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

In what way she expected Flora de Barral to set about saving herself from a most miserable existence I can’t conceive; but I verify believe that she would have found it easier to forgive the girl an actual crime; say the rifling of the Bournemouth old lady’s desk, for instance.  And then—for Mrs. Fyne was very much of a woman herself—her sense of proprietorship was very strong within her; and though she had not much use for her brother, yet she did not like to see him annexed by another woman.  By a chit of a girl.  And such a girl, too.  Nothing is truer than that, in this world, the luckless have no right to their opportunities—as if misfortune were a legal disqualification.  Fyne’s sentiments (as they naturally would be in a man) had more stability.  A good deal of his sympathy survived.  Indeed I heard him murmur “Ghastly nuisance,” but I knew it was of the integrity of his domestic accord that he was thinking.  With my eyes on the dog lying curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in a subdued impersonal tone: “Yes.  Why not let yourself be persuaded?”

I never saw little Fyne less solemn.  He hissed through his teeth in unexpectedly figurative style that it would take a lot to persuade him to “push under the head of a poor devil of a girl quite sufficiently plucky”—and snorted.  He was still gazing at the distant quarry, and I think he was affected by that sight.  I assured him that I was far from advising him to do anything so cruel.  I am convinced he had always doubted the soundness of my principles, because he turned on me swiftly as though he had been on the watch for a lapse from the straight path.

“Then what do you mean?  That I should pretend!”

“No!  What nonsense!  It would be immoral.  I may however tell you that if I had to make a choice I would rather do something immoral than something cruel.  What I meant was that, not believing in the efficacy of the interference, the whole question is reduced to your consenting to do what your wife wishes you to do.  That would be acting like a gentleman, surely.  And acting unselfishly too, because I can very well understand how distasteful it may be to you.  Generally speaking, an unselfish action is a moral action.  I’ll tell you what.  I’ll go with you.”

He turned round and stared at me with surprise and suspicion.  “You would go with me?” he repeated.

“You don’t understand,” I said, amused at the incredulous disgust of his tone.  “I must run up to town, to-morrow morning.  Let us go together.  You have a set of travelling chessmen.”

His physiognomy, contracted by a variety of emotions, relaxed to a certain extent at the idea of a game.  I told him that as I had business at the Docks he should have my company to the very ship.

“We shall beguile the way to the wilds of the East by improving conversation,” I encouraged him.

“My brother-in-law is staying at an hotel—the Eastern Hotel,” he said, becoming sombre again.  “I haven’t the slightest idea where it is.”

“I know the place.  I shall leave you at the door with the comfortable conviction that you are doing what’s right since it pleases a lady and cannot do any harm to anybody whatever.”

“You think so?  No harm to anybody?” he repeated doubtfully.

“I assure you it’s not the slightest use,” I said with all possible emphasis which seemed only to increase the solemn discontent of his expression.

“But in order that my going should be a perfectly candid proceeding I must first convince my wife that it isn’t the slightest use,” he objected portentously.

“Oh, you casuist!” I said.  And I said nothing more because at that moment Mrs. Fyne stepped out into the porch.  We rose together at her appearance.  Her clear, colourless, unflinching glance enveloped us both critically.  I sustained the chill smilingly, but Fyne stooped at once to release the dog.  He was some time about it; then simultaneously with his recovery of upright position the animal passed at one bound from profoundest slumber into most tumultuous activity.  Enveloped in the tornado of his inane scurryings and barkings I took Mrs. Fyne’s hand extended to me woodenly and bowed over it with deference.  She walked down the path without a word; Fyne had preceded her and was waiting by the open gate.  They passed out and walked up the road surrounded by a low cloud of dust raised by the dog gyrating madly about their two figures progressing side by side with rectitude and propriety, and (I don’t know why) looking to me as if they had annexed the whole country-side.  Perhaps it was that they had impressed me somehow with the sense of their superiority.  What superiority?  Perhaps it consisted just in their limitations.  It was obvious that neither of them had carried away a high opinion of me.  But what affected me most was the indifference of the Fyne dog.  He used to precipitate himself at full speed and with a frightful final upward spring upon my waistcoat, at least once at each of our meetings.  He had neglected that ceremony this time notwithstanding my correct and even conventional conduct in offering him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation from the Fyne household.  And I remembered against him how on a certain day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral—who was morbidly sensitive.

I sat down in the porch and, maybe inspired by secret antagonism to the Fynes, I said to myself deliberately that Captain Anthony must be a fine fellow.  Yet on the facts as I knew them he might have been a dangerous trifler or a downright scoundrel.  He had made a miserable, hopeless girl follow him clandestinely to London.  It is true that the girl had written since, only Mrs. Fyne had been remarkably vague as to the contents.  They were unsatisfactory.  They did not positively announce imminent nuptials as far as I could make it out from her rather mysterious hints.  But then her inexperience might have led her astray.  There was no fathoming the innocence of a woman like Mrs. Fyne who, venturing as far as possible in theory, would know nothing of the real aspect of things.  It would have been comic if she were making all this fuss for nothing.  But I rejected this suspicion for the honour of human nature.

I imagined to myself Captain Anthony as simple and romantic.  It was much more pleasant.  Genius is not hereditary but temperament may be.  And he was the son of a poet with an admirable gift of individualising, of etherealizing the common-place; of making touching, delicate, fascinating the most hopeless conventions of the, so-called, refined existence.

What I could not understand was Mrs. Fyne’s dog-in-the-manger attitude.  Sentimentally she needed that brother of hers so little!  What could it matter to her one way or another—setting aside common humanity which would suggest at least a neutral attitude.  Unless indeed it was the blind working of the law that in our world of chances the luckless must be put in the wrong somehow.

And musing thus on the general inclination of our instincts towards injustice I met unexpectedly, at the turn of the road, as it were, a shape of duplicity.  It might have been unconscious on Mrs. Fyne’s part, but her leading idea appeared to me to be not to keep, not to preserve her brother, but to get rid of him definitely.  She did not hope to stop anything.  She had too much sense for that.  Almost anyone out of an idiot asylum would have had enough sense for that.  She wanted the protest to be made, emphatically, with Fyne’s fullest concurrence in order to make all intercourse for the future impossible.  Such an action would estrange the pair for ever from the Fynes.  She understood her brother and the girl too.  Happy together, they would never forgive that outspoken hostility—and should the marriage turn out badly . . . Well, it would be just the same.  Neither of them would be likely to bring their troubles to such a good prophet of evil.

Yes.  That must have been her motive.  The inspiration of a possibly unconscious Machiavellism!  Either she was afraid of having a sister-in-law to look after during the husband’s long absences; or dreaded the more or less distant eventuality of her brother being persuaded to leave the sea, the friendly refuge of his unhappy youth, and to settle on shore, bringing to her very door this undesirable, this embarrassing connection.  She wanted to be done with it—maybe simply from the fatigue of continuous effort in good or evil, which, in the bulk of common mortals, accounts for so many surprising inconsistencies of conduct.

I don’t know that I had classed Mrs. Fyne, in my thoughts, amongst common mortals.  She was too quietly sure of herself for that.  But little Fyne, as I spied him next morning (out of the carriage window) speeding along the platform, looked very much like a common, flustered mortal who has made a very near thing of catching his train: the starting wild eyes, the tense and excited face, the distracted gait, all the common symptoms were there, rendered more impressive by his native solemnity which flapped about him like a disordered garment.  Had he—I asked myself with interest—resisted his wife to the very last minute and then bolted up the road from the last conclusive argument, as though it had been a loaded gun suddenly produced?  I opened the carriage door, and a vigorous porter shoved him in from behind just as the end of the rustic platform went gliding swiftly from under his feet.  He was very much out of breath, and I waited with some curiosity for the moment he would recover his power of speech.  That moment came.  He said “Good morning” with a slight gasp, remained very still for another minute and then pulled out of his pocket the travelling chessboard, and holding it in his hand, directed at me a glance of inquiry.

“Yes.  Certainly,” I said, very much disappointed.

CHAPTER SEVEN—ON THE PAVEMENT

Fyne was not willing to talk; but as I had been already let into the secret, the fair-minded little man recognized that I had some right to information if I insisted on it.  And I did insist, after the third game.  We were yet some way from the end of our journey.

“Oh, if you want to know,” was his somewhat impatient opening.  And then he talked rather volubly.  First of all his wife had not given him to read the letter received from Flora (I had suspected him of having it in his pocket), but had told him all about the contents.  It was not at all what it should have been even if the girl had wished to affirm her right to disregard the feelings of all the world.  Her own had been trampled in the dirt out of all shape.  Extraordinary thing to say—I would admit, for a young girl of her age.  The whole tone of that letter was wrong, quite wrong.  It was certainly not the product of a—say, of a well-balanced mind.

“If she were given some sort of footing in this world,” I said, “if only no bigger than the palm of my hand, she would probably learn to keep a better balance.”

Fyne ignored this little remark.  His wife, he said, was not the sort of person to be addressed mockingly on a serious subject.  There was an unpleasant strain of levity in that letter, extending even to the references to Captain Anthony himself.  Such a disposition was enough, his wife had pointed out to him, to alarm one for the future, had all the circumstances of that preposterous project been as satisfactory as in fact they were not.  Other parts of the letter seemed to have a