Chance

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Chance


"But we, my dear Marlow, have 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--"

"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 from that 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
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 to talk 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
confidences 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 substance 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, 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 all 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 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 the 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 are often 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 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 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 poor Flora 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, 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. As to you I have never been
deceived in you for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of
you for years. You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you 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 the wild staring expression of being
choked by invisible fingers on her throat, and yet horribly pale. The
effect 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
stood motionless and dumb.

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 some time 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--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 to 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 have 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 inimical 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 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, 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 went 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 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, 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 had the instantaneous,
profound, maternal perception of the child's loneliness--and a girl too!
It was irresistible. 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 bounded; 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. 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 unimportant 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 recognize 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 a 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 he had to seize and half drag, half
carry her to his wife. Mrs. Fyne waited at the door with her quite
unmoved physiognomy and her readiness to confront any sort of
responsibility, which already characterized 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 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 . . .

He fidgeted. 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 very 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, 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 had 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
ill-natured 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 dispatched 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 next day it was in the shape of an elderly man. An
unexpected sort of 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 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 derisive 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 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?

An extreme distaste for that respectable member of society was depicted
in Fyne's face even as he was telling me 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 consciousness 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.

The good Fynes didn't dare to look at each other before this unforeseen
but perfectly authorized 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
dexterous 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 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 . . .