Chance by Joseph Conrad (free novel 24 .TXT) 📖

She was not intelligent enough for that.  She had no knowledge of the world.  She had got hold of words as a child might get hold of some poisonous pills and play with them for “dear, tiny little marbles.”  No!  The domestic-slave daughter of Carleon Anthony and the little Fyne of the Civil Service (that flower of civilization) were not intelligent people.  They were commonplace, earnest, without smiles and without guile.  But he had his solemnities and she had her reveries, her lurid, violent, crude reveries.  And I thought with some sadness that all these revolts and indignations, all these protests, revulsions of feeling, pangs of suffering and of rage, expressed but the uneasiness of sensual beings trying for their share in the joys of form, colour, sensations—the only riches of our world of senses.  A poet may be a simple being but he is bound to be various and full of wiles, ingenious and irritable.  I reflected on the variety of ways the ingenuity of the late bard of civilization would be able to invent for the tormenting of his dependants.  Poets not being generally foresighted in practical affairs, no vision of consequences would restrain him.  Yes.  The Fynes were excellent people, but Mrs. Fyne wasn’t the daughter of a domestic tyrant for nothing.  There were no limits to her revolt.  But they were excellent people.  It was clear that they must have been extremely good to that girl whose position in the world seemed somewhat difficult, with her face of a victim, her obvious lack of resignation and the bizarre status of orphan “to a certain extent.”

Such were my thoughts, but in truth I soon ceased to trouble about all these people.  I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind an awful smell.  I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the dark.  My slumbers—I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise, confound it, is that it helps our natural callousness—my slumbers were deep, dreamless and refreshing.

My appetite at breakfast was not affected by my ignorance of the facts, motives, events and conclusions.  I think that to understand everything is not good for the intellect.  A well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy.  But Mrs. Fyne’s individualist woman-doctrine, naïvely unscrupulous, flitted through my mind.  The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends’ heads!  Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent mother (of the strict governess type), she was as guileless of consequences as any determinist philosopher ever was.

As to honour—you know—it’s a very fine medieval inheritance which women never got hold of.  It wasn’t theirs.  Since it may be laid as a general principle that women always get what they want we must suppose they didn’t want it.  In addition they are devoid of decency.  I mean masculine decency.  Cautiousness too is foreign to them—the heavy reasonable cautiousness which is our glory.  And if they had it they would make of it a thing of passion, so that its own mother—I mean the mother of cautiousness—wouldn’t recognize it.  Prudence with them is a matter of thrill like the rest of sublunary contrivances.  “Sensation at any cost,” is their secret device.  All the virtues are not enough for them; they want also all the crimes for their own.  And why?  Because in such completeness there is power—the kind of thrill they love most . . . ”

“Do you expect me to agree to all this?” I interrupted.

“No, it isn’t necessary,” said Marlow, feeling the check to his eloquence but with a great effort at amiability.  “You need not even understand it.  I continue: with such disposition what prevents women—to use the phrase an old boatswain of my acquaintance applied descriptively to his captain—what prevents them from “coming on deck and playing hell with the ship” generally, is that something in them precise and mysterious, acting both as restraint and as inspiration; their femininity in short which they think they can get rid of by trying hard, but can’t, and never will.  Therefore we may conclude that, for all their enterprises, the world is and remains safe enough.  Feeling, in my character of a lover of peace, soothed by that conclusion I prepared myself to enjoy a fine day.

And it was a fine day; a delicious day, with the horror of the Infinite veiled by the splendid tent of blue; a day innocently bright like a child with a washed face, fresh like an innocent young girl, suave in welcoming one’s respects like—like a Roman prelate.  I love such days.  They are perfection for remaining indoors.  And I enjoyed it temperamentally in a chair, my feet up on the sill of the open window, a book in my hands and the murmured harmonies of wind and sun in my heart making an accompaniment to the rhythms of my author.  Then looking up from the page I saw outside a pair of grey eyes thatched by ragged yellowy-white eyebrows gazing at me solemnly over the toes of my slippers.  There was a grave, furrowed brow surmounting that portentous gaze, a brown tweed cap set far back on the perspiring head.

“Come inside,” I cried as heartily as my sinking heart would permit.

After a short but severe scuffle with his dog at the outer door, Fyne entered.  I treated him without ceremony and only waved my hand towards a chair.  Even before he sat down he gasped out:

“We’ve heard—midday post.”

Gasped out!  The grave, immovable Fyne of the Civil Service, gasped!  This was enough, you’ll admit, to cause me to put my feet to the ground swiftly.  That fellow was always making me do things in subtle discord with my meditative temperament.  No wonder that I had but a qualified liking for him.  I said with just a suspicion of jeering tone:

“Of course.  I told you last night on the road that it was a farce we were engaged in.”

He made the little parlour resound to its foundations with a note of anger positively sepulchral in its depth of tone.  “Farce be hanged!  She has bolted with my wife’s brother, Captain Anthony.”  This outburst was followed by complete subsidence.  He faltered miserably as he added from force of habit: “The son of the poet, you know.”

A silence fell.  Fyne’s several expressions were so many examples of varied consistency.  This was the discomfiture of solemnity.  My interest of course was revived.

“But hold on,” I said.  “They didn’t go together.  Is it a suspicion or does she actually say that . . . ”

“She has gone after him,” stated Fyne in comminatory tones.  “By previous arrangement.  She confesses that much.”

He added that it was very shocking.  I asked him whether he should have preferred them going off together; and on what ground he based that preference.  This was sheer fun for me in regard of the fact that Fyne’s too was a runaway match, which even got into the papers in its time, because the late indignant poet had no discretion and sought to avenge this outrage publicly in some absurd way before a bewigged judge.  The dejected gesture of little Fyne’s hand disarmed my mocking mood.  But I could not help expressing my surprise that Mrs. Fyne had not detected at once what was brewing.  Women were supposed to have an unerring eye.

He told me that his wife had been very much engaged in a certain work.  I had always wondered how she occupied her time.  It was in writing.  Like her husband she too published a little book.  Much later on I came upon it.  It had nothing to do with pedestrianism.  It was a sort of hand-book for women with grievances (and all women had them), a sort of compendious theory and practice of feminine free morality.  It made you laugh at its transparent simplicity.  But that authorship was revealed to me much later.  I didn’t of course ask Fyne what work his wife was engaged on; but I marvelled to myself at her complete ignorance of the world, of her own sex and of the other kind of sinners.  Yet, where could she have got any experience?  Her father had kept her strictly cloistered.  Marriage with Fyne was certainly a change but only to another kind of claustration.  You may tell me that the ordinary powers of observation ought to have been enough.  Why, yes!  But, then, as she had set up for a guide and teacher, there was nothing surprising for me in the discovery that she was blind.  That’s quite in order.  She was a profoundly innocent person; only it would not have been proper to tell her husband so.

CHAPTER THREE—THRIFT—AND THE CHILD

But there was nothing improper in my observing to Fyne that, last night, Mrs. Fyne seemed to have some idea where that enterprising young lady had gone to.  Fyne shook his head.  No; his wife had been by no means so certain as she had pretended to be.  She merely had her reasons to think, to hope, that the girl might have taken a room somewhere in London, had buried herself in town—in readiness or perhaps in horror of the approaching day—

He ceased and sat solemnly dejected, in a brown study.  “What day?” I asked at last; but he did not hear me apparently.  He diffused such portentous gloom into the atmosphere that I lost patience with him.

“What on earth are you so dismal about?” I cried, being genuinely surprised and puzzled.  “One would think the girl was a state prisoner under your care.”

And suddenly I became still more surprised at myself, at the way I had somehow taken for granted things which did appear queer when one thought them out.

“But why this secrecy?  Why did they elope—if it is an elopement?  Was the girl afraid of your wife?  And your brother-in-law?  What on earth possesses him to make a clandestine match of it?  Was he afraid of your wife too?”

Fyne made an effort to rouse himself.

“Of course my brother-in-law, Captain Anthony, the son of . . . ”  He checked himself as if trying to break a bad habit.  “He would be persuaded by her.  We have been most friendly to the girl!”

“She struck me as a foolish and inconsiderate little person.  But why should you and your wife take to heart so strongly mere folly—or even a want of consideration?”

“It’s the most unscrupulous action,” declared Fyne weightily—and sighed.

“I suppose she is poor,” I observed after a short silence.  “But after all . . . ”

“You don’t know who she is.”  Fyne had regained his average solemnity.

I confessed that I had not caught her name when his wife had introduced us to each other.  “It was something beginning with an S- wasn’t it?”  And then with the utmost coolness Fyne remarked that it did not matter.  The name was not her name.

“Do you mean to say that you made a young lady known to me under a false name?” I asked, with the amused feeling that the days of wonders and portents had not passed away yet.  That the eminently serious Fynes should do such an exceptional thing was simply staggering.  With a more hasty enunciation than usual little Fyne was sure that I would not demand an apology for this irregularity if I knew what her real name was.  A sort of warmth crept into his deep tone.

“We have tried to befriend that girl in every way.  She is the daughter and only child of de Barral.”

Evidently he expected to produce a sensation; he kept his eyes fixed upon me prepared for some sign of it.  But I merely returned his intense, awaiting gaze.  For a time we stared at each other.  Conscious of being reprehensibly dense I groped in the darkness of my mind: De Barral, De Barral—and all at once noise and light burst on me as if a window of my memory had been suddenly flung open on a street in the City.  De Barral!  But could it