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

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?”

I asked Miss de Barral what answer she made to this query.

“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 realized 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