Amy Foster

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Amy Foster


"His courtship had lasted some time--ever since he got his precarious
footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green
satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You
bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on a fair-day. I don't suppose the
girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable
intentions could not be mistaken.

"It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I
fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons,
how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside. Every old woman
in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm,
promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he
twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled
such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man
who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in
the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird
and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand--she
would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence--and she would run
out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered
nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if
she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see
his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in
his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his
aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to
see her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know;
and Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that 'this man, my dear, will do you
some harm some day yet.' And so it went on. They could be seen on the
roads, she tramping stolidly in her finery--grey dress, black feather,
stout boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a
hundred yards away; and he, his coat slung picturesquely over one
shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how
plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever
seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced by the
divine quality of her pity.

"Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you get an old man
for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did not know how to proceed.
However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he was now Swaffer's
under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father and
declared himself humbly. 'I daresay she's fool enough to marry you,' was
all Foster said. 'And then,' he used to relate, 'he puts his hat on his
head, looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles
the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do the work.' The Fosters, of
course, didn't like to lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give
all her money to her mother. But there was in Foster a very genuine
aversion to that match. He contended that the fellow was very good with
sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one thing, he used
to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a dam' fool; and then,
these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes. And perhaps he
would want to carry her off somewhere--or run off himself. It was not
safe. He preached it to his daughter that the fellow might ill-use her
in some way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if
the man had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was
quite an excitement, and the two went on 'walking out' together in the
face of opposition. Then something unexpected happened.

"I don't know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was
regarded in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the
relation was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked formally for an
interview--'and the Miss too' (he called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer
simply _Miss_)--it was to obtain their permission to marry.
Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the
intelligence into Miss Swaffer's best ear. She showed no surprise, and
only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, 'He certainly won't get
any other girl to marry him.'

"It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the munificence: but in
a very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with
a cottage (the cottage you've seen this morning) and something like an
acre of ground--had made it over to him in absolute property. Willcox
expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a great
pleasure in making it ready. It recited: 'In consideration of saving the
life of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.'

"Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting
married.

"Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the
evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where
he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip,
and humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born,
he got elevated at the 'Coach and Horses,' essayed again a song and a
dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for
a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care. There was a
man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the
language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.

"But I don't know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step,
heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.

"One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me
that 'women were funny.' I had heard already of domestic differences.
People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what
sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent,
unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day
as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing
to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some
harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the
evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him
by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child--in
his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so
that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our
ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife
should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that would pass, he said.
And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate
that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion,
charitable to the poor!

"I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his
strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
had begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered. . . ."

The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of
the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the
hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.

"Physiologically, now," he said, turning away abruptly, "it was
possible. It was possible."

He remained silent. Then went on--"At all events, the next time I saw
him he was ill--lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not
acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of
course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state
of depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a
couch downstairs.

"A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the
little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting
steam on the hob, and some child's linen lay drying on the fender. The
room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed
perhaps.

"He was very feverish, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a
chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
eyes. 'Why don't you have him upstairs?' I asked. With a start and a
confused stammer she said, 'Oh! ah! I couldn't sit with him upstairs,
Sir.'

"I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that
he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands. 'I couldn't. I
couldn't. He keeps on saying something--I don't know what.' With the
memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her
ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes,
at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but
seemed, staring at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was
uneasy.

"'What's the matter with him?' she asked in a sort of vacant
trepidation. 'He doesn't look very ill. I never did see anybody look
like this before. . . .'

"'Do you think,' I asked indignantly, 'he is shamming?'

"'I can't help it, sir,' she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped
her hands and looked right and left. 'And there's the baby. I am
so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can't
understand what he says to it.'

"'Can't you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?' I asked.

"'Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,' she muttered, dully
resigned all at once.

"I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had
to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. 'Oh, I hope he
won't talk!' she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.

"I don't know how it is I did not see--but I didn't. And yet, turning
in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if
meditating a flight up the miry road.

"Towards the night his fever increased.

"He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat
with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and
every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she
could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker
cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal
instinct and that unaccountable fear.

"Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She
did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he
was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever,
amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently,
'Water! Give me water!'

"She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He
spoke to her, and his passionate remonstrances only increased her
fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time,
entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore
it as long as she could. And then a gust of rage came over him.

"He sat up and called out terribly one word--some word. Then he got up
as though he hadn't been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered dismay,
indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she
simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard
him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice--and
fled. . . . Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull,
blurred glance of these eyes the spectre of the fear which had hunted
her on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster's
cottage! I did the next day.

"And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle,
just outside the little wicket-gate.

"I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and
on my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open.
My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp
smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the
cheerless yellow paper on the wall. 'Amy!' I called aloud, and my voice
seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had
cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. 'Gone!' he said distinctly. 'I
had only asked for water--only for a little water. . . .'

"He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching
a painfully gasped word now and then. They were no longer in his own
language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And
with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild
creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him.
She had left him--sick--helpless--thirsty. The spear of the hunter had
entered his very soul. 'Why?' he cried in the penetrating and indignant
voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a
swish of rain answered.

"And as I turned away to shut the door he pronounced the word
'Merciful!' and expired.

"Eventually I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death.
His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this
night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away.
Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the
dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.

"'Do you know where your daughter is?' I asked.

"'Don't I!' he cried. 'I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a
poor woman like this.'

"'He won't frighten her any more,' I said. 'He is dead.'

"He struck with his stick at the mud.

"'And there's the child.'

"Then, after thinking deeply for a while--"'I don't know that it isn't
for the best.'

"That's what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of
him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and
striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no
longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love
or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as
a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and
works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child
is 'Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him Johnny--which means Little John.

"It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does
she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot
in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on
his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black
eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I
seemed to see again the other one--the father, cast out mysteriously by
the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."