gentleness and generosity, sitting
up to his neck in ship’s accounts amused me. “I am sure he would not
have minded,” I said, smiling. But the girl’s stare was sombre, her
thin white face seemed pathetically careworn.
“I can hardly believe yet,” she murmured anxiously.
“It’s quite real. Never fear,” I said encouragingly, but had to change
my tone at once. “You had better go down that way a little,” I directed
her abruptly.
I had seen Fyne come striding out of the hotel door. The intelligent
girl, without staying to ask questions, walked away from me quietly down
one street while I hurried on to meet Fyne coming up the other at his
efficient pedestrian gait. My object was to stop him getting as far as
the corner. He must have been thinking too hard to be aware of his
surroundings. I put myself in his way, and he nearly walked into me.
“Hallo!” I said.
His surprise was extreme. “You here! You don’t mean to say you have
been waiting for me?”
I said negligently that I had been detained by unexpected business in
the neighbourhood, and thus happened to catch sight of him coming out.
He stared at me with solemn distraction, obviously thinking of something
else. I suggested that he had better take the next city-ward tram-car.
He was inattentive, and I perceived that he was profoundly perturbed.
As Miss de Barral (she had moved out of sight) could not possibly
approach the hotel door as long as we remained where we were I proposed
that we should wait for the car on the other side of the street. He
obeyed rather the slight touch on his arm than my words, and while we
were crossing the wide roadway in the midst of the lumbering wheeled
traffic, he exclaimed in his deep tone, “I don’t know which of these two
is more mad than the other!”
“Really!” I said, pulling him forward from under the noses of two
enormous sleepy-headed cart-horses. He skipped wildly out of the way
and up on the curbstone with a purely instinctive precision; his mind
had nothing to do with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and
while in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he continued to
relieve his outraged feelings.
“You would never believe! They _are_ mad!”
I took care to place myself in such a position that to face me he had to
turn his back on the hotel across the road. I believe he was glad I was
there to talk to. But I thought there was some misapprehension in the
first statement he shot out at me without loss of time, that Captain
Anthony had been glad to see him. It was indeed difficult to believe
that, directly he opened the door, his wife’s “sailor-brother” had
positively shouted: “Oh, it’s you! The very man I wanted to see.”
“I found him sitting there,” went on Fyne impressively in his
effortless, grave chest voice, “drafting his will.”
This was unexpected, but I preserved a non-committal attitude, knowing
full well that our actions in themselves are neither mad nor sane. But
I did not see what there was to be excited about. And Fyne was
distinctly excited. I understood it better when I learned that the
captain of the _Ferndale_ wanted little Fyne to be one of the trustees.
He was leaving everything to his wife. Naturally, a request which
involved him into sanctioning in a way a proceeding which he had been
sent by his wife to oppose, must have appeared sufficiently mad to Fyne.
“Me! Me, of all people in the world!” he repeated portentously. But I
could see that he was frightened. Such want of tact!
“He knew I came from his sister. You don’t put a man into such an
awkward position,” complained Fyne. “It made me speak much more
strongly against all this very painful business than I would have had
the heart to do otherwise.”
I pointed out to him concisely, and keeping my eyes on the door of the
hotel, that he and his wife were the only bond with the land Captain
Anthony had. Who else could he have asked?
“I explained to him that he was breaking this bond,” declared Fyne
solemnly. “Breaking it once for all. And for what—for what?”
He glared at me. I could perhaps have given him an inkling for what,
but I said nothing. He started again:
“My wife assures me that the girl does not love him a bit. She goes by
that letter she received from her. There is a passage in it where she
practically admits that she was quite unscrupulous in accepting this
offer of marriage, but says to my wife that she supposes she, my wife,
will not blame her—as it was in self-defence. My wife has her own
ideas, but this is an outrageous misapprehension of her views.
Outrageous.”
The good little man paused and then added weightily:
“I didn’t tell that to my brother-in-law—I mean, my wife’s views.”
“No,” I said. “What would have been the good?”
“It’s positive infatuation,” agreed, little Fyne, in the tone as though
he had made an awful discovery. “I have never seen anything so hopeless
and inexplicable in my life. I—I felt quite frightened and sorry,” he
added, while I looked at him curiously asking myself whether this
excellent civil servant and notable pedestrian had felt the breath of a
great and fatal love-spell passing him by in the room of that East-End
hotel. He did look for a moment as though he had seen a ghost, an
other-world thing. But that look vanished instantaneously, and he
nodded at me with mere exasperation at something quite of this world—
whatever it was. “It’s a bad business. My brother-in-law knows nothing
of women,” he cried with an air of profound, experienced wisdom.
What he imagined he knew of women himself I can’t tell. I did not know
anything of the opportunities he might have had. But this is a subject
which, if approached with undue solemnity, is apt to elude one’s grasp
entirely. No doubt Fyne knew something of a woman who was Captain
Anthony’s sister. But that, admittedly, had been a very solemn study.
I smiled at him gently, and as if encouraged or provoked, he completed
his thought rather explosively.
“And that girl understands nothing.... It’s sheer lunacy.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “whether the circumstances of isolation at sea
would be any alleviation to the danger. But it’s certain that they
shall have the opportunity to learn everything about each other in a
lonely _tête-à-tête_.”
“But dash it all,” he cried in hollow accents which at the same time had
the tone of bitter irony—I had never before heard a sound so quaintly
ugly and almost horrible—“You forget Mr Smith.”
“What Mr Smith?” I asked innocently.
Fyne made an extraordinary simiesque grimace. I believe it was quite
involuntary, but you know that a grave, much-lined, shaven countenance
when distorted in an unusual way is extremely apelike. It was a
surprising sight, and rendered me not only speechless but stopped the
progress of my thought completely. I must have presented a remarkably
imbecile appearance.
“My brother-in-law considered it amusing to chaff me about us
introducing the girl as Miss Smith,” said Fyne, going surly in a moment.
“He said that perhaps if he had heard her real name from the first it
might have restrained him. As it was, he made the discovery too late.
Asked me to tell Zoe this together with a lot more nonsense.”
Fyne gave me the impression of having escaped from a man inspired by a
grimly playful ebullition of high spirits. It must have been most
distasteful to him; and his solemnity got damaged somehow in the
process, I perceived. There were holes in it through which I could see
a new, an unknown Fyne.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he went on, “but she looks upon her father
exclusively as a victim. I don’t know,” he burst out suddenly through
an enormous rent in his solemnity, “if she thinks him absolutely a
saint, but she certainly imagines him to be a martyr.”
It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, the prison,
that you may forget people whom are put there as though they were dead.
One needn’t worry about them. Nothing can happen to them that you can
help. They can do nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They
come out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to themselves
or anyone else. I had completely forgotten the financier de Barral.
The girl for me was an orphan, but now I perceived suddenly the force of
Fyne’s qualifying statement, “to a certain extent.” It would have been
infinitely more kind all round for the law to have shot, beheaded,
strangled, or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a
danger to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to
take care of itself. But I observed to Fyne that, however insane was
the view she held, one could not declare the girl mad on that account.
“So she thinks of her father—does she? I suppose she would appear to
us saner if she thought only of herself.”
“I am positive,” Fyne said earnestly, “that she went and made desperate
eyes at Anthony....”
“Oh come!” I interrupted. “You haven’t seen her make eyes. You don’t
know the colour of her eyes.”
“Very well! It don’t matter. But it could hardly have come to that if
she hadn’t.... It’s all one, though. I tell you she has led him on, or
accepted him, if you like, simply because she was thinking of her
father. She doesn’t care a bit about Anthony, I believe. She cares for
no one. Never cared for anyone. Ask Zoe. For myself I don’t blame
her,” added Fyne, giving me another view of unsuspected things through
the rags and tatters of his damaged solemnity. “No! by heavens, I don’t
blame her—the poor devil.”
I agreed with him silently. I suppose affections are, in a sense, to be
learned. If there exists a native spark of love in all of us, it must
be fanned while we are young. Hers, if she ever had it, had been
drenched in as ugly a lot of corrosive liquid as could be imagined. But
I was surprised at Fyne obscurely feeling this.
“She loves no one except that preposterous advertising shark,” he
pursued venomously, but in a more deliberate manner. “And Anthony knows
it.”
“Does he?” I said doubtfully.
“She’s quite capable of having told him herself,” affirmed Fyne, with
amazing insight. “But whether or no, _I’ve_ told him.”
“You did? From Mrs Fyne, of course.”
Fyne only blinked owlishly at this piece of my insight.
“And how did Captain Anthony receive this interesting information?” I
asked further.
“Most improperly,” said Fyne, who really was in a state in which he
didn’t mind what he blurted out. “He isn’t himself. He begged me to
tell his sister that he offered no remarks on her conduct. Very
improper and inconsequent. He said—I was tired of this wrangling. I
told him I made allowances for the state of excitement he was in.”
“You know, Fyne,” I said, “a man in jail seems to me such an incredible,
cruel, nightmarish sort of thing that I can hardly believe in his
existence. Certainly not in relation to any other existences.”
“But dash it all,” cried Fyne, “he isn’t shut up for life. They are
going to let him out. He’s coming out! That’s the whole trouble. What
is he coming out to, I want to know? It seems a more cruel business
than the shutting him up was. This has been the worry for weeks. Do
you see now?”
I saw, all sorts of things! Immediately before me I saw the excitement
of little Fyne—mere food for wonder. Further off, in a sort of gloom
and beyond the light of day and the movement of the street, I saw the
figure of a man, stiff like a ramrod, moving with small steps, a slight
girlish figure by his side. And the gloom was like the gloom of
villainous slums, of misery, of wretchedness, of a starved and degraded
existence. It was a relief that I could see only their shabby hopeless
backs. He was an awful ghost. But indeed to call him a ghost was only
a refinement of polite speech, and a manner of concealing one’s terror
of such things. Prisons are wonderful contrivances. Shut—open. Very
neat. Shut—open. And out comes some sort of corpse, to wander awfully
in a world in which it has no possible connections and carrying with it
the appalling tainted atmosphere of its silent abode. Marvellous
arrangement. It works automatically, and, when you look at it, the
perfection makes you sick; which for a mere mechanism is no mean
triumph. Sick and scared. It had nearly scared that poor girl to her
death. Fancy having to take such a thing by the hand! Now I understood
the remorseful strain I had detected in her speeches.
“By Jove!” I said. “They are about to let him out! I never thought of
that.”
Fyne was contemptuous either of me or of things at large.
“You didn’t suppose he was to be kept in jail for life?”
At that moment I caught sight of Flora de Barral at the junction of the
two streets. Then some vehicles following each other in quick
succession hid from my sight the black slight figure with just a touch
of colour in her hat. She was walking slowly; and it might have been
caution or reluctance. While listening to Fyne I stared hard past his
shoulder trying to catch sight of her again. He was going on with
positive heat, the rags of his solemnity dropping off him at every
second sentence.
That was just it. His wife and he had been perfectly aware of it. Of
course the girl never talked of her father with Mrs Fyne. I suppose
with her theory of innocence she found it difficult. But she must have
been thinking of it day and night. What to do with him? Where to go?
How to keep body and soul together? He had never made any friends. The
only relations were the atrocious East-End cousins. We know what they
were. Nothing but wretchedness, whichever way she turned in an unjust
and prejudiced world. And to look at him helplessly she felt would be
too much for her.
I won’t say I was thinking these thoughts. It was not necessary. This
complete knowledge was in my head while I stared hard across the wide
road, so hard that I failed to hear little Fyne till he raised his deep
voice indignantly.
“I don’t blame the girl,” he was saying. “He is infatuated with her.
Anybody can see that. Why she should have got such a hold on him I
can’t understand. She said ‘Yes’ to him only for the sake of that
fatuous, swindling father of hers. It’s perfectly plain if one thinks
it over a moment. One needn’t even think of it. We have it under her
own hand. In that letter to my wife she says she has acted
unscrupulously. She has owned up, then, for what else can it mean, I
should like to know. And so they are to be married before that old
idiot comes out.—He will be surprised,” commented Fyne suddenly in a
strangely malignant tone. “He shall be met at the jail door by a Mrs
Anthony, a Mrs Captain Anthony. Very pleasant for Zoe. And for all I
know, my brother-in-law means to turn up dutifully too. A little family
event. It’s extremely pleasant to think of. Delightful. A charming
family party. We three against the world—and all that sort of thing.
And what for. For a girl that doesn’t care twopence for him.”
The demon of bitterness had entered into little Fyne. He amazed me as
though he had changed his skin from white to black. It was quite as
wonderful. And he kept it up, too.
“Luckily there are some advantages in the—the profession of a sailor.
As long as they defy the world away at sea somewhere eighteen thousand
miles from here, I don’t mind so much. I wonder what that interesting
old party will say. He will have another surprise. They mean to drag
him along with them on board the ship straight away. Rescue work. Just
think of Roderick Anthony, the son of a gentleman, after all....”
He gave me a little shock. I thought he was going to say the “son of
the poet” as usual; but his mind was not running on such vanities now.
His unspoken thought must have gone on “and uncle of my girls.” I
suspect that he had been roughly handled by Captain Anthony up there,
and the resentment gave a tremendous fillip to the slow play of his
wits. Those men of sober fancy, when anything rouses their imaginative
faculty, are very thorough. “Just think!” he cried. “The three of them
crowded into a four-wheeler, and Anthony sitting deferentially opposite
that astonished old jail-bird!”
The good little man laughed. An improper sound it was to come from his
manly chest; and what made it worse was the thought that for the least
thing, by a mere hair’s breadth, he might have taken this affair
sentimentally. But clearly Anthony was no diplomatist. His
brother-in-law must have appeared to him, to use the language of shore
people, a perfect philistine with a heart like a flint. What Fyne
precisely meant by “wrangling” I don’t know, but I had no doubt that
these two had “wrangled” to a profoundly disturbing extent. How much
the other was affected I could not even imagine; but the man before me
was quite amazingly upset.
“In a four-wheeler! Take him on board!” I muttered, startled by the
change in Fyne.
“That’s the plan—nothing less. If I am to believe what I have been
told, his feet will scarcely touch the ground between the prison-gates
and the deck of that ship.”
The transformed Fyne spoke in a forcibly lowered tone which I heard
without difficulty. The rumbling, composite noises of the street were
hushed for a moment, during one of these sudden breaks in the traffic as
if the stream of commerce had dried up at its source. Having an
unobstructed view past Fyne’s shoulder, I was astonished to see that the
girl was still there. I thought she had gone up long before. But there
was her black slender figure, her white face under the roses of her hat.
She stood on the edge of the pavement as people stand on the bank of a
stream, very still, as if waiting—or as if unconscious of where she
was. The three dismal, sodden loafers (I could see them too; they
hadn’t budged an inch) seemed to me to be watching her. Which was
horrible.
Meantime Fyne was telling me rather remarkable things—for him. He
declared first it was a mercy in a sense. Then he asked me if it were
not real madness, to saddle one’s existence with such a perpetual
reminder. The daily existence. The isolated sea-bound existence. To
bring such an additional strain into the solitude already trying enough
for two people was the craziest thing. Undesirable relations were bad
enough on shore. One could cut them or at least forget their existence
now and then. He himself was preparing to forget his brother-in-law’s
existence as much as possible.
That was the general sense of his remarks, not his exact words. I
thought that his wife’s brother’s existence had never been very
embarrassing to him but that now of course he would have to abstain from
his allusions to the “son of the poet—you know.” I said “yes, yes,” in
the pauses because I did not want him to turn round; and all the time I
was watching the girl intently. I thought I knew now what she meant
with her “He was most generous.” Yes. Generosity of character may
carry a man through any situation. But why didn’t she go then to her
generous man? Why stand there as if clinging to this solid earth which
she surely hated as one must hate the place where one has been
tormented, hopeless, unhappy? Suddenly she stirred. Was she going to
cross over? No. She turned and began to walk slowly close to the
curbstone, reminding me of the time when I discovered her walking near
the edge of a ninety-foot sheer drop. It was the same impression, the
same carriage, straight, slim, with rigid head and the two hands hanging
lightly clasped in front—only now a small sunshade was dangling from
them. I saw something fateful in that deliberate pacing towards the
inconspicuous door with the words _Hotel Entrance_ on the glass-panels.
She was abreast of it now and I thought that she would stop again; but
no! She swerved rigidly—at the moment there was no one near her; she
had that bit of pavement to herself—with inanimate slowness as if moved
by something outside herself.
“A confounded convict,” Fyne burst out.
With the sound of that word offending my ears I saw the girl extend her
arm, push the door open a little way and glide in. I saw plainly that
movement, the hand put out in advance with the gesture of a
sleep-walker.
She had vanished, her black figure had melted in the darkness of the
open door. For some time Fyne said nothing; and I thought of the girl
going upstairs, appearing before the man. Were they looking at each
other in silence and feeling they were alone in the world as lovers
should at the moment of meeting? But that fine forgetfulness was surely
impossible to Anthony the seaman directly after the wrangling interview
with Fyne the emissary of an order of things which stops at the edge of
the sea. How much he was disturbed I couldn’t tell because I did not
know what that impetuous lover had had to listen to.
“Going to take the old fellow to sea with them,” I said. “Well I really
don’t see what else they could have done with him. You told your
brother-in-law what you thought of it? I wonder how he took it.”
“Very improperly,” repeated Fyne. “His manner was offensive, derisive,
from the first. I don’t mean he was actually rude in words. Hang it
all, I am not a contemptible ass. But he was exulting at having got
hold of a miserable girl.”
“It is pretty certain that she will be much less poor and miserable,” I
murmured.
It looked as if the exultation of Captain Anthony had got on Fyne’s
nerves. “I told the fellow very plainly that he was abominably selfish
in this,” he affirmed unexpectedly.
“You did! Selfish!” I said rather taken aback. “But what if the girl
thought that, on the contrary, he was most generous.”
“What do you know about it,” growled Fyne. The rents and slashes of his
solemnity were closing up gradually but it was going to be a surly
solemnity. “Generosity! I am disposed to give it another name. No.
Not folly,” he shot out at me as though I had meant to interrupt him.
“Still another. Something worse. I need not tell you what it is,” he
added with grim meaning.
“Certainly. You needn’t—unless you like,” I said blankly. Little Fyne
had never interested me so much since the beginning of the de
Barral-Anthony affair when I first perceived possibilities in him. The
possibilities of dull men are exciting because when they happen they
suggest legendary cases of “possession,” not exactly by the devil but,
anyhow, by a strange spirit.
“I told him it was a shame,” said Fyne. “Even if the girl did make eyes
at him—but I think with you that she did not. Yes! A shame to take
advantage of a girl’s distress—a girl that does not love him in the
least.”
“You think it’s so bad as that?” I said. “Because you know I don’t.”
“What can you think about it,” he retorted on me with a solemn stare.
“I go by her letter to my wife.”
“Ah! that famous letter. But you haven’t actually read it,” I said.
“No, but my wife told me. Of course it was a most improper sort of
letter to write considering the circumstances. It pained Mrs Fyne to
discover how thoroughly she had been misunderstood. But what is written
is not all. It’s what my wife could read between the lines. She says
that the girl is really terrified at heart.”
“She had not much in life to give her any very special courage for it,
or any great confidence in mankind. That’s very true. But this seems
an exaggeration.”
“I should like to know what reasons you have to say that,” asked Fyne
with offended solemnity. “I really don’t see any. But I had sufficient
authority to tell my brother-in-law that if he thought he was going to
do something chivalrous and fine he was mistaken. I can see very well
that he will do everything she asks him to do—but, all the same, it is
rather a pitiless transaction.”
For a moment I felt it might be so. Fyne caught sight of an approaching
tram-car and stepped out on the road to meet it. “Have you a more
compassionate scheme ready?” I called after him. He made no answer,
clambered on to the rear platform, and only then looked back. We
exchanged a perfunctory wave of the hand. We also looked at each other,
he rather angrily, I fancy, and I with wonder. I may also mention that
it was for the last time. From that day I never set eyes on the Fynes.
As usual the unexpected happened to me. It had nothing to do with Flora
de Barral. The fact is that I went away. My call was not like her
call. Mine was not urged on me with passionate vehemence or tender
gentleness made all the finer and more compelling by the allurements of
generosity which is a virtue as mysterious as any other but having a
glamour of its own. No, it was just a prosaic offer of employment on
rather good terms which, with a sudden sense of having wasted my time on
shore long enough, I accepted without misgivings. And once started out
of my indolence I went, as my habit was, very, very far away and for a
long, long time. Which is another proof of my indolence. How far Flora
went I can’t say. But I will tell you my idea: my idea is that she went
as far as she was able—as far as she could bear it—as far as she had
to....