78.

"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

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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 men, having obtained their

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unholy supremacy by the most unscrupulous abuse of their might,
the women must start for the reconquest of their own with their
hands morally unbound. 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 consider-
ing 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,

81.

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 more transient shadows to her husband, I could not tell. Any length I supposed. And he looked on, endorsed, acquiesced, approved, just for that very reason - because these pretty girls were but shadows to him. Oh! 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

82.

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?"

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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 civilisation) 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,

84.

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 civilisation
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
troubled 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 weakness the impulse

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to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But
Mrs. Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous
~~so administration~~, 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 recognise 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.

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"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 tempera-
mantally in a chair, my feet up on the sill of the open window,
a Beck 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

87.

pair of grey eyes thatched by ragged yellowy-white eyebrows
gazing at me solemnly over the toes of my elevated 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, well - 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 tem-
perament. 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 shout of anger positively sepulchral in its depth of
tone. "Farce he hanged! She has bolted with my wife's
brother Captain Anthony." This outburst was followed by
complete subsidence. He faltered miserably while adding from
force of habit: "The son of the poet you know."

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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).

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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,

---

90.

CHAPTER III.

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

91.

brother-in-law? What on earth possessed 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.

92.

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 broke 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. "Yes,
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.

93.

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 recognising 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 pos-
session 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 Smith 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 under-estimating the alacrity of human folly in rising

94.

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

95.

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 risk 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

96.

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 said. He did not know what to do with them in London. He himself had a suite of rooms in an hotel. He gave there daily 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 with the air of being lost in a strange place. 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. Garleon Anthony was a tremendous aristocrat (his father had been a "restoring" architect) and his daughter

97.

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, Mrs. Fyne told me with
heightened colour and angry eyes, 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

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cut up, and holding the child tightly by the hand wept bitterly
at the side of the grave. Mrs. Fyne, at the cost of a whole
bitter 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 her," said Warlow, the 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 hadn't 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 spread both her elbows at the feast I can
tell you, and made it the time of her life. She was nearly
forty and harboured a secret taste for patronising young men

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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 or any other
with 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 compe-
tition, 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 ways,
like a confounded company of parrots instructed by some devil

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with a taste for practical jokes, that the financier de Barral
was helping to bring 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

101.

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 expectation -- though I daresay he didn't withhold his ministrations from elderly plebians 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 common 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.

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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

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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," irre-
solutely. 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 <u>garniture de
cheminée</u> 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 <u>garniture</u> 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 confabula-
tion of no more than a minute, reconduct him to the door and

104.

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." "Getainly, 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."

105.

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;
then, 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 judgement. 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

106.

names. He was totally unable to organise anything, to
form a company, 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 which 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, unornamented 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

107.

exhorted with bated breath to behold and admire the simplicity
of the head-quarters of a 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 door-way 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
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

108.

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 — the 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 accom-

109.

paniment 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 a 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 bank of the Amazon was another 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,

110.

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 different 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 under-
hand 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

111.

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, cor-
tempt, 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 re-
peated this defence, this excuse, this confession of faith,

112.

with wearisome iteration. Everything he had done or left
undone had been to gain time. He had hypnotised 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, he 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

113.

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 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 judgement from. But in such a case I
verily believe that a little is as good as a feast - perhaps
better. If one has a taste for that kind of thing the merest
starling point becomes a coign of vantage, and then by a series
of logically deduced verisimilitudes one arrives at truth - or

114.

very near the truth - as near as any circumstantial evidence
can do. I have not studied De Barral but this 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
flaming newspaper contents bills, the shrieks of the news
boys "The Thrift Frauds! Cross examination of the accused!
Extra speshull!" - resounding 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 a most 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 helplessly insolvent, and done enough of other things
highly reprehensible in the eyes of the law, to earn himself
seven years penal servitude. The sentence making its way
outside met with a good reception. A small mob composed mainly

115.

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 penetrat-
ing, 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 near, in and 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. One muses on
the chances of life lying before them, but with a more kindly
feeling inasmuch that one knows that there will be no harm
for anyone in the silent passions they shall inspire as they
come and go on their stormy but straightforward ways.

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 "swine ought to have been poleaxed." I

116.

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 press-
man 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 <u>Orb</u>
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 characterise 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.

117.

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 per-
mitted 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 that
was awful. Just try to realize the feelings of a man whose
imagination just wakes up at the very moment he is about to
enter the tomb...."

"You must not imagine went on Marlow after a pause

118.

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 say,
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 trans-
cendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them.
There are limits to my cruelty. Bo! I didn't reckon up
carefully in my mind all this which 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 excur-
sion into the past, remained sufficiently in the present to
muse in a vague, absent-minded way on the respectable propor-
tions 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

119.

when it makes up its meteorological mind to behave like a per-
fect gentleman. Of course the English climate is never a rough-
It suffers from spleen somewhat frequently - but that is gentle-
manly 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, in-
tensely 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

120.

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 -

121.

met him; and on her marriage she lost sight of the child
completely. But after the birth of Polly (Polly was the
second 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) recognised her outside a shop and rushed,
actually rushed, into Mrs. Fyne's arms. Rather touching this.
And so, disregarding the marked coldness of that ... h'm ...
governess, his wife naturally responded.....

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

He nodded with deepened gravity, stating in his
bass tone.

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

De Barral, 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

122.

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 cold 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 positively — 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 (undesired)
behind her back 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 weekends gravely with her and the
children. The Fynes, in their good natured concern for the
unlucky child of the man busied in stirring masterfully so

123.

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 unpro-
tected big girl while looking at their own little girls play-
ing on the sands. Fyne assured me that his wife's rest was dis-
turbed 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. TheGoverness
was conscious of being a complete master of the situation, hav-
ing once for all established her ascendancy over De Barral.
She had taken all her measures against outside observation of

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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
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
anyone to do anything. The situation itself vanished in the
financial crash as a building vanishes in an earthquake - here

125.

one moment and gone the next with only an illomened 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, of 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 big
pedigree St. Bernard. The dog too went: the most noble-looking
item in the beggarly assets.

126.

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. What can you expect? Poor downtrodden things? They
had no hand in building up morality, honour or other restraints.
They had only to suffer from the absurdities attached to them,
unavoidably, as to all mundane arrangements. 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 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
work" 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

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fantastically step in to take the place of the sober humdrum
Imaginative....."

I raised my hand to stop *their* key from 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. "Today 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
they only 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 im-
portant. For there is nothing more *unimportant* than the
Irrelevant when it has ceased to amuse and charm; and then the
danger would be of the subjugated masculinity in its exaspera-
tion, making some brusque, unguarded movement and accidently
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

128.

damaged. The women themselves would be the first to become disgusted with their own creation.

There was something of the 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

129.

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, 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.

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Chapter 4

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, fullُfull 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 only that very morning, 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

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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 curtly by a "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
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 naïve loyalty she told Mrs. Fyne that, immensely
as she was fond of her, she could not hear a word against Charley-
the wonderful Charley!

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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 country people as she said) to govern, 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

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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, with the loving inscription,
of Flora De Barral 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 one 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

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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, luckily 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,

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too, carry in their insignificance the seeds of further
incalculable chances.

Of course, all the chances were that the De Barral
should have fallen upon a perfectly harmless, naive, usual,
inefficient specimen of respectable governess for his daughter;
or on a common-place 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 liberations of thought,
whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora De Barral,
was, as you may have noticed, severely practical - terribly

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practical. No! Hers was not a rare temperament, except
in its virility 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. 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

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like. It may be that those two beings, knocked out in their conspiracy, said to each other with naive conviction "We have been jolly well swindled." It's possible. Such a disappointment, however, intimately shared, may turn to acidity of speech in the accomplices. I have no difficulty in imagining that the woman - of forty, and the chief of the enterprise - must have raged. 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 at times we were always tilting at each other. I saw an

138

opening and pushed my uncandid thrust.

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

"Well, I have, he returned unabashed. But let me remind you, this situation came to me unasked. I am like a puzzle-headed chief-mate we had once in the dear old "Samuel" 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

139

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 men 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."

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"You expect a cogency of conduct not usual in women. And then 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. When he came down to see his daughter she was always there, in her place, with them, but in a complete detachment from the sentimental aspect of these occasions. He had for her the greatest respect combined with a feeling of uneasy gratitude. Maybe that some hope of being provided for in her own life might takeroot in foreign to her thought. 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

141

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 married very young, out of a suddenly impoverished and bereaved home, a man of promise who died at the end of six months leaving her absolutely destitute. Some very distant connections had helped her to her first situation. 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 features 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 yet 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 unreasonable. 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 the ordinary,

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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, deplorably, 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 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 aavour of revolt.

And so the altercation in the night went on, over the irremediable. He arguing "What's the hurry? Why bolt away 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 bolt. 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

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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 struck 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, exasperated 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 on 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 may 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 aspect. 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

144

of a morally restrained universe. But this did not make it
any easier, on opening the morning paper feverishly, to see
the thing confirmed. O 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...

drop 3
lines here

"You understand" Marlow interrupted in current

145.

"Good morning," 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 deigning, 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 soft of moral obligation not to be indifferent. But no comfort for anyone could be got by rushing out into

146.

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 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, as if she were a dull, uninteresting
day.

In the breakfast-room the governess in her place, a
newspaper half-concealed under the blanket on her lap, after a
few words exchanged with lips that seemed hardly to move, re-
maining 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

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a half hearted try to smile at the girl; and sitting opposite to 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 pre-judiced eyes in his very bowler hat and in the smart cut of

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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

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"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 differential lavishness. She 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 provenance, the possession of a document of the sort made him unreasonably uncomfortable till it 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

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(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 governness 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 and leave the poor kid 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?

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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 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 patronised 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

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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 your pardon M'am -- but are you going away for
good?"

He was startled by her tone; the unexpected, unladylike,
harshness which fell on his trained ear with the disagreeable
effect of a false note. "Yes. I am going away. And the
best thing for you all is to go away too, as soon as you like.
You can go now, today, this moment. You had your wages paid
you only last week. The longer you stay the greater your loss.

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But I have nothing to do with it any longer. 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 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 he were posted
on duty there.

The ladies' maid was the only servant upstairs, hovering
in the passage on the first floor, curious and as if fascin-
ated 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

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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 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 some-
where? Fyne couldn't tell her. He doubted the last, Flora
having now, he judged, no value, either positive or specula-
tive. Though no great reader of character he did not credit
the governess with any kind or humane intention. 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 goodbye 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.

155.

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 as to the conditions of
inside the house. The expression was humorously puzzled -
nothing more.

For, at the end of his lesson, seizing his trusty stick
and issuing out with his habitual vivacity of movement he very
nearly cannoned just outside the drawing room door into the
back of Miss Barral's governess. He stopped himself in
time and she turned round swiftly. It was embarrassing; he
apologised; but her face was not startled; it was not aware of
him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very
singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment.
In order to cover his retreat he made some inane remark on the
weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark
according to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a
smile of unfathomable meaning. Nothing could have been more

156

singular. The good looking young gentleman of questionable
appearance (might have been a third rate actor with sporting
tastes or something of the kind) took not the slightest notice
of him in the hall. No servant was to be seen. He let him-
self out pulling the door to behind him with a crash as, in a
manner, he was forced to do to get it shut at all.

When the echo of it had died away the woman on the
landing leaned over the banister and called out bitterly to the
man below "Don't you want to come up and say good-bye." He
had an impatient movement of the shoulders and went on pacing to
and fro for a time as though he had not heard. But suddenly
he checked himself, stood still for a moment, then with a
gloomy face and without taking his hands out of his pockets ran
up the stairs quickly. Already facing the door she turned her
head for a whispered taunt. "Come! Confess that you were
dying to see her stupid little face once more," to which he
disdained to answer.

Flora De Barral, still sitting before the table at
which she had been working on her sketch, raised her head at the
noise of the opening door. The invading manner of their
entrance gave her the sense of something she had never seen
before. She knew them well. She knew the woman better in a
sense than she knew her father. There had been between them
an intimacy of relation as great as it can possibly be without

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the final closeness of affection. The delightful Charley walked in, keeping his eyes fixed on the back of her governess whose raised veil hid her forehead like a brown band above the black line of the eyebrows. The girl was astounded and alarmed by their advance, by the altogether unknown, never before suspected expression in the woman's face. Not that it was distorted in the least; but the stress of passion often discloses an aspect of the personality completely ignored till then by its closest intimates. There was something like an emanation from her eyes and from the face of the other, who, keeping exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a head kept his eyelids lowered in a demurely sinister fashion - which in the poor girl, reached, stirred, set free that faculty of unreasoning, explosive terror lying as if locked up at the bottom of all human hearts and of the hearts of animals as well. With suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement as instinctive almost as the bound'g of a startled fawn, she jumped up and found herself clear of the table in the middle of the big room, exclaiming at those amazing and familiar strangers.

"What do you want?"

You will note that she cried: What do you want? Not what has happened? She told Mrs. Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of something ill-simile at her, of being personally attacked. And that must have been very terrifying.

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The woman before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the
protection of life, security embodied and visible and undisputed

You may imagine then the force of the shock in the
intuitive perception not merely of danger, for she did
not know what was alarming her, but in the sense of the secur-
ity being gone. And not only security. I don't know how
to explain it clearly. Look! Even a small child lives,
plays and suffers in terms of its conception of its own existence
Imagine, if you can, a fact coming in suddenly with a force
capable of shattering that very conception itself. It was
only because of the girl being still so much of a child that
she escaped mental destruction; that, in other words she got
over it. Could one conceive of her more mature, while still
as ignorant as she was, one must conclude that she would have
become an idiot on the spot - long before the end of that
experience. Luckily, people, whether mature or not mature,
(and who really is ever mature?) are for the most part quite
incapable of understanding what is happening to them: a mer-
ciful provision of nature to preserve an average amount of
sanity for working purposes in this world......

"But we who see the inestimable advantage of understanding what is happening to others", I struck in. "Or at least some of us seem to. Is that too a provision of nature? And what is it for? Is it that we may amuse ourselves gossiping about each other's affairs? You for instance seem so."

159

"I don't know what I seem," Marlow silenced me, "and surely life must be amused somehow. It would be still a very respectable provision if it were only for that end. But note that from the same provision of understanding, there springs in us compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that indulgence which is next door to affection. I don't mean to say that I am inclined to an indulgent view of the precious couple which broke in upon an unsuspecting girl. They came marching in (it's the very expression she used later on to Mrs. Fyne) but at her cry they stopped. It must have been startling enough to them. It was like having the mask torn off when you don't expect it. The man stopped for good; he didn't offer to move a step further. But, though the governess had come in there for the very purpose of taking the mask off for the first time in her life, she seemed to look upon the frightened cry as a fresh provocation."

"What are you screaming for, you little fool?" she said advancing alone close to the girl who was affected exactly as if she had seen Medusa's head with serpentine locks set mysteriously on the shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat she knew so well. It made her lose all her hold on reality. She told Mrs. Fyne: "I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know that I was frightened. If she had told me it was a joke I would have laughed. If

160

she had told me to put on my hat and go out with her I
would have gone to put on my hat and gone out with her
and never said a single word; I should have been
convinced I had been mad for a minute or so, and I would
have worried myself to death rather than breathe a hint of it
to her or anyone. But the wretch put her face close to mine
and I could not move. Directly I had looked into her eyes I
felt grown on to the carpet."

It was years afterwards that she used tottalk like
this to Mrs. Fyne --- and to Mrs. Fyne alone. Nobody else
ever heard the story from her lips. But it was never forgotten.
It was always felt; it remained like a mark on her soul, a
sort of mystic wound, to be contemplated, to be meditated over.
And she said further to Mrs. Fyne, in the course of many con-
fidences provoked by that contemplation, that, as long as that
woman called her names, it was almost soothing, it was in a
manner reassuring. Her imagination had, like her body,
gone off in a wild bound to meet the unknown; and then to hear
after all something which more in its tone than in its sub-
stance was mere venomous abuse, had steadied the inward flutter
of all her being.

"She called me a little fool more times than I can
remember. I! A fool! Why, Mrs. Fyne! I do assure you I
had never yet thought at all; never of anything in the world,

161

till then. I just went on living. And one can't be a fool without one has at least tried to think. But what had I ever to think about?"

"And no doubt," commented Marlow, "her life had been a mere life of sensations - the response to which can neither be foolish nor wise. It can only be temperamental; and I believe that she was of a generally happy disposition, a child of the average kind. Even when she was asked violently whether she imagined that there was anything in her, apart from her money, to induce any intelligent person to take any sort of interest in her existence, she only caught her breath in one dry sob and said nothing, made no other sound, made no movement. When she was viciously assured that she was in heart, mind, manner and appearance, an utterly common and insipid creature, she remained still, without indignation, without anger. She stood, a frail and passive vessel into which the other went on pouring all the accumulated dislike for her pupils, her scorn of all her employers, (the ducal one included) the accumulated resentment, the infinite hatred of all these unrelieved years of - I won't say hypocrisy. The practice of perfect hypocrisy is a relief in itself, a secret triumph of the vilest sort, no doubt, but still a way of getting even with the common morality from which some of us appear to suffer so much. No! I will say

162

the years, the passionate, bitter years, of restraint, the
iron, admirably mannered restraint at every moment, in a
never-failing perfect correctness of speech, glances,
movements, smiles, gestures, establishing for her a high
reputation, an impressive record of success in her sphere.
It had been like living half strangled for years.

And all this torture for nothing, in the end!
What looked at last like a possible prize - oh without
illusions! but still a prize - broken in her hands, fallen
in the dust, the bitter dust, of disappointment, she
revelled in the miserable revenge - pretty safe too - only
regretting the unworthiness of the girlish figure which
stood for so much she had longed to be able to spit venom
at, if only once, in perfect liberty. The presence of a
young man at her back increased both her satisfaction and her
rage. But the very violence of the attack seemed to defeat
its end by rendering the representative victim as it were
insensible. The cause of this outrage naturally escaping
the girl's imagination her attitude was in effect that of
dense, hopeless stupidity. And it is a fact that the worst
shocks of life may be received, often are received, without
outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and the
convulsions of sobbing. The insatiable governess missed
these signs exceedingly. This pitiful stolidity was only

163.

a fresh provocation. Yet the poor girl was deadly pale.

"I was cold," she used to explain to Mrs. Fyne.

I had had time to get terrified. She had pushed her face so near to mine and her teeth looked as though she wanted to bite me. Her eyes seemed to have become quite dry, hard and small in a lot of horrible wrinkles. I was too afraid of her to shudder, too afraid of her to put my fingers to my ears. I didn't know what I expected her to call me next, but when she told me I was no better than a beggar - that there would be no more masters, no more servants, no more horses for me - I said to myself: "Is that all" I should have laughed if I hadn't been too afraid of her to make the least little sound."

It seemed that she had to know all the possible phases of that sort of anguish, beginning with instinctive panic, through the bewildered stage, the frozen stage and the stage of blanched apprehension, down to the instinctive prudence of extreme terror - the stillness of the mouse. But when she heard herself called the child of a cheat and a swindler, the very monstrous unexpectedness of this caused in her a revulsion towards letting herself go. She screamed out all at once "You mustn't speak like this of Papa!"

The effort of it uprooted her from that spot where her little feet seemed dug deep into the thick luxurious carpet,

164

and she retreated backwards to a distant part of the room,
hearing herself repeat "You mustn't, you mustn't as if it
were somebody else screaming. She came to a chair and flung
herself into it. Thereupon the somebody else ceased screaming
and she lolled, exhausted, sightless, in a silent room, as if
indifferent to everything and without a single thought in her
head.

The next few seconds seemed to last for ever so long;
a black abyss of time separating what was past and gone from
the reappearance of the governess and the reawakening of
fear. And that woman was forcing the words through her set
teeth: "You say I mustn't, I mustn't. All the world will
be speaking of him like this to-morrow. They will say it,
and they'll print it. You shall hear it and you shall read
it -- and then you shall know whose daughter you are."

Her face lighted up with an atrocious satisfaction.
"He's nothing but a thief," she cried. "This father of yours,
He has cheated me. As to you I have never been dejected in you
for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of you
for years. You are a vulgar, silly, nonentity and shall go
back to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung
from, and beg your bread - that is if anybody's charity will
have anything to do with you, which I doubt..."

She would have gone on regardless of the enormous
eyes, of the open mouth of the girl who sat up suddenly with a

165.

wild staring expression of being choked by invisible fingers
on her throat, and yet horribly pale. The effect of this
scene on her constitution was so profound, Mrs. Fyne told
me, that she who as a child had a rather pretty delicate
colouring, showed a white bloodless face for a couple of
years afterwards, and remained always liable at the slightest
emotion to an extraordinary ghost-like whiteness. The end
came in the abomination of desolation of the poor child's
miserable cry for help: "Charley! Charley!" coming from
her throat in hidden gasping efforts. Her enlarged eyes
had discovered him where he had stood motionless and dumb
through all that scene.

He started from his immobility, a hand withdrawn
brusquely from the pocket of his overcoat, strode up to the
woman, seized her by the arm from behind saying in a rough
commanding tone: "Come away Eliza." In an instant the
child saw them close together and remote, near the door, gone
through the door, which she neither heard nor saw being opened
or shut. But it was shut. Oh! yes, it was shut. Her
slow unseeing glance wandered all over the room. For sometime
longer she remained leaning forward, collecting her strength
doubting if she would be able to stand. She stood up at
last. Everything about her spun round in an oppressive
silence. She remembered perfectly - as she told Mrs. Fyne -

166.

that clinging to the arm of the chair she called out
twice "Papa! Papa!" At the thought that he was far away
in London everything about her became quite still.
Then, frightened suddenly by the solitude of that empty room,
she rushed out of it blindly.

With that fatal diffidence in well doing, inherent in the present condition of humanity, the Fynes continued to watch at their window. "It's always so difficult to know what do do for the best," Fyne assured me. It is. Good intentions stand in their own way so much. Whereas if you want to do harm to anyone you needn't hesitate. You've got only to go on. No one will reproach you with your mistakes or call you a confounded, clumsy meddler. The Fynes watched the door, the closed street door imimical somehow to their benevolent thoughts, the face of the house cruelly impenetrable.

It was just as on any other day. The unchanged daily aspect of inanimate things is so impressive that Fyne went back into the room for a moment, picked up the paper again, and ran his eyes over the item of news. No doubt of it. It looked very bad. He came back to the window and Mrs. Fyne.

Tired out as she was she sat there resolute and ready for responsibility. But she had no suggestion to offer. People

167

do fear a rebuff wonderfully, and all her audacity was in
her thoughts. She shrank from the incomparably insolent manner
of the governess. Fyne stood by her side, as in those
old-fashioned photographs of married couples where you see a
husband with his hand on the back of his wife's chair.

And they were about as efficient as an old photograph, and
as still, till Mrs. Fyne started slightly. The street door
had swung open, and, at once, bursting out, appeared the
young man, his hat (Mrs. Fyne observed) tilted forward
over his eyes. After him the governess slipped through
turning round at once to shut the door behind her with care.

Meantime the man, not waiting for her, got down the white steps
and strode along the pavement, his hands rammed deep into
the pockets of his fawn overcoat. The woman, that woman of
composed movements, of deliberate superior manner, took a
little run to catch up with him, and directly she had caught
up with him tried to introduce her hand under his arm. Mrs.
Fyne saw the brusque half turn of the fellow's body as one
avoids an importunate contact, defeating her attempt rudely.
She did not try again but kept pace with his rapid stride,
and Mrs. Fyne watched them, walking independently, turn the
corner of the street side by side, disappear for ever.

The Fynes looked at each other eloquently,
doubtfully: What do you think of this? Then with common accord
turned their eyes back to the street door, closed, massive,

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dark, the great, clear -brass knocker shining in a quiet
slant of sunshine cut by a diagonal line of heavy shade filling
the further end of the street. Could the girl be already gone?
Sent away to her father? Had she any relations? Nobody but
De Barral himself ever came to see her, Mrs. Fyne remembered; and
she has the instantaneous, profound, maternal perception of
the child's loneliness - and a girl too! It was irresis-
tible. And, besides, the departure of the governess was not
without its encouraging influence. "I am going over at once
to find out," she declared resolutely but still staring across
the street. Her intention was arrested by the sight of that
awful sombrely glistening door, swinging back suddenly
on the yawning darkness of the hall, out of which literally
flew out, right out on the pavement, almost without touching
the white steps, a little figure swathed in a holland pinafore
up to the chin, its hair streaming back from its head,
darting past a lamp-post, past the red pillar-box.... "Here,"
cried Mrs. Fyne; "She's coming here! Run John! Run!"

Fyne bounded out of the room. This is his own word.
Bounded! He assured me with intensified solemnity that he bound
ed; and the sight of the short and muscular Fyne bounding
gravely about the circumscribed passages and staircases of a
small, very high class, private hotel, would have been worth
any amount of money to a man greedy of memorable impressions.

169

But as I looked at him, the desire of laughter at my very
lips, I asked myself: how many men could be found ready to
compromise their cherished gravity for the sake of the unimport-
ant child of a ruined financier with an ugly, black cloud
already wreathing his head. I didn't laugh at little Fyne.
I encouraged him: "You did! - very good... Well?

His main thought was to save the child from some
unpleasant interference. There was a porter downstairs, page
boys; some people going away with their trunks in the passage;
a railway omnibus at the door, white-breasted waiters dodging
about the entrance.

He was in time. He was at the door before she
reached it in her blind course. She did not recognise him;
perhaps she did not see him. He caught her by the arm as
she ran past and, very sensibly, without trying to check her,
simply darted in with her and up the stairs, causing no end
of consternation amongst the people in his way. They
scattered. What might have been their thoughts at the spectacle
of an apparently shameless middle-aged man abducting headlong
into the upper regions of a respectable hotel a terrified
young girl obviously under age, I don't know. And Fyne
(he told me so) did not care, for what people might think.
All he wanted was to reach his wife before the girl collapsed.
For a time she ran with him but at the last flight of stairs

170.

he had to seize and half drag, half carry her to his wife,
Mr. Fyne waited at the door with her quite unmoved physiognomy
and her readiness to confront any sort of responsibility,
which already characterised her, long before she became a
ruthless theorist. Relieved, his mission accomplished, Fyne
closed hastily the door of the sitting room.

But before long both Fynes became frightened. After
a period of immobility in the arms of Mrs. Fyne, the girl,
who had not said a word, tore herself out from that slightly
rigid embrace. She struggled dumbly between them, they did
not know why, soundless and ghastly, till she sank exhausted
on a couch. Luckily the children were out with the two nurses.
The hotel housemaid helped Mrs. Fyne to put Flora de Barral
to bed. She was as if gone speechless and insane. She lay
on her back, her face white like a piece of paper, her dark
eyes staring at the ceiling, her awful immobility broken
by sudden shivering fits with a loud chattering of teeth in
the shadowy silence of the room, the blinds pulled down,
Mrs. Fyne sitting by patiently, her arms folded, yet inwardly
moved by the riddle of that distress of which she could not
guess the word, and saying to herself: "That child is too
emotional - much too emotional to be ever really sound!"
As if anyone not made of stone could be perfectly sound in
this world. And then how sound? In what sense - to resist
what? Force or corruption? And even in the best armour of

171.

steel there are joints a treacherous stroke can always find
if chance gives the opportunity.

General considerations never had the power to
trouble Mrs. Fyne much. The girl not being in a state to
be questioned she waited by the bedside. Fyne had crossed
over to the house, his scruples overcome by his anxiety to
discover what really had happened. He did not have to lift
the knocker; the door stood open on the inside gloom of the
hall; he walked into it and saw no one about, the servants
having assembled for a fatuous consultation in the basement.
Fyne's uplifted bass voice startled them down there, the
butler coming up staring and in his shirt sleeves, very
suspicious at first, and then, on Fyne's explanation that he
was the husband of a lady who had called several times at
the house - Miss De Barral's mother's friend - becoming
humanely concerned and communicative, in a man to man tone,
but preserving his trained high-class servant's voice: "Oh
bless you sir, no! She does not mean to come back. She
told me so herself" - he assured Fyne with a faint shade of
contempt creeping into his tone.

As regards their young lady nobody downstairs had
any idea that she had run out of the house. He dared say
they all would have been willing to do their very best
for her, for the time being; but since she was now with her
mother's friends....

172

He fidgetted. He murmured that all this was very unexpected.
He wanted to know what he had better do with letters or telegrams
which might arrive in the course of the day.

"Letters addressed to Miss De. Barral, you had better
bring over to my hotel over there," said Fyne beginning to
feel extremely worried about the future. The man said "Yes
sir," adding, "and if a letter comes addressed to Mrs....."

Fyne stopped him by a gesture. "I don't know....
Anything you like."

"Very well, sir."

The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne,
but remained on the doorstep for a while, looking up and down
the street in the spirit of independent expectation like a
man who is again his own master. Mrs. Fyne hearing her husband
return came out of the room where the girl was lying in bed."
"No change," she whispered; and Fyne could only make a hopeless
sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would
end.

He feared future complications - naturally; a man of
limited means, in a public position, his time not his own. Yes.
He owned to me in the parlour of my farmhouse that he had been
much concerned then at the possible consequences. But as he
was making this artless confession I said to myself that,
whatever consequences and complications he might have imagined,
the complication from which he was suffering now could never,

173

173

never have presented itself to his mind. Slow but sure (for I conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning to the last page) it has been coming for something like six years - and now it had come. The complication was there! I looked at his unshaken solemnity with the amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat illnatured practical joke.

"Oh hang it," he exclaimed - in no logical connection with what he had been relating to me. Nevertheless the exclamation was intelligible enough.

However at first there were, he admitted, no untoward complications, no embarrassing consequences. To a telegram in guarded terms despatched to De Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-four hours. This certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety. When the answer arrived late on the evening of the next day it was in the shape of an elderly man. An unexpected sort of a man. Fyne explained to me with precision that he evidently belonged to what is most respectable in the lower middle classes. He was calm and slow in his speech. He was wearing a frock coat, had grey whiskers meeting under his chin, and declared on entering that Mr. De Barral was his cousin. He hastened to add that he had not seen his cousin for many years, while he looked upon Fyne (who received him alone) with so much distrust that Fyne felt hurt (the person actually refusing at first the chair offered to him) and retorted tartly

174

that he, for his part had never seen Mr. De Barral, in his
life, and that, since the visitor did not want to sit down, he,
Fyne, begged him to state his business as shortly as possible.
The man in black sat down then with a faint superior smile.

He had come for the girl. His cousin had asked him
in a note delivered by a messenger to go to Brighton at once and
take "his girl" over from a gentleman named Fyne and give her
house-room for a time in his family. And there he was. His
business had not allowed him to come sooner. His business was
the manufacture on a large scale of cardboard boxes. He had
two grown up girls of his own. He had consulted his wife and
so that was all right. The girl would get a welcome in his
home. His home most likely, was not what she had been used to
but, etc. etc.,

All the time Fyne felt subtly in that man's manner a
dérisive disapproval of everything that was not lower middle
class, a profound respect for money, a mean sort of contempt
for speculators that fail, and a conceited satisfaction with
his own respectable vulgarity.

With Mrs. Fyne the manner of the obscure cousin of De
Barral was but little less offensive. He looked at her rather
slyly but her cold, decided demeanour impressed him. Mrs.
Fyne on her side was simply appalled by the personage, but
did not show it outwardly. Not even when the man remarked with

175

false simplicity that Florrie - her name was Florrie wasn't
it? would probably miss at first all her grand friends. And
when he was informed that the girl was in bed, not feeling
well at all he showed an unsympathetic alarm. "She wasn't
an invalid was she? No. What was the matter with her then?
he inquired.

An extreme distaste for that respectable member
of society was depicted in Fyne's face even as he was telling
of him after all these years. He was a specimen of precisely
the class of which people like the Fynes have the least
experience; and I imagine he jarred on them painfully. He
possessed all the civic virtues in their very meanest form,
and the finishing touch was given by a low sort of conscious-
ness he manifested of possessing them. His industry was
exemplary. He wished to catch the earliest possible train
next morning. It seems that for seven and twenty years he had
never missed being seated on his office-stool at the factory
punctually at ten o'clock every day. He listened to Mrs.
Fyne's objections with undisguised impatience. Why couldn't
Florrie get up and have her breakfast at eight like other
people. In his house the breakfast was at eight sharp.
Mrs. Fyne's polite stoicism overcame him at last. He had
come down at a very great personal inconvenience, he assured
her with displeasure, but he gave up the early train.

176

The good Fynes didn't dare to look at each other
before this unforeseen but perfectly authorised guardian,
the same thought springing up in their minds: Poor girl!
Poor girl! If the women of the family were like this too!...
And of course they would be. Poor girl! But what could they
have done even if they had been prepared to raise objections.
The person in the frock-coat had the father's note; he had
shown it to Fyne. Just a request to take care of the girl -
as her nearest relative - without any explanation or a single
allusion to the financial catastrophe, its tone strangely
detached and in its very silence on the point giving occasion
to think that the writer was not uneasy as to the child's
future. Probably it was that very idea which had set the
cousin so readily in motion. Men had come before out of
commercial crashes with estates in the country and a
comfortable income, if not for themselves then for their
wives. And if a wife could be made comfortable by a little
accurate management then why not a daughter? Yes. This
possibility might have been discussed in the person's household
and judged worth acting upon.

The man actually hinted broadly that such was his
belief and in face of Fyne's guarded replies gave him to
understand that he was not the dupe of such reticences.
Obviously he looked upon the Fynes as being disappointed
because the girl was taken away from them. They, by a diplomatic

177

sacrifice in the interests of poor Flora, had asked the man to dinner. He accepted ungraciously remarking that he was not used to late hours. He had generally a bit of supper about half past eight or nine. However ...

He gazed contemptuously round the prettily decorated dining room. He wrinkled his nose in a puzzled way at the dishes offered to him by the waiter but refused none, devouring the food with a great appetite and drinking (swilling Fyne called it) gallons of ginger beer, which was procured for him (in stone bottles) at his request. The difficulty of keeping up a conversation with that being exhausted Mrs. Fyne herself, who had come to the table armed with adamantine resolution. The only memorable thing he said was when in a pause of gorging himself "with these French dishes" he deliberately let his eyes roam over the little tables occupied by parties of diners, and remarked that his wife did for a moment think of coming down with him, but that he was glad she didn't do so. "She wouldn't have been at all happy seeing all this alcohol about. Not at all happy," he declared weightily.

"You must have had a charming evening," I said to Fyne, "if I may judge from the way you have kept the memory green."

"Delightful," he growled with, positively, a flash of anger at the recollection, but lapsed back into his solemnity

281

a hand in a worn brown glove as much as to say she could not
question anyone's right against such an outcast as herself.

I ought to have been moved perhaps; but I only noted
the total absence of humility ... "No right at all," I continued,
"but just interest. Mrs. Fyne - it's too difficult to explain
how it came about - has talked to me of you - well - extensively."

No doubt Mrs. Fyne had told me the truth, Flora said
brusquely with an unexpected hoarseness of tone. This very
dress she was wearing had been given her by Mrs. Fyne. Of
course I looked at it. It could not have been a recent gift.
Close-fitting and black with heliotrope silk facings under a
figured net, it looked far from new, just on this side of
shabbiness; in fact, it accentuated the slightness of her
figure, it went well in its suggestion of half mourning with
the white face in which the unsmiling red lips alone seemed
warm with the rich blood of life and passion.

Little Fyne was staying up there an unconscionable
time. Was he arguing, preaching, remonstrating? Had he dis-
covered in himself a capacity and a taste for that sort of thing?
Or was he perhaps, in an intense dislike for the job, beating
about the bush and only puzzling Captain Anthony the providential

282

man, who, if he expected the girl to appear at any moment,
must have been on tenterhooks all the time and beside himself
with impatience to see the back of his brother-in-law. How
was it that he had not got rid of Fyne long before in any case?
I don't mean by actually throwing him out of the window, but in
some other resolute manner.

Surely Fyne had not impressed him. That he was an
impressionable man I could not doubt. The presence of the
girl there on the pavement before me proved this up to the
hilt - and, well, yes, touchingly enough.

It so happened that in their wanderings to and fro
our glances met. They met and remained in contact more
familiar than a hand-clasp, more communicative, more expressive.
There was something comic too in the whole situation, in the
poor girl and myself waiting together on the broad pavement
at a corner public-house for the issue of Fyne's ridiculous
mission. But the comic when it is human becomes quickly
painful. Yes, she was infinitely anxious. And I was asking
myself whether this poignant tension of her suspense depended -
to put it plainly - on hunger or love.

The answer would have been of some interest to Captain

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Anthony. For my part, in the presence of a young girl I always become convinced that the dreams of sentiment - like the consoling mysteries of Faith - are invincible; and that it is never reason which governs men and women.

Yet what sentiment could there have been on her part?
I remembered her tone only a moment since when she said: "That evening Captain Anthony arrived at the cottage." And considering, too, what the arrival of Captain Anthony meant in this connection, I wondered at the calmness with which she could mention that fact. He arrived at the cottage. In the evening. I knew that late train. He probably walked from the station. The evening would be well advanced. I could almost see a dark indistinct figure opening the wicket gate of the garden. Where was she? Did she see him enter? Was she somewhere near by and did she hear without the slightest premonition his chance and fateful footsteps on the flagged path leading to the cottage-door? In the shadow of the night made more cruelly sombre for her by the very shadow of death he must have appeared too strange, too remote, too unknown to impress himself on her thought as a living force - such a force as a man can bring to bear on a woman's destiny.

284

She glanced towards the hotel door again; I followed
suit and then our eyes met once more, this time intentionally.
A tentative, uncertain intimacy was springing up between us
two. She said simply: "You are waiting for Mr. Fyne to come
out, aren't you?"

I admitted to her that I was waiting to see Mr. Fyne
come out. That was all. I had nothing to say to him.

"I have said yesterday all I had to say to him," I
added meaningly. "I have said it to them both, in fact, I
have also heard all they had to say."

"About me?" she murmured.

"Yes. The conversation was about you."

"I wonder if they told you everything."

If she wondered I could do nothing else but wonder
too. But I did not tell her that. I only smiled. The material
point was that Captain Anthony should be told everything. But
as to that I was very certain that the good sister would see
to it. Was there anything more to disclose - some other misery,
some other deception of which that girl had been a victim? It
seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to imagine.
What struck me most was her - I suppose I must call it - com-
posure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had

285

done. One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank;
and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her
from my thoughts as a passive butt of ferocious misfortune.

Looking back at the occasion when we first got on speaking
terms on the road by the quarry, I had to admit that she presented
some points of a problematic appearance. I don't know why I
imagined Captain Anthony as the sort of man who would not be
likely to take the initiative - not perhaps from indifference
but from that peculiar timidity before women which often enough is
found in conjunction with chivalrous instincts, with a great need
for affection and great stability of feelings. Such men are
easily moved. At the least encouragement they go forward with
the eagerness, with the recklessness of starvation. This ac-
counted for the suddenness of the affair. No! With all her
inexperience this girl could not have found any great difficulty
in her conquering enterprise. She must have begun it. And yet
there she was, patient, almost unmoved, almost pitiful, waiting
outside like a beggar, without a right to anything but compassion,
for a promised dole.

Every moment people were passing close by us, singly, in
twos and threes; the inhabitants of that end of the town where

286

life goes on unadorned by grace or splendour; they passed us
in their shabby garments, with sallow faces, haggard, anxious
or weary, or simply without expression, in an unsmiling sombre
stream not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered existences
whose joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes
were miserable, glamourless, and of no account in the world.
And when one thought of their reality to themselves one's heart
became oppressed. But of all the individuals who passed by
~~all~~ none appeared to me for the moment so pathetic in its
unconscious patience as the girl standing before me; none more
difficult to understand. It is perhaps because I was thinking
of things which I could not ask her about.

In fact we had nothing to say to each other; but we
two, strangers as we really were to each other, had dealt with
the most intimate and final of subjects, the subject of death.
It had created a sort of bond between us. It made our silence
weighty and uneasy. I ought to have left her there and then;
but, as I think I've told you before, the fact of having shouted
her away from the edge of a precipice seemed somehow to have
engaged my responsibility as to this other leap. And so we
had still an intimate subject between us to lend more weight

287

and more uneasiness to our silence. The subject of marriage.
I use the word not so much in reference to the ceremony itself
(I had no doubt of this, Captain Anthony being a decent fellow)
or in view of the social institution in general, as to which I
have no opinion, but in regard to the human relation. The
first two views are not particularly interesting. The ceremony,
I suppose, is adequate; the institution, I daresay, is useful
or it would not have endured. But the human relation thus
recognised is a mysterious thing in its origins, character and
consequences. Unfortunately you can't buttonhole familiarly
a young girl as you would a young fellow. I don't think that
even another woman could really do it. She would not be trusted.
There is not between women that fund of at least conditional
loyalty which men may depend on in their dealings with each
other. I believe that any woman would rather trust a man.
The difficulty in such a delicate case was how to get on terms.

So we held our peace in the odious uproar of that wide
roadway thronged with heavy carts. Great vans carrying enor-
mous piled up loads advanced swaying like mountains. The
ground vibrated. One felt insignificant on the edge of that
traffic going on and on with an overpowering, deep, monotonous

288

rumble. It was as if the whole world existed only for selling and buying and those who had nothing to do with the movement of merchandise were of no account.

"You must be tired," I said. One had to say something if only to assert oneself against that wearisome, passionless and crushing uproar. She raised her eyes for a moment. No, she was not. Not very. She had not walked all the way. She came by train as far as the Whitechapel Station and had only walked from there.

She had had an ugly pilgrimage; but whether of love or of necessity who could tell? And that precisely was what I should have liked to get at. It was not however a question to be asked point-blank, and I could not think of any effective circumlocution. It occurred to me too that she might conceivably know nothing of it herself - I mean by reflection. That young woman had been obviously considering death. She had gone the length of forming some conception of it. But as to its companion fatality - love, she, I was certain, had never reflected upon its meaning.

You may say that feelings are outside the scope of reflection. But the profoundest and least controllable of our emotions becomes in its consequences a fruitful subject of meditation. I am not alluding here to the everyday matches of this

291

anything, which comes practically to the same thing. Darkness and chaos are first cousins. I should have liked to ask the girl for a word, something which would give my imagination its line.

But how was one to venture so far? I can be rough sometimes but. I am not naturally impertinent. I would have liked to ask her for instance: "Do you know what you have done with yourself?" A question like that. Anyhow it was time for one of us to say something. A question it must be. And the question I asked was: "So he's going to show you the ship?"

She seemed glad I had spoken at last and glad of the opportunity to speak herself.

"Yes. He said he would - this morning. Did you say you did not know Captain Anthony?"

"No. I don't know him. Is he anything like his sister?"

She looked startled and murmured "Sister!" in a puzzled tone which astonished me. "Oh! Mrs. Fyne," she exclaimed, recollecting herself, and avoiding my eyes while I looked at her curiously.

What an extraordinary detachment! And all the time the stream of shabby people was hastening by us, with the

292

continuous dreary shuffling noise of weary footsteps on the flagstones. The sunshine falling on the grime of surfaces, on the poverty of tones and forms seemed of an inferior quality, its joy faded, its brilliance tarnished and dusty. I had to raise my voice in the dull vibrating noise of the roadway.

"You don't mean to say you have forgotten the connection?"

She cried readily enough: "I wasn't thinking." And then, while I wondered what could have been the images occupying her brain at this time, she asked me: "You didn't see my letter to Mrs. Fyne - did you?"

"No, I didn't," I shouted. Just then the racket was distracting, a pair-horse trolly lightly loaded with loose rods of iron passing slowly very near us. "I wasn't trusted so far." And remembering Mrs. Fyne's hints that the girl was unbalanced, I added: "Was it an unreserved confession you wrote?"

She did not answer me for a time, and as I waited I thought that there's nothing like a confession to make one look mad; and that of all confessions a written one is the most detrimental all round. Never confess! Never, never! An untimely joke is a source of bitter regret always. Sometimes

293

it may ruin a man; not because it is a joke, but because it
is untimely. And a confession of whatever sort is always un-
timely. The only thing which makes it supportable for a while
is curiosity. You smile? Ah, but it is so, or else people
would be sent to the rightabout at the second sentence. How
many sympathetic souls can you reckon on in the world? One
in ten, one in a hundred - in a thousand - in ten thousand?
Ah! What a sell these confessions are! What a horrible
sell! You seek sympathy, and all you get is the most evanescent
sense of relief - if you get that much. For a confession,
whatever it may be, stirs the secret depths of the hearer's
character. Often depths that he himself is but dimly aware
of. And so the righteous triumph secretly, the lucky are
amused, the strong are disgusted, the weak either upset or
irritated with you according to the measure of their sincerity
with themselves. And all of them in their hearts brand you
for either mad or impudent ......"

I had seldom seen Marlow so vehement, so pessimistic,
so earnestly cynical before. I cut his declamation short
by asking what answer Flora de Barral had given to his question.
"Did the poor girl admit firing off her confidences at Mrs.
Fyne - eight pages of close writing - that sort of thing?"

294

Marlow shook his head.

"She did not tell me. I accepted her silence. as a kind
of answer and remarked that it would have been better if she had
simply announced the fact to Mrs. Fyne at the cottage. "Why
didn't you do it?" I asked point-blank.

She said: "I am not a very plucky girl." She looked up
at me and added meaningly: "And you know it. And you know why."

I must remark that she seemed to have become very sub-
dued since our first meeting at the quarry. Almost a different
person from the defiant, angry and despairing girl with quivering
lips and resentful glances.

"I thought it was very sensible of you to get away from
sheer drop," I said.

She looked up with something of that old expression.

"That's not what I mean. I see you will have it that
you saved my life. Nothing of the kind. I was concerned for
that vile little beast of a dog. No! It was the idea of - of
doing away with myself which was cowardly. That's what I meant
by saying I am not a very plucky girl."

"Oh!" I retorted airily. "That little dog. He isn't
really a bad little dog." But she lowered her eyelids and went
on:

295

"I was so miserable that I could think only of myself.
This was mean. It was cruel too. And besides I had not
given it up — now then."

Marlow changed his tone.

"I don't know much of the psychology of self-destruction.
It's a sort of subject one has few opportunities to study closely.
I knew a man once who came to my rooms one evening, and while
smoking a cigar confessed to me moodily that he was trying to
discover some graceful way of retiring out of existence. I
didn't study his case, but I had a glimpse of him the other day
at a cricket match, with some women, having a good time. That
seems a fairly reasonable attitude. Considered as a sin, it
is a case for repentance before the throne of a merciful God.
But I imagine that Flora de Barral's religion under the care of
the distinguished governess could have been nothing but outward
formality. Remorse in the sense of gnawing shame and unavailing
regret is only understandable to me when some wrong had been done
to a fellow- creature. But why she, that girl who existed on
sufferance, so to speak - why she should writhe inwardly with

296

remorse because she had once thought of getting rid of a life
which was nothing in every respect but a curse - that I could
not understand. I thought it was very likely some obscure
influence of common forms of speech, some traditional or in-
herited feeling - a vague notion that suicide is a legal crime;
words of old moralists and preachers which remain in the air
and help to form all the authorised moral conventions. Yes,
I was surprised at her remorse. But lowering her glance unex-
pectedly till her dark eyelashes seemed to rest against her
white cheeks she presented a perfectly demure aspect. It was
so attractive that I could not help a faint smile. That Flora
de Barral should ever, in any aspect, have the power to evoke
a smile was the very last thing I should have believed. She
went on after a slight hesitation:

"One day I started for there, for that place

Look at the influence of a mere play of physiognomy!
If you remember what we were talking about you will hardly be-
lieve that I caught myself grinning down at that demure little
girl. I must say too that I felt more friendly to her at the
moment than ever before.

"Oh, you did? To take that jump? You are a deter-
mined little person. Well, what happened that time?"

["297", "An almost imperceptible alteration in her bearing; a\nslight droop of her head perhaps - a mere nothing - made her\nlook more demure than ever.", "\"I had left the cottage,\" she began a little hurriedly.\n\"I was walking along the road - you know, the road. I had made\nup my mind I was not coming back this time \"", "I won't deny that these words spoken from under the\nbrim of her poor cheap hat (oh yes, certainly, her head was down -\nshe had put it down) gave me a thrill; for indeed I had never\ndoubted her sincerity. It could never have been a make-believe\ndespair.", "\"Yes,\" I whispered. \"You were going along the road \"}, "\"When ...\" Again she hesitated with an effect of\ninnocent shyness worlds asunder from tragic issues; then\nglided on ... \"When suddenly Captain Anthony came through a\ngate out of a field.\"", "I coughed down the beginning of a most improper fit\nof laughter, and felt ashamed of myself. Her eyes raised for\na moment seemed full of innocent suffering and unexpressed\nmenace in the depths of the dilated pupils within the rings of\nsombre blue. It was - how shall I say it? - a night effect"]

298

when you seem to see vague shapes and don't know what reality
you may come upon at any time. Then she lowered her eyelids
again shutting all mysteriousness out of the situation except
for the sobering memory of that glance, nightlike in the sun-
shine, expressively still, in the brutal unrest of the street.

"So Captain Anthony joined you - did he?"

"He opened a field-gate and walked out on the road.
He crossed to my side and went on with me. He had his pipe
in his hand. He said: 'Are you going far this morning?'"

These words (I was watching her white face as she spoke)
gave me a slight shudder. She remained demure, almost prim.
And I remarked:

"You have been talking together before, of course."

"Not more than twenty words altogether since he arrived,"
she declared without emphasis. "That day he had said 'Good-
morning' to me when we met at breakfast two hours before. And
I said good-morning to him. I did not see him afterwards till
he came out on the road."

I thought to myself that this was not accidental. He
had been observing her. I felt certain also that he had not
been asking any questions of Mrs. Fyne.

299

"I wouldn't look at him," said Flora de Barral. "I had done with looking at people. He said to me: 'My sister does not put herself out much for us. We had better keep each other company. I have read every book there is in that cottage.' I walked on. He did not leave me. I thought he would very soon but he didn't. He didn't seem to notice that I was not talking to him."

She was now perfectly still. The wretched little
parasol hung down against her dress from her joined hands.
I was rigid with attention. It isn't every day that one culls
such a volunteered tale on a girl's lips. The ugly street-noises
swelling up for a moment covered the next few words she said.
It was vexing. The next word I heard was "worried."

"It worried you to have him there, walking by your side."

"Yes. Just that." She went on with downcast eyes.

There was something prettily comical in her attitude and her
tone, while I pictured to myself a poor white-faced girl walking
to her death with an unconscious man striding by her side.
Unconscious? I don't know. First of all, I felt certain that
this was no chance meeting. Something had happened before.

Was he a man for a coup-de-foudre,

300

the lightning stroke of love? I don't think so. That sort
of susceptibility is luckily rare. A world of inflammable
lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type would very soon end in
barbarism and misery. But it is a fact that in every man
(not in every woman) there lives a lover; a lover who is called
out in all his potentialities often by the most insignificant
little things - as long as they come at the psychological moment:
the glimpse of a face at an unusual angle, an evanescent attitude,
the curve of a cheek often looked at before, perhaps, but then,
at the moment, seen charged with astonishing significance.
These are great mysteries, of course. Magic signs.

I don't know in what the sign consisted in this case.
It might have been her pallor (it wasn't pasty nor yet papery)
that white face with the eyes like blue gleams of fire and lips
like red coals. In certain lights, in certain poises of head
it suggested tragic sorrow. Or it might have been her wavy
hair. Or even just that pointed chin stuck out a little, re-
sentful and not particularly distinguished, doing away with
the mysterious aloofness of her〔ragive〕presence.
But
any way at a given moment Anthony must have suddenly _seen_ the
girl. And then that something had happened to him. Perhaps
nothing more than the thought coming into his head that this

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was "a possible woman."

Followed this waylaying! Its resolute character makes me think it was the chin's doing; that "common mortal" touch which stands in such good stead to some women. Because men, I mean really masculine men, those whose generations have evolved an ideal woman, are often very timid. Who wouldn't be before the ideal? It's your sentimental trifler who has just missed being nothing at all who is enterprising, simply because it is easy to appear enterprising when one does not mean to put one's belief to the test.

Well, whatever it was that encouraged him, Captain Anthony stuck to Flora de Barral in a manner which in a timid man might have been called heroic if it had not been so simple. Whether policy, diplomacy, simplicity, or just inspiration, he kept up his talk, rather deliberate, with very few pauses. Then suddenly as if recollecting himself:

"It's funny. I don't think you are annoyed with me for giving you my company unasked. But why don't you say something?"

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

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"I made no answer," she said in that even, unemotional low voice which seemed to be her voice for delicate confidences. "I walked on. He did not seem to mind. We came to the foot of the quarry where the path winds up hill, past the place where you were sitting by the roadside that day. I began to wonder what I should do. After we got to the top Captain Anthony said that he had not been for a walk with a lady for years and years - almost since he was a boy. We had then come to where I ought to have turned off and struck across a field. I thought of making a run of it. But he would have caught me up. I knew he would; and, of course, he would not have allowed me. I couldn't give him the slip .... "

"Why didn't you ask him to leave you?" I inquired curiously.

"He would not have taken any notice," she went on steadily. "And what would I have done then? I could not have started quarrelling with him - could I? I hadn't enough energy to get angry. I felt very tired suddenly. I just stumbled on straight along the road. Captain Anthony told me that the family - some relations of his mother - he used to know in Liverpool was broken up now, and he had never made any friends since.

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All gone their different ways. All the girls married. Nice girls they were and very friendly to him when he was but little more than a boy. He repeated: 'Very nice, cheery, clever girls.' I sat down on a bank against a hedge and began to cry."

"You must have astonished him not a little," I observed.

Anthony, it seems, remained on the road looking down at her. He did not offer to approach her, neither did he make any other movement or gesture. Flora de Barral told me all this. She could see him through her tears, blurred to a mere shadow on the white road, and then again becoming more distinct, but always absolutely still and as if lost in thought before a strange phenomenon which demanded the closest possible attention.

Later on Flora learned that he had never seen a woman cry; not in that way, at least. He was impressed and interested by the mysteriousness of the effect. She said that she was very conscious of being looked at, but was not able to stop herself crying. In fact, she was not capable of any effort. Suddenly he advanced two steps, stooped, caught hold of her hands lying on her lap and pulled her up to her feet; she found herself standing close to him almost before she realised what he had done. Some people were coming briskly along the road and Captain Anthony

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muttered: "You don't want to be stared at. What about that
stile over there? Can we go back across the fields?"

She snatched her hands out of his grasp (it seems he
had omitted to let them go), marched away from him and got over
the stile. It was a big field sprinkled profusely with white
sheep. A trodden path crossed it diagonally. After she had
gone more than half way she turned her head for the first time.
Keeping five yards or so behind, Captain Anthony was following
her with an air of extreme interest. Interest or eagerness.
At any rate she caught an expression on his face which frightened
her. But not enough to make her run. And indeed it would
have had to be something incredibly awful to scare into a run
a girl who had come to the end of her courage to live. The end
of all things being a question of hours no new hurt that life
could do her mattered very much. She took it for granted that
for her, at least, there were only evil things in life.

But as if encouraged by this glance over the shoulder
Captain Anthony came up with her, and now that he was by her
side, she felt his nearness intimately, like a touch. She
tried to disregard this sensation. But she was not angry with
him now. It wasn't worth while. She was thankful that he had

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the sense not to ask any question as to this crying. Of course
he didn't ask because he didn't care. No one in the world
cared for her, neither those who pretended nor yet those who
did not pretend. She preferred the latter.

Captain Anthony opened for her a gate into another
field; when they got through he kept walking abreast of her, elbow to
elbow almost. His voice growled pleasantly in her very ear.
Staying in this dull place was enough to give anyone the blues.
His sister scribbled all day. It was positively unkind. He
alluded to his nieces as rude, selfish monkeys - without either
feelings or manners. And he went on to talk about his ship
being laid up for a month and dismantled in the cabin for repairs
and alterations. The worst was that on arriving in London he
found he couldn't get the rooms he was used to, where they made
him as comfortable as such a confirmed sea-dog as himself could
be in comfortable anywhere on shore.

In the effort to subdue by dint of talking and to keep
in check the mysterious, the profound attraction he felt already
for that delicate being of flesh and blood, with pale cheeks,
with darkened eyelids and eyes scalded with hot tears, he went
on speaking of himself as a confirmed enemy of life on shore -
a perfect terror to a simple man, what with the fads and proprietie

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and the ceremonies and affectations. He hated all that. He wasn't fit for it. There was no rest and peace and safety but on the sea.

This gave a view of Captain Anthony as a hermit withdrawn from a wicked world. It was amusingly unexpected to me and nothing more. But it must have appealed straight to that bruised and battered young soul. Still shrinking from his nearness she had ended by listening to him with avidity. His deep murmuring voice soothed her. And she thought suddenly that there was peace and rest in the grave too.

She heard him say: "Look at my sister. She isn't a bad woman by any means. She asks me here because it's right and proper, I suppose, but she has no use for me. There you have your shore people. I quite understand anybody crying. I would have been gone already, only, truth to say, I haven't any friends to go to." He added brusquely: "And you?"

She made a slight negative sign. He must have been observing her, putting two and two together. After a pause he said simply: "When I first came here I thought you were governess to these girls. My sister didn't say a word about you to me."

Then Flora spoke for the first time.

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"Mrs. Fyne is my best friend."

"So she is mine," he said without the slightest irony
or bitterness, but added with conviction: "That shews you what
life ashore is. Much better be out of it."

As they were approaching the cottage he was heard
again as though a long silent walk had not intervened: "But
anyhow I shan't ask her anything about you."

He stopped short and she went on alone. His last
words had impressed her. Everything he had said seemed somehow
to have a special meaning under its obvious conversational
sense. Till she went in at the door of the cottage she felt
his eyes resting on her.

That is it. He had made himself felt. That girl
was, one may say, washing about with slack limbs on the ugly
waves of life with no opportunity to strike out for herself,
when suddenly she had been made to feel that there was somebody
beside her in the bitter water. A most considerable moral
event for her; whether she was aware of it or not. They met
again at the one o'clock dinner. I am inclined to think that,
under her frail appearance being a healthy girl, and fast
walking and what I may call relief-crying (there are many kinds
of crying) making one hungry, she made a good meal. It was

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Captain Anthony who had no appetite. His sister commented on it in a curt, businesslike manner, and the eldest of his delightful nieces said mockingly: "You have been taking too much exercise this morning, Uncle Roderick." The mild Uncle Roderick turned upon her with a "What do you know about it, young lady?" so charged with suppressed savagery that the whole round table gave one gasp and went dumb for the rest of the meal. He took no notice whatever of Flora de Barral. I don't think it was from prudence or any calculated motive. I believe he was so full of her aspects when alone with him that he did not want to look in her direction when there were other people about to hamper his imagination.

You understand I am piecing here bits of dis connected statements. Next day Flora saw him leaning over the field gate. When she told me this, I didn't of course ask her how it was she was there. Probably she could not have told me how it was she was there. The difficulty here is to keep steadily in view the then conditions of her existence, a combination of dreariness and horror.

That hermit-like but not exactly misanthropic sailor was leaning over the gate moodily. When he saw the white-faced restless Flora drifting like a lost thing along the road he

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put his pipe in his pocket and called out "Good morning, Miss Smith" in a tone of amazing happiness. She with one foot in life and the other in a nightmare was at the same time inort and unstable, and very much at the mercy of sudden impulses. She swerved, came distractedly right up to the gate and looking straight into his eyes: "I am not Miss Smith. That's not my name. Don't call me by it."

She was shaking as if in a passion. His eyes expressed nothing; he only unlatched the gate in silence, grasped her arm and drew her in. Then closing it with a kick —

"Not your name? That's all one to me. Your name's the least thing about you I care for." He was leading her firmly away from the gate though she resisted slightly. There was a sort of joy in his eyes which frightened her. "You are not a princess in disguise," he said with an unexpected laugh she found blood-curdling. "And that's all I care for. You had better understand that I am not blind and not a fool. And then it's plain for even a fool to see that things have been going hard with you. You are on a lee shore and eating your heart out with worry."

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What seemed most awful to her was the elated light in
his eyes, the rapacious smile that would come and go on his lips
as if he were gloating over her misery. But her misery was his
opportunity and he rejoiced while the tenderest pity seemed to
flood his whole being. He pointed out to her that she knew who
he was. He was Mrs. Fyne's brother. And, well, if his sister
was the best friend she had in the world, then, by Jove, it was
about time somebody came along to look after her a little.

Flora had tried more than once to free herself, but he
tightened his grasp of her arm each time and even shook it a
little without ceasing to speak. The nearness of his face to
hers intimidated her. He seemed striving to look through her.
It was obvious the world had been using her ill. And even as
he spoke with indignation the very marks and stamp of this ill
usage of which he was so certain seemed to add to that inex-
plicable attraction he felt for her person. It was not pity
alone, I take it. It was something more spontaneous,perverse
and exciting. It gave him the feeling that if only he could
get her, no woman would belong to him so completely as this
woman.

"Whatever your troubles," he said, "I am the man to take
you away from them - that is, if you are not afraid. You told
me you had no friends. Neither have I. Nobody ever cared for me

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as far as I can remember. Perhaps you could. Yes, I live
on the sea. But who would you be parting from? No one.
You have no one belonging to you ... "

At this point she broke away from him and ran. He
did not pursue her. The tall hedges tossing in the wind,
the wide fields, the clouds driving over the sky and the sky
itself wheeled about her in masses of green and white and blue
as if the world were breaking up silently in a whirl and her
foot at the next step were bound to find the void. She
reached the gate all right, got out, and, once on the road,
discovered that she had not the courage to look back.
The
rest of that day she spent with the Fyne girls who gave
her to understand that she was a slow and unprofitable person.
Long after tea, nearly at dusk, Captain Anthony (the son of
the poet) appeared suddenly before her in the little garden
in front of the cottage. They were alone for the moment.
The wind had dropped. In the calm evening air the voices of
Mrs. Fyne and the girls strolling aimlessly on the road could
be heard. He said to her severely:

"You have understood?"

She looked at him in silence.

"That I love you," he finished.

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She shook her head the least bit.

"Don't you believe me?" he asked in a low, infuriated
voice.

"Nobody would love me," she answered in a very quiet
tone. "Nobody could."

He was dumb for a time, astonished beyond measure, as he
well might have been. He doubted his ears. He was outraged.

"Eh? What? Can't love you? What do you know about
it? It's my affair, isn't it? You dare say _that_ to a man
who has just told you! You must be mad!"

"Very nearly," she said with the accent of pent-up
sincerity, and even relieved because she was able to say some thing
which she felt was true. For the last few days she had felt
herself several times near that madness which is but an intolerable
lucidity of apprehension.

The clear voices of Mrs. Fyne and the girls were coming
nearer, sounding affected in the peace of the passion-laden
earth. He began storming at her hastily.

"Nonsense! Nobody can ... Indeed! Pah! You'll
have to be shown that somebody can. I can. Nobody ..." He
made a contemptuous hissing noise. "More likely _you_ can't.
They have done something to you. Something's crushed your

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pluck. You can't face a man - that's what it is. What made
you like this? Where do you come from? You have been put
upon. The scoundrels - whoever they are, men or women - seem
to have robbed you of your very name. You say you are not
Miss Smith. Who are you, then?"

She did not answer. He muttered, "Not that I care",
and was silent, because the fatuous self-confident chatter of
the Fyne girls could be heard at the very gate. But they were
not going to bed yet. They passed on. He waited a little
in silence and immobility, then stamped his foot and lost control
of himself. He growled at her in a savage passion. She felt
certain that he was threatening her and calling her names.
She was no stranger to abuse, as we know, but there seemed to
be a particular kind of ferocity in this which was new to her.
She began to tremble. The especially terrifying thing was
that she could not make out the nature of these awful menaces
and names. Not a word. Yet it was not the shrinking anguish
of her other experiences of angry scenes, reproaches and abuse.
She made a mighty effort though her knees were knocking together,
and in an expiring voice demanded that he should let her go indoors,
"Don't stop me. It's no use. It's no use," she repeated
faintly, feeling an invincible obstinacy rising within her,

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yet without anger against that raging man.

He became articulate suddenly and, without raising his voice, perfectly audible.

"No use! No use! You dare stand here and tell me that -- you white-faced <u>white</u> wisp, you wreath of mist, you little ghost of all the sorrow in the world. You dare! Heven't I been looking at you? There's not enough of you for a good handful. You are all eyes. What makes your cheeks always so white as if you had seen something ... Don't speak. I love it ... No use! And you really think that I can now go to sea for a year or more, to the other side of the world someplace leaving you behind. Why! You would vanish ... what little there is of you. Some rough wind will blow you away altogether. I know it. You have no holding ground on earth. Well, then trust yourself to me -- to the sea -- which is deep like your eyes."

She said: "Impossible." He kept quiet for a while, then asked in a totally changed tone, a tone of gloomy curiosity:

"You can't stand me then? Is that it?"

"No," she said, more steady herself. "I am not thinking of you at all."

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The inane voices of the Fyne girls were heard over the sombre fields calling to each other, thin and clear. He muttered: "You could try to. Unless you are thinking of some-body else."

"Yes. I am thinking of some body else, of some one who has nobody but me."

His shadowy form stepped out of her way, and suddenly leaned sideways against the wooden support of the porch. And as she stood still, surprised by this staggering movement, his voice spoke up in a tone quite strange to her.

"Go in then. Go out of my sight — I thought you said nobody could love you."

She was passing him when suddenly he struck her as so forlorn that she was inspired to say: "No one has ever loved me — not in that way — if that's what you mean. Nobody would."

He detached himself brusquely from the post, and she did not shrink; but Mrs. Fyne and the girls were already at the gate.

All he understood was that everything was not over yet. There was no time to lose; Mrs. Fyne and the girls had come in at the gate. He whispered "Wait" with such authority (he was the son of Carleon Anthony, the domestic autocrat) that

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it did arrest her for a moment, long enough to hear him say
that he could not be left like this to puzzle over her non-
sense all night. She was to slip down again into the garden
later on - as soon as she could do so without being heard.
He would be there waiting for her till - till daylight. She
didn't think he could go to sleep - did she? And she had
better come, or - he broke off on an unfinished threat.

She vanished into the unlighted cottage just as Mrs.
Fyne came up to the porch. Nervous, holding her breath in
the darkness of the living-room, she heard her best friend say:
"You ought to have joined us," And then, "Have you seen Miss
Smith anywhere?"

Flora shuddered, expecting him to break out into be-
traying imprecations on Miss Smith's head, and cause a painful
and humiliating explanation. She imagined him full of his
mysterious ferocity. To her great surprise, Anthony's voice
sounded very much as usual, with perhaps a slight tinge of
grimness. "Miss Smith! No. I've seen no Miss Smith."

Mrs. Fyne seemed satisfied - and not much concerned
really.

Flora, relieved, got clear away to her room upstairs,

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and shutting her door quietly, dropped into a chair. She was
used to reproaches, abuse, to all sorts of wicked ill usage
—
short of actual beating on her body. But otherwise inexplicable
angers had cut and slashed and trampled down her youth without
mercy — and mainly, it appeared, because she was the financier
de Barral's daughter and also condemned to a degrading sort of
poverty through the action of treacherous men who had turned
upon her father in his hour of need. And she thought with the
tenderest possible affection of that upright figure buttoned up
but
in a long frock coat, soft-voiced and having/little to say to
his girl. She seemed to feel his hand closed round hers.
On his flying visits to Brighton he would always walk hand in
hand with her. People stared covertly at them; the hand was
playing; and there was the sea — the blue gaiety of the sea.
They were quietly happy together ... It was all over.

Suddenly, such an immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, but she nearly cried aloud. And that dread of what was before her, which had been eating up her courage slowly in the course of odious years, flamed up into an access of panic, that sort of fearful panic which had already driven her out twice to the top of the cliff-like quarry. She jumped up

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saying to herself: "Why not now? At once! Yes. I'll do it now - in the dark!" The very horror of it seemed to give her additional resolution.

She came down the staircase quietly, and only on the point of opening the door and because of the discovery that it was unfastened, she remembered Captain Anthony's threat to stay in the garden all night. She hesitated. She did not understand the mood of that man clearly. He was violent. But it was a violence which even while it frightened her was not repulsive. And then she thought that nothing mattered now. She had gone beyond the point where things matter. What would he think if her coming down to him - as he would naturally suppose. But even that didn't matter. He could not despise her more than she despised herself. She thinks that she must have been light-headed because the thought came into her mind that should he get into ungovernable fury from disappointment, and perchance strangle her, it would be as good a way to be done with it as any.

"You had that thought," I exclaimed in wonder.

With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost pain-taking precision (her very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and no more), she said that, yes, the

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thought came into her head. This makes one shudder at the
mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For this was a
thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come
from the depths of that sort of experience which she had not
had, and went far beyond what a young girl's
possible conception of the strongest and most veiled of human
emotions.

"He was there, of course?" I said.

"Yes, he was there." She saw him on the path directly
she stepped outside the porch. He was very still. It was as
though he had been standing there with his face to the door
for hours.

Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tender-
ness, he must have been ready for any extravagance of conduct.
Knowing the profound silence each night brought to that nook of
the country, I could imagine them having the feeling of being
the only two people on the wide earth. A row of six or seven
lofty elms just across the road opposite the cottage made the
night more obscure in that little garden. If these two could
just make out each other that was all.

"Well! And were you very much terrified?" I asked,
knowing that she kept still.

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She made me wait a little longer before she said
raising her eyes: "He was gentleness itself."

I noticed three abominable drink-sodden loafers, sallow
and dirty, who had come unnoticed to range themselves in a row
within ten feet of us against the front of the public-house.
They stared at Flora de Barral's back with unseeing mournful
fixity.

"Let's move this way a little," I proposed.

She turned at once and we made a few paces; not too
far to take us out of sight of the hotel door, but very nearly.
I could just keep my eyes on it. After all, I had not been so
very long with the girl. If you were to disentangle the words
we actually exchanged from my comments you would see that they
were not so very many, including everything she had so unex-
pectedly told me of her story. No, not so very many. And now
it seemed as though there would be no more. No! I could
expect no more. The confidence was wonderful enough in its
nature as far as it went, and perhaps not to have been expected
from any other girl under the sun. And I felt a little a
ashamed. The origin of our intimacy was too gruesome. It
was as if listening to her I had taken advantage of having seen

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her poor bewildered scared soul without its veils. But I was
curious, too; or, to render myself justice without false
modesty - I was anxious; anxious to know a little more.

I felt like a blackmailer all the same when I made
my attempt with a light-hearted remark.

"And so you gave up that walk you proposed to take?"

"Yes, I gave up the walk," she said slowly before
raising her downcast eyes. When she did so it was with an
extraordinary effect. It was like catching sight suddenly of
a piece of blue sky, of a stretch of open water. And for a
moment I understood the sudden desire of that man to whom the
sea and sky of his solitary life had appeared suddenly incomplete
without that glance which seemed to belong to them both. He
was not for nothing the son of a poet, however cantankerous,
absurd and refined. I looked into those unabashed eyes while
the girl went on, her demure appearance and precise tone changed
to a very earnest expression. Woman is various indeed.

"But I want you to understand, Mr...." she had actually
to think of my name ... "Mr. Marlow, that I have written to Mrs.
Fyne that I haven't been - that I have done nothing to make
Captain Anthony behave to me as he had behaved. I haven't.

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I haven't. It isn't my doing. It isn't my fault - if she likes
to put it in that way. But she with her ideas ought to understand
that I couldn't, that I couldn't .... I know she hates me now.
I think she never liked me. I think nobody ever cared for me.
I was told once nobody could care for me - and I think it is true.
At any rate I can't forget it."

I felt that her abominable experience with the governess
had implanted in her unlucky breast a lasting doubt, an ineradicable
suspicion of herself and of others. I said:

"Remember, Miss de Barral, that to be fair you must
trust a man altogether - or not at all."

She dropped her eyes suddenly. I thought I heard a
faint sigh. I tried to take a light tone again, and yet it
seemed impossible to get off the ground which gave me my standing
with her.

"Mrs. Fyne is absurd. She's an excellent woman, but
really you could not be expected to throw away your chance of life
simply that she might cherish a good opinion of your memory.
That would be excessive."

"It was not of my life that I was thinking while Captain
Anthony was - was speaking to me," said Flora de Barral with an
effort.

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I told her that she was wrong then. She ought to
have been thinking of her life, and not only of her life but
of the life of the man who was speaking to her too. She let
me finish, then shook her head impatiently.

"I mean - death."

"Well," I said, "when he stood before you there, out-
side the cottage, he really stood between you and that. I have
it out of your own mouth. You can't deny it."

"If you will have it that he saved my life, then he has
got it. It was not for me. Oh no - it was not for me that
I... It was not fear - there." She finished petulantly: "And
you may just as well know it."

She hung her head and swung the parasol slightly to and
fro. I thought a little.

"Do you know French, Miss de Barral?" I asked.

She made a sign with her head that she did, but without
showing any surprise at the question and without ceasing to
swing her parasol.

"Well then, somehow or other, I have the notion that
Captain Anthony is what the French call "un galant homme."
I should like to think he is being treated as he deserves."

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The form of her lips (I could see them under the brim of her hat) was suddenly altered into a line of seriousness. The parasol stopped swinging.

"I have given him what he wanted - that's myself," she said without a tremor and with some dignity of tone.

Impressed by the manner and the directness of the words, I hesitated for a moment what to say. Then made up my mind to clear up the point.

"And you have got what you wanted? Is that it?"

The daughter of the egregious financier de Barral did not answer at once this question going to the heart of things. Then raising her head and gazing wistfully across the street with the endless transit of innumerable bargains, she said with intense gravity:

"He has been most generous."

I was pleased to hear these words, not that I doubted the infatuation of Roderick Anthony. But I was pleased to hear something which proved that she was sensible and open to the sentiment of gratitude which in this case was significant. In the face of man's desire a girl is excusable if she thinks herself priceless. I mean a girl of our civilization which

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has established a dithyrambic phraseology for the expression
of love. And a man in love will accept any convention exalting
the object of his passion and in this indirect way his passion
itself. In what way the captain of the ship *Ferndale* gave
proofs of lover-like lavishness I could not guess very well.
But anything to this girl starved of the commonest decencies
of mere indifference was likely to appear generous if all good
feeling were not dead within her, strangled, not in a boundless
conceit of herself as is sometimes the case with fortunate
girls - sunshines of homes - but in implacable resentment,
bitter contempt, the harsh ingratitude of undeserved misfortune.
My mind ran on careful arrangements for her comfort, privacy,
amusement as far as possible on board a ship out for a southern
voyage. But I was glad she was so appreciative. It is lucky
that small things please women - because without it their lot
would be even harder than it is. And it is not silly of them
to be thus pleased; for it is in small things that the deepest
loyalty, that which they need most, the loyalty of the passing
moment, is best expressed.

She had remained thoughtful, letting her deep motion-
less eyes rest on the streaming jumble of traffic. Suddenly
she said:

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"And I wanted to ask you... I was really glad when I saw you actually here. Who would have expected you here, at this spot, before this hotel! I certainly never ..... You see it meant a lot to me. You are the only person who knows ..... who knows for certain ..... "

"Knows what?" I said, not discovering at first what she had in her mind. Then I saw it. She would have it if I had a sort of secret in my keeping. "Why can't you leave that alone?" I remonstrated, rather annoyed at the invidious position she was forcing on me in a sense. It's true that I was the only person to see," I added. "But, as it happens, after your mysterious disappearance I told the Fynes the story of our meeting."

Her eyes raised to mine had an expression of dreamy, unfathomable candour, if I dare say so. And if you wonder what I mean I can only say that I remember that I have seen the sea wear such an expression on one or two occasions shortly after sunrise on a calm, fresh day. She said as if meditating aloud that she supposed the Fynes were not likely to talk about that. She couldn't imagine any connection in which .... Why should they?

As her tone had become interrogatory I assented. "To be sure. There's no reason whatever." Thinking to myself

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that they would be more likely indeed to keep quiet about it.
They had other things to talk of. And then remembering little
Fyne stuck upstairs for an unconscionable time, enough to blurt
out everything he ever knew in his life, I reflected that he
would assume naturally that Captain Anthony had nothing to learn
from him about Flora de Barral. It had been up to now my
assumption too. I saw my mistake. The sincerest of women will
make no unnecessary confidences to a man. And this is as it
should be.

"No - no!" I said reassuringly. "It's most unlikely.
Are you much concerned?"

"Well, you see, when I came down," she said again in
that precise demure tone, "when I came down - into the garden
Captain Anthony misunderstood - "

"Of course he would. Men are so conceited," I said.

I saw it well enough that he must have thought she had
come down for him. What else could he have thought? And then
he had been "gentleness itself." A new experience for that
poor, delicate, and yet so resisting creature. Gentleness in
passion! What could have been more seductive to the bruised,
starved heart of that girl? Perhaps had he been violent, she

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might have told him that what she came down to keep was the
tryst of death - not of love. It occurred to me as I looked
at her, young, fragile in aspect, and intensely alive in her
quietness, that perhaps she did not know herself then what sort
of tryst she was coming down to keep.

She smiled faintly, almost awkwardly as if she were
totally unused to smiling, at my cheap jocularity. Then she
said with that forced precision, a sort of conscious primness:

"I didn't want him to know."

I approved heartily. Quite right. Much better.
Let him ever remain under his misapprehension which was so
much more flattering for him.

I tried to keep it in the tone of comedy; but she
was, I believe, too simple to understand my intention. She
went on, looking down:

"Oh! You think so? When I saw you I didn't know
why you were here. I was glad when you spoke to me because
this is exactly what I wanted to ask you for. I wanted to
ask you if you ever get to know Captain Anthony - by any
chance - anywhere - you are a sailor too, are you not? - that
you would never mention - never - that - that you had ever seen
me over there."

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"My dear young lady," I cried, horror-struck at the supposition. "Why should I? What makes you think I ever should dream of ..... "

She had raised her head at my vehemence. She did not understand it. The world had treated her so dishonourably that she had no notion even of what mere decency of feeling is like. It was not her fault. Indeed, I don't know why she should have put her trust in anybody's promises. But I thought it would be better to promise. So I assured her that she could depend on my absolute silence.

"I am not likely to ever set eyes on Captain Anthony," I added with conviction - as a further guarantee.

She accepted my assurance in silence, without a sign. Her gravity had in it something acute - perhaps because of that chin. While we were still looking at each other she declared:

"There's no deception in it really. I want you to believe that if I am here, like this, to-day, it is not from fear. It is not!"

"I quite understand," I said. But her firm yet self-conscious gaze became doubtful. "I do", I insisted. "I understand perfectly that it was not of death that you were afraid."

She lowered her eyes slowly, and I went on:

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"As to life, that's another thing. And I don't know
that one ought to blame you very much - though it seemed rather
an excessive step. I wonder now if it isn't the ugliness rather
than the pain of the struggle which ..... "

She shuddered visibly: "But I do blame myself," she
exclaimed with feeling. "I am ashamed." And, dropping her
head, she looked in a moment the very picture of remorse and
shame.

"Well, you will be going away from all its horrors,"
I said. "And surely you are not afraid of the sea. You are
a sailor's grand-daughter, I understand."

She sighed deeply. She remembered her grandfather
only a little. He was a clean-shaven man with a ruddy com-
plexion and rather long, perfectly white hair. He used to
take her on his knee, and putting his face near hers, used to
talk to her in loving whispers. If only he were alive now...!

She remained silent for a while.

"Aren't you anxious to see the ship?" I asked.

She lowered her head still more so that I could not
see anything of her face.

"I don't know," she murmured.

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I had already the suspicion that she did not know her own feelings. All this work of the merest chance had been so unexpected, so sudden. And she had nothing to fall back upon, no experience but such as to shake her belief in every human being, her memories but of treacherous events and people, no one to turn to -- and what confidence in herself could she have? She could not even have illusions of the helpful sort. She had a fact, at best always mysterious, which I feared she did not thoroughly understand, and I thought that she did not understand her own heart either. She was dreadfully and pitifully forlorn. It was almost in order to comfort my own depression that I re-marked cheerfully:

"Well, I know of somebody who must be growing extremely anxious to see you."

"I am before my time," she confessed simply, rousing herself. "I had nothing to do. So I came out."

I had the sudden vision of a shabby, lonely little room at the other end of the town. It had grown intolerable to her restlessness. The mere thought of it oppressed her. Flora de Barral was looking frankly at her chance confidant.

"And I came this way," she went on. "I appointed the

332

time myself yesterday, but Captain Anthony would not have
minded. He told me he was going to look over some business
papers till I came."

The idea of the son of the poet, the rescuer of the
most forlorn damsel of modern times, the man of violence,
gentleness and generosity, sitting up to his neck in ship's
accounts amused me. "I am sure he would not have minded," I
said, smiling knowingly. But the girl's stare was sombre,
her thin white face seemed pathetically careworn.

"I can hardly believe yet," she murmured anxiously.

"It's quite real. Never fear," I said encouragingly,
but had to change my tone at once. "You had better go down
that way a little," I directed her abruptly.

I had seen Fyne come striding out of the hotel door.
The intelligent girl, without staying to ask questions, walked
away from me quietly down one street while I hurried on to
meet Fyne coming up the other at his efficient pedestrian gait.
My object was to stop him getting so far as the corner. He
must have been thinking too hard to be aware of his surround-
ings. I put myself in his way, and he nearly walked into me.

"Hello!" I said.

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His surprise was extreme. "You here! You don't mean to say you have been waiting for me?"

I said negligently that I had been detained by unexpected business in the neighbourhood, and thus I happened to catch sight of him coming out.

He stared at me with a sort of solemn distraction, obviously thinking of something else. I suggested that he had better take the next city-ward tramcar. He was inattentive, and I perceived that he was not paying any attention. As Miss de Barral (she had moved out of sight) could not possibly approach the hotel door as long as we remained where we were I proposed that we should wait for the car on the other side of the street. He obeyed rather the slight touch on his arm than my words, and as we were crossing the wide roadway in the midst of the lumbering wheeled traffic, he exclaimed in his deep tone, "I don't know which of them is more mad than the other!"

"Really!" I said, pulling him forward from under the noses of two enormous sleepy-headed cart-horses. He skipped wildly out of the way and up on the curbstone with a purely instinctive precision; his mind had nothing to do with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and while, so to speak,

334

in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he continued to
relieve his outraged feelings.

"You would never believe—"

I took care to place myself in such a position that
to face me he had to turn his back on the hotel across the road.
I believe he was glad I was there to talk to. But I thought
there was some misapprehension in the first statement he shot
out at me without loss of time, that Captain Anthony had been
glad to see him. It was indeed difficult to believe that,
directly he opened the door, his wife's "sailor-brother" had
positively shouted: "Oh, it's you! The very man I wanted to see."

"I found him sitting there," went on Fyne impressively
in his effortless grave chest voice, "drafting his will."

This was unexpected, but I preserved a non-committal
attitude, knowing full well that our actions in themselves are
neither mad nor sane. But I did not see what there was to be
excited about. And Fyne was distinctly excited. I understood
it better when I learned that the captain of the "Ferndale"
wanted little Fyne to be one of the trustees
was leaving everything to his wife. Naturally, a request
which involved him into sanctioning in a way a proceeding which

335

he had been sent by his wife to oppose must have appeared sufficiently mad to Fyne.

"Me! Me, of all people in the world!" he repeated portentously. But I could see that he was frightened. Such want of tact!

"He knew I came from his sister. You don't put a man into such an awkward position," complained Fyne. "It made me speak much more strongly against all this very painful business than I would have had the heart to do otherwise."

I pointed out to him concisely, and keeping my eyes on the door of the hotel, that he and his wife were the only bond with the land Captain Anthony had. Who else could he have asked?

"I explained to him that he was breaking my bond," declared Fyne solemnly. "Breaking it once for all. And for what - for what?"

He positively glared at me. I could perhaps have given him an inkling for what, but I said nothing. He started again:

"My wife assures me that the girl does not love him a bit. She goes by that letter she received from her. There is a passage in it where she practically admits that she was

336

quite unscrupulous in accepting this offer of marriage, but says
to my wife that she supposes she, my wife, will not blame her -
as it was in self-defence. My wife has her own ideas, but this
is an outrageous misapprehension of her views. Outrageous."

The good little man paused and then added weightily:

"I didn't tell that to my brother-in-law - I mean, my
wife's views."

"No," I said. "What would have been the good?"

"It's positive infatuation," agreed little Fyne, in the
tone as though he had made an awful discovery. "I have never
seen anything so hopeless and inexplicable in my life. I - I
felt quite frightened and sorry," he added, while I looked at
him curiously asking myself whether this excellent civil servant
and notable pedestrian had felt the breath of a great and fatal
love-spell passing him by in the room of that East-end
hotel. He did look for a moment as though he had seen a ghost,
as the saying is, an other-world thing. But that look vanished
instantaneously, and he nodded at me with mere exasperation at
something quite of this world - whatever it was. "It's a bad
business. My brother-in-law knows nothing of women," he cried
with an air of profound experienced wisdom.

337

What he imagined he knew of women himself I can't tell. I did not know anything of the opportunities he might have had. But it is a subject which, if approached with undue solemnity, is apt to elude one's grasp entirely. No doubt he knew something of a woman who was Captain Anthony's sister. But that, admittedly, had been a very solemn study. I smiled at him gently, and as if encouraged or provoked, he completed his thought rather explosively.

"And that girl understands nothing ..... It's sheer lunacy."

"I don't know," I said, "whether the circumstances of isolation at sea would be any alleviation to the danger. But it's certain that they shall have the opportunity to learn everything about each other in a lonely tête-a-tête .... "

"But dash it all," he cried in hollow accents which at the same time had the tone of bitter irony — I had never heard before a sound so quaintly ugly and almost horrible — "You forget Mr. Smith."

"What Mr. Smith?" I asked innocently.

Fyne made an extraordinary simile, grimace. I believe it was quite involuntary, but you know that a grave,

338

much-lined shaven countenance when distorted in an unusual
way is extremely apelike. It was a surprising sight, and
rendered me not only speechless but stopped the progress of
my thought completely. I must have presented a remarkably
imbecile appearance.

"My brother-in-law considered it amusing to chaff
me about us introducing the girl as Miss Smith," said Fyne,
going surly in a moment. "He said that perhaps if he had
heard her real name from the first it might have restrained
him. As it was, he made the discovery too late. Pure open
mockery all that talk. Asked me to tell Zoe this together
with a lot more nonsense."

Fyne gave me the impression of having been out of a long
break from being inspired by a fierce, grimly playful
 ebullition of high spirits. It must have been most dis-
tasteful to him; and his solemnity got damaged somehow in
the process, I perceived. There were holes in it through which
I could see a new, an unknown Fyne.

"You wouldn't believe it," he went on, "but she looks
upon her father exclusively as a victim. I don't know," he
burst out suddenly through an enormous rent in his solemnity,

339

"if she thinks him absolutely a saint, but she certainly
imagines him a martyr."

It is one of the advantages of that magnificent in-
vention, the prison, that you may forget people which are put
there as though they were dead. One needn't worry about them.
Nothing can happen to them that you can help. They can do
nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They come
out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to them-
selves or anyone else. It is about as awkward as though they
had returned from the grave, and nearly as horrible - if you
come to think of it. I had completely forgotten the financier
de Barral. It is a fact. The girl for me was an orphan,
but now I perceived suddenly the force of Fyne's qualifying
statement, "to a certain extent." It would have been infinitely
more kind
kinder all round for the law to have shot, beheaded, strangled
or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a danger
to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to
take care of itself. But I observed to Fyne that, however
insane was the view she held, one could not declare the girl
mad on that account.

"So she thinks of her father - does she? I suppose

340

us
she would appear to saner if she thought only of herself."

"I am positive," he said earnestly, "that she went
and made desperate eyes at Anthony .... "

"Oh come!" I interrupted. "You haven't seen her make
eyes. You don't know the colour of her eyes."

"Very well! It don't matter. But it could hardly
have come to that if she hadn't .... It's all one, though.
I tell you she has led him on, or accepted him, if you like,
simply because she was thinking of her father. She doesn't
care a bit about Anthony, I believe. She cares for no one.
Never cared for anyone. Ask Zoe. She knows .... For myself
I don't blame her," added Fyne, giving me another view of un-
suspected things through the rags and tatters of his damaged
solemnity. "No! by heavens, I don't blame her - the poor
devil."

I agreed with him silently. I suppose affections are,
in a sense, to be learned. If there exists a native spark of
love in all of us, it must be fanned while we are young. Hers,
if she ever had it, had been drenched in as ugly a lot of cor-
rosive liquid as could be imagined. But I was surprised at
Fyne obscurely feeling this.

341

"She loves no one except that preposterous advertising shark," he pursued venomously, but in a more deliberate manner. "And I believe Anthony knows it."

"Does he?" I said doubtfully.

"She's quite capable of having told him," affirmed Fyne, with amazing insight. "But whether or no, I've told him."

"You did - eh? From Mrs. Fyne, of course."

Fyne only blinked owlishly at this piece of my insight.

"And how did Captain Anthony receive this interesting information?" I asked further.

"Most improperly," said Fyne, who really was in a state in which he didn't mind what he blurted out. "He isn't himself. He begged me to tell his sister that he offered no remarks on her conduct. Very improper and inconsequent. He said .... Never mind. I told him I made allowances for the state of excitement he was in."

"You know, Fyne," I said, "a man in jail seems to me such an incredible, cruel, nightmarish sort of thing that I can hardly believe in his existence. Certainly not in relation to any other existences."

"But dash it all," cried Fyne, "he isn't shut up for

342

life. They are going to let him out. He's coming out!
That's the whole trouble. What is he coming out to, I want
to know? It seems a more cruel business than the shutting
him up was. This has been the worry for weeks now. Don't
you see ..... ?"

I saw - all sorts of things. Immediately before me
I saw the excitement of little Fyne - mere food for wonder.
Further off in a sort of gloom and beyond the light of day and
the movement of the street I saw the figure of a man, stiff like
a ramrod, moving with small steps, a slight girlish figure by
his side. And the gloom was like the gloom of villainous
slums, of misery, of wretchedness, of a starved and degraded
existence. It was a relief that I could see only their shabby
hopeless backs. He was an awful ghost. But indeed to call
him a ghost was only a refinement of polite speech, and a manner
of concealing one's terror of such things. Prisons are won-
derful contrivances. Shut - Open. Very neat. Shut. & Open - And
AM out comes some sort of corpse, كايتto wander awfully
in a world in which it has no possible connections and carrying
with it the appalling tainted atmosphere of its silent abode.
Marvellous arrangement. It works automatically, and when you
look at it the perfection makes you sick, which for a mere

343

mechanism is no mean triumph. Sick and scared. It had
nearly scared that poor girl to her death. Fancy having
to take such a thing by the hand! Now I understood the re-
morseful strain I had detected in her speeches.

"By Jove!" I said. "They are about to let him out!
I never thought of that."

Fyne was contemptuous either of me or of things at
large.

"You didn't suppose he was to be kept in jail for
life?"

At that moment I caught sight of Flora de Barral at the
junction of the two streets. Then some vehicles following
each other in quick succession hid from my sight the black
slight figure with just a touch of colour in her hat. She
was walking slowly, I thought; and it might have been caution
or reluctance. While listening to Fyne I stared hard past
his shoulder trying to catch sight of her again. He was going
on with positive heat, the rags of his solemnity dropping off
him at every second sentence.

That was just it. His wife and he had been per-
fectly aware of it. Of course the girl never talked of
her father with Mrs. Fyne. I suppose with her theory of

344

innocence she found it difficult. But she must have been
thinking of it night and day. What to do with him? Where
to go? How to keep body and soul together? He had never
made any friends. The only relations were the atrocious East-
end cousins. We know what they were. Nothing but wretchedness,
whichever way she turned in an unjust and prejudiced world.
And to look at him helplessly she felt would be too much for her.

I won't say I was thinking these thoughts. It was not
necessary. This complete knowledge was in my head while I
stared hard across the wide road, so hard that I failed to hear
little Fyne till he raised his deep voice indignantly.

"I don't blame the girl," he was saying. "He is in-
fatuated with her. Anybody can see that. Why she should
have got such a hold on him I can't understand. She said
"Yes" to him only for the sake of that fatuous, swindling
father of hers. It's perfectly plain if one thinks it over
a moment. One needn't even think of it. We have it under
her own hand. In that letter to my wife she says she has
acted unscrupuloualy. She has owned up, then, for what else
can it mean, I should like to know. And so they are to be
married in three days' time, I believe.

345

old idiot comes out ..... He will be surprised," commented
Fyne suddenly in a strangely malignant tone. "He shall be
met at the jail door by a Mrs. Anthony, a Mrs. Captain Anthony.
Very pleasant for Zoe. And for all I know, my brother-in-law
means to turn up dutifully too. A little family event. It's
extremely pleasant to think of. Delightful. A charming family
party. We three against the world - and all that sort of
thing. And what for? For a girl that doesn't care twopence
for him."

The demon of bitterness had entered into little Fyne.
He amazed me as though he had changed his skin from white to
black. It was quite as wonderful. And he kept it up, too.

"Luckily there are some advantages in the pro-
fession of a sailor. As long as they defy the world away at
sea somewhere eighteen thousand miles from here, I don't mind
so much. I wonder what that interesting old party will say.
He will have another surprise. They mean to drag him along
with them on board the ship straight away. Rescue work.
Just think of Roderick Anthony, the son of a gentleman, after
all ....... "

He gave me a little shock. I thought he was going

346

to say the "son of the poet" as usual; but his mind was not
running on such vanities now. His unspoken thought must have gone
on "and uncle of my girls." I suspect that he had been roughly
handled by Captain Anthony up there, and the resentment gave a
tremendous fillip to the slow play of his wits. Those men of
sober fancy, when anything rouses their imaginative faculty, are
very thorough. "Just think!" he cried. "The three of them
crowded into a four-wheeler, and Anthony sitting deferentially
opposite that astonished old jail-bird!"

The good little man laughed. An improper sound it was to
come from his manly chest; and what made it worse was the thought
that for the least thing, by a mere hair's breadth, he might have
taken this affair sentimentally. But clearly Anthony was no
diplomatist. His brother-in-law must have appeared to him, to use
the language of shore people, a perfect philistine with a heart
like a flint. What Pyne precisely meant by "wrangling" I don't
know, but I had no doubt that these two had "wrangled" to a pro-
foundly disturbing extent. How much the other was affected I
could not even imagine; but the man before me was quite amazingly
upset.

"In a four-wheeler! Take him on board!" I muttered,

347

startled by the change in Fyne.

"That's the plan--nothing less. If I am to believe what I have been told, his feet will scarcely touch the ground between the prison-gates and the deck of that ship."

The transformed Fyne spoke in a forcibly lowered tone which I heard without difficulty. The rumbling, composite noises of the street were hushed for a moment, during one of these sudden breaks in the traffic as if the stream of commerce had dried up at its source. Having an unobstructed view past Fyne's shoulder on the other side of the street, I was astonished to see that the girl was still there I thought she had gone up long before. But there was her black slender figure, her white face under the roses of her hat. She stood on the edge of the pavement as people stand on the bank of a stream, very still, as if waiting -- or as if unconscious of where she was. The three dismal sodden loafers (I could see them too; they hadn't budged an inch) seemed to me to be watching her. Which was horrible.

Meantime Fyne was telling me rather remarkable things - for him. He declared first it was a mercy in a sense. Then he asked me if it were not real madness, to saddle one's existence with such a perpetual reminder. The daily existence. The isolated, sea-bound existence. To bring such an additional strain into the solitude already trying enough for two people. It was the craziest thing. Undesirable

348

relations were bad enough on shore. One could cut them or
at least forget their existence now and then. He himself
was preparing to forget his brother-in-law's existence as much
as possible.

That was the general sense of his remarks, not
his exact words. I thought that his wife's brother's
existence had never been very embarrassing to him but that now
of course he would have to abstain from his allusions to the
"son of the poet" -- you know!" I said "yes, yes" in
the pauses because I did not want him to turn round; and all
the time I was watching the girl intently. I thought I knew
now what she meant with her: "He was most generous."
Yes. Generosity of character may carry a man through any
situation. But why didn't she go then to her generous man?
Why stand there as if clinging to this solid earth which she
surely hated as one must hate the place where one has been
tormented, hopeless, unhappy? Suddenly she stirred. Was she
going to cross over? No. She turned and began to walk slowly
close to the curbstone, reminding me of the time when throwing
my head up I had discovered her walking near the edge of
a ninety foot sheer drop. It was the same impression, the
same carriage, straight, slim, with rigid head and the two
hands hanging lightly clasped in front -- only now a small
sunshade was dangling from them. Something fateful in that

349

deliberate pacing towards the inconspicuous small door
with the words *Hotel Entrance* on the glass panels.

She was abreast of it now and I thought that she
would stop again; but no! She swerved rigidly-- at the
moment there was no one near her; she had that bit of pavement
to herself -- crossed over with the same inanimate slowness
as if moved by something outside herself.

"A confounded convict," Fyne burst out.

With the sound of that word offending my ears I saw
the girl extend her arm, push the door open a little way and
glide in. I saw plainly that movement, the hand put out in
advance with the gesture of a sleep-walker.

She had vanished, her black figure had melted
in the darkness of the open door. For some time Fyne said
nothing; and I thought of the girl going upstairs, appearing
before the man. Were they looking at each other in silence
and feeling they were alone in the world as lovers should at
the moment of meeting? But that fine forgetfulness was surely
impossible to Anthony, the seaman, directly after the "wrangling"
interview with Fyne, the emissary of an order of things which
stops at the edge of the sea. How much he was disturbed I
couldn't tell because I did not know what that impetuous lover
had had to listen to.

"Going to take the old fellow to sea with them,"

35D

350

I said. "Well I really don't see what else they could have done with him. You told your brother-in-law what you thought of it? I wonder how he took it."

"Very improperly," repeated Fyne. "His manner was offensive, derisive, from the first. I don't mean he was actually rude in words. But I hang it all, I am not a contemptible ass. But he was exulting at having got hold of a miserable girl."

"It is pretty certain that she will be much less poor and miserable." I murmured.

It looked as if the exultation of Captain Anthony had got on Fyne's nerves. "I told the fellow very plainly that he was abominably selfish in this," he affirmed unexpectedly.

"You did! Selfish!" I said rather taken aback. "But what if the girl thought that, on the contrary, he was most generous."

"What do you know about it," growled Fyne. The rents and slashes of his solemnity were closing up gradually but it was going to be a surly solemnity. "Generosity! I am disposed to give it another name. No. Not folly," he shot out at me though I had not meant to interrupt him. "Still another. Something worse. I need not tell you what it is," he added with grim meaning.

351

"Certainly, You needn't - unless you like," I said blankly. Little Fyne had never interested me so much since the beginning of the De Barral-Anthony affair when I first perceived possibilities in him. The possibilities of dull men are exciting because when they happen they suggest legendary cases of "possession", not exactly by the devil but anyhow by a strange spirit.

"I told him it was a shame," said Fyne. "Even if the girl did make eyes at him - but I think with you that she did not. Yes! A shame to take advantage of a girl's distress - a girl that does not love him in the least."

"You think it's so bad as that?" I said. "Because you know I don't."

"What can you think about that," he retorted on me with a solemn stare. "I go by her letter to my wife."

"Ah! that famous letter." I said. "But you haven't actually read it," I said.

"No, I didn't think so." My wife told me. Of course it was a most improper sort of letter to write considering the circumstances. It pained Mrs. Fyne to discover how thoroughly she had been misunderstood. But what is written is not all. It's what my wife could read between the lines. She says that the girl is really terrified at heart."

"She had not much in life to give her any very special courage for it, or any great confidence in mankind."

352

That's very true. But this seems an exaggeration."

"I should like to know what grounds you have to say that," asked Fyne with offended solemnity. "I really don't see any. But I had sufficient authority to tell my brother-in-law that if he thought he was going to do something chivalrous and fine he was mistaken. I can see very well that he will do everything she asks him to do - but, all the same, it is rather a pitiless transaction."

For a moment I felt it might be so. Fyne caught sight of an approaching tram-car and stepped out on the road to meet it. "Have you a more compassionate scheme ready?"

I called after him. He made no answer, clambered on to the rear platform, and only then looked back. We exchanged a perfunctory wave of the hand. I suppose we also looked at each other, he rather angrily, I fancy, and I with wonder. I may also mention that it was for the last time. From that day I never set eyes on the Fynes. As usual the unexpected happened to me. It had nothing to do with Flora de Barral but it was the same sort of unexpected which had happened to her in so far that it took me away from home, away from solid land where credulity flourishes (credulity followed by revenge) and love flames up on the flimsiest pretences sometimes, and sometimes from impulses which it would not do to scrutinize too closely even if there were the remotest hope of understanding their nature.

353

The facts are that I went away and so did she.

My call was not like her call. Mine was not urged on me with
passionate violence or tender gentleness made all the finer or
more compelling by the allurements of generosity which is a
virtue as mysterious as any other but having a glamour of its
own. No, it was just a prosaic offer of employment on rather
good terms which, with a sudden sense of having wasted my time
on shore long enough, I accepted without misgivings. And once
started out of my indolence I went, as my habit was, very,
very far away and for a long, long time. Which is another
proof of my indolence. How far she went
I can't say. But I will tell you my idea. My idea is that
she went as far as she was able to as far as she could bear
as far as she had to. ¹¹

She remains to me in the last instance the slight,
black rigid figure hesitating on the sidewalk and then
slipping quickly through a crack in the door. A little figure
loaded with misfortune and as if dangerous in its frailness to
the man it had captivated by no other art than the pathetically
white face which get off the depth of her sea-blue eyes into a
quite unfathetic clearness.

Not much to remember; but a girl like Flora de Barral,
a girl one had seen as I have seen her and talked to as I have
talked to her. I do not forgotten very readily. It makes her, you
will easily understand, so much more real than the people one