Chance, Joseph Conrad [10 best novels of all time TXT] 📗

lie down, and it may be presumed she slept.  At any rate she survived the voyage across the North Sea and told Mrs. Fyne all about it, concealing nothing and receiving no rebuke—for Mrs. Fyne’s opinions had a large freedom in their pedantry.  She held, I suppose, that a woman holds an absolute right—or possesses a perfect excuse—to escape in her own way from a man-mismanaged world.

* * * * *

What is to be noted is that even in London, having had time to take a reflective view, poor Flora was far from being certain as to the true inwardness of her violent dismissal.  She felt the humiliation of it with an almost maddened resentment.

“And did you enlighten her on the point?” I ventured to ask.

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders with a philosophical acceptance of all the necessities which ought not to be.  Something had to be said, she murmured.  She had told the girl enough to make her come to the right conclusion by herself.

“And she did?”

“Yes.  Of course.  She isn’t a goose,” retorted Mrs. Fyne tartly.

“Then her education is completed,” I remarked with some bitterness.  “Don’t you think she ought to be given a chance?”

Mrs. Fyne understood my meaning.

“Not this one,” she snapped in a quite feminine way.  “It’s all very well for you to plead, but I—”

“I do not plead.  I simply asked.  It seemed natural to ask what you thought.”

“It’s what I feel that matters.  And I can’t help my feelings.  You may guess,” she added in a softer tone, “that my feelings are mostly concerned with my brother.  We were very fond of each other.  The difference of our ages was not very great.  I suppose you know he is a little younger than I am.  He was a sensitive boy.  He had the habit of brooding.  It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy at home.  You have heard, no doubt . . . Yes?  Well, I was made still more unhappy and hurt—I don’t mind telling you that.  He made his way to some distant relations of our mother’s people who I believe were not known to my father at all.  I don’t wish to judge their action.”

I interrupted Mrs. Fyne here.  I had heard.  Fyne was not very communicative in general, but he was proud of his father-in-law—“Carleon Anthony, the poet, you know.”  Proud of his celebrity without approving of his character.  It was on that account, I strongly suspect, that he seized with avidity upon the theory of poetical genius being allied to madness, which he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading a few years ago.  It struck him as being truth itself—illuminating like the sun.  He adopted it devoutly.  He bored me with it sometimes.  Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls?  He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the “well-established fact” that genius was not transmissible.

I said only “Oh!  Isn’t it?” and he thought he had silenced me by an unanswerable argument.  But he continued to talk of his glorious father-in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he told me how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet’s late wife naturally addressed themselves to him in considerable concern, suggesting a friendly consultation as to the boy’s future, the incensed (but always refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere polished badinage which offended mortally the Liverpool people.  This witty outbreak of what was in fact mortification and rage appeared to them so heartless that they simply kept the boy.  They let him go to sea not because he was in their way but because he begged hard to be allowed to go.

“Oh!  You do know,” said Mrs. Fyne after a pause.  “Well—I felt myself very much abandoned.  Then his choice of life—so extraordinary, so unfortunate, I may say.  I was very much grieved.  I should have liked him to have been distinguished—or at any rate to remain in the social sphere where we could have had common interests, acquaintances, thoughts.  Don’t think that I am estranged from him.  But the precise truth is that I do not know him.  I was most painfully affected when he was here by the difficulty of finding a single topic we could discuss together.”

While Mrs. Fyne was talking of her brother I let my thoughts wander out of the room to little Fyne who by leaving me alone with his wife had, so to speak, entrusted his domestic peace to my honour.

“Well, then, Mrs. Fyne, does it not strike you that it would be reasonable under the circumstances to let your brother take care of himself?”

“And suppose I have grounds to think that he can’t take care of himself in a given instance.”  She hesitated in a funny, bashful manner which roused my interest.  Then:

“Sailors I believe are very susceptible,” she added with forced assurance.

I burst into a laugh which only increased the coldness of her observing stare.

“They are.  Immensely!  Hopelessly!  My dear Mrs. Fyne, you had better give it up!  It only makes your husband miserable.”

“And I am quite miserable too.  It is really our first difference . . . ”

“Regarding Miss de Barral?” I asked.

“Regarding everything.  It’s really intolerable that this girl should be the occasion.  I think he really ought to give way.”

She turned her chair round a little and picking up the book I had been reading in the morning began to turn the leaves absently.

Her eyes being off me, I felt I could allow myself to leave the room.  Its atmosphere had become hopeless for little Fyne’s domestic peace.  You may smile.  But to the solemn all things are solemn.  I had enough sagacity to understand that.

I slipped out into the porch.  The dog was slumbering at Fyne’s feet.  The muscular little man leaning on his elbow and gazing over the fields presented a forlorn figure.  He turned his head quickly, but seeing I was alone, relapsed into his moody contemplation of the green landscape.

I said loudly and distinctly: “I’ve come out to smoke a cigarette,” and sat down near him on the little bench.  Then lowering my voice: “Tolerance is an extremely difficult virtue,” I said.  “More difficult for some than heroism.  More difficult than compassion.”

I avoided looking at him.  I knew well enough that he would not like this opening.  General ideas were not to his taste.  He mistrusted them.  I lighted a cigarette, not that I wanted to smoke, but to give another moment to the consideration of the advice—the diplomatic advice I had made up my mind to bowl him over with.  And I continued in subdued tones.

“I have been led to make these remarks by what I have discovered since you left us.  I suspected from the first.  And now I am certain.  What your wife cannot tolerate in this affair is Miss de Barral being what she is.”

He made a movement, but I kept my eyes away from him and went on steadily.  “That is—her being a woman.  I have some idea of Mrs. Fyne’s mental attitude towards society with its injustices, with its atrocious or ridiculous conventions.  As against them there is no audacity of action your wife’s mind refuses to sanction.  The doctrine which I imagine she stuffs into the pretty heads of your girl-guests is almost vengeful.  A sort of moral fire-and-sword doctrine.  How far the lesson is wise is not for me to say.  I don’t permit myself to judge.  I seem to see her very delightful disciples singeing themselves with the torches, and cutting their fingers with the swords of Mrs. Fyne’s furnishing.”

“My wife holds her opinions very seriously,” murmured Fyne suddenly.

“Yes.  No doubt,” I assented in a low voice as before.  “But it is a mere intellectual exercise.  What I see is that in dealing with reality Mrs. Fyne ceases to be tolerant.  In other words, that she can’t forgive Miss de Barral for being a woman and behaving like a woman.  And yet this is not only reasonable and natural, but it is her only chance.  A woman against the world has no resources but in herself.  Her only means of action is to be what she is.  You understand what I mean.”

Fyne mumbled between his teeth that he understood.  But he did not seem interested.  What he expected of me was to extricate him from a difficult situation.  I don’t know how far credible this may sound, to less solemn married couples, but to remain at variance with his wife seemed to him a considerable incident.  Almost a disaster.

“It looks as though I didn’t care what happened to her brother,” he said.  “And after all if anything . . . ”

I became a little impatient but without raising my tone:

“What thing?” I asked.  “The liability to get penal servitude is so far like genius that it isn’t hereditary.  And what else can be objected to the girl?  All the energy of her deeper feelings, which she would use up vainly in the danger and fatigue of a struggle with society may be turned into devoted attachment to the man who offers her a way of escape from what can be only a life of moral anguish.  I don’t mention the physical difficulties.”

Glancing at Fyne out of the corner of one eye I discovered that he was attentive.  He made the remark that I should have said all this to his wife.  It was a sensible enough remark.  But I had given Mrs. Fyne up.  I asked him if his impression was that his wife meant to entrust him with a letter for her brother?

No.  He didn’t think so.  There were certain reasons which made Mrs. Fyne unwilling to commit her arguments to paper.  Fyne was to be primed with them.  But he had no doubt that if he persisted in his refusal she would make up her mind to write.

“She does not wish me to go unless with a full conviction that she is right,” said Fyne solemnly.

“She’s very exacting,” I commented.  And then I reflected that she was used to it.  “Would nothing less do for once?”

“You don’t mean that I should give way—do you?” asked Fyne in a whisper of alarmed suspicion.

As this was exactly what I meant, I let his fright sink into him.  He fidgeted.  If the word may be used of so solemn a personage, he wriggled.  And when the horrid suspicion had descended into his very heels, so to speak, he became very still.  He sat gazing stonily into space bounded by the yellow, burnt-up slopes of the rising ground a couple of miles away.  The face of the down showed the white scar of the quarry where not more than sixteen hours before Fyne and I had been groping in the dark with horrible apprehension of finding under our hands the shattered body of a girl.  For myself I had in addition the memory of my meeting with her.  She was certainly walking very near the edge—courting a sinister solution.  But, now, having by the most unexpected chance come upon a man, she had found another way to escape from the world.  Such world as was open to her—without shelter, without bread, without honour.  The best she could have found in it would have been a precarious dole of pity diminishing as her years increased.  The appeal of the abandoned child Flora to the sympathies of the Fynes had been irresistible.  But now she had become a woman, and Mrs. Fyne was presenting an implacable front to a particularly feminine transaction.  I may say triumphantly feminine.  It is true that Mrs. Fyne did not want women to be women.  Her theory was that they should turn themselves into unscrupulous sexless nuisances.  An offended theorist dwelt in her bosom somewhere.