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

they may be credited with any mind at all.  The rather numerous men of the family were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose.  None in that grubbing lot had enough humanity to leave her alone.  At first she was made much of, in an offensively patronising manner.  The connection with the great de Barral gratified their vanity even in the moment of the smash.  They dragged her to their place of worship, whatever it might have been, where the congregation stared at her, and they gave parties to other beings like themselves at which they exhibited her with ignoble self-satisfaction.  She did not know how to defend herself from their importunities, insolence and exigencies.  She lived amongst them, a passive victim, quivering in every nerve, as if she were flayed.  After the trial her position became still worse.  On the least occasion and even on no occasions at all she was scolded, or else taunted with her dependence.  The pious girl lectured her on her defects, the romping girl teased her with contemptuous references to her accomplishments, and was always trying to pick insensate quarrels with her about some “fellow” or other.  The mother backed up her girls invariably, adding her own silly, wounding remarks.  I must say they were probably not aware of the ugliness of their conduct.  They were nasty amongst themselves as a matter of course; their disputes were nauseating in origin, in manner, in the spirit of mean selfishness.  These women, too, seemed to enjoy greatly any sort of row and were always ready to combine together to make awful scenes to the luckless girl on incredibly flimsy pretences.  Thus Flora on one occasion had been reduced to rage and despair, had her most secret feelings lacerated, had obtained a view of the utmost baseness to which common human nature can descend—I won’t say à propos de bottes as the French would excellently put it, but literally à propos of some mislaid cheap lace trimmings for a nightgown the romping one was making for herself.  Yes, that was the origin of one of the grossest scenes which, in their repetition, must have had a deplorable effect on the unformed character of the most pitiful of de Barral’s victims.  I have it from Mrs. Fyne.  The girl turned up at the Fynes’ house at half-past nine on a cold, drizzly evening.  She had walked bareheaded, I believe, just as she ran out of the house, from somewhere in Poplar to the neighbourhood of Sloane Square—without stopping, without drawing breath, if only for a sob.

“We were having some people to dinner,” said the anxious sister of Captain Anthony.

She had heard the front door bell and wondered what it might mean.  The parlourmaid managed to whisper to her without attracting attention.  The servants had been frightened by the invasion of that wild girl in a muddy skirt and with wisps of damp hair sticking to her pale cheeks.  But they had seen her before.  This was not the first occasion, nor yet the last.

Directly she could slip away from her guests Mrs. Fyne ran upstairs.

“I found her in the night nursery crouching on the floor, her head resting on the cot of the youngest of my girls.  The eldest was sitting up in bed looking at her across the room.”

Only a nightlight was burning there.  Mrs. Fyne raised her up, took her over to Mr. Fyne’s little dressing-room on the other side of the landing, to a fire by which she could dry herself, and left her there.  She had to go back to her guests.

A most disagreeable surprise it must have been to the Fynes.  Afterwards they both went up and interviewed the girl.  She jumped up at their entrance.  She had shaken her damp hair loose; her eyes were dry—with the heat of rage.

I can imagine little Fyne solemnly sympathetic, solemnly listening, solemnly retreating to the marital bedroom.  Mrs. Fyne pacified the girl, and, fortunately, there was a bed which could be made up for her in the dressing-room.

“But—what could one do after all!” concluded Mrs. Fyne.

And this stereotyped exclamation, expressing the difficulty of the problem and the readiness (at any rate) of good intentions, made me, as usual, feel more kindly towards her.

Next morning, very early, long before Fyne had to start for his office, the “odious personage” turned up, not exactly unexpected perhaps, but startling all the same, if only by the promptness of his action.  From what Flora herself related to Mrs. Fyne, it seems that without being very perceptibly less “odious” than his family he had in a rather mysterious fashion interposed his authority for the protection of the girl.  “Not that he cares,” explained Flora.  “I am sure he does not.  I could not stand being liked by any of these people.  If I thought he liked me I would drown myself rather than go back with him.”

For of course he had come to take “Florrie” home.  The scene was the dining-room—breakfast interrupted, dishes growing cold, little Fyne’s toast growing leathery, Fyne out of his chair with his back to the fire, the newspaper on the carpet, servants shut out, Mrs. Fyne rigid in her place with the girl sitting beside her—the “odious person,” who had bustled in with hardly a greeting, looking from Fyne to Mrs. Fyne as though he were inwardly amused at something he knew of them; and then beginning ironically his discourse.  He did not apologize for disturbing Fyne and his “good lady” at breakfast, because he knew they did not want (with a nod at the girl) to have more of her than could be helped.  He came the first possible moment because he had his business to attend to.  He wasn’t drawing a tip-top salary (this staring at Fyne) in a luxuriously furnished office.  Not he.  He had risen to be an employer of labour and was bound to give a good example.

I believe the fellow was aware of, and enjoyed quietly, the consternation his presence brought to the bosom of Mr. and Mrs. Fyne.  He turned briskly to the girl.  Mrs. Fyne confessed to me that they had remained all three silent and inanimate.  He turned to the girl: “What’s this game, Florrie?  You had better give it up.  If you expect me to run all over London looking for you every time you happen to have a tiff with your auntie and cousins you are mistaken.  I can’t afford it.”

Tiff—was the sort of definition to take one’s breath away, having regard to the fact that both the word convict and the word pauper had been used a moment before Flora de Barral ran away from the quarrel about the lace trimmings.  Yes, these very words!  So at least the girl had told Mrs. Fyne the evening before.  The word tiff in connection with her tale had a peculiar savour, a paralysing effect.  Nobody made a sound.  The relative of de Barral proceeded uninterrupted to a display of magnanimity.  “Auntie told me to tell you she’s sorry—there!  And Amelia (the romping sister) shan’t worry you again.  I’ll see to that.  You ought to be satisfied.  Remember your position.”

Emboldened by the utter stillness pervading the room he addressed himself to Mrs. Fyne with stolid effrontery:

“What I say is that people should be good-natured.  She can’t stand being chaffed.  She puts on her grand airs.  She won’t take a bit of a joke from people as good as herself anyway.  We are a plain lot.  We don’t like it.  And that’s how trouble begins.”

Insensible to the stony stare of three pairs of eyes, which, if the stories of our childhood as to the power of the human eye are true, ought to have been enough to daunt a tiger, that unabashed manufacturer from the East End fastened his fangs, figuratively speaking, into the poor girl and prepared to drag her away for a prey to his cubs of both sexes.  “Auntie has thought of sending you your hat and coat.  I’ve got them outside in the cab.”

Mrs. Fyne looked mechanically out of the window.  A four-wheeler stood before the gate under the weeping sky.  The driver in his conical cape and tarpaulin hat, streamed with water.  The drooping horse looked as though it had been fished out, half unconscious, from a pond.  Mrs. Fyne found some relief in looking at that miserable sight, away from the room in which the voice of the amiable visitor resounded with a vulgar intonation exhorting the strayed sheep to return to the delightful fold.  “Come, Florrie, make a move.  I can’t wait on you all day here.”

Mrs. Fyne heard all this without turning her head away from the window.  Fyne on the hearthrug had to listen and to look on too.  I shall not try to form a surmise as to the real nature of the suspense.  Their very goodness must have made it very anxious.  The girl’s hands were lying in her lap; her head was lowered as if in deep thought; and the other went on delivering a sort of homily.  Ingratitude was condemned in it, the sinfulness of pride was pointed out—together with the proverbial fact that it “goes before a fall.”  There were also some sound remarks as to the danger of nonsensical notions and the disadvantages of a quick temper.  It sets one’s best friends against one.  “And if anybody ever wanted friends in the world it’s you, my girl.”  Even respect for parental authority was invoked.  “In the first hour of his trouble your father wrote to me to take care of you—don’t forget it.  Yes, to me, just a plain man, rather than to any of his fine West-End friends.  You can’t get over that.  And a father’s a father no matter what a mess he’s got himself into.  You ain’t going to throw over your own father—are you?”

It was difficult to say whether he was more absurd than cruel or more cruel than absurd.  Mrs. Fyne, with the fine ear of a woman, seemed to detect a jeering intention in his meanly unctuous tone, something more vile than mere cruelty.  She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw the girl raise her two hands to her head, then let them fall again on her lap.  Fyne in front of the fire was like the victim of an unholy spell—bereft of motion and speech but obviously in pain.  It was a short pause of perfect silence, and then that “odious creature” (he must have been really a remarkable individual in his way) struck out into sarcasm.

“Well? . . . ”  Again a silence.  “If you have fixed it up with the lady and gentleman present here for your board and lodging you had better say so.  I don’t want to interfere in a bargain I know nothing of.  But I wonder how your father will take it when he comes out . . . or don’t you expect him ever to come out?”

At that moment, Mrs. Fyne told me she met the girl’s eyes.  There was that in them which made her shut her own.  She also felt as though she would have liked to put her fingers in her ears.  She restrained herself, however; and the “plain man” passed in his appalling versatility from sarcasm to veiled menace.

“You have—eh?  Well and good.  But before I go home let me ask you, my girl, to think if by any chance you throwing us over like this won’t be rather bad for your father later on?  Just think it over.”

He looked at his victim with an air of cunning mystery.  She jumped up so suddenly that he started back.  Mrs. Fyne rose too, and even the spell was removed from her husband.  But the girl dropped again into the chair and turned her head to look at Mrs. Fyne.  This time it was no accidental meeting of fugitive glances.  It was a deliberate communication.  To my question as to its nature Mrs. Fyne said