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Chance: A Tale in Two Parts

by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #1476 · 783,860 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Chance: A Tale in Two Parts

Author: Joseph Conrad


        
Release date: September 1, 1998 [eBook #1476]
                Most recently updated: February 27, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1476

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHANCE: A TALE IN TWO PARTS ***

CHANCE

A TALE IN TWO PARTS


   Those that hold that all things are governed by Fortune had not erred,
   had they not persisted there

   SIR THOMAS BROWNE

TO SIR HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G. WHOSE STEADFAST FRIENDSHIP IS RESPONSIBLE
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THESE PAGES




PART I--THE DAMSEL


CHAPTER ONE--YOUNG POWELL AND HIS CHANCE


I believe he had seen us out of the window coming off to dine in the
dinghy of a fourteen-ton yawl belonging to Marlow my host and skipper.  We
helped the boy we had with us to haul the boat up on the landing-stage
before we went up to the riverside inn, where we found our new
acquaintance eating his dinner in dignified loneliness at the head of a
long table, white and inhospitable like a snow bank.

The red tint of his clear-cut face with trim short black whiskers under a
cap of curly iron-grey hair was the only warm spot in the dinginess of
that room cooled by the cheerless tablecloth.  We knew him already by
sight as the owner of a little five-ton cutter, which he sailed alone
apparently, a fellow yachtsman in the unpretending band of fanatics who
cruise at the mouth of the Thames.  But the first time he addressed the
waiter sharply as 'steward' we knew him at once for a sailor as well as a
yachtsman.

Presently he had occasion to reprove that same waiter for the slovenly
manner in which the dinner was served.  He did it with considerable
energy and then turned to us.

"If we at sea," he declared, "went about our work as people ashore high
and low go about theirs we should never make a living.  No one would
employ us.  And moreover no ship navigated and sailed in the happy-go-
lucky manner people conduct their business on shore would ever arrive
into port."

Since he had retired from the sea he had been astonished to discover that
the educated people were not much better than the others.  No one seemed
to take any proper pride in his work: from plumbers who were simply
thieves to, say, newspaper men (he seemed to think them a specially
intellectual class) who never by any chance gave a correct version of the
simplest affair.  This universal inefficiency of what he called "the
shore gang" he ascribed in general to the want of responsibility and to a
sense of security.

"They see," he went on, "that no matter what they do this tight little
island won't turn turtle with them or spring a leak and go to the bottom
with their wives and children."

From this point the conversation took a special turn relating exclusively
to sea-life.  On that subject he got quickly in touch with Marlow who in
his time had followed the sea.  They kept up a lively exchange of
reminiscences while I listened.  They agreed that the happiest time in
their lives was as youngsters in good ships, with no care in the world
but not to lose a watch below when at sea and not a moment's time in
going ashore after work hours when in harbour.  They agreed also as to
the proudest moment they had known in that calling which is never
embraced on rational and practical grounds, because of the glamour of its
romantic associations.  It was the moment when they had passed
successfully their first examination and left the seamanship Examiner
with the little precious slip of blue paper in their hands.

"That day I wouldn't have called the Queen my cousin," declared our new
acquaintance enthusiastically.

At that time the Marine Board examinations took place at the St.
Katherine's Dock House on Tower Hill, and he informed us that he had a
special affection for the view of that historic locality, with the
Gardens to the left, the front of the Mint to the right, the miserable
tumble-down little houses farther away, a cabstand, boot-blacks squatting
on the edge of the pavement and a pair of big policemen gazing with an
air of superiority at the doors of the Black Horse public-house across
the road.  This was the part of the world, he said, his eyes first took
notice of, on the finest day of his life.  He had emerged from the main
entrance of St. Katherine's Dock House a full-fledged second mate after
the hottest time of his life with Captain R-, the most dreaded of the
three seamanship Examiners who at the time were responsible for the
merchant service officers qualifying in the Port of London.

"We all who were preparing to pass," he said, "used to shake in our shoes
at the idea of going before him.  He kept me for an hour and a half in
the torture chamber and behaved as though he hated me.  He kept his eyes
shaded with one of his hands.  Suddenly he let it drop saying, "You will
do!"  Before I realised what he meant he was pushing the blue slip across
the table.  I jumped up as if my chair had caught fire.

"Thank you, sir," says I, grabbing the paper.

"Good morning, good luck to you," he growls at me.

"The old doorkeeper fussed out of the cloak-room with my hat.  They
always do.  But he looked very hard at me before he ventured to ask in a
sort of timid whisper: "Got through all right, sir?"  For all answer I
dropped a half-crown into his soft broad palm.  "Well," says he with a
sudden grin from ear to ear, "I never knew him keep any of you gentlemen
so long.  He failed two second mates this morning before your turn came.
Less than twenty minutes each: that's about his usual time."

"I found myself downstairs without being aware of the steps as if I had
floated down the staircase.  The finest day in my life.  The day you get
your first command is nothing to it.  For one thing a man is not so young
then and for another with us, you know, there is nothing much more to
expect.  Yes, the finest day of one's life, no doubt, but then it is just
a day and no more.  What comes after is about the most unpleasant time
for a youngster, the trying to get an officer's berth with nothing much
to show but a brand-new certificate.  It is surprising how useless you
find that piece of ass's skin that you have been putting yourself in such
a state about.  It didn't strike me at the time that a Board of Trade
certificate does not make an officer, not by a long long way.  But the
slippers of the ships I was haunting with demands for a job knew that
very well.  I don't wonder at them now, and I don't blame them either.
But this 'trying to get a ship' is pretty hard on a youngster all the
same . . . "

He went on then to tell us how tired he was and how discouraged by this
lesson of disillusion following swiftly upon the finest day of his life.
He told us how he went the round of all the ship-owners' offices in the
City where some junior clerk would furnish him with printed forms of
application which he took home to fill up in the evening.  He used to run
out just before midnight to post them in the nearest pillar-box.  And
that was all that ever came of it.  In his own words: he might just as
well have dropped them all properly addressed and stamped into the sewer
grating.

Then one day, as he was wending his weary way to the docks, he met a
friend and former shipmate a little older than himself outside the
Fenchurch Street Railway Station.

He craved for sympathy but his friend had just "got a ship" that very
morning and was hurrying home in a state of outward joy and inward
uneasiness usual to a sailor who after many days of waiting suddenly gets
a berth.  This friend had the time to condole with him but briefly.  He
must be moving.  Then as he was running off, over his shoulder as it
were, he suggested: "Why don't you go and speak to Mr. Powell in the
Shipping Office."  Our friend objected that he did not know Mr. Powell
from Adam.  And the other already pretty near round the corner shouted
back advice: "Go to the private door of the Shipping Office and walk
right up to him.  His desk is by the window.  Go up boldly and say I sent
you."

Our new acquaintance looking from one to the other of us declared: "Upon
my word, I had grown so desperate that I'd have gone boldly up to the
devil himself on the mere hint that he had a second mate's job to give
away."

It was at this point that interrupting his flow of talk to light his pipe
but holding us with his eye he inquired whether we had known Powell.
Marlow with a slight reminiscent smile murmured that he "remembered him
very well."

Then there was a pause.  Our new acquaintance had become involved in a
vexatious difficulty with his pipe which had suddenly betrayed his trust
and disappointed his anticipation of self-indulgence.  To keep the ball
rolling I asked Marlow if this Powell was remarkable in any way.

"He was not exactly remarkable," Marlow answered with his usual
nonchalance.  "In a general way it's very difficult for one to become
remarkable.  People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know.
I remember Powell so well simply because as one of the Shipping Masters
in the Port of London he dispatched me to sea on several long stages of
my sailor's pilgrimage.  He resembled Socrates.  I mean he resembled him
genuinely: that is in the face.  A philosophical mind is but an accident.
He reproduced exactly the familiar bust of the immortal sage, if you will
imagine the bust with a high top hat riding far on the back of the head,
and a black coat over the shoulders.  As I never saw him except from the
other side of the long official counter bearing the five writing desks of
the five Shipping Masters, Mr. Powell has remained a bust to me."

Our new acquaintance advanced now from the mantelpiece with his pipe in
good working order.

"What was the most remarkable about Powell," he enunciated dogmatically
with his head in a cloud of smoke, "is that he should have had just that
name.  You see, my name happens to be Powell too."

It was clear that this intelligence was not imparted to us for social
purposes.  It required no acknowledgment.  We continued to gaze at him
with expectant eyes.

He gave himself up to the vigorous enjoyment of his pipe for a silent
minute or two.  Then picking up the thread of his story he told us how he
had started hot foot for Tower Hill.  He had not been that way since the
day of his examination--the finest day of his life--the day of his
overweening pride.  It was very different now.  He would not have called
the Queen his cousin, still, but this time it was from a sense of
profound abasement.  He didn't think himself good enough for anybody's
kinship.  He envied the purple-nosed old cab-drivers on the stand, the
boot-black boys at the edge of the pavement, the two large bobbies pacing
slowly along the Tower Gardens railings in the consciousness of their
infallible might, and the bright scarlet sentries walking smartly to and
fro before the Mint.  He envied them their places in the scheme of
world's labour.  And he envied also the miserable sallow, thin-faced
loafers blinking their obscene eyes and rubbing their greasy shoulders
against the door-jambs of the Black Horse pub, because they were too far
gone to feel their degradation.

I must render the man the justice that he conveyed very well to us the
sense of his youthful hopelessness surprised at not finding its place in
the sun and no recognition of its right to live.

He went up the outer steps of St. Katherine's Dock House, the very steps
from which he had some six weeks before surveyed the cabstand, the
buildings, the policemen, the boot-blacks, the paint, gilt, and
plateglass of the Black Horse, with the eye of a Conqueror.  At the time
he had been at the bottom of his heart surprised that all this had not
greeted him with songs and incense, but now (he made no secret of it) he
made his entry in a slinking fashion past the doorkeeper's glass box.  "I
hadn't any half-crowns to spare for tips," he remarked grimly.  The man,
however, ran out after him asking: "What do you require?" but with a
grateful glance up at the first floor in remembrance of Captain R-'s
examination room (how easy and delightful all that had been) he bolted
down a flight leading to the basement and found himself in a place of
dusk and mystery and many doors.  He had been afraid of being stopped by
some rule of no-admittance.  However he was not pursued.

The basement of St. Katherine's Dock House is vast in extent and
confusing in its plan.  Pale shafts of light slant from above into the
gloom of its chilly passages.  Powell wandered up and down there like an
early Christian refugee in the catacombs; but what little faith he had in
the success of his enterprise was oozing out at his finger-tips.  At a
dark turn under a gas bracket whose flame was half turned down his self-
confidence abandoned him altogether.

"I stood there to think a little," he said.  "A foolish thing to do
because of course I got scared.  What could you expect?  It takes some
nerve to tackle a stranger with a request for a favour.  I wished my
namesake Powell had been the devil himself.  I felt somehow it would have
been an easier job.  You see, I never believed in the devil enough to be
scared of him; but a man can make himself very unpleasant.  I looked at a
lot of doors, all shut tight, with a growing conviction that I would
never have the pluck to open one of them.  Thinking's no good for one's
nerve.  I concluded I would give up the whole business.  But I didn't
give up in the end, and I'll tell you what stopped me.  It was the
recollection of that confounded doorkeeper who had called after me.  I
felt sure the fellow would be on the look-out at the head of the stairs.
If he asked me what I had been after, as he had the right to do, I
wouldn't know what to answer that wouldn't make me look silly if no
worse.  I got very hot.  There was no chance of slinking out of this
business.

"I had lost my bearings somehow down there.  Of the many doors of various
sizes, right and left, a good few had glazed lights above; some however
must have led merely into lumber rooms or such like, because when I
brought myself to try one or two I was disconcerted to find that they
were locked.  I stood there irresolute and uneasy like a baffled thief.
The confounded basement was as still as a grave and I became aware of my
heart beats.  Very uncomfortable sensation.  Never happened to me before
or since.  A bigger door to the left of me, with a large brass handle
looked as if it might lead into the Shipping Office.  I tried it, setting
my teeth.  "Here goes!"

"It came open quite easily.  And lo! the place it opened into was hardly
any bigger than a cupboard.  Anyhow it wasn't more than ten feet by
twelve; and as I in a way expected to see the big shadowy cellar-like
extent of the Shipping Office where I had been once or twice before, I
was extremely startled.  A gas bracket hung from the middle of the
ceiling over a dark, shabby writing-desk covered with a litter of
yellowish dusty documents.  Under the flame of the single burner which
made the place ablaze with light, a plump, little man was writing hard,
his nose very near the desk.  His head was perfectly bald and about the
same drab tint as the papers.  He appeared pretty dusty too.

"I didn't notice whether there were any cobwebs on him, but I shouldn't
wonder if there were because he looked as though he had been imprisoned
for years in that little hole.  The way he dropped his pen and sat
blinking my way upset me very much.  And his dungeon was hot and musty;
it smelt of gas and mushrooms, and seemed to be somewhere 120 feet below
the ground.  Solid, heavy stacks of paper filled all the corners half-way
up to the ceiling.  And when the thought flashed upon me that these were
the premises of the Marine Board and that this fellow must be connected
in some way with ships and sailors and the sea, my astonishment took my
breath away.  One couldn't imagine why the Marine Board should keep that
bald, fat creature slaving down there.  For some reason or other I felt
sorry and ashamed to have found him out in his wretched captivity.  I
asked gently and sorrowfully: "The Shipping Office, please."

He piped up in a contemptuous squeaky voice which made me start: "Not
here.  Try the passage on the other side.  Street side.  This is the Dock
side.  You've lost your way . . . "

He spoke in such a spiteful tone that I thought he was going to round off
with the words: "You fool" . . . and perhaps he meant to.  But what he
finished sharply with was: "Shut the door quietly after you."

And I did shut it quietly--you bet.  Quick and quiet.  The indomitable
spirit of that chap impressed me.  I wonder sometimes whether he has
succeeded in writing himself into liberty and a pension at last, or had
to go out of his gas-lighted grave straight into that other dark one
where nobody would want to intrude.  My humanity was pleased to discover
he had so much kick left in him, but I was not comforted in the least.  It
occurred to me that if Mr. Powell had the same sort of temper . . .
However, I didn't give myself time to think and scuttled across the space
at the foot of the stairs into the passage where I'd been told to try.
And I tried the first door I came to, right away, without any hanging
back, because coming loudly from the hall above an amazed and scandalized
voice wanted to know what sort of game I was up to down there.  "Don't
you know there's no admittance that way?" it roared.  But if there was
anything more I shut it out of my hearing by means of a door marked
_Private_ on the outside.  It let me into a six-feet wide strip between a
long counter and the wall, taken off a spacious, vaulted room with a
grated window and a glazed door giving daylight to the further end.  The
first thing I saw right in front of me were three middle-aged men having
a sort of romp together round about another fellow with a thin, long neck
and sloping shoulders who stood up at a desk writing on a large sheet of
paper and taking no notice except that he grinned quietly to himself.
They turned very sour at once when they saw me.  I heard one of them
mutter 'Hullo!  What have we here?'

"'I want to see Mr. Powell, please,' I said, very civil but firm; I would
let nothing scare me away now.  This was the Shipping Office right
enough.  It was after 3 o'clock and the business seemed over for the day
with them.  The long-necked fellow went on with his writing steadily.  I
observed that he was no longer grinning.  The three others tossed their
heads all together towards the far end of the room where a fifth man had
been looking on at their antics from a high stool.  I walked up to him as
boldly as if he had been the devil himself.  With one foot raised up and
resting on the cross-bar of his seat he never stopped swinging the other
which was well clear of the stone floor.  He had unbuttoned the top of
his waistcoat and he wore his tall hat very far at the back of his head.
He had a full unwrinkled face and such clear-shining eyes that his grey
beard looked quite false on him, stuck on for a disguise.  You said just
now he resembled Socrates--didn't you?  I don't know about that.  This
Socrates was a wise man, I believe?"

"He was," assented Marlow.  "And a true friend of youth.  He lectured
them in a peculiarly exasperating manner.  It was a way he had."

"Then give me Powell every time," declared our new acquaintance sturdily.
"He didn't lecture me in any way.  Not he.  He said: 'How do you do?'
quite kindly to my mumble.  Then says he looking very hard at me: 'I
don't think I know you--do I?'

"No, sir," I said and down went my heart sliding into my boots, just as
the time had come to summon up all my cheek.  There's nothing meaner in
the world than a piece of impudence that isn't carried off well.  For
fear of appearing shamefaced I started about it so free and easy as
almost to frighten myself.  He listened for a while looking at my face
with surprise and curiosity and then held up his hand.  I was glad enough
to shut up, I can tell you.

"Well, you are a cool hand," says he.  "And that friend of yours too.  He
pestered me coming here every day for a fortnight till a captain I'm
acquainted with was good enough to give him a berth.  And no sooner he's
provided for than he turns you on.  You youngsters don't seem to mind
whom you get into trouble."

"It was my turn now to stare with surprise and curiosity.  He hadn't been
talking loud but he lowered his voice still more.

"Don't you know it's illegal?"

"I wondered what he was driving at till I remembered that procuring a
berth for a sailor is a penal offence under the Act.  That clause was
directed of course against the swindling practices of the boarding-house
crimps.  It had never struck me it would apply to everybody alike no
matter what the motive, because I believed then that people on shore did
their work with care and foresight.

"I was confounded at the idea, but Mr. Powell made me soon see that an
Act of Parliament hasn't any sense of its own.  It has only the sense
that's put into it; and that's precious little sometimes.  He didn't mind
helping a young man to a ship now and then, he said, but if we kept on
coming constantly it would soon get about that he was doing it for money.

"A pretty thing that would be: the Senior Shipping-Master of the Port of
London hauled up in a police court and fined fifty pounds," says he.
"I've another four years to serve to get my pension.  It could be made to
look very black against me and don't you make any mistake about it," he
says.

"And all the time with one knee well up he went on swinging his other leg
like a boy on a gate and looking at me very straight with his shining
eyes.  I was confounded I tell you.  It made me sick to hear him imply
that somebody would make a report against him.

"Oh!" I asked shocked, "who would think of such a scurvy trick, sir?"  I
was half disgusted with him for having the mere notion of it.

"Who?" says he, speaking very low.  "Anybody.  One of the office
messengers maybe.  I've risen to be the Senior of this office and we are
all very good friends here, but don't you think that my colleague that
sits next to me wouldn't like to go up to this desk by the window four
years in advance of the regulation time?  Or even one year for that
matter.  It's human nature."

"I could not help turning my head.  The three fellows who had been
skylarking when I came in were now talking together very soberly, and the
long-necked chap was going on with his writing still.  He seemed to me
the most dangerous of the lot.  I saw him sideface and his lips were set
very tight.  I had never looked at mankind in that light before.  When
one's young human nature shocks one.  But what startled me most was to
see the door I had come through open slowly and give passage to a head in
a uniform cap with a Board of Trade badge.  It was that blamed old
doorkeeper from the hall.  He had run me to earth and meant to dig me out
too.  He walked up the office smirking craftily, cap in hand.

"What is it, Symons?" asked Mr. Powell.

"I was only wondering where this 'ere gentleman 'ad gone to, sir.  He
slipped past me upstairs, sir."

I felt mighty uncomfortable.

"That's all right, Symons.  I know the gentleman," says Mr. Powell as
serious as a judge.

"Very well, sir.  Of course, sir.  I saw the gentleman running races all
by 'isself down 'ere, so I . . ."

"It's all right I tell you," Mr. Powell cut him short with a wave of his
hand; and, as the old fraud walked off at last, he raised his eyes to me.
I did not know what to do: stay there, or clear out, or say that I was
sorry.

"Let's see," says he, "what did you tell me your name was?"

"Now, observe, I hadn't given him my name at all and his question
embarrassed me a bit.  Somehow or other it didn't seem proper for me to
fling his own name at him as it were.  So I merely pulled out my new
certificate from my pocket and put it into his hand unfolded, so that he
could read _Charles Powell_ written very plain on the parchment.

"He dropped his eyes on to it and after a while laid it quietly on the
desk by his side.  I didn't know whether he meant to make any remark on
this coincidence.  Before he had time to say anything the glass door came
open with a bang and a tall, active man rushed in with great strides.  His
face looked very red below his high silk hat.  You could see at once he
was the skipper of a big ship.

"Mr. Powell after telling me in an undertone to wait a little addressed
him in a friendly way.

"I've been expecting you in every moment to fetch away your Articles,
Captain.  Here they are all ready for you."  And turning to a pile of
agreements lying at his elbow he took up the topmost of them.  From where
I stood I could read the words: "Ship _Ferndale_" written in a large
round hand on the first page.

"No, Mr. Powell, they aren't ready, worse luck," says that skipper.  "I've
got to ask you to strike out my second officer."  He seemed excited and
bothered.  He explained that his second mate had been working on board
all the morning.  At one o'clock he went out to get a bit of dinner and
didn't turn up at two as he ought to have done.  Instead there came a
messenger from the hospital with a note signed by a doctor.  Collar bone
and one arm broken.  Let himself be knocked down by a pair horse van
while crossing the road outside the dock gate, as if he had neither eyes
nor ears.  And the ship ready to leave the dock at six o'clock to-morrow
morning!

"Mr. Powell dipped his pen and began to turn the leaves of the agreement
over.  "We must then take his name off," he says in a kind of unconcerned
sing-song.

"What am I to do?" burst out the skipper.  "This office closes at four
o'clock.  I can't find a man in half an hour."

"This office closes at four," repeats Mr. Powell glancing up and down the
pages and touching up a letter here and there with perfect indifference.

"Even if I managed to lay hold some time to-day of a man ready to go at
such short notice I couldn't ship him regularly here--could I?"

"Mr. Powell was busy drawing his pen through the entries relating to that
unlucky second mate and making a note in the margin.

"You could sign him on yourself on board," says he without looking up.
"But I don't think you'll find easily an officer for such a pier-head
jump."

"Upon this the fine-looking skipper gave signs of distress.  The ship
mustn't miss the next morning's tide.  He had to take on board forty tons
of dynamite and a hundred and twenty tons of gunpowder at a place down
the river before proceeding to sea.  It was all arranged for next day.
There would be no end of fuss and complications if the ship didn't turn
up in time . . . I couldn't help hearing all this, while wishing him to
take himself off, because I wanted to know why Mr. Powell had told me to
wait.  After what he had been saying there didn't seem any object in my
hanging about.  If I had had my certificate in my pocket I should have
tried to slip away quietly; but Mr. Powell had turned about into the same
position I found him in at first and was again swinging his leg.  My
certificate open on the desk was under his left elbow and I couldn't very
well go up and jerk it away.

"I don't know," says he carelessly, addressing the helpless captain but
looking fixedly at me with an expression as if I hadn't been there.  "I
don't know whether I ought to tell you that I know of a disengaged second
mate at hand."

"Do you mean you've got him here?" shouts the other looking all over the
empty public part of the office as if he were ready to fling himself
bodily upon anything resembling a second mate.  He had been so full of
his difficulty that I verify believe he had never noticed me.  Or perhaps
seeing me inside he may have thought I was some understrapper belonging
to the place.  But when Mr. Powell nodded in my direction he became very
quiet and gave me a long stare.  Then he stooped to Mr. Powell's ear--I
suppose he imagined he was whispering, but I heard him well enough.

"Looks very respectable."

"Certainly," says the shipping-master quite calm and staring all the time
at me.  "His name's Powell."

"Oh, I see!" says the skipper as if struck all of a heap.  "But is he
ready to join at once?"

"I had a sort of vision of my lodgings--in the North of London, too,
beyond Dalston, away to the devil--and all my gear scattered about, and
my empty sea-chest somewhere in an outhouse the good people I was staying
with had at the end of their sooty strip of garden.  I heard the Shipping
Master say in the coolest sort of way:

"He'll sleep on board to-night."

"He had better," says the Captain of the _Ferndale_ very businesslike, as
if the whole thing were settled.  I can't say I was dumb for joy as you
may suppose.  It wasn't exactly that.  I was more by way of being out of
breath with the quickness of it.  It didn't seem possible that this was
happening to me.  But the skipper, after he had talked for a while with
Mr. Powell, too low for me to hear became visibly perplexed.

"I suppose he had heard I was freshly passed and without experience as an
officer, because he turned about and looked me over as if I had been
exposed for sale.

"He's young," he mutters.  "Looks smart, though . . . You're smart and
willing (this to me very sudden and loud) and all that, aren't you?"

"I just managed to open and shut my mouth, no more, being taken unawares.
But it was enough for him.  He made as if I had deafened him with
protestations of my smartness and willingness.

"Of course, of course.  All right."  And then turning to the Shipping
Master who sat there swinging his leg, he said that he certainly couldn't
go to sea without a second officer.  I stood by as if all these things
were happening to some other chap whom I was seeing through with it.  Mr.
Powell stared at me with those shining eyes of his.  But that bothered
skipper turns upon me again as though he wanted to snap my head off.

"You aren't too big to be told how to do things--are you?  You've a lot
to learn yet though you mayn't think so."

"I had half a mind to save my dignity by telling him that if it was my
seamanship he was alluding to I wanted him to understand that a fellow
who had survived being turned inside out for an hour and a half by
Captain R- was equal to any demand his old ship was likely to make on his
competence.  However he didn't give me a chance to make that sort of fool
of myself because before I could open my mouth he had gone round on
another tack and was addressing himself affably to Mr. Powell who
swinging his leg never took his eyes off me.

"I'll take your young friend willingly, Mr. Powell.  If you let him sign
on as second-mate at once I'll take the Articles away with me now."

"It suddenly dawned upon me that the innocent skipper of the _Ferndale_
had taken it for granted that I was a relative of the Shipping Master!  I
was quite astonished at this discovery, though indeed the mistake was
natural enough under the circumstances.  What I ought to have admired was
the reticence with which this misunderstanding had been established and
acted upon.  But I was too stupid then to admire anything.  All my
anxiety was that this should be cleared up.  I was ass enough to wonder
exceedingly at Mr. Powell failing to notice the misapprehension.  I saw a
slight twitch come and go on his face; but instead of setting right that
mistake the Shipping Master swung round on his stool and addressed me as
'Charles.'  He did.  And I detected him taking a hasty squint at my
certificate just before, because clearly till he did so he was not sure
of my christian name.  "Now then come round in front of the desk,
Charles," says he in a loud voice.

"Charles!  At first, I declare to you, it didn't seem possible that he
was addressing himself to me.  I even looked round for that Charles but
there was nobody behind me except the thin-necked chap still hard at his
writing, and the other three Shipping Masters who were changing their
coats and reaching for their hats, making ready to go home.  It was the
industrious thin-necked man who without laying down his pen lifted with
his left hand a flap near his desk and said kindly:

"Pass this way."

I walked through in a trance, faced Mr. Powell, from whom I learned that
we were bound to Port Elizabeth first, and signed my name on the Articles
of the ship _Ferndale_ as second mate--the voyage not to exceed two
years.

"You won't fail to join--eh?" says the captain anxiously.  "It would
cause no end of trouble and expense if you did.  You've got a good six
hours to get your gear together, and then you'll have time to snatch a
sleep on board before the crew joins in the morning."

"It was easy enough for him to talk of getting ready in six hours for a
voyage that was not to exceed two years.  He hadn't to do that trick
himself, and with his sea-chest locked up in an outhouse the key of which
had been mislaid for a week as I remembered.  But neither was I much
concerned.  The idea that I was absolutely going to sea at six o'clock
next morning hadn't got quite into my head yet.  It had been too sudden.

"Mr. Powell, slipping the Articles into a long envelope, spoke up with a
sort of cold half-laugh without looking at either of us.

"Mind you don't disgrace the name, Charles."

"And the skipper chimes in very kindly:

"He'll do well enough I dare say.  I'll look after him a bit."

"Upon this he grabs the Articles, says something about trying to run in
for a minute to see that poor devil in the hospital, and off he goes with
his heavy swinging step after telling me sternly: "Don't you go like that
poor fellow and get yourself run over by a cart as if you hadn't either
eyes or ears."

"Mr. Powell," says I timidly (there was by then only the thin-necked man
left in the office with us and he was already by the door, standing on
one leg to turn the bottom of his trousers up before going away).  "Mr.
Powell," says I, "I believe the Captain of the _Ferndale_ was thinking
all the time that I was a relation of yours."

"I was rather concerned about the propriety of it, you know, but Mr.
Powell didn't seem to be in the least.

"Did he?" says he.  "That's funny, because it seems to me too that I've
been a sort of good uncle to several of you young fellows lately.  Don't
you think so yourself?  However, if you don't like it you may put him
right--when you get out to sea."  At this I felt a bit queer.  Mr. Powell
had rendered me a very good service:- because it's a fact that with us
merchant sailors the first voyage as officer is the real start in life.
He had given me no less than that.  I told him warmly that he had done
for me more that day than all my relations put together ever did.

"Oh, no, no," says he.  "I guess it's that shipment of explosives waiting
down the river which has done most for you.  Forty tons of dynamite have
been your best friend to-day, young man."

"That was true too, perhaps.  Anyway I saw clearly enough that I had
nothing to thank myself for.  But as I tried to thank him, he checked my
stammering.

"Don't be in a hurry to thank me," says he.  "The voyage isn't finished
yet."

Our new acquaintance paused, then added meditatively: "Queer man.  As if
it made any difference.  Queer man."

"It's certainly unwise to admit any sort of responsibility for our
actions, whose consequences we are never able to foresee," remarked
Marlow by way of assent.

"The consequence of his action was that I got a ship," said the other.
"That could not do much harm," he added with a laugh which argued a
probably unconscious contempt of general ideas.

But Marlow was not put off.  He was patient and reflective.  He had been
at sea many years and I verily believe he liked sea-life because upon the
whole it is favourable to reflection.  I am speaking of the now nearly
vanished sea-life under sail.  To those who may be surprised at the
statement I will point out that this life secured for the mind of him who
embraced it the inestimable advantages of solitude and silence.  Marlow
had the habit of pursuing general ideas in a peculiar manner, between
jest and earnest.

"Oh, I wouldn't suggest," he said, "that your namesake Mr. Powell, the
Shipping Master, had done you much harm.  Such was hardly his intention.
And even if it had been he would not have had the power.  He was but a
man, and the incapacity to achieve anything distinctly good or evil is
inherent in our earthly condition.  Mediocrity is our mark.  And perhaps
it's just as well, since, for the most part, we cannot be certain of the
effect of our actions."

"I don't know about the effect," the other stood up to Marlow manfully.
"What effect did you expect anyhow?  I tell you he did something
uncommonly kind."

"He did what he could," Marlow retorted gently, "and on his own showing
that was not a very great deal.  I cannot help thinking that there was
some malice in the way he seized the opportunity to serve you.  He
managed to make you uncomfortable.  You wanted to go to sea, but he
jumped at the chance of accommodating your desire with a vengeance.  I am
inclined to think your cheek alarmed him.  And this was an excellent
occasion to suppress you altogether.  For if you accepted he was relieved
of you with every appearance of humanity, and if you made objections
(after requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop
you as a sort of impostor.  You might have had to decline that berth for
some very valid reason.  From sheer necessity perhaps.  The notice was
too uncommonly short.  But under the circumstances you'd have covered
yourself with ignominy."

Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"Quite a mistake," he said.  "I am not of the declining sort, though I'll
admit it was something like telling a man that you would like a bath and
in consequence being instantly knocked overboard to sink or swim with
your clothes on.  However, I didn't feel as if I were in deep water at
first.  I left the shipping office quietly and for a time strolled along
the street as easy as if I had a week before me to fit myself out.  But
by and by I reflected that the notice was even shorter than it looked.
The afternoon was well advanced; I had some things to get, a lot of small
matters to attend to, one or two persons to see.  One of them was an aunt
of mine, my only relation, who quarrelled with poor father as long as he
lived about some silly matter that had neither right nor wrong to it.  She
left her money to me when she died.  I used always to go and see her for
decency's sake.  I had so much to do before night that I didn't know
where to begin.  I felt inclined to sit down on the kerb and hold my head
in my hands.  It was as if an engine had been started going under my
skull.  Finally I sat down in the first cab that came along and it was a
hard matter to keep on sitting there I can tell you, while we rolled up
and down the streets, pulling up here and there, the parcels accumulating
round me and the engine in my head gathering more way every minute.  The
composure of the people on the pavements was provoking to a degree, and
as to the people in shops, they were benumbed, more than half
frozen--imbecile.  Funny how it affects you to be in a peculiar state of
mind: everybody that does not act up to your excitement seems so
confoundedly unfriendly.  And my state of mind what with the hurry, the
worry and a growing exultation was peculiar enough.  That engine in my
head went round at its top speed hour after hour till eleven at about at
night it let up on me suddenly at the entrance to the Dock before large
iron gates in a dead wall."

* * * * *

These gates were closed and locked.  The cabby, after shooting his things
off the roof of his machine into young Powell's arms, drove away leaving
him alone with his sea-chest, a sail cloth bag and a few parcels on the
pavement about his feet.  It was a dark, narrow thoroughfare he told us.
A mean row of houses on the other side looked empty: there wasn't the
smallest gleam of light in them.  The white-hot glare of a gin palace a
good way off made the intervening piece of the street pitch black.  Some
human shapes appearing mysteriously, as if they had sprung up from the
dark ground, shunned the edge of the faint light thrown down by the
gateway lamps.  These figures were wary in their movements and perfectly
silent of foot, like beasts of prey slinking about a camp fire.  Powell
gathered up his belongings and hovered over them like a hen over her
brood.  A gruffly insinuating voice said:

"Let's carry your things in, Capt'in!  I've got my pal 'ere."

He was a tall, bony, grey-haired ruffian with a bulldog jaw, in a torn
cotton shirt and moleskin trousers.  The shadow of his hobnailed boots
was enormous and coffinlike.  His pal, who didn't come up much higher
than his elbow, stepping forward exhibited a pale face with a long
drooping nose and no chin to speak of.  He seemed to have just scrambled
out of a dust-bin in a tam-o'shanter cap and a tattered soldier's coat
much too long for him.  Being so deadly white he looked like a horrible
dirty invalid in a ragged dressing gown.  The coat flapped open in front
and the rest of his apparel consisted of one brace which crossed his
naked, bony chest, and a pair of trousers.  He blinked rapidly as if
dazed by the faint light, while his patron, the old bandit, glowered at
young Powell from under his beetling brow.

"Say the word, Capt'in.  The bobby'll let us in all right.  'E knows both
of us."

"I didn't answer him," continued Mr. Powell.  "I was listening to
footsteps on the other side of the gate, echoing between the walls of the
warehouses as if in an uninhabited town of very high buildings dark from
basement to roof.  You could never have guessed that within a stone's
throw there was an open sheet of water and big ships lying afloat.  The
few gas lamps showing up a bit of brick work here and there, appeared in
the blackness like penny dips in a range of cellars--and the solitary
footsteps came on, tramp, tramp.  A dock policeman strode into the light
on the other side of the gate, very broad-chested and stern.

"Hallo!  What's up here?"

"He was really surprised, but after some palaver he let me in together
with the two loafers carrying my luggage.  He grumbled at them however
and slammed the gate violently with a loud clang.  I was startled to
discover how many night prowlers had collected in the darkness of the
street in such a short time and without my being aware of it.  Directly
we were through they came surging against the bars, silent, like a mob of
ugly spectres.  But suddenly, up the street somewhere, perhaps near that
public-house, a row started as if Bedlam had broken loose: shouts, yells,
an awful shrill shriek--and at that noise all these heads vanished from
behind the bars.

"Look at this," marvelled the constable.  "It's a wonder to me they
didn't make off with your things while you were waiting."

"I would have taken good care of that," I said defiantly.  But the
constable wasn't impressed.

"Much you would have done.  The bag going off round one dark corner; the
chest round another.  Would you have run two ways at once?  And anyhow
you'd have been tripped up and jumped upon before you had run three
yards.  I tell you you've had a most extraordinary chance that there
wasn't one of them regular boys about to-night, in the High Street, to
twig your loaded cab go by.  Ted here is honest . . . You are on the
honest lay, Ted, ain't you?"

"Always was, orficer," said the big ruffian with feeling.  The other
frail creature seemed dumb and only hopped about with the edge of its
soldier coat touching the ground.

"Oh yes, I dare say," said the constable.  "Now then, forward, march . . .
He's that because he ain't game for the other thing," he confided to
me.  "He hasn't got the nerve for it.  However, I ain't going to lose
sight of them two till they go out through the gate.  That little chap's
a devil.  He's got the nerve for anything, only he hasn't got the muscle.
Well!  Well!  You've had a chance to get in with a whole skin and with
all your things."

"I was incredulous a little.  It seemed impossible that after getting
ready with so much hurry and inconvenience I should have lost my chance
of a start in life from such a cause.  I asked:

"Does that sort of thing happen often so near the dock gates?"

"Often!  No!  Of course not often.  But it ain't often either that a man
comes along with a cabload of things to join a ship at this time of
night.  I've been in the dock police thirteen years and haven't seen it
done once."

"Meantime we followed my sea-chest which was being carried down a sort of
deep narrow lane, separating two high warehouses, between honest Ted and
his little devil of a pal who had to keep up a trot to the other's
stride.  The skirt of his soldier's coat floating behind him nearly swept
the ground so that he seemed to be running on castors.  At the corner of
the gloomy passage a rigged jib boom with a dolphin-striker ending in an
arrow-head stuck out of the night close to a cast iron lamp-post.  It was
the quay side.  They set down their load in the light and honest Ted
asked hoarsely:

"Where's your ship, guv'nor?"

"I didn't know.  The constable was interested at my ignorance.

"Don't know where your ship is?" he asked with curiosity.  "And you the
second officer!  Haven't you been working on board of her?"

"I couldn't explain that the only work connected with my appointment was
the work of chance.  I told him briefly that I didn't know her at all.  At
this he remarked:

"So I see.  Here she is, right before you.  That's her."

"At once the head-gear in the gas light inspired me with interest and
respect; the spars were big, the chains and ropes stout and the whole
thing looked powerful and trustworthy.  Barely touched by the light her
bows rose faintly alongside the narrow strip of the quay; the rest of her
was a black smudge in the darkness.  Here I was face to face with my
start in life.  We walked in a body a few steps on a greasy pavement
between her side and the towering wall of a warehouse and I hit my shins
cruelly against the end of the gangway.  The constable hailed her quietly
in a bass undertone '_Ferndale_ there!'  A feeble and dismal sound,
something in the nature of a buzzing groan, answered from behind the
bulwarks.

"I distinguished vaguely an irregular round knob, of wood, perhaps,
resting on the rail.  It did not move in the least; but as another broken-
down buzz like a still fainter echo of the first dismal sound proceeded
from it I concluded it must be the head of the ship-keeper.  The stalwart
constable jeered in a mock-official manner.

"Second officer coming to join.  Move yourself a bit."

"The truth of the statement touched me in the pit of the stomach (you
know that's the spot where emotion gets home on a man) for it was borne
upon me that really and truly I was nothing but a second officer of a
ship just like any other second officer, to that constable.  I was moved
by this solid evidence of my new dignity.  Only his tone offended me.
Nevertheless I gave him the tip he was looking for.  Thereupon he lost
all interest in me, humorous or otherwise, and walked away driving
sternly before him the honest Ted, who went off grumbling to himself like
a hungry ogre, and his horrible dumb little pal in the soldier's coat,
who, from first to last, never emitted the slightest sound.

"It was very dark on the quarter deck of the _Ferndale_ between the deep
bulwarks overshadowed by the break of the poop and frowned upon by the
front of the warehouse.  I plumped down on to my chest near the after
hatch as if my legs had been jerked from under me.  I felt suddenly very
tired and languid.  The ship-keeper, whom I could hardly make out hung
over the capstan in a fit of weak pitiful coughing.  He gasped out very
low 'Oh! dear!  Oh! dear!' and struggled for breath so long that I got up
alarmed and irresolute.

"I've been took like this since last Christmas twelvemonth.  It ain't
nothing."

"He seemed a hundred years old at least.  I never saw him properly
because he was gone ashore and out of sight when I came on deck in the
morning; but he gave me the notion of the feeblest creature that ever
breathed.  His voice was thin like the buzzing of a mosquito.  As it
would have been cruel to demand assistance from such a shadowy wreck I
went to work myself, dragging my chest along a pitch-black passage under
the poop deck, while he sighed and moaned around me as if my exertions
were more than his weakness could stand.  At last as I banged pretty
heavily against the bulkheads he warned me in his faint breathless wheeze
to be more careful.

"What's the matter?" I asked rather roughly, not relishing to be
admonished by this forlorn broken-down ghost.

"Nothing!  Nothing, sir," he protested so hastily that he lost his poor
breath again and I felt sorry for him.  "Only the captain and his missus
are sleeping on board.  She's a lady that mustn't be disturbed.  They
came about half-past eight, and we had a permit to have lights in the
cabin till ten to-night."

"This struck me as a considerable piece of news.  I had never been in a
ship where the captain had his wife with him.  I'd heard fellows say that
captains' wives could work a lot of mischief on board ship if they
happened to take a dislike to anyone; especially the new wives if young
and pretty.  The old and experienced wives on the other hand fancied they
knew more about the ship than the skipper himself and had an eye like a
hawk's for what went on.  They were like an extra chief mate of a
particularly sharp and unfeeling sort who made his report in the evening.
The best of them were a nuisance.  In the general opinion a skipper with
his wife on board was more difficult to please; but whether to show off
his authority before an admiring female or from loving anxiety for her
safety or simply from irritation at her presence--nobody I ever heard on
the subject could tell for certain.

"After I had bundled in my things somehow I struck a match and had a
dazzling glimpse of my berth; then I pitched the roll of my bedding into
the bunk but took no trouble to spread it out.  I wasn't sleepy now,
neither was I tired.  And the thought that I was done with the earth for
many many months to come made me feel very quiet and self-contained as it
were.  Sailors will understand what I mean."

Marlow nodded.  "It is a strictly professional feeling," he commented.
"But other professions or trades know nothing of it.  It is only this
calling whose primary appeal lies in the suggestion of restless adventure
which holds out that deep sensation to those who embrace it.  It is
difficult to define, I admit."

"I should call it the peace of the sea," said Mr. Charles Powell in an
earnest tone but looking at us as though he expected to be met by a laugh
of derision and were half prepared to salve his reputation for common
sense by joining in it.  But neither of us laughed at Mr. Charles Powell
in whose start in life we had been called to take a part.  He was lucky
in his audience.

"A very good name," said Marlow looking at him approvingly.  "A sailor
finds a deep feeling of security in the exercise of his calling.  The
exacting life of the sea has this advantage over the life of the earth
that its claims are simple and cannot be evaded."

"Gospel truth," assented Mr. Powell.  "No! they cannot be evaded."

That an excellent understanding should have established itself between my
old friend and our new acquaintance was remarkable enough.  For they were
exactly dissimilar--one individuality projecting itself in length and the
other in breadth, which is already a sufficient ground for irreconcilable
difference.  Marlow who was lanky, loose, quietly composed in varied
shades of brown robbed of every vestige of gloss, had a narrow, veiled
glance, the neutral bearing and the secret irritability which go together
with a predisposition to congestion of the liver.  The other, compact,
broad and sturdy of limb, seemed extremely full of sound organs
functioning vigorously all the time in order to keep up the brilliance of
his colouring, the light curl of his coal-black hair and the lustre of
his eyes, which asserted themselves roundly in an open, manly face.
Between two such organisms one would not have expected to find the
slightest temperamental accord.  But I have observed that profane men
living in ships like the holy men gathered together in monasteries
develop traits of profound resemblance.  This must be because the service
of the sea and the service of a temple are both detached from the
vanities and errors of a world which follows no severe rule.  The men of
the sea understand each other very well in their view of earthly things,
for simplicity is a good counsellor and isolation not a bad educator.  A
turn of mind composed of innocence and scepticism is common to them all,
with the addition of an unexpected insight into motives, as of
disinterested lookers-on at a game.  Mr. Powell took me aside to say,

"I like the things he says."

"You understand each other pretty well," I observed.

"I know his sort," said Powell, going to the window to look at his cutter
still riding to the flood.  "He's the sort that's always chasing some
notion or other round and round his head just for the fun of the thing."

"Keeps them in good condition," I said.

"Lively enough I dare say," he admitted.

"Would you like better a man who let his notions lie curled up?"

"That I wouldn't," answered our new acquaintance.  Clearly he was not
difficult to get on with.  "I like him, very well," he continued, "though
it isn't easy to make him out.  He seems to be up to a thing or two.
What's he doing?"

I informed him that our friend Marlow had retired from the sea in a sort
of half-hearted fashion some years ago.

Mr. Powell's comment was: "Fancied had enough of it?"

"Fancied's the very word to use in this connection," I observed,
remembering the subtly provisional character of Marlow's long sojourn
amongst us.  From year to year he dwelt on land as a bird rests on the
branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true
element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after
minute.  The sea is the sailor's true element, and Marlow, lingering on
shore, was to me an object of incredulous commiseration like a bird,
which, secretly, should have lost its faith in the high virtue of flying.



CHAPTER TWO--THE FYNES AND THE GIRL-FRIEND


We were on our feet in the room by then, and Marlow, brown and
deliberate, approached the window where Mr. Powell and I had retired.
"What was the name of your chance again?" he asked.  Mr. Powell stared
for a moment.

"Oh!  The _Ferndale_.  A Liverpool ship.  Composite built."

"_Ferndale_," repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  "_Ferndale_."

"Know her?"

"Our friend," I said, "knows something of every ship.  He seems to have
gone about the seas prying into things considerably."

Marlow smiled.

"I've seen her, at least once."

"The finest sea-boat ever launched," declared Mr. Powell sturdily.
"Without exception."

"She looked a stout, comfortable ship," assented Marlow.  "Uncommonly
comfortable.  Not very fast tho'."

"She was fast enough for any reasonable man--when I was in her," growled
Mr. Powell with his back to us.

"Any ship is that--for a reasonable man," generalized Marlow in a
conciliatory tone.  "A sailor isn't a globe-trotter."

"No," muttered Mr. Powell.

"Time's nothing to him," advanced Marlow.

"I don't suppose it's much," said Mr. Powell.  "All the same a quick
passage is a feather in a man's cap."

"True.  But that ornament is for the use of the master only.  And by the
by what was his name?"

"The master of the _Ferndale_?  Anthony.  Captain Anthony."

"Just so.  Quite right," approved Marlow thoughtfully.  Our new
acquaintance looked over his shoulder.

"What do you mean?  Why is it more right than if it had been Brown?"

"He has known him probably," I explained.  "Marlow here appears to know
something of every soul that ever went afloat in a sailor's body."

Mr. Powell seemed wonderfully amenable to verbal suggestions for looking
again out of the window, he muttered:

"He was a good soul."

This clearly referred to Captain Anthony of the _Ferndale_.  Marlow
addressed his protest to me.

"I did not know him.  I really didn't.  He was a good soul.  That's
nothing very much out of the way--is it?  And I didn't even know that
much of him.  All I knew of him was an accident called Fyne.

At this Mr. Powell who evidently could be rebellious too turned his back
squarely on the window.

"What on earth do you mean?" he asked.  "An--accident--called Fyne," he
repeated separating the words with emphasis.

Marlow was not disconcerted.

"I don't mean accident in the sense of a mishap.  Not in the least.  Fyne
was a good little man in the Civil Service.  By accident I mean that
which happens blindly and without intelligent design.  That's generally
the way a brother-in-law happens into a man's life."

Marlow's tone being apologetic and our new acquaintance having again
turned to the window I took it upon myself to say:

"You are justified.  There is very little intelligent design in the
majority of marriages; but they are none the worse for that.  Intelligence
leads people astray as far as passion sometimes.  I know you are not a
cynic."

Marlow smiled his retrospective smile which was kind as though he bore no
grudge against people he used to know.

"Little Fyne's marriage was quite successful.  There was no design at all
in it.  Fyne, you must know, was an enthusiastic pedestrian.  He spent
his holidays tramping all over our native land.  His tastes were simple.
He put infinite conviction and perseverance into his holidays.  At the
proper season you would meet in the fields, Fyne, a serious-faced, broad-
chested, little man, with a shabby knap-sack on his back, making for some
church steeple.  He had a horror of roads.  He wrote once a little book
called the 'Tramp's Itinerary,' and was recognised as an authority on the
footpaths of England.  So one year, in his favourite over-the-fields,
back-way fashion he entered a pretty Surrey village where he met Miss
Anthony.  Pure accident, you see.  They came to an understanding, across
some stile, most likely.  Little Fyne held very solemn views as to the
destiny of women on this earth, the nature of our sublunary love, the
obligations of this transient life and so on.  He probably disclosed them
to his future wife.  Miss Anthony's views of life were very decided too
but in a different way.  I don't know the story of their wooing.  I
imagine it was carried on clandestinely and, I am certain, with
portentous gravity, at the back of copses, behind hedges . . .

"Why was it carried on clandestinely?" I inquired.

"Because of the lady's father.  He was a savage sentimentalist who had
his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives.  He was a terror; but
the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in his
wife's parentage.  It stimulated his ingenuity too.  Difficult--is it
not?--to introduce one's wife's maiden name into general conversation.
But my simple Fyne made use of Captain Anthony for that purpose, or else
I would never even have heard of the man.  "My wife's sailor-brother" was
the phrase.  He trotted out the sailor-brother in a pretty wide range of
subjects: Indian and colonial affairs, matters of trade, talk of travels,
of seaside holidays and so on.  Once I remember "My wife's sailor-brother
Captain Anthony" being produced in connection with nothing less recondite
than a sunset.  And little Fyne never failed to add "The son of Carleon
Anthony, the poet--you know."  He used to lower his voice for that
statement, and people were impressed or pretended to be."

The late Carleon Anthony, the poet, sang in his time of the domestic and
social amenities of our age with a most felicitous versification, his
object being, in his own words, "to glorify the result of six thousand
years' evolution towards the refinement of thought, manners and
feelings."  Why he fixed the term at six thousand years I don't know.  His
poems read like sentimental novels told in verse of a really superior
quality.  You felt as if you were being taken out for a delightful
country drive by a charming lady in a pony carriage.  But in his domestic
life that same Carleon Anthony showed traces of the primitive
cave-dweller's temperament.  He was a massive, implacable man with a
handsome face, arbitrary and exacting with his dependants, but
marvellously suave in his manner to admiring strangers.  These contrasted
displays must have been particularly exasperating to his long-suffering
family.  After his second wife's death his boy, whom he persisted by a
mere whim in educating at home, ran away in conventional style and, as if
disgusted with the amenities of civilization, threw himself, figuratively
speaking, into the sea.  The daughter (the elder of the two children)
either from compassion or because women are naturally more enduring,
remained in bondage to the poet for several years, till she too seized a
chance of escape by throwing herself into the arms, the muscular arms, of
the pedestrian Fyne.  This was either great luck or great sagacity.  A
civil servant is, I should imagine, the last human being in the world to
preserve those traits of the cave-dweller from which she was fleeing.  Her
father would never consent to see her after the marriage.  Such
unforgiving selfishness is difficult to understand unless as a perverse
sort of refinement.  There were also doubts as to Carleon Anthony's
complete sanity for some considerable time before he died.

Most of the above I elicited from Marlow, for all I knew of Carleon
Anthony was his unexciting but fascinating verse.  Marlow assured me that
the Fyne marriage was perfectly successful and even happy, in an earnest,
unplayful fashion, being blessed besides by three healthy, active, self-
reliant children, all girls.  They were all pedestrians too.  Even the
youngest would wander away for miles if not restrained.  Mrs. Fyne had a
ruddy out-of-doors complexion and wore blouses with a starched front like
a man's shirt, a stand-up collar and a long necktie.  Marlow had made
their acquaintance one summer in the country, where they were accustomed
to take a cottage for the holidays . . .

At this point we were interrupted by Mr. Powell who declared that he must
leave us.  The tide was on the turn, he announced coming away from the
window abruptly.  He wanted to be on board his cutter before she swung
and of course he would sleep on board.  Never slept away from the cutter
while on a cruise.  He was gone in a moment, unceremoniously, but giving
us no offence and leaving behind an impression as though we had known him
for a long time.  The ingenuous way he had told us of his start in life
had something to do with putting him on that footing with us.  I gave no
thought to seeing him again.

Marlow expressed a confident hope of coming across him before long.

"He cruises about the mouth of the river all the summer.  He will be easy
to find any week-end," he remarked ringing the bell so that we might
settle up with the waiter.

* * * * *

Later on I asked Marlow why he wished to cultivate this chance
acquaintance.  He confessed apologetically that it was the commonest sort
of curiosity.  I flatter myself that I understand all sorts of curiosity.
Curiosity about daily facts, about daily things, about daily men.  It is
the most respectable faculty of the human mind--in fact I cannot conceive
the uses of an incurious mind.  It would be like a chamber perpetually
locked up.  But in this particular case Mr. Powell seemed to have given
us already a complete insight into his personality such as it was; a
personality capable of perception and with a feeling for the vagaries of
fate, but essentially simple in itself.

Marlow agreed with me so far.  He explained however that his curiosity
was not excited by Mr. Powell exclusively.  It originated a good way
further back in the fact of his accidental acquaintance with the Fynes,
in the country.  This chance meeting with a man who had sailed with
Captain Anthony had revived it.  It had revived it to some purpose, to
such purpose that to me too was given the knowledge of its origin and of
its nature.  It was given to me in several stages, at intervals which are
not indicated here.  On this first occasion I remarked to Marlow with
some surprise:

"But, if I remember rightly you said you didn't know Captain Anthony."

"No.  I never saw the man.  It's years ago now, but I seem to hear solemn
little Fyne's deep voice announcing the approaching visit of his wife's
brother "the son of the poet, you know."  He had just arrived in London
from a long voyage, and, directly his occupations permitted, was coming
down to stay with his relatives for a few weeks.  No doubt we two should
find many things to talk about by ourselves in reference to our common
calling, added little Fyne portentously in his grave undertones, as if
the Mercantile Marine were a secret society.

You must understand that I cultivated the Fynes only in the country, in
their holiday time.  This was the third year.  Of their existence in town
I knew no more than may be inferred from analogy.  I played chess with
Fyne in the late afternoon, and sometimes came over to the cottage early
enough to have tea with the whole family at a big round table.  They sat
about it, an unsmiling, sunburnt company of very few words indeed.  Even
the children were silent and as if contemptuous of each other and of
their elders.  Fyne muttered sometimes deep down in his chest some
insignificant remark.  Mrs. Fyne smiled mechanically (she had splendid
teeth) while distributing tea and bread and butter.  A something which
was not coldness, nor yet indifference, but a sort of peculiar
self-possession gave her the appearance of a very trustworthy, very
capable and excellent governess; as if Fyne were a widower and the
children not her own but only entrusted to her calm, efficient,
unemotional care.  One expected her to address Fyne as Mr.  When she
called him John it surprised one like a shocking familiarity.  The
atmosphere of that holiday was--if I may put it so--brightly dull.
Healthy faces, fair complexions, clear eyes, and never a frank smile in
the whole lot, unless perhaps from a girl-friend.

The girl-friend problem exercised me greatly.  How and where the Fynes
got all these pretty creatures to come and stay with them I can't
imagine.  I had at first the wild suspicion that they were obtained to
amuse Fyne.  But I soon discovered that he could hardly tell one from the
other, though obviously their presence met with his solemn approval.
These girls in fact came for Mrs. Fyne.  They treated her with admiring
deference.  She answered to some need of theirs.  They sat at her feet.
They were like disciples.  It was very curious.  Of Fyne they took but
scanty notice.  As to myself I was made to feel that I did not exist.

After tea we would sit down to chess and then Fyne's everlasting gravity
became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward which
resembled sly satisfaction.  Of the divine frivolity of laughter he was
only capable over a chess-board.  Certain positions of the game struck
him as humorous, which nothing else on earth could do . . .

"He used to beat you," I asserted with confidence.

"Yes.  He used to beat me," Marlow owned up hastily.

So he and Fyne played two games after tea.  The children romped together
outside, gravely, unplayfully, as one would expect from Fyne's children,
and Mrs. Fyne would be gone to the bottom of the garden with the girl-
friend of the week.  She always walked off directly after tea with her
arm round the girl-friend's waist.  Marlow said that there was only one
girl-friend with whom he had conversed at all.  It had happened quite
unexpectedly, long after he had given up all hope of getting into touch
with these reserved girl-friends.

One day he saw a woman walking about on the edge of a high quarry, which
rose a sheer hundred feet, at least, from the road winding up the hill
out of which it had been excavated.  He shouted warningly to her from
below where he happened to be passing.  She was really in considerable
danger.  At the sound of his voice she started back and retreated out of
his sight amongst some young Scotch firs growing near the very brink of
the precipice.

"I sat down on a bank of grass," Marlow went on.  "She had given me a
turn.  The hem of her skirt seemed to float over that awful sheer drop,
she was so close to the edge.  An absurd thing to do.  A perfectly mad
trick--for no conceivable object!  I was reflecting on the foolhardiness
of the average girl and remembering some other instances of the kind,
when she came into view walking down the steep curve of the road.  She
had Mrs. Fyne's walking-stick and was escorted by the Fyne dog.  Her dead
white face struck me with astonishment, so that I forgot to raise my hat.
I just sat and stared.  The dog, a vivacious and amiable animal which for
some inscrutable reason had bestowed his friendship on my unworthy self,
rushed up the bank demonstratively and insinuated himself under my arm.

The girl-friend (it was one of them) went past some way as though she had
not seen me, then stopped and called the dog to her several times; but he
only nestled closer to my side, and when I tried to push him away
developed that remarkable power of internal resistance by which a dog
makes himself practically immovable by anything short of a kick.  She
looked over her shoulder and her arched eyebrows frowned above her
blanched face.  It was almost a scowl.  Then the expression changed.  She
looked unhappy.  "Come here!" she cried once more in an angry and
distressed tone.  I took off my hat at last, but the dog hanging out his
tongue with that cheerfully imbecile expression some dogs know so well
how to put on when it suits their purpose, pretended to be deaf.

She cried from the distance desperately.

"Perhaps you will take him to the cottage then.  I can't wait."

"I won't be responsible for that dog," I protested getting down the bank
and advancing towards her.  She looked very hurt, apparently by the
desertion of the dog.  "But if you let me walk with you he will follow us
all right," I suggested.

She moved on without answering me.  The dog launched himself suddenly
full speed down the road receding from us in a small cloud of dust.  It
vanished in the distance, and presently we came up with him lying on the
grass.  He panted in the shade of the hedge with shining eyes but
pretended not to see us.  We had not exchanged a word so far.  The girl
by my side gave him a scornful glance in passing.

"He offered to come with me," she remarked bitterly.

"And then abandoned you!" I sympathized.  "It looks very unchivalrous.
But that's merely his want of tact.  I believe he meant to protest
against your reckless proceedings.  What made you come so near the edge
of that quarry?  The earth might have given way.  Haven't you noticed a
smashed fir tree at the bottom?  Tumbled over only the other morning
after a night's rain."

"I don't see why I shouldn't be as reckless as I please."

I was nettled by her brusque manner of asserting her folly, and I told
her that neither did I as far as that went, in a tone which almost
suggested that she was welcome to break her neck for all I cared.  This
was considerably more than I meant, but I don't like rude girls.  I had
been introduced to her only the day before--at the round tea-table--and
she had barely acknowledged the introduction.  I had not caught her name
but I had noticed her fine, arched eyebrows which, so the physiognomists
say, are a sign of courage.

I examined her appearance quietly.  Her hair was nearly black, her eyes
blue, deeply shaded by long dark eyelashes.  She had a little colour now.
She looked straight before her; the corner of her lip on my side drooped
a little; her chin was fine, somewhat pointed.  I went on to say that
some regard for others should stand in the way of one's playing with
danger.  I urged playfully the distress of the poor Fynes in case of
accident, if nothing else.  I told her that she did not know the bucolic
mind.  Had she given occasion for a coroner's inquest the verdict would
have been suicide, with the implication of unhappy love.  They would
never be able to understand that she had taken the trouble to climb over
two post-and-rail fences only for the fun of being reckless.  Indeed even
as I talked chaffingly I was greatly struck myself by the fact.

She retorted that once one was dead what horrid people thought of one did
not matter.  It was said with infinite contempt; but something like a
suppressed quaver in the voice made me look at her again.  I perceived
then that her thick eyelashes were wet.  This surprising discovery
silenced me as you may guess.  She looked unhappy.  And--I don't know how
to say it--well--it suited her.  The clouded brow, the pained mouth, the
vague fixed glance!  A victim.  And this characteristic aspect made her
attractive; an individual touch--you know.

The dog had run on ahead and now gazed at us by the side of the Fyne's
garden-gate in a tense attitude and wagging his stumpy tail very, very
slowly, with an air of concentrated attention.  The girl-friend of the
Fynes bolted violently through the aforesaid gate and into the cottage
leaving me on the road--astounded.

A couple of hours afterwards I returned to the cottage for chess as
usual.  I saw neither the girl nor Mrs. Fyne then.  We had our two games
and on parting I warned Fyne that I was called to town on business and
might be away for some time.  He regretted it very much.  His brother-in-
law was expected next day but he didn't know whether he was a
chess-player.  Captain Anthony ("the son of the poet--you know") was of a
retiring disposition, shy with strangers, unused to society and very much
devoted to his calling, Fyne explained.  All the time they had been
married he could be induced only once before to come and stay with them
for a few days.  He had had a rather unhappy boyhood; and it made him a
silent man.  But no doubt, concluded Fyne, as if dealing portentously
with a mystery, we two sailors should find much to say to one another.

This point was never settled.  I was detained in town from week to week
till it seemed hardly worth while to go back.  But as I had kept on my
rooms in the farmhouse I concluded to go down again for a few days.

It was late, deep dusk, when I got out at our little country station.  My
eyes fell on the unmistakable broad back and the muscular legs in cycling
stockings of little Fyne.  He passed along the carriages rapidly towards
the rear of the train, which presently pulled out and left him solitary
at the end of the rustic platform.  When he came back to where I waited I
perceived that he was much perturbed, so perturbed as to forget the
convention of the usual greetings.  He only exclaimed Oh! on recognizing
me, and stopped irresolute.  When I asked him if he had been expecting
somebody by that train he didn't seem to know.  He stammered
disconnectedly.  I looked hard at him.  To all appearances he was
perfectly sober; moreover to suspect Fyne of a lapse from the proprieties
high or low, great or small, was absurd.  He was also a too serious and
deliberate person to go mad suddenly.  But as he seemed to have forgotten
that he had a tongue in his head I concluded I would leave him to his
mystery.  To my surprise he followed me out of the station and kept by my
side, though I did not encourage him.  I did not however repulse his
attempts at conversation.  He was no longer expecting me, he said.  He
had given me up.  The weather had been uniformly fine--and so on.  I
gathered also that the son of the poet had curtailed his stay somewhat
and gone back to his ship the day before.

That information touched me but little.  Believing in heredity in
moderation I knew well how sea-life fashions a man outwardly and stamps
his soul with the mark of a certain prosaic fitness--because a sailor is
not an adventurer.  I expressed no regret at missing Captain Anthony and
we proceeded in silence till, on approaching the holiday cottage, Fyne
suddenly and unexpectedly broke it by the hurried declaration that he
would go on with me a little farther.

"Go with you to your door," he mumbled and started forward to the little
gate where the shadowy figure of Mrs. Fyne hovered, clearly on the
lookout for him.  She was alone.  The children must have been already in
bed and I saw no attending girl-friend shadow near her vague but
unmistakable form, half-lost in the obscurity of the little garden.

I heard Fyne exclaim "Nothing" and then Mrs. Fyne's well-trained,
responsible voice uttered the words, "It's what I have said," with
incisive equanimity.  By that time I had passed on, raising my hat.
Almost at once Fyne caught me up and slowed down to my strolling gait
which must have been infinitely irksome to his high pedestrian faculties.
I am sure that all his muscular person must have suffered from awful
physical boredom; but he did not attempt to charm it away by
conversation.  He preserved a portentous and dreary silence.  And I was
bored too.  Suddenly I perceived the menace of even worse boredom.  Yes!
He was so silent because he had something to tell me.

I became extremely frightened.  But man, reckless animal, is so made that
in him curiosity, the paltriest curiosity, will overcome all terrors,
every disgust, and even despair itself.  To my laconic invitation to come
in for a drink he answered by a deep, gravely accented: "Thanks, I will"
as though it were a response in church.  His face as seen in the
lamplight gave me no clue to the character of the impending
communication; as indeed from the nature of things it couldn't do, its
normal expression being already that of the utmost possible seriousness.
It was perfect and immovable; and for a certainty if he had something
excruciatingly funny to tell me it would be all the same.

He gazed at me earnestly and delivered himself of some weighty remarks on
Mrs. Fyne's desire to befriend, counsel, and guide young girls of all
sorts on the path of life.  It was a voluntary mission.  He approved his
wife's action and also her views and principles in general.

All this with a solemn countenance and in deep measured tones.  Yet
somehow I got an irresistible conviction that he was exasperated by
something in particular.  In the unworthy hope of being amused by the
misfortunes of a fellow-creature I asked him point-blank what was wrong
now.

What was wrong was that a girl-friend was missing.  She had been missing
precisely since six o'clock that morning.  The woman who did the work of
the cottage saw her going out at that hour, for a walk.  The pedestrian
Fyne's ideas of a walk were extensive, but the girl did not turn up for
lunch, nor yet for tea, nor yet for dinner.  She had not turned up by
footpath, road or rail.  He had been reluctant to make inquiries.  It
would have set all the village talking.  The Fynes had expected her to
reappear every moment, till the shades of the night and the silence of
slumber had stolen gradually over the wide and peaceful rural landscape
commanded by the cottage.

After telling me that much Fyne sat helpless in unconclusive agony.  Going
to bed was out of the question--neither could any steps be taken just
then.  What to do with himself he did not know!

I asked him if this was the same young lady I saw a day or two before I
went to town?  He really could not remember.  Was she a girl with dark
hair and blue eyes?  I asked further.  He really couldn't tell what
colour her eyes were.  He was very unobservant except as to the
peculiarities of footpaths, on which he was an authority.

I thought with amazement and some admiration that Mrs. Fyne's young
disciples were to her husband's gravity no more than evanescent shadows.
However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that--yes,
her hair was of some dark shade.

"We had a good deal to do with that girl first and last," he explained
solemnly; then getting up as if moved by a spring he snatched his cap off
the table.  "She may be back in the cottage," he cried in his bass voice.
I followed him out on the road.

It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of
the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid
revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.  I hate such skies.
Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart;
and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness.  I nearly ran
back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit
before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient,
phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with.  On the other
hand there was something fascinating in the very absurdity.  He cut along
in his best pedestrian style and I found myself let in for a spell of
severe exercise at eleven o'clock at night.

In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the vast
obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was like a
bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer.  Inside, at the
table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs. Fyne sitting with folded arms and not
a hair of her head out of place.  She looked exactly like a governess who
had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just the neutral
manner of a governess.  To her husband, too, for that matter.

Fyne told her that I was fully informed.  Not a muscle of her ruddy
smooth handsome face moved.  She had schooled herself into that sort of
thing.  Having seen two successive wives of the delicate poet chivied and
worried into their graves, she had adopted that cool, detached manner to
meet her gifted father's outbreaks of selfish temper.  It had now become
a second nature.  I suppose she was always like that; even in the very
hour of elopement with Fyne.  That transaction when one remembered it in
her presence acquired a quaintly marvellous aspect to one's imagination.
But somehow her self-possession matched very well little Fyne's
invariable solemnity.

I was rather sorry for him.  Wasn't he worried!  The agony of solemnity.
At the same time I was amused.  I didn't take a gloomy view of that
"vanishing girl" trick.  Somehow I couldn't.  But I said nothing.  None
of us said anything.  We sat about that big round table as if assembled
for a conference and looked at each other in a sort of fatuous
consternation.  I would have ended by laughing outright if I had not been
saved from that impropriety by poor Fyne becoming preposterous.

He began with grave anguish to talk of going to the police in the
morning, of printing descriptive bills, of setting people to drag the
ponds for miles around.  It was extremely gruesome.  I murmured something
about communicating with the young lady's relatives.  It seemed to me a
very natural suggestion; but Fyne and his wife exchanged such a
significant glance that I felt as though I had made a tactless remark.

But I really wanted to help poor Fyne; and as I could see that, manlike,
he suffered from the present inability to act, the passive waiting, I
said: "Nothing of this can be done till to-morrow.  But as you have given
me an insight into the nature of your thoughts I can tell you what may be
done at once.  We may go and look at the bottom of the old quarry which
is on the level of the road, about a mile from here."

The couple made big eyes at this, and then I told them of my meeting with
the girl.  You may be surprised but I assure you I had not perceived this
aspect of it till that very moment.  It was like a startling revelation;
the past throwing a sinister light on the future.  Fyne opened his mouth
gravely and as gravely shut it.  Nothing more.  Mrs. Fyne said, "You had
better go," with an air as if her self-possession had been pricked with a
pin in some secret place.

And I--you know how stupid I can be at times--I perceived with dismay for
the first time that by pandering to Fyne's morbid fancies I had let
myself in for some more severe exercise.  And wasn't I sorry I spoke!  You
know how I hate walking--at least on solid, rural earth; for I can walk a
ship's deck a whole foggy night through, if necessary, and think little
of it.  There is some satisfaction too in playing the vagabond in the
streets of a big town till the sky pales above the ridges of the roofs.  I
have done that repeatedly for pleasure--of a sort.  But to tramp the
slumbering country-side in the dark is for me a wearisome nightmare of
exertion.

With perfect detachment Mrs. Fyne watched me go out after her husband.
That woman was flint.

* * * * *

The fresh night had a smell of soil, of turned-up sods like a grave--an
association particularly odious to a sailor by its idea of confinement
and narrowness; yes, even when he has given up the hope of being buried
at sea; about the last hope a sailor gives up consciously after he has
been, as it does happen, decoyed by some chance into the toils of the
land.  A strong grave-like sniff.  The ditch by the side of the road must
have been freshly dug in front of the cottage.

Once clear of the garden Fyne gathered way like a racing cutter.  What
was a mile to him--or twenty miles?  You think he might have gone
shrinkingly on such an errand.  But not a bit of it.  The force of
pedestrian genius I suppose.  I raced by his side in a mood of profound
self-derision, and infinitely vexed with that minx.  Because dead or
alive I thought of her as a minx . . ."

I smiled incredulously at Marlow's ferocity; but Marlow pausing with a
whimsically retrospective air, never flinched.

"Yes, yes.  Even dead.  And now you are shocked.  You see, you are such a
chivalrous masculine beggar.  But there is enough of the woman in my
nature to free my judgment of women from glamorous reticency.  And then,
why should I upset myself?  A woman is not necessarily either a doll or
an angel to me.  She is a human being, very much like myself.  And I have
come across too many dead souls lying so to speak at the foot of high
unscaleable places for a merely possible dead body at the bottom of a
quarry to strike my sincerity dumb.

The cliff-like face of the quarry looked forbiddingly impressive.  I will
admit that Fyne and I hung back for a moment before we made a plunge off
the road into the bushes growing in a broad space at the foot of the
towering limestone wall.  These bushes were heavy with dew.  There were
also concealed mudholes in there.  We crept and tumbled and felt about
with our hands along the ground.  We got wet, scratched, and plastered
with mire all over our nether garments.  Fyne fell suddenly into a
strange cavity--probably a disused lime-kiln.  His voice uplifted in
grave distress sounded more than usually rich, solemn and profound.  This
was the comic relief of an absurdly dramatic situation.  While hauling
him out I permitted myself to laugh aloud at last.  Fyne, of course,
didn't.

I need not tell you that we found nothing after a most conscientious
search.  Fyne even pushed his way into a decaying shed half-buried in dew-
soaked vegetation.  He struck matches, several of them too, as if to make
absolutely sure that the vanished girl-friend of his wife was not hiding
there.  The short flares illuminated his grave, immovable countenance
while I let myself go completely and laughed in peals.

I asked him if he really and truly supposed that any sane girl would go
and hide in that shed; and if so why?

Disdainful of my mirth he merely muttered his basso-profundo thankfulness
that we had not found her anywhere about there.  Having grown extremely
sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of this
affair, I felt that it was only an imperfect, reserved, thankfulness,
with one eye still on the possibilities of the several ponds in the
neighbourhood.  And I remember I snorted, I positively snorted, at that
poor Fyne.

What really jarred upon me was the rate of his walking.  Differences in
politics, in ethics and even in aesthetics need not arouse angry
antagonism.  One's opinion may change; one's tastes may alter--in fact
they do.  One's very conception of virtue is at the mercy of some
felicitous temptation which may be sprung on one any day.  All these
things are perpetually on the swing.  But a temperamental difference,
temperament being immutable, is the parent of hate.  That's why religious
quarrels are the fiercest of all.  My temperament, in matters pertaining
to solid land, is the temperament of leisurely movement, of deliberate
gait.  And there was that little Fyne pounding along the road in a most
offensive manner; a man wedded to thick-soled, laced boots; whereas my
temperament demands thin shoes of the lightest kind.  Of course there
could never have been question of friendship between us; but under the
provocation of having to keep up with his pace I began to dislike him
actively.  I begged sarcastically to know whether he could tell me if we
were engaged in a farce or in a tragedy.  I wanted to regulate my
feelings which, I told him, were in an unbecoming state of confusion.

But Fyne was as impervious to sarcasm as a turtle.  He tramped on, and
all he did was to ejaculate twice out of his deep chest, vaguely,
doubtfully.

"I am afraid . . . I am afraid! . . . "

This was tragic.  The thump of his boots was the only sound in a shadowy
world.  I kept by his side with a comparatively ghostly, silent tread.  By
a strange illusion the road appeared to run up against a lot of low stars
at no very great distance, but as we advanced new stretches of whitey-
brown ribbon seemed to come up from under the black ground.  I observed,
as we went by, the lamp in my parlour in the farmhouse still burning.  But
I did not leave Fyne to run in and put it out.  The impetus of his
pedestrian excellence carried me past in his wake before I could make up
my mind.

"Tell me, Fyne," I cried, "you don't think the girl was mad--do you?"

He answered nothing.  Soon the lighted beacon-like window of the cottage
came into view.  Then Fyne uttered a solemn: "Certainly not," with
profound assurance.  But immediately after he added a "Very highly strung
young person indeed," which unsettled me again.  Was it a tragedy?

"Nobody ever got up at six o'clock in the morning to commit suicide," I
declared crustily.  "It's unheard of!  This is a farce."

As a matter of fact it was neither farce nor tragedy.

Coming up to the cottage we had a view of Mrs. Fyne inside still sitting
in the strong light at the round table with folded arms.  It looked as
though she had not moved her very head by as much as an inch since we
went away.  She was amazing in a sort of unsubtle way; crudely amazing--I
thought.  Why crudely?  I don't know.  Perhaps because I saw her then in
a crude light.  I mean this materially--in the light of an unshaded lamp.
Our mental conclusions depend so much on momentary physical
sensations--don't they?  If the lamp had been shaded I should perhaps
have gone home after expressing politely my concern at the Fynes'
unpleasant predicament.

Losing a girl-friend in that manner is unpleasant.  It is also
mysterious.  So mysterious that a certain mystery attaches to the people
to whom such a thing does happen.  Moreover I had never really understood
the Fynes; he with his solemnity which extended to the very eating of
bread and butter; she with that air of detachment and resolution in
breasting the common-place current of their unexciting life, in which the
cutting of bread and butter appeared to me, by a long way, the most
dangerous episode.  Sometimes I amused myself by supposing that to their
minds this world of ours must be wearing a perfectly overwhelming aspect,
and that their heads contained respectively awfully serious and extremely
desperate thoughts--and trying to imagine what an exciting time they must
be having of it in the inscrutable depths of their being.  This last was
difficult to a volatile person (I am sure that to the Fynes I was a
volatile person) and the amusement in itself was not very great; but
still--in the country--away from all mental stimulants! . . . My efforts
had invested them with a sort of amusing profundity.

But when Fyne and I got back into the room, then in the searching,
domestic, glare of the lamp, inimical to the play of fancy, I saw these
two stripped of every vesture it had amused me to put on them for fun.
Queer enough they were.  Is there a human being that isn't that--more or
less secretly?  But whatever their secret, it was manifest to me that it
was neither subtle nor profound.  They were a good, stupid, earnest
couple and very much bothered.  They were that--with the usual unshaded
crudity of average people.  There was nothing in them that the lamplight
might not touch without the slightest risk of indiscretion.

Directly we had entered the room Fyne announced the result by saying
"Nothing" in the same tone as at the gate on his return from the railway
station.  And as then Mrs. Fyne uttered an incisive "It's what I've
said," which might have been the veriest echo of her words in the garden.
We three looked at each other as if on the brink of a disclosure.  I
don't know whether she was vexed at my presence.  It could hardly be
called intrusion--could it?  Little Fyne began it.  It had to go on.  We
stood before her, plastered with the same mud (Fyne was a sight!),
scratched by the same brambles, conscious of the same experience.  Yes.
Before her.  And she looked at us with folded arms, with an extraordinary
fulness of assumed responsibility.  I addressed her.

"You don't believe in an accident, Mrs. Fyne, do you?"

She shook her head in curt negation while, caked in mud and inexpressibly
serious-faced, Fyne seemed to be backing her up with all the weight of
his solemn presence.  Nothing more absurd could be conceived.  It was
delicious.  And I went on in deferential accents: "Am I to understand
then that you entertain the theory of suicide?"

I don't know that I am liable to fits of delirium but by a sudden and
alarming aberration while waiting for her answer I became mentally aware
of three trained dogs dancing on their hind legs.  I don't know why.
Perhaps because of the pervading solemnity.  There's nothing more solemn
on earth than a dance of trained dogs.

"She has chosen to disappear.  That's all."

In these words Mrs. Fyne answered me.  The aggressive tone was too much
for my endurance.  In an instant I found myself out of the dance and down
on all-fours so to speak, with liberty to bark and bite.

"The devil she has," I cried.  "Has chosen to . . . Like this, all at
once, anyhow, regardless . . . I've had the privilege of meeting that
reckless and brusque young lady and I must say that with her air of an
angry victim . . . "

"Precisely," Mrs. Fyne said very unexpectedly like a steel trap going
off.  I stared at her.  How provoking she was!  So I went on to finish my
tirade.  "She struck me at first sight as the most inconsiderate wrong-
headed girl that I ever . . . "

"Why should a girl be more considerate than anyone else?  More than any
man, for instance?" inquired Mrs. Fyne with a still greater assertion of
responsibility in her bearing.

Of course I exclaimed at this, not very loudly it is true, but forcibly.
Were then the feelings of friends, relations and even of strangers to be
disregarded?  I asked Mrs. Fyne if she did not think it was a sort of
duty to show elementary consideration not only for the natural feelings
but even for the prejudices of one's fellow-creatures.

Her answer knocked me over.

"Not for a woman."

Just like that.  I confess that I went down flat.  And while in that
collapsed state I learned the true nature of Mrs. Fyne's feminist
doctrine.  It was not political, it was not social.  It was a knock-me-
down doctrine--a practical individualistic doctrine.  You would not thank
me for expounding it to you at large.  Indeed I think that she herself
did not enlighten me fully.  There must have been things not fit for a
man to hear.  But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed me to
grasp its naive atrociousness, it was something like this: that no
consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in
the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined
victim of conditions created by men's selfish passions, their vices and
their abominable tyranny) from taking the shortest cut towards securing
for herself the easiest possible existence.  She had even the right to go
out of existence without considering anyone's feelings or convenience
since some women's existences were made impossible by the shortsighted
baseness of men.

I looked at her, sitting before the lamp at one o'clock in the morning,
with her mature, smooth-cheeked face of masculine shape robbed of its
freshness by fatigue; at her eyes dimmed by this senseless vigil.  I
looked also at Fyne; the mud was drying on him; he was obviously tired.
The weariness of solemnity.  But he preserved an unflinching, endorsing,
gravity of expression.  Endorsing it all as became a good, convinced
husband.

"Oh!  I see," I said.  "No consideration . . . Well I hope you like it."

They amused me beyond the wildest imaginings of which I was capable.
After the first shock, you understand, I recovered very quickly.  The
order of the world was safe enough.  He was a civil servant and she his
good and faithful wife.  But when it comes to dealing with human beings
anything, anything may be expected.  So even my astonishment did not last
very long.  How far she developed and illustrated that conscienceless and
austere doctrine to the girl-friends, who were mere transient shadows to
her husband, I could not tell.  Any length I supposed.  And he looked on,
acquiesced, approved, just for that very reason--because these pretty
girls were but shadows to him.  O!  Most virtuous Fyne!  He cast his eyes
down.  He didn't like it.  But I eyed him with hidden animosity for he
had got me to run after him under somewhat false pretences.

Mrs. Fyne had only smiled at me very expressively, very self-confidently.
"Oh I quite understand that you accept the fullest responsibility," I
said.  "I am the only ridiculous person in this--this--I don't know how
to call it--performance.  However, I've nothing more to do here, so I'll
say good-night--or good morning, for it must be past one."

But before departing, in common decency, I offered to take any wires they
might write.  My lodgings were nearer the post-office than the cottage
and I would send them off the first thing in the morning.  I supposed
they would wish to communicate, if only as to the disposal of the
luggage, with the young lady's relatives . . .

Fyne, he looked rather downcast by then, thanked me and declined.

"There is really no one," he said, very grave.

"No one," I exclaimed.

"Practically," said curt Mrs. Fyne.

And my curiosity was aroused again.

"Ah!  I see.  An orphan."

Mrs. Fyne looked away weary and sombre, and Fyne said "Yes" impulsively,
and then qualified the affirmative by the quaint statement: "To a certain
extent."

I became conscious of a languid, exhausted embarrassment, bowed to Mrs.
Fyne, and went out of the cottage to be confronted outside its door by
the bespangled, cruel revelation of the Immensity of the Universe.  The
night was not sufficiently advanced for the stars to have paled; and the
earth seemed to me more profoundly asleep--perhaps because I was alone
now.  Not having Fyne with me to set the pace I let myself drift, rather
than walk, in the direction of the farmhouse.  To drift is the only
reposeful sort of motion (ask any ship if it isn't) and therefore
consistent with thoughtfulness.  And I pondered: How is one an orphan "to
a certain extent"?

No amount of solemnity could make such a statement other than bizarre.
What a strange condition to be in.  Very likely one of the parents only
was dead?  But no; it couldn't be, since Fyne had said just before that
"there was really no one" to communicate with.  No one!  And then
remembering Mrs. Fyne's snappy "Practically" my thoughts fastened upon
that lady as a more tangible object of speculation.

I wondered--and wondering I doubted--whether she really understood
herself the theory she had propounded to me.  Everything may be
said--indeed ought to be said--providing we know how to say it.  She
probably did not.  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, naively 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 be the same?  Surely not!

"The financier?" I suggested half incredulous.

"Yes," said Fyne; and in this instance his native solemnity of tone
seemed to be strangely appropriate.  "The convict."

Marlow looked at me, significantly, and remarked in an explanatory tone:

"One somehow never thought of de Barral as having any children, or any
other home than the offices of the "Orb"; or any other existence,
associations or interests than financial.  I see you remember the crash
. . . "

"I was away in the Indian Seas at the time," I said.  "But of course--"

"Of course," Marlow struck in.  "All the world . . . You may wonder at my
slowness in recognizing the name.  But you know that my memory is merely
a mausoleum of proper names.  There they lie inanimate, awaiting the
magic touch--and not very prompt in arising when called, either.  The
name is the first thing I forget of a man.  It is but just to add that
frequently it is also the last, and this accounts for my possession of a
good many anonymous memories.  In de Barral's case, he got put away in my
mausoleum in company with so many names of his own creation that really
he had to throw off a monstrous heap of grisly bones before he stood
before me at the call of the wizard Fyne.  The fellow had a pretty fancy
in names: the "Orb" Deposit Bank, the "Sceptre" Mutual Aid Society, the
"Thrift and Independence" Association.  Yes, a very pretty taste in
names; and nothing else besides--absolutely nothing--no other merit.  Well
yes.  He had another name, but that's pure luck--his own name of de
Barral which he did not invent.  I don't think that a mere Jones or Brown
could have fished out from the depths of the Incredible such a colossal
manifestation of human folly as that man did.  But it may be that I am
underestimating the alacrity of human folly in rising to the bait.  No
doubt I am.  The greed of that absurd monster is incalculable,
unfathomable, inconceivable.  The career of de Barral demonstrates that
it will rise to a naked hook.  He didn't lure it with a fairy tale.  He
hadn't enough imagination for it . . . "

"Was he a foreigner?" I asked.  "It's clearly a French name.  I suppose
it _was_ his name?"

"Oh, he didn't invent it.  He was born to it, in Bethnal Green, as it
came out during the proceedings.  He was in the habit of alluding to his
Scotch connections.  But every great man has done that.  The mother, I
believe, was Scotch, right enough.  The father de Barral whatever his
origins retired from the Customs Service (tide-waiter I think), and
started lending money in a very, very small way in the East End to people
connected with the docks, stevedores, minor barge-owners, ship-chandlers,
tally clerks, all sorts of very small fry.  He made his living at it.  He
was a very decent man I believe.  He had enough influence to place his
only son as junior clerk in the account department of one of the Dock
Companies.  "Now, my boy," he said to him, "I've given you a fine start."
But de Barral didn't start.  He stuck.  He gave perfect satisfaction.  At
the end of three years he got a small rise of salary and went out
courting in the evenings.  He went courting the daughter of an old sea-
captain who was a churchwarden of his parish and lived in an old badly
preserved Georgian house with a garden: one of these houses standing in a
reduced bit of "grounds" that you discover in a labyrinth of the most
sordid streets, exactly alike and composed of six-roomed hutches.

Some of them were the vicarages of slum parishes.  The old sailor had got
hold of one cheap, and de Barral got hold of his daughter--which was a
good bargain for him.  The old sailor was very good to the young couple
and very fond of their little girl.  Mrs. de Barral was an equable,
unassuming woman, at that time with a fund of simple gaiety, and with no
ambitions; but, woman-like, she longed for change and for something
interesting to happen now and then.  It was she who encouraged de Barral
to accept the offer of a post in the west-end branch of a great bank.  It
appears he shrank from such a great adventure for a long time.  At last
his wife's arguments prevailed.  Later on she used to say: 'It's the only
time he ever listened to me; and I wonder now if it hadn't been better
for me to die before I ever made him go into that bank.'

You may be surprised at my knowledge of these details.  Well, I had them
ultimately from Mrs. Fyne.  Mrs. Fyne while yet Miss Anthony, in her days
of bondage, knew Mrs. de Barral in her days of exile.  Mrs. de Barral was
living then in a big stone mansion with mullioned windows in a large damp
park, called the Priory, adjoining the village where the refined poet had
built himself a house.

These were the days of de Barral's success.  He had bought the place
without ever seeing it and had packed off his wife and child at once
there to take possession.  He did not know what to do with them in
London.  He himself had a suite of rooms in an hotel.  He gave there
dinner parties followed by cards in the evening.  He had developed the
gambling passion--or else a mere card mania--but at any rate he played
heavily, for relaxation, with a lot of dubious hangers on.

Meantime Mrs. de Barral, expecting him every day, lived at the Priory,
with a carriage and pair, a governess for the child and many servants.
The village people would see her through the railings wandering under the
trees with her little girl lost in her strange surroundings.  Nobody ever
came near her.  And there she died as some faithful and delicate animals
die--from neglect, absolutely from neglect, rather unexpectedly and
without any fuss.  The village was sorry for her because, though
obviously worried about something, she was good to the poor and was
always ready for a chat with any of the humble folks.  Of course they
knew that she wasn't a lady--not what you would call a real lady.  And
even her acquaintance with Miss Anthony was only a cottage-door, a
village-street acquaintance.  Carleon Anthony was a tremendous aristocrat
(his father had been a "restoring" architect) and his daughter was not
allowed to associate with anyone but the county young ladies.
Nevertheless in defiance of the poet's wrathful concern for undefiled
refinement there were some quiet, melancholy strolls to and fro in the
great avenue of chestnuts leading to the park-gate, during which Mrs. de
Barral came to call Miss Anthony 'my dear'--and even 'my poor dear.'  The
lonely soul had no one to talk to but that not very happy girl.  The
governess despised her.  The housekeeper was distant in her manner.
Moreover Mrs. de Barral was no foolish gossiping woman.  But she made
some confidences to Miss Anthony.  Such wealth was a terrific thing to
have thrust upon one she affirmed.  Once she went so far as to confess
that she was dying with anxiety.  Mr. de Barral (so she referred to him)
had been an excellent husband and an exemplary father but "you see my
dear I have had a great experience of him.  I am sure he won't know what
to do with all that money people are giving to him to take care of for
them.  He's as likely as not to do something rash.  When he comes here I
must have a good long serious talk with him, like the talks we often used
to have together in the good old times of our life."  And then one day a
cry of anguish was wrung from her: 'My dear, he will never come here, he
will never, never come!'

She was wrong.  He came to the funeral, was extremely cut up, and holding
the child tightly by the hand wept bitterly at the side of the grave.
Miss Anthony, at the cost of a whole week of sneers and abuse from the
poet, saw it all with her own eyes.  De Barral clung to the child like a
drowning man.  He managed, though, to catch the half-past five fast
train, travelling to town alone in a reserved compartment, with all the
blinds down . . . "

"Leaving the child?" I said interrogatively.

"Yes.  Leaving . . . He shirked the problem.  He was born that way.  He
had no idea what to do with her or for that matter with anything or
anybody including himself.  He bolted back to his suite of rooms in the
hotel.  He was the most helpless . . . She might have been left in the
Priory to the end of time had not the high-toned governess threatened to
send in her resignation.  She didn't care for the child a bit, and the
lonely, gloomy Priory had got on her nerves.  She wasn't going to put up
with such a life and, having just come out of some ducal family, she
bullied de Barral in a very lofty fashion.  To pacify her he took a
splendidly furnished house in the most expensive part of Brighton for
them, and now and then ran down for a week-end, with a trunk full of
exquisite sweets and with his hat full of money.  The governess spent it
for him in extra ducal style.  She was nearly forty and harboured a
secret taste for patronizing young men of sorts--of a certain sort.  But
of that Mrs. Fyne of course had no personal knowledge then; she told me
however that even in the Priory days she had suspected her of being an
artificial, heartless, vulgar-minded woman with the lowest possible
ideals.  But de Barral did not know it.  He literally did not know
anything . . . "

"But tell me, Marlow," I interrupted, "how do you account for this
opinion?  He must have been a personality in a sense--in some one sense
surely.  You don't work the greatest material havoc of a decade at least,
in a commercial community, without having something in you."

Marlow shook his head.

"He was a mere sign, a portent.  There was nothing in him.  Just about
that time the word Thrift was to the fore.  You know the power of words.
We pass through periods dominated by this or that word--it may be
development, or it may be competition, or education, or purity or
efficiency or even sanctity.  It is the word of the time.  Well just then
it was the word Thrift which was out in the streets walking arm in arm
with righteousness, the inseparable companion and backer up of all such
national catch-words, looking everybody in the eye as it were.  The very
drabs of the pavement, poor things, didn't escape the fascination . . .
However! . . . Well the greatest portion of the press were screeching in
all possible tones, like a confounded company of parrots instructed by
some devil with a taste for practical jokes, that the financier de Barral
was helping the great moral evolution of our character towards the newly-
discovered virtue of Thrift.  He was helping it by all these great
establishments of his, which made the moral merits of Thrift manifest to
the most callous hearts, simply by promising to pay ten per cent.
interest on all deposits.  And you didn't want necessarily to belong to
the well-to-do classes in order to participate in the advantages of
virtue.  If you had but a spare sixpence in the world and went and gave
it to de Barral it was Thrift!  It's quite likely that he himself
believed it.  He must have.  It's inconceivable that he alone should
stand out against the infatuation of the whole world.  He hadn't enough
intelligence for that.  But to look at him one couldn't tell . . . "

"You did see him then?" I said with some curiosity.

"I did.  Strange, isn't it?  It was only once, but as I sat with the
distressed Fyne who had suddenly resuscitated his name buried in my
memory with other dead labels of the past, I may say I saw him again, I
saw him with great vividness of recollection, as he appeared in the days
of his glory or splendour.  No!  Neither of these words will fit his
success.  There was never any glory or splendour about that figure.  Well,
let us say in the days when he was, according to the majority of the
daily press, a financial force working for the improvement of the
character of the people.  I'll tell you how it came about.

At that time I used to know a podgy, wealthy, bald little man having
chambers in the Albany; a financier too, in his way, carrying out
transactions of an intimate nature and of no moral character; mostly with
young men of birth and expectations--though I dare say he didn't withhold
his ministrations from elderly plebeians either.  He was a true democrat;
he would have done business (a sharp kind of business) with the devil
himself.  Everything was fly that came into his web.  He received the
applicants in an alert, jovial fashion which was quite surprising.  It
gave relief without giving too much confidence, which was just as well
perhaps.  His business was transacted in an apartment furnished like a
drawing-room, the walls hung with several brown, heavily-framed, oil
paintings.  I don't know if they were good, but they were big, and with
their elaborate, tarnished gilt-frames had a melancholy dignity.  The man
himself sat at a shining, inlaid writing table which looked like a rare
piece from a museum of art; his chair had a high, oval, carved back,
upholstered in faded tapestry; and these objects made of the costly black
Havana cigar, which he rolled incessantly from the middle to the left
corner of his mouth and back again, an inexpressibly cheap and nasty
object.  I had to see him several times in the interest of a poor devil
so unlucky that he didn't even have a more competent friend than myself
to speak for him at a very difficult time in his life.

I don't know at what hour my private financier began his day, but he used
to give one appointments at unheard of times: such as a quarter to eight
in the morning, for instance.  On arriving one found him busy at that
marvellous writing table, looking very fresh and alert, exhaling a faint
fragrance of scented soap and with the cigar already well alight.  You
may believe that I entered on my mission with many unpleasant
forebodings; but there was in that fat, admirably washed, little man such
a profound contempt for mankind that it amounted to a species of good
nature; which, unlike the milk of genuine kindness, was never in danger
of turning sour.  Then, once, during a pause in business, while we were
waiting for the production of a document for which he had sent (perhaps
to the cellar?) I happened to remark, glancing round the room, that I had
never seen so many fine things assembled together out of a collection.
Whether this was unconscious diplomacy on my part, or not, I shouldn't
like to say--but the remark was true enough, and it pleased him
extremely.  "It _is_ a collection," he said emphatically.  "Only I live
right in it, which most collectors don't.  But I see that you know what
you are looking at.  Not many people who come here on business do.  Stable
fittings are more in their way."

I don't know whether my appreciation helped to advance my friend's
business but at any rate it helped our intercourse.  He treated me with a
shade of familiarity as one of the initiated.

The last time I called on him to conclude the transaction we were
interrupted by a person, something like a cross between a bookmaker and a
private secretary, who, entering through a door which was not the
anteroom door, walked up and stooped to whisper into his ear.

"Eh?  What?  Who, did you say?"

The nondescript person stooped and whispered again, adding a little
louder: "Says he won't detain you a moment."

My little man glanced at me, said "Ah!  Well," irresolutely.  I got up
from my chair and offered to come again later.  He looked whimsically
alarmed.  "No, no.  It's bad enough to lose my money but I don't want to
waste any more of my time over your friend.  We must be done with this to-
day.  Just go and have a look at that _garniture de cheminee_ yonder.
There's another, something like it, in the castle of Laeken, but mine's
much superior in design."

I moved accordingly to the other side of that big room.  The _garniture_
was very fine.  But while pretending to examine it I watched my man going
forward to meet a tall visitor, who said, "I thought you would be
disengaged so early.  It's only a word or two"--and after a whispered
confabulation of no more than a minute, reconduct him to the door and
shake hands ceremoniously.  "Not at all, not at all.  Very pleased to be
of use.  You can depend absolutely on my information"--"Oh thank you,
thank you.  I just looked in."  "Certainly, quite right.  Any time . . .
Good morning."

I had a good look at the visitor while they were exchanging these
civilities.  He was clad in black.  I remember perfectly that he wore a
flat, broad, black satin tie in which was stuck a large cameo pin; and a
small turn down collar.  His hair, discoloured and silky, curled slightly
over his ears.  His cheeks were hairless and round, and apparently soft.
He held himself very upright, walked with small steps and spoke gently in
an inward voice.  Perhaps from contrast with the magnificent polish of
the room and the neatness of its owner, he struck me as dingy, indigent,
and, if not exactly humble, then much subdued by evil fortune.

I wondered greatly at my fat little financier's civility to that dubious
personage when he asked me, as we resumed our respective seats, whether I
knew who it was that had just gone out.  On my shaking my head negatively
he smiled queerly, said "De Barral," and enjoyed my surprise.  Then
becoming grave: "That's a deep fellow, if you like.  We all know where he
started from and where he got to; but nobody knows what he means to do."
He became thoughtful for a moment and added as if speaking to himself, "I
wonder what his game is."

And, you know, there was no game, no game of any sort, or shape or kind.
It came out plainly at the trial.  As I've told you before, he was a
clerk in a bank, like thousands of others.  He got that berth as a second
start in life and there he stuck again, giving perfect satisfaction.  Then
one day as though a supernatural voice had whispered into his ear or some
invisible fly had stung him, he put on his hat, went out into the street
and began advertising.  That's absolutely all that there was to it.  He
caught in the street the word of the time and harnessed it to his
preposterous chariot.

One remembers his first modest advertisements headed with the magic word
Thrift, Thrift, Thrift, thrice repeated; promising ten per cent. on all
deposits and giving the address of the Thrift and Independence Aid
Association in Vauxhall Bridge Road.  Apparently nothing more was
necessary.  He didn't even explain what he meant to do with the money he
asked the public to pour into his lap.  Of course he meant to lend it out
at high rates of interest.  He did so--but he did it without system,
plan, foresight or judgment.  And as he frittered away the sums that
flowed in, he advertised for more--and got it.  During a period of
general business prosperity he set up The Orb Bank and The Sceptre Trust,
simply, it seems for advertising purposes.  They were mere names.  He was
totally unable to organize anything, to promote any sort of enterprise if
it were only for the purpose of juggling with the shares.  At that time
he could have had for the asking any number of Dukes, retired Generals,
active M.P.'s, ex-ambassadors and so on as Directors to sit at the
wildest boards of his invention.  But he never tried.  He had no real
imagination.  All he could do was to publish more advertisements and open
more branch offices of the Thrift and Independence, of The Orb, of The
Sceptre, for the receipt of deposits; first in this town, then in that
town, north and south--everywhere where he could find suitable premises
at a moderate rent.  For this was the great characteristic of the
management.  Modesty, moderation, simplicity.  Neither The Orb nor The
Sceptre nor yet their parent the Thrift and Independence had built for
themselves the usual palaces.  For this abstention they were praised in
silly public prints as illustrating in their management the principle of
Thrift for which they were founded.  The fact is that de Barral simply
didn't think of it.  Of course he had soon moved from Vauxhall Bridge
Road.  He knew enough for that.  What he got hold of next was an old,
enormous, rat-infested brick house in a small street off the Strand.
Strangers were taken in front of the meanest possible, begrimed, yellowy,
flat brick wall, with two rows of unadorned window-holes one above the
other, and were exhorted with bated breath to behold and admire the
simplicity of the head-quarters of the great financial force of the day.
The word THRIFT perched right up on the roof in giant gilt letters, and
two enormous shield-like brass-plates curved round the corners on each
side of the doorway were the only shining spots in de Barral's business
outfit.  Nobody knew what operations were carried on inside except
this--that if you walked in and tendered your money over the counter it
would be calmly taken from you by somebody who would give you a printed
receipt.  That and no more.  It appears that such knowledge is
irresistible.  People went in and tendered; and once it was taken from
their hands their money was more irretrievably gone from them than if
they had thrown it into the sea.  This then, and nothing else was being
carried on in there . . . "

"Come, Marlow," I said, "you exaggerate surely--if only by your way of
putting things.  It's too startling."

"I exaggerate!" he defended himself.  "My way of putting things!  My dear
fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial
jargon off my statements.  And you are startled!  I am giving you the
naked truth.  It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge
of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth.  What comes with a
shock is admitted with difficulty.  But what will you say to the end of
his career?

It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden.  It began with the Orb
Deposit Bank.  Under the name of that institution de Barral with the
frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian
prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the
government.  It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs--a miserable
remnant of his ancestors' treasures--that sort of thing.  And it was all
authentic enough.  There was a real prince; and the claim too was
sufficiently real--only unfortunately it was not a valid claim.  So the
prince lost his case on the last appeal and the beginning of de Barral's
end became manifest to the public in the shape of a half-sheet of note
paper wafered by the four corners on the closed door of The Orb offices
notifying that payment was stopped at that establishment.

Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week.  I won't say in
American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de
Barral concerns.  There never had been any bottom to it.  It was like the
cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its
deposits.  That they were gone was clear; and the bankruptcy proceedings
which followed were like a sinister farce, bursts of laughter in a
setting of mute anguish--that of the depositors; hundreds of thousands of
them.  The laughter was irresistible; the accompaniment of the bankrupt's
public examination.

I don't know if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the
possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from
both--and the three alternatives are possible--but it was discovered that
this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of the
public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors.  He had been
the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even
lunatics.  Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone
in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of
Patagonia, quarries in Labrador--such like speculations.  Fisheries to
feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them.  A
principality to be bought in Madagascar was another.  As the grotesque
details of these incredible transactions came out one by one ripples of
laughter ran over the closely packed court--each one a little louder than
the other.  The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative
effect of absurdity.  The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the
reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching
anxiously every word, laughed like one man.  They laughed
hysterically--the poor wretches--on the verge of tears.

There was only one person who remained unmoved.  It was de Barral
himself.  He preserved his serene, gentle expression, I am told (for I
have not witnessed those scenes myself), and looked around at the people
with an air of placid sufficiency which was the first hint to the world
of the man's overweening, unmeasurable conceit, hidden hitherto under a
diffident manner.  It could be seen too in his dogged assertion that if
he had been given enough time and a lot more money everything would have
come right.  And there were some people (yes, amongst his very victims)
who more than half believed him, even after the criminal prosecution
which soon followed.  When placed in the dock he lost his steadiness as
if some sustaining illusion had gone to pieces within him suddenly.  He
ceased to be himself in manner completely, and even in disposition, in so
far that his faded neutral eyes matching his discoloured hair so well,
were discovered then to be capable of expressing a sort of underhand
hate.  He was at first defiant, then insolent, then broke down and burst
into tears; but it might have been from rage.  Then he calmed down,
returned to his soft manner of speech and to that unassuming quiet
bearing which had been usual with him even in his greatest days.  But it
seemed as though in this moment of change he had at last perceived what a
power he had been; for he remarked to one of the prosecuting counsel who
had assumed a lofty moral tone in questioning him, that--yes, he had
gambled--he liked cards.  But that only a year ago a host of smart people
would have been only too pleased to take a hand at cards with him.  Yes--he
went on--some of the very people who were there accommodated with seats
on the bench; and turning upon the counsel "You yourself as well," he
cried.  He could have had half the town at his rooms to fawn upon him if
he had cared for that sort of thing.  "Why, now I think of it, it took me
most of my time to keep people, just of your sort, off me," he ended with
a good humoured--quite unobtrusive, contempt, as though the fact had
dawned upon him for the first time.

This was the moment, the only moment, when he had perhaps all the
audience in Court with him, in a hush of dreary silence.  And then the
dreary proceedings were resumed.  For all the outside excitement it was
the most dreary of all celebrated trials.  The bankruptcy proceedings had
exhausted all the laughter there was in it.  Only the fact of wide-spread
ruin remained, and the resentment of a mass of people for having been
fooled by means too simple to save their self-respect from a deep wound
which the cleverness of a consummate scoundrel would not have inflicted.
A shamefaced amazement attended these proceedings in which de Barral was
not being exposed alone.  For himself his only cry was: Time! Time!  Time
would have set everything right.  In time some of these speculations of
his were certain to have succeeded.  He repeated this defence, this
excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome iteration.  Everything
he had done or left undone had been to gain time.  He had hypnotized
himself with the word.  Sometimes, I am told, his appearance was
ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing down the vista of
future ages.  Time--and of course, more money.  "Ah!  If only you had
left me alone for a couple of years more," he cried once in accents of
passionate belief.  "The money was coming in all right."  The deposits
you understand--the savings of Thrift.  Oh yes they had been coming in to
the very last moment.  And he regretted them.  He had arrived to regard
them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion.  And yet it was a
perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel who was
beginning a question with the words "You have had all these immense sums
. . . " with the indignant retort "_What_ have I had out of them?"

"It was perfectly true.  He had had nothing out of them--nothing of the
prestigious or the desirable things of the earth, craved for by predatory
natures.  He had gratified no tastes, had known no luxury; he had built
no gorgeous palaces, had formed no splendid galleries out of these
"immense sums."  He had not even a home.  He had gone into these rooms in
an hotel and had stuck there for years, giving no doubt perfect
satisfaction to the management.  They had twice raised his rent to show I
suppose their high sense of his distinguished patronage.  He had bought
for himself out of all the wealth streaming through his fingers neither
adulation nor love, neither splendour nor comfort.  There was something
perfect in his consistent mediocrity.  His very vanity seemed to miss the
gratification of even the mere show of power.  In the days when he was
most fully in the public eye the invincible obscurity of his origins
clung to him like a shadowy garment.  He had handled millions without
ever enjoying anything of what is counted as precious in the community of
men, because he had neither the brutality of temperament nor the fineness
of mind to make him desire them with the will power of a masterful
adventurer . . . "

"You seem to have studied the man," I observed.

"Studied," repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  "No!  Not studied.  I had no
opportunities.  You know that I saw him only on that one occasion I told
you of.  But it may be that a glimpse and no more is the proper way of
seeing an individuality; and de Barral was that, in virtue of his very
deficiencies for they made of him something quite unlike one's
preconceived ideas.  There were also very few materials accessible to a
man like me to form a judgment from.  But in such a case I verify believe
that a little is as good as a feast--perhaps better.  If one has a taste
for that kind of thing the merest starting-point becomes a coign of
vantage, and then by a series of logically deducted verisimilitudes one
arrives at truth--or very near the truth--as near as any circumstantial
evidence can do.  I have not studied de Barral but that is how I
understand him so far as he could be understood through the din of the
crash; the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the newspaper contents bills,
"The Thrift Frauds.  Cross-examination of the accused.  Extra
special"--blazing fiercely; the charitable appeals for the victims, the
grave tones of the dailies rumbling with compassion as if they were the
national bowels.  All this lasted a whole week of industrious sittings.  A
pressman whom I knew told me "He's an idiot."  Which was possible.  Before
that I overheard once somebody declaring that he had a criminal type of
face; which I knew was untrue.  The sentence was pronounced by artificial
light in a stifling poisonous atmosphere.  Something edifying was said by
the judge weightily, about the retribution overtaking the perpetrator of
"the most heartless frauds on an unprecedented scale."  I don't
understand these things much, but it appears that he had juggled with
accounts, cooked balance sheets, had gathered in deposits months after he
ought to have known himself to be hopelessly insolvent, and done enough
of other things, highly reprehensible in the eyes of the law, to earn for
himself seven years' penal servitude.  The sentence making its way
outside met with a good reception.  A small mob composed mainly of people
who themselves did not look particularly clever and scrupulous, leavened
by a slight sprinkling of genuine pickpockets amused itself by cheering
in the most penetrating, abominable cold drizzle that I remember.  I
happened to be passing there on my way from the East End where I had
spent my day about the Docks with an old chum who was looking after the
fitting out of a new ship.  I am always eager, when allowed, to call on a
new ship.  They interest me like charming young persons.

I got mixed up in that crowd seething with an animosity as senseless as
things of the street always are, and it was while I was laboriously
making my way out of it that the pressman of whom I spoke was jostled
against me.  He did me the justice to be surprised.  "What?  You here!
The last person in the world . . . If I had known I could have got you
inside.  Plenty of room.  Interest been over for the last three days.  Got
seven years.  Well, I am glad."

"Why are you glad?  Because he's got seven years?" I asked, greatly
incommoded by the pressure of a hulking fellow who was remarking to some
of his equally oppressive friends that the "beggar ought to have been
poleaxed."  I don't know whether he had ever confided his savings to de
Barral but if so, judging from his appearance, they must have been the
proceeds of some successful burglary.  The pressman by my side said 'No,'
to my question.  He was glad because it was all over.  He had suffered
greatly from the heat and the bad air of the court.  The clammy, raw,
chill of the streets seemed to affect his liver instantly.  He became
contemptuous and irritable and plied his elbows viciously making way for
himself and me.

A dull affair this.  All such cases were dull.  No really dramatic
moments.  The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was
certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for
revelations of that kind.  Dull dog that de Barral--he grumbled.  He
could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the
appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the
road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive snigger that, after
the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough
to make a sort of protest.  'You haven't given me time.  If I had been
given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.'
And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in all these
days, raising a hard-clenched fist above his head.

The pressman disapproved of that manifestation.  It was not his business
to understand it.  Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand
anything?  I guess not.  It would lead him too far away from the
actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind.  He probably
thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view;
the weak voice; the colourless personality as incapable of an attitude as
a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that
time and place--no, it wasn't worth much.  And then, for him, an
accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly "bad
business."  His business was to write a readable account.  But I who had
nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our
still untouched glasses.  And the disclosure which so often rewards a
moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill very
much approaching a shudder.  I seemed to understand that, with the shock
of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the imagination of that
man, whose moods, notions and motives wore frequently an air of grotesque
mystery--that his imagination had been at last roused into activity.  And
this was awful.  Just try to enter into the feelings of a man whose
imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb . . . "

* * * * *

"You must not think," went on Marlow after a pause, "that on that morning
with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us call it
information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had, or
rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral.  Information is
something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a
piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull.  Whereas knowledge
comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in
its repose a fine resonant quality . . . But as such distinctions touch
upon the transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them.
There are limits to my cruelty.  No!  I didn't reckon up carefully in my
mind all this I have been telling you.  How could I have done so, with
Fyne right there in the room?  He sat perfectly still, statuesque in
homely fashion, after having delivered himself of his effective assent:
"Yes.  The convict," and I, far from indulging in a reminiscent excursion
into the past, remained sufficiently in the present to muse in a vague,
absent-minded way on the respectable proportions and on the (upon the
whole) comely shape of his great pedestrian's calves, for he had thrown
one leg over his knee, carelessly, to conceal the trouble of his mind by
an air of ease.  But all the same the knowledge was in me, the awakened
resonance of which I spoke just now; I was aware of it on that beautiful
day, so fresh, so warm and friendly, so accomplished--an exquisite
courtesy of the much abused English climate when it makes up its
meteorological mind to behave like a perfect gentleman.  Of course the
English climate is never a rough.  It suffers from spleen somewhat
frequently--but that is gentlemanly too, and I don't mind going to meet
him in that mood.  He has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in
which he is very fascinating.  How seldom he lapses into a blustering
manner, after all!  And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately
enough, one may go out and kill something.  But his fine days are the
best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse--even to dream; in
fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of
comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear,
luminous and serene weather.

That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the
weather's glory which would have lent enchantment to the most unpromising
of intellectual prospects.  For a companion I had found a book, not
bemused with the cleverness of the day--a fine-weather book, simple and
sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend.  But looking at little Fyne
seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of my
contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let in
for some form of severe exercise.  Walking, it would be, I feared, since,
for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual impression
of Fyne.  Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be brought in
helpful relation to the good Fyne's present trouble and perplexity I
could not imagine; except on the principle that senseless pedestrianism
was Fyne's panacea for all the ills and evils bodily and spiritual of the
universe.  It could be of no use for me to say or do anything.  It was
bound to come.  Contemplating his muscular limb encased in a
golf-stocking, and under the strong impression of the information he had
just imparted I said wondering, rather irrationally:

"And so de Barral had a wife and child!  That girl's his daughter.  And
how . . . "

Fyne interrupted me by stating again earnestly, as though it were
something not easy to believe, that his wife and himself had tried to
befriend the girl in every way--indeed they had!  I did not doubt him for
a moment, of course, but my wonder at this was more rational.  At that
hour of the morning, you mustn't forget, I knew nothing as yet of Mrs.
Fyne's contact (it was hardly more) with de Barral's wife and child
during their exile at the Priory, in the culminating days of that man's
fame.

Fyne who had come over, it was clear, solely to talk to me on that
subject, gave me the first hint of this initial, merely out of doors,
connection.  "The girl was quite a child then," he continued.  "Later on
she was removed out of Mrs. Fyne's reach in charge of a governess--a very
unsatisfactory person," he explained.  His wife had then--h'm--met him;
and on her marriage she lost sight of the child completely.  But after
the birth of Polly (Polly was the third Fyne girl) she did not get on
very well, and went to Brighton for some months to recover her
strength--and there, one day in the street, the child (she wore her hair
down her back still) recognized her outside a shop and rushed, actually
rushed, into Mrs. Fyne's arms.  Rather touching this.  And so,
disregarding the cold impertinence of that . . . h'm . . . governess, his
wife naturally responded.

He was solemnly fragmentary.  I broke in with the observation that it
must have been before the crash.

Fyne nodded with deepened gravity, stating in his bass tone--

"Just before," and indulged himself with a weighty period of solemn
silence.

De Barral, he resumed suddenly, was not coming to Brighton for week-ends
regularly, then.  Must have been conscious already of the approaching
disaster.  Mrs. Fyne avoided being drawn into making his acquaintance,
and this suited the views of the governess person, very jealous of any
outside influence.  But in any case it would not have been an easy
matter.  Extraordinary, stiff-backed, thin figure all in black, the
observed of all, while walking hand-in-hand with the girl; apparently
shy, but--and here Fyne came very near showing something like
insight--probably nursing under a diffident manner a considerable amount
of secret arrogance.  Mrs. Fyne pitied Flora de Barral's fate long before
the catastrophe.  Most unfortunate guidance.  Very unsatisfactory
surroundings.  The girl was known in the streets, was stared at in public
places as if she had been a sort of princess, but she was kept with a
very ominous consistency, from making any acquaintances--though of course
there were many people no doubt who would have been more than willing
to--h'm--make themselves agreeable to Miss de Barral.  But this did not
enter into the plans of the governess, an intriguing person hatching a
most sinister plot under her severe air of distant, fashionable
exclusiveness.  Good little Fyne's eyes bulged with solemn horror as he
revealed to me, in agitated speech, his wife's more than suspicions, at
the time, of that, Mrs., Mrs. What's her name's perfidious conduct.  She
actually seemed to have--Mrs. Fyne asserted--formed a plot already to
marry eventually her charge to an impecunious relation of her own--a
young man with furtive eyes and something impudent in his manner, whom
that woman called her nephew, and whom she was always having down to stay
with her.

"And perhaps not her nephew.  No relation at all"--Fyne emitted with a
convulsive effort this, the most awful part of the suspicions Mrs. Fyne
used to impart to him piecemeal when he came down to spend his week-ends
gravely with her and the children.  The Fynes, in their good-natured
concern for the unlucky child of the man busied in stirring casually so
many millions, spent the moments of their weekly reunion in wondering
earnestly what could be done to defeat the most wicked of conspiracies,
trying to invent some tactful line of conduct in such extraordinary
circumstances.  I could see them, simple, and scrupulous, worrying
honestly about that unprotected big girl while looking at their own
little girls playing on the sea-shore.  Fyne assured me that his wife's
rest was disturbed by the great problem of interference.

"It was very acute of Mrs. Fyne to spot such a deep game," I said,
wondering to myself where her acuteness had gone to now, to let her be
taken unawares by a game so much simpler and played to the end under her
very nose.  But then, at that time, when her nightly rest was disturbed
by the dread of the fate preparing for de Barral's unprotected child, she
was not engaged in writing a compendious and ruthless hand-book on the
theory and practice of life, for the use of women with a grievance.  She
could as yet, before the task of evolving the philosophy of rebellious
action had affected her intuitive sharpness, perceive things which were,
I suspect, moderately plain.  For I am inclined to believe that the woman
whom chance had put in command of Flora de Barral's destiny took no very
subtle pains to conceal her game.  She was conscious of being a complete
master of the situation, having once for all established her ascendancy
over de Barral.  She had taken all her measures against outside
observation of her conduct; and I could not help smiling at the thought
what a ghastly nuisance the serious, innocent Fynes must have been to
her.  How exasperated she must have been by that couple falling into
Brighton as completely unforeseen as a bolt from the blue--if not so
prompt.  How she must have hated them!

But I conclude she would have carried out whatever plan she might have
formed.  I can imagine de Barral accustomed for years to defer to her
wishes and, either through arrogance, or shyness, or simply because of
his unimaginative stupidity, remaining outside the social pale, knowing
no one but some card-playing cronies; I can picture him to myself
terrified at the prospect of having the care of a marriageable girl
thrust on his hands, forcing on him a complete change of habits and the
necessity of another kind of existence which he would not even have known
how to begin.  It is evident to me that Mrs. What's her name would have
had her atrocious way with very little trouble even if the excellent
Fynes had been able to do something.  She would simply have bullied de
Barral in a lofty style.  There's nothing more subservient than an
arrogant man when his arrogance has once been broken in some particular
instance.

However there was no time and no necessity for any one to do anything.
The situation itself vanished in the financial crash as a building
vanishes in an earthquake--here one moment and gone the next with only an
ill-omened, slight, preliminary rumble.  Well, to say 'in a moment' is an
exaggeration perhaps; but that everything was over in just twenty-four
hours is an exact statement.  Fyne was able to tell me all about it; and
the phrase that would depict the nature of the change best is: an instant
and complete destitution.  I don't understand these matters very well,
but from Fyne's narrative it seemed as if the creditors or the
depositors, or the competent authorities, had got hold in the twinkling
of an eye of everything de Barral possessed in the world, down to his
watch and chain, the money in his trousers' pocket, his spare suits of
clothes, and I suppose the cameo pin out of his black satin cravat.
Everything!  I believe he gave up the very wedding ring of his late wife.
The gloomy Priory with its damp park and a couple of farms had been made
over to Mrs. de Barral; but when she died (without making a will) it
reverted to him, I imagine.  They got that of course; but it was a mere
crumb in a Sahara of starvation, a drop in the thirsty ocean.  I dare say
that not a single soul in the world got the comfort of as much as a
recovered threepenny bit out of the estate.  Then, less than crumbs, less
than drops, there were to be grabbed, the lease of the big Brighton
house, the furniture therein, the carriage and pair, the girl's riding
horse, her costly trinkets; down to the heavily gold-mounted collar of
her pedigree St. Bernard.  The dog too went: the most noble-looking item
in the beggarly assets.

What however went first of all or rather vanished was nothing in the
nature of an asset.  It was that plotting governess with the trick of a
"perfect lady" manner (severely conventional) and the soul of a
remorseless brigand.  When a woman takes to any sort of unlawful
man-trade, there's nothing to beat her in the way of thoroughness.  It's
true that you will find people who'll tell you that this terrific
virulence in breaking through all established things, is altogether the
fault of men.  Such people will ask you with a clever air why the servile
wars were always the most fierce, desperate and atrocious of all wars.
And you may make such answer as you can--even the eminently feminine one,
if you choose, so typical of the women's literal mind "I don't see what
this has to do with it!"  How many arguments have been knocked over (I
won't say knocked down) by these few words!  For if we men try to put the
spaciousness of all experiences into our reasoning and would fain put the
Infinite itself into our love, it isn't, as some writer has remarked, "It
isn't women's doing."  Oh no.  They don't care for these things.  That
sort of aspiration is not much in their way; and it shall be a funny
world, the world of their arranging, where the Irrelevant would
fantastically step in to take the place of the sober humdrum Imaginative
. . . "

I raised my hand to stop my friend Marlow.

"Do you really believe what you have said?" I asked, meaning no offence,
because with Marlow one never could be sure.

"Only on certain days of the year," said Marlow readily with a malicious
smile.  "To-day I have been simply trying to be spacious and I perceive
I've managed to hurt your susceptibilities which are consecrated to
women.  When you sit alone and silent you are defending in your mind the
poor women from attacks which cannot possibly touch them.  I wonder what
can touch them?  But to soothe your uneasiness I will point out again
that an Irrelevant world would be very amusing, if the women take care to
make it as charming as they alone can, by preserving for us certain well-
known, well-established, I'll almost say hackneyed, illusions, without
which the average male creature cannot get on.  And that condition is
very important.  For there is nothing more provoking than the Irrelevant
when it has ceased to amuse and charm; and then the danger would be of
the subjugated masculinity in its exasperation, making some brusque,
unguarded movement and accidentally putting its elbow through the fine
tissue of the world of which I speak.  And that would be fatal to it.  For
nothing looks more irretrievably deplorable than fine tissue which has
been damaged.  The women themselves would be the first to become
disgusted with their own creation.

There was something of women's highly practical sanity and also of their
irrelevancy in the conduct of Miss de Barral's amazing governess.  It
appeared from Fyne's narrative that the day before the first rumble of
the cataclysm the questionable young man arrived unexpectedly in Brighton
to stay with his "Aunt."  To all outward appearance everything was going
on normally; the fellow went out riding with the girl in the afternoon as
he often used to do--a sight which never failed to fill Mrs. Fyne with
indignation.  Fyne himself was down there with his family for a whole
week and was called to the window to behold the iniquity in its progress
and to share in his wife's feelings.  There was not even a groom with
them.  And Mrs. Fyne's distress was so strong at this glimpse of the
unlucky girl all unconscious of her danger riding smilingly by, that Fyne
began to consider seriously whether it wasn't their plain duty to
interfere at all risks--simply by writing a letter to de Barral.  He said
to his wife with a solemnity I can easily imagine "You ought to undertake
that task, my dear.  You have known his wife after all.  That's something
at any rate."   On the other hand the fear of exposing Mrs. Fyne to some
nasty rebuff worried him exceedingly.  Mrs. Fyne on her side gave way to
despondency.  Success seemed impossible.  Here was a woman for more than
five years in charge of the girl and apparently enjoying the complete
confidence of the father.  What, that would be effective, could one say,
without proofs, without . . .  This Mr. de Barral must be, Mrs. Fyne
pronounced, either a very stupid or a downright bad man, to neglect his
child so.

You will notice that perhaps because of Fyne's solemn view of our
transient life and Mrs. Fyne's natural capacity for responsibility, it
had never occurred to them that the simplest way out of the difficulty
was to do nothing and dismiss the matter as no concern of theirs.  Which
in a strict worldly sense it certainly was not.  But they spent, Fyne
told me, a most disturbed afternoon, considering the ways and means of
dealing with the danger hanging over the head of the girl out for a ride
(and no doubt enjoying herself) with an abominable scamp.



CHAPTER FOUR--THE GOVERNESS


And the best of it was that the danger was all over already.  There was
no danger any more.  The supposed nephew's appearance had a purpose.  He
had come, full, full to trembling--with the bigness of his news.  There
must have been rumours already as to the shaky position of the de
Barral's concerns; but only amongst those in the very inmost know.  No
rumour or echo of rumour had reached the profane in the West-End--let
alone in the guileless marine suburb of Hove.  The Fynes had no
suspicion; the governess, playing with cold, distinguished exclusiveness
the part of mother to the fabulously wealthy Miss de Barral, had no
suspicion; the masters of music, of drawing, of dancing to Miss de
Barral, had no idea; the minds of her medical man, of her dentist, of the
servants in the house, of the tradesmen proud of having the name of de
Barral on their books, were in a state of absolute serenity.  Thus, that
fellow, who had unexpectedly received a most alarming straight tip from
somebody in the City arrived in Brighton, at about lunch-time, with
something very much in the nature of a deadly bomb in his possession.  But
he knew better than to throw it on the public pavement.  He ate his lunch
impenetrably, sitting opposite Flora de Barral, and then, on some excuse,
closeted himself with the woman whom little Fyne's charity described
(with a slight hesitation of speech however) as his "Aunt."

What they said to each other in private we can imagine.  She came out of
her own sitting-room with red spots on her cheek-bones, which having
provoked a question from her "beloved" charge, were accounted for by a
curt "I have a headache coming on."  But we may be certain that the talk
being over she must have said to that young blackguard: "You had better
take her out for a ride as usual."  We have proof positive of this in
Fyne and Mrs. Fyne observing them mount at the door and pass under the
windows of their sitting-room, talking together, and the poor girl all
smiles; because she enjoyed in all innocence the company of Charley.  She
made no secret of it whatever to Mrs. Fyne; in fact, she had confided to
her, long before, that she liked him very much: a confidence which had
filled Mrs. Fyne with desolation and that sense of powerless anguish
which is experienced in certain kinds of nightmare.  For how could she
warn the girl?  She did venture to tell her once that she didn't like Mr.
Charley.  Miss de Barral heard her with astonishment.  How was it
possible not to like Charley?  Afterwards with naive loyalty she told
Mrs. Fyne that, immensely as she was fond of her she could not hear a
word against Charley--the wonderful Charley.

The daughter of de Barral probably enjoyed her jolly ride with the jolly
Charley (infinitely more jolly than going out with a stupid old riding-
master), very much indeed, because the Fynes saw them coming back at a
later hour than usual.  In fact it was getting nearly dark.  On
dismounting, helped off by the delightful Charley, she patted the neck of
her horse and went up the steps.  Her last ride.  She was then within a
few days of her sixteenth birthday, a slight figure in a riding habit,
rather shorter than the average height for her age, in a black bowler hat
from under which her fine rippling dark hair cut square at the ends was
hanging well down her back.  The delightful Charley mounted again to take
the two horses round to the mews.  Mrs. Fyne remaining at the window saw
the house door close on Miss de Barral returning from her last ride.

And meantime what had the governess (out of a nobleman's family) so
judiciously selected (a lady, and connected with well-known county people
as she said) to direct the studies, guard the health, form the mind,
polish the manners, and generally play the perfect mother to that
luckless child--what had she been doing?  Well, having got rid of her
charge by the most natural device possible, which proved her practical
sense, she started packing her belongings, an act which showed her clear
view of the situation.  She had worked methodically, rapidly, and well,
emptying the drawers, clearing the tables in her special apartment of
that big house, with something silently passionate in her thoroughness;
taking everything belonging to her and some things of less unquestionable
ownership, a jewelled penholder, an ivory and gold paper knife (the house
was full of common, costly objects), some chased silver boxes presented
by de Barral and other trifles; but the photograph of Flora de Barral,
with the loving inscription, which stood on her writing desk, of the most
modern and expensive style, in a silver-gilt frame, she neglected to
take.  Having accidentally, in the course of the operations, knocked it
off on the floor she let it lie there after a downward glance.  Thus it,
or the frame at least, became, I suppose, part of the assets in the de
Barral bankruptcy.

At dinner that evening the child found her company dull and brusque.  It
was uncommonly slow.  She could get nothing from her governess but
monosyllables, and the jolly Charley actually snubbed the various cheery
openings of his "little chum"--as he used to call her at times,--but not
at that time.  No doubt the couple were nervous and preoccupied.  For all
this we have evidence, and for the fact that Flora being offended with
the delightful nephew of her profoundly respected governess sulked
through the rest of the evening and was glad to retire early.  Mrs.,
Mrs.--I've really forgotten her name--the governess, invited her nephew
to her sitting-room, mentioning aloud that it was to talk over some
family matters.  This was meant for Flora to hear, and she heard
it--without the slightest interest.  In fact there was nothing
sufficiently unusual in such an invitation to arouse in her mind even a
passing wonder.  She went bored to bed and being tired with her long ride
slept soundly all night.  Her last sleep, I won't say of innocence--that
word would not render my exact meaning, because it has a special meaning
of its own--but I will say: of that ignorance, or better still, of that
unconsciousness of the world's ways, the unconsciousness of danger, of
pain, of humiliation, of bitterness, of falsehood.  An unconsciousness
which in the case of other beings like herself is removed by a gradual
process of experience and information, often only partial at that, with
saving reserves, softening doubts, veiling theories.  Her unconsciousness
of the evil which lives in the secret thoughts and therefore in the open
acts of mankind, whenever it happens that evil thought meets evil
courage; her unconsciousness was to be broken into with profane violence
with desecrating circumstances, like a temple violated by a mad, vengeful
impiety.  Yes, that very young girl, almost no more than a child--this
was what was going to happen to her.  And if you ask me, how, wherefore,
for what reason?  I will answer you: Why, by chance!  By the merest
chance, as things do happen, lucky and unlucky, terrible or tender,
important or unimportant; and even things which are neither, things so
completely neutral in character that you would wonder why they do happen
at all if you didn't know that they, too, carry in their insignificance
the seeds of further incalculable chances.

Of course, all the chances were that de Barral should have fallen upon a
perfectly harmless, naive, usual, inefficient specimen of respectable
governess for his daughter; or on a commonplace silly adventuress who
would have tried, say, to marry him or work some other sort of common
mischief in a small way.  Or again he might have chanced on a model of
all the virtues, or the repository of all knowledge, or anything equally
harmless, conventional, and middle class.  All calculations were in his
favour; but, chance being incalculable, he fell upon an individuality
whom it is much easier to define by opprobrious names than to classify in
a calm and scientific spirit--but an individuality certainly, and a
temperament as well.  Rare?   No.  There is a certain amount of what I
would politely call unscrupulousness in all of us.  Think for instance of
the excellent Mrs. Fyne, who herself, and in the bosom of her family,
resembled a governess of a conventional type.  Only, her mental excesses
were theoretical, hedged in by so much humane feeling and conventional
reserves, that they amounted to no more than mere libertinage of thought;
whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora de Barral, was, as you
may have noticed, severely practical--terribly practical.  No!  Hers was
not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of repression; a
feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people into sudden
irrelevancy.  Hers was feminine irrelevancy.  A male genius, a male
ruffian, or even a male lunatic, would not have behaved exactly as she
did behave.  There is a softness in masculine nature, even the most
brutal, which acts as a check.

While the girl slept those two, the woman of forty, an age in itself
terrible, and that hopeless young "wrong 'un" of twenty-three (also well
connected I believe) had some sort of subdued row in the cleared rooms:
wardrobes open, drawers half pulled out and empty, trunks locked and
strapped, furniture in idle disarray, and not so much as a single scrap
of paper left behind on the tables.  The maid, whom the governess and the
pupil shared between them, after finishing with Flora, came to the door
as usual, but was not admitted.  She heard the two voices in dispute
before she knocked, and then being sent away retreated at once--the only
person in the house convinced at that time that there was "something up."

Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there
must be such places in any statement dealing with life.  In what I am
telling you of now--an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the green
country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our meeting a
man who has been a blue-water sailor--this evening confabulation is a
dark, inscrutable spot.  And we may conjecture what we like.  I have no
difficulty in imagining that the woman--of forty, and the chief of the
enterprise--must have raged at large.  And perhaps the other did not rage
enough.  Youth feels deeply it is true, but it has not the same vivid
sense of lost opportunities.  It believes in the absolute reality of
time.  And then, in that abominable scamp with his youth already soiled,
withered like a plucked flower ready to be flung on some rotting heap of
rubbish, no very genuine feeling about anything could exist--not even
about the hazards of his own unclean existence.  A sneering half-laugh
with some such remark as: "We are properly sold and no mistake" would
have been enough to make trouble in that way.  And then another sneer,
"Waste time enough over it too," followed perhaps by the bitter retort
from the other party "You seemed to like it well enough though, playing
the fool with that chit of a girl."  Something of that sort.  Don't you
see it--eh . . . "

Marlow looked at me with his dark penetrating glance.  I was struck by
the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion.  But we were always
tilting at each other.  I saw an opening and pushed my uncandid thrust.

"You have a ghastly imagination," I said with a cheerfully sceptical
smile.

"Well, and if I have," he returned unabashed.  "But let me remind you
that this situation came to me unasked.  I am like a puzzle-headed chief-
mate we had once in the dear old _Samarcand_ when I was a youngster.  The
fellow went gravely about trying to "account to himself"--his favourite
expression--for a lot of things no one would care to bother one's head
about.  He was an old idiot but he was also an accomplished practical
seaman.  I was quite a boy and he impressed me.  I must have caught the
disposition from him."

"Well--go on with your accounting then," I said, assuming an air of
resignation.

"That's just it."  Marlow fell into his stride at once.  "That's just it.
Mere disappointed cupidity cannot account for the proceedings of the next
morning; proceedings which I shall not describe to you--but which I shall
tell you of presently, not as a matter of conjecture but of actual fact.
Meantime returning to that evening altercation in deadened tones within
the private apartment of Miss de Barral's governess, what if I were to
tell you that disappointment had most likely made them touchy with each
other, but that perhaps the secret of his careless, railing behaviour,
was in the thought, springing up within him with an emphatic oath of
relief "Now there's nothing to prevent me from breaking away from that
old woman."  And that the secret of her envenomed rage, not against this
miserable and attractive wretch, but against fate, accident and the whole
course of human life, concentrating its venom on de Barral and including
the innocent girl herself, was in the thought, in the fear crying within
her "Now I have nothing to hold him with . . . "

I couldn't refuse Marlow the tribute of a prolonged whistle "Phew!  So
you suppose that . . . "

He waved his hand impatiently.

"I don't suppose.  It was so.  And anyhow why shouldn't you accept the
supposition.  Do you look upon governesses as creatures above suspicion
or necessarily of moral perfection?  I suppose their hearts would not
stand looking into much better than other people's.  Why shouldn't a
governess have passions, all the passions, even that of libertinage, and
even ungovernable passions; yet suppressed by the very same means which
keep the rest of us in order: early training--necessity--circumstances--fear
of consequences; till there comes an age, a time when the restraint of
years becomes intolerable--and infatuation irresistible . . . "

"But if infatuation--quite possible I admit," I argued, "how do you
account for the nature of the conspiracy."

"You expect a cogency of conduct not usual in women," said Marlow.  "The
subterfuges of a menaced passion are not to be fathomed.  You think it is
going on the way it looks, whereas it is capable, for its own ends, of
walking backwards into a precipice.

When one once acknowledges that she was not a common woman, then all this
is easily understood.  She was abominable but she was not common.  She
had suffered in her life not from its constant inferiority but from
constant self-repression.  A common woman finding herself placed in a
commanding position might have formed the design to become the second
Mrs. de Barral.  Which would have been impracticable.  De Barral would
not have known what to do with a wife.  But even if by some impossible
chance he had made advances, this governess would have repulsed him with
scorn.  She had treated him always as an inferior being with an assured,
distant politeness.  In her composed, schooled manner she despised and
disliked both father and daughter exceedingly.  I have a notion that she
had always disliked intensely all her charges including the two ducal (if
they were ducal) little girls with whom she had dazzled de Barral.  What
an odious, ungratified existence it must have been for a woman as avid of
all the sensuous emotions which life can give as most of her betters.

She had seen her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die,
and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her.  No
wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled
with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant
distinction of a powdered coiffure--no wonder, I say, that she clung
desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young scamp, even
to the extent of hatching for him that amazing plot.  He was not so far
gone in degradation as to make him utterly hopeless for such an attempt.
She hoped to keep him straight with that enormous bribe.  She was clearly
a woman uncommon enough to live without illusions--which, of course, does
not mean that she was reasonable.  She had said to herself, perhaps with
a fury of self-contempt "In a few years I shall be too old for anybody.
Meantime I shall have him--and I shall hold him by throwing to him the
money of that ordinary, silly, little girl of no account."  Well, it was
a desperate expedient--but she thought it worth while.  And besides there
is hardly a woman in the world, no matter how hard, depraved or frantic,
in whom something of the maternal instinct does not survive, unconsumed
like a salamander, in the fires of the most abandoned passion.  Yes there
might have been that sentiment for him too.  There _was_ no doubt.  So I
say again: No wonder!  No wonder that she raged at everything--and
perhaps even at him, with contradictory reproaches: for regretting the
girl, a little fool who would never in her life be worth anybody's
attention, and for taking the disaster itself with a cynical levity in
which she perceived a flavour of revolt.

And so the altercation in the night went on, over the irremediable.  He
arguing "What's the hurry?  Why clear out like this?" perhaps a little
sorry for the girl and as usual without a penny in his pocket,
appreciating the comfortable quarters, wishing to linger on as long as
possible in the shameless enjoyment of this already doomed luxury.  There
was really no hurry for a few days.  Always time enough to vanish.  And,
with that, a touch of masculine softness, a sort of regard for
appearances surviving his degradation: "You might behave decently at the
last, Eliza."  But there was no softness in the sallow face under the
gala effect of powdered hair, its formal calmness gone, the dark-ringed
eyes glaring at him with a sort of hunger.  "No!  No!  If it is as you
say then not a day, not an hour, not a moment."  She stuck to it, very
determined that there should be no more of that boy and girl philandering
since the object of it was gone; angry with herself for having suffered
from it so much in the past, furious at its having been all in vain.

But she was reasonable enough not to quarrel with him finally.  What was
the good?  She found means to placate him.  The only means.  As long as
there was some money to be got she had hold of him.  "Now go away.  We
shall do no good by any more of this sort of talk.  I want to be alone
for a bit."  He went away, sulkily acquiescent.  There was a room always
kept ready for him on the same floor, at the further end of a short
thickly carpeted passage.

How she passed the night, this woman with no illusions to help her
through the hours which must have been sleepless I shouldn't like to say.
It ended at last; and this strange victim of the de Barral failure, whose
name would never be known to the Official Receiver, came down to
breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection.  From the very first,
somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true.  All her life she had
never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the passionate who at
bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally restrained
universe.  But this did not make it any easier, on opening the morning
paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed.  Oh yes!  It was there.  The
Orb had suspended payment--the first growl of the storm faint as yet, but
to the initiated the forerunner of a deluge.  As an item of news it was
not indecently displayed.  It was not displayed at all in a sense.  The
serious paper, the only one of the great dailies which had always
maintained an attitude of reserve towards the de Barral group of banks,
had its "manner."  Yes! a modest item of news!  But there was also, on
another page, a special financial article in a hostile tone beginning
with the words "We have always feared" and a guarded, half-column leader,
opening with the phrase: "It is a deplorable sign of the times" what was,
in effect, an austere, general rebuke to the absurd infatuations of the
investing public.  She glanced through these articles, a line here and a
line there--no more was necessary to catch beyond doubt the murmur of the
oncoming flood.  Several slighting references by name to de Barral
revived her animosity against the man, suddenly, as by the effect of
unforeseen moral support.  The miserable wretch! . . . "

* * * * *

"--You understand," Marlow interrupted the current of his narrative,
"that in order to be consecutive in my relation of this affair I am
telling you at once the details which I heard from Mrs. Fyne later in the
day, as well as what little Fyne imparted to me with his usual solemnity
during that morning call.  As you may easily guess the Fynes, in their
apartments, had read the news at the same time, and, as a matter of fact,
in the same august and highly moral newspaper, as the governess in the
luxurious mansion a few doors down on the opposite side of the street.
But they read them with different feelings.  They were thunderstruck.
Fyne had to explain the full purport of the intelligence to Mrs. Fyne
whose first cry was that of relief.  Then that poor child would be safe
from these designing, horrid people.  Mrs. Fyne did not know what it
might mean to be suddenly reduced from riches to absolute penury.  Fyne
with his masculine imagination was less inclined to rejoice extravagantly
at the girl's escape from the moral dangers which had been menacing her
defenceless existence.  It was a confoundedly big price to pay.  What an
unfortunate little thing she was!  "We might be able to do something to
comfort that poor child at any rate for the time she is here," said Mrs.
Fyne.  She felt under a sort of moral obligation not to be indifferent.
But no comfort for anyone could be got by rushing out into the street at
this early hour; and so, following the advice of Fyne not to act hastily,
they both sat down at the window and stared feelingly at the great house,
awful to their eyes in its stolid, prosperous, expensive respectability
with ruin absolutely standing at the door.

By that time, or very soon after, all Brighton had the information and
formed a more or less just appreciation of its gravity.  The butler in
Miss de Barral's big house had seen the news, perhaps earlier than
anybody within a mile of the Parade, in the course of his morning duties
of which one was to dry the freshly delivered paper before the fire--an
occasion to glance at it which no intelligent man could have neglected.
He communicated to the rest of the household his vaguely forcible
impression that something had gone d---bly wrong with the affairs of "her
father in London."

This brought an atmosphere of constraint through the house, which Flora
de Barral coming down somewhat later than usual could not help noticing
in her own way.  Everybody seemed to stare so stupidly somehow; she
feared a dull day.

In the dining-room the governess in her place, a newspaper half-concealed
under the cloth on her lap, after a few words exchanged with lips that
seemed hardly to move, remaining motionless, her eyes fixed before her in
an enduring silence; and presently Charley coming in to whom she did not
even give a glance.  He hardly said good morning, though he had a half-
hearted try to smile at the girl, and sitting opposite her with his eyes
on his plate and slight quivers passing along the line of his
clean-shaven jaw, he too had nothing to say.  It was dull, horribly dull
to begin one's day like this; but she knew what it was.  These
never-ending family affairs!  It was not for the first time that she had
suffered from their depressing after-effects on these two.  It was a
shame that the delightful Charley should be made dull by these stupid
talks, and it was perfectly stupid of him to let himself be upset like
this by his aunt.

When after a period of still, as if calculating, immobility, her
governess got up abruptly and went out with the paper in her hand, almost
immediately afterwards followed by Charley who left his breakfast half
eaten, the girl was positively relieved.  They would have it out that
morning whatever it was, and be themselves again in the afternoon.  At
least Charley would be.  To the moods of her governess she did not attach
so much importance.

For the first time that morning the Fynes saw the front door of the awful
house open and the objectionable young man issue forth, his rascality
visible to their prejudiced eyes in his very bowler hat and in the smart
cut of his short fawn overcoat.  He walked away rapidly like a man
hurrying to catch a train, glancing from side to side as though he were
carrying something off.  Could he be departing for good?  Undoubtedly,
undoubtedly!  But Mrs. Fyne's fervent "thank goodness" turned out to be a
bit, as the Americans--some Americans--say "previous."  In a very short
time the odious fellow appeared again, strolling, absolutely strolling
back, his hat now tilted a little on one side, with an air of leisure and
satisfaction.  Mrs. Fyne groaned not only in the spirit, at this sight,
but in the flesh, audibly; and asked her husband what it might mean.  Fyne
naturally couldn't say.  Mrs. Fyne believed that there was something
horrid in progress and meantime the object of her detestation had gone up
the steps and had knocked at the door which at once opened to admit him.

He had been only as far as the bank.

His reason for leaving his breakfast unfinished to run after Miss de
Barral's governess, was to speak to her in reference to that very errand
possessing the utmost possible importance in his eyes.  He shrugged his
shoulders at the nervousness of her eyes and hands, at the half-strangled
whisper "I had to go out.  I could hardly contain myself."  That was her
affair.  He was, with a young man's squeamishness, rather sick of her
ferocity.  He did not understand it.  Men do not accumulate hate against
each other in tiny amounts, treasuring every pinch carefully till it
grows at last into a monstrous and explosive hoard.  He had run out after
her to remind her of the balance at the bank.  What about lifting that
money without wasting any more time?  She had promised him to leave
nothing behind.

An account opened in her name for the expenses of the establishment in
Brighton, had been fed by de Barral with deferential lavishness.  The
governess crossed the wide hall into a little room at the side where she
sat down to write the cheque, which he hastened out to go and cash as if
it were stolen or a forgery.  As observed by the Fynes, his uneasy
appearance on leaving the house arose from the fact that his first
trouble having been caused by a cheque of doubtful authenticity, the
possession of a document of the sort made him unreasonably uncomfortable
till this one was safely cashed.  And after all, you know it was stealing
of an indirect sort; for the money was de Barral's money if the account
was in the name of the accomplished lady.  At any rate the cheque was
cashed.  On getting hold of the notes and gold he recovered his jaunty
bearing, it being well known that with certain natures the presence of
money (even stolen) in the pocket, acts as a tonic, or at least as a
stimulant.  He cocked his hat a little on one side as though he had had a
drink or two--which indeed he might have had in reality, to celebrate the
occasion.

The governess had been waiting for his return in the hall, disregarding
the side-glances of the butler as he went in and out of the dining-room
clearing away the breakfast things.  It was she, herself, who had opened
the door so promptly.  "It's all right," he said touching his
breast-pocket; and she did not dare, the miserable wretch without
illusions, she did not dare ask him to hand it over.  They looked at each
other in silence.  He nodded significantly: "Where is she now?" and she
whispered "Gone into the drawing-room.  Want to see her again?" with an
archly black look which he acknowledged by a muttered, surly: "I am
damned if I do.  Well, as you want to bolt like this, why don't we go
now?"

She set her lips with cruel obstinacy and shook her head.  She had her
idea, her completed plan.  At that moment the Fynes, still at the window
and watching like a pair of private detectives, saw a man with a long
grey beard and a jovial face go up the steps helping himself with a thick
stick, and knock at the door.  Who could he be?

He was one of Miss de Barral's masters.  She had lately taken up painting
in water-colours, having read in a high-class woman's weekly paper that a
great many princesses of the European royal houses were cultivating that
art.  This was the water-colour morning; and the teacher, a veteran of
many exhibitions, of a venerable and jovial aspect, had turned up with
his usual punctuality.  He was no great reader of morning papers, and
even had he seen the news it is very likely he would not have understood
its real purport.  At any rate he turned up, as the governess expected
him to do, and the Fynes saw him pass through the fateful door.

He bowed cordially to the lady in charge of Miss de Barral's education,
whom he saw in the hall engaged in conversation with a very good-looking
but somewhat raffish young gentleman.  She turned to him graciously:
"Flora is already waiting for you in the drawing-room."

The cultivation of the art said to be patronized by princesses was
pursued in the drawing-room from considerations of the right kind of
light.  The governess preceded the master up the stairs and into the room
where Miss de Barral was found arrayed in a holland pinafore (also of the
right kind for the pursuit of the art) and smilingly expectant.  The
water-colour lesson enlivened by the jocular conversation of the kindly,
humorous, old man was always great fun; and she felt she would be
compensated for the tiresome beginning of the day.

Her governess generally was present at the lesson; but on this occasion
she only sat down till the master and pupil had gone to work in earnest,
and then as though she had suddenly remembered some order to give, rose
quietly and went out of the room.

Once outside, the servants summoned by the passing maid without a bell
being rung, and quick, quick, let all this luggage be taken down into the
hall, and let one of you call a cab.  She stood outside the drawing-room
door on the landing, looking at each piece, trunk, leather cases,
portmanteaus, being carried past her, her brows knitted and her aspect so
sombre and absorbed that it took some little time for the butler to
muster courage enough to speak to her.  But he reflected that he was a
free-born Briton and had his rights.  He spoke straight to the point but
in the usual respectful manner.

"Beg you pardon, ma'am--but are you going away for good?"

He was startled by her tone.  Its unexpected, unlady-like harshness fell
on his trained ear with the disagreeable effect of a false note.  "Yes.  I
am going away.  And the best thing for all of you is to go away too, as
soon as you like.  You can go now, to-day, this moment.  You had your
wages paid you only last week.  The longer you stay the greater your
loss.  But I have nothing to do with it now.  You are the servants of Mr.
de Barral--you know."

The butler was astounded by the manner of this advice, and as his eyes
wandered to the drawing-room door the governess extended her arm as if to
bar the way.  "Nobody goes in there."  And that was said still in another
tone, such a tone that all trace of the trained respectfulness vanished
from the butler's bearing.  He stared at her with a frank wondering gaze.
"Not till I am gone," she added, and there was such an expression on her
face that the man was daunted by the mystery of it.  He shrugged his
shoulders slightly and without another word went down the stairs on his
way to the basement, brushing in the hall past Mr. Charles who hat on
head and both hands rammed deep into his overcoat pockets paced up and
down as though on sentry duty there.

The ladies' maid was the only servant upstairs, hovering in the passage
on the first floor, curious and as if fascinated by the woman who stood
there guarding the door.  Being beckoned closer imperiously and asked by
the governess to bring out of the now empty rooms the hat and veil, the
only objects besides the furniture still to be found there, she did so in
silence but inwardly fluttered.  And while waiting uneasily, with the
veil, before that woman who, without moving a step away from the drawing-
room door was pinning with careless haste her hat on her head, she heard
within a sudden burst of laughter from Miss de Barral enjoying the fun of
the water-colour lesson given her for the last time by the cheery old
man.

Mr. and Mrs. Fyne ambushed at their window--a most incredible occupation
for people of their kind--saw with renewed anxiety a cab come to the
door, and watched some luggage being carried out and put on its roof.  The
butler appeared for a moment, then went in again.  What did it mean?  Was
Flora going to be taken to her father; or were these people, that woman
and her horrible nephew, about to carry her off somewhere?  Fyne couldn't
tell.  He doubted the last, Flora having now, he judged, no value, either
positive or speculative.  Though no great reader of character he did not
credit the governess with humane intentions.  He confessed to me naively
that he was excited as if watching some action on the stage.  Then the
thought struck him that the girl might have had some money settled on
her, be possessed of some means, of some little fortune of her own and
therefore--

He imparted this theory to his wife who shared fully his consternation.
"I can't believe the child will go away without running in to say good-
bye to us," she murmured.  "We must find out!  I shall ask her."  But at
that very moment the cab rolled away, empty inside, and the door of the
house which had been standing slightly ajar till then was pushed to.

They remained silent staring at it till Mrs. Fyne whispered doubtfully "I
really think I must go over."  Fyne didn't answer for a while (his is a
reflective mind, you know), and then as if Mrs. Fyne's whispers had an
occult power over that door it opened wide again and the white-bearded
man issued, astonishingly active in his movements, using his stick almost
like a leaping-pole to get down the steps; and hobbled away briskly along
the pavement.  Naturally the Fynes were too far off to make out the
expression of his face.  But it would not have helped them very much to a
guess at the conditions inside the house.  The expression was humorously
puzzled--nothing more.

For, at the end of his lesson, seizing his trusty stick and coming out
with his habitual vivacity, he very nearly cannoned just outside the
drawing-room door into the back of Miss de Barral's gover

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