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CHANCE--A TALE IN TWO PARTS

by Joseph Conrad




PART I--THE DAMSEL




CHAPTER ONE--YOUNG POWELL AND HIS CHANCE



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I felt mighty uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Looks very respectable."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pass this way."

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

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

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

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

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

"And the skipper chimes in very kindly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

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


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

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

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

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

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

"Hallo!  What's up here?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I like the things he says."

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

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

"Keeps them in good condition," I said.

"Lively enough I dare say," he admitted.

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER TWO--THE FYNES AND THE GIRL-FRIEND



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

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

"Ferndale," repeated Marlow thoughtfully.  "Ferndale."

"Know her?"

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

Marlow smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

"No," muttered Mr. Powell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He was a good soul."

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

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

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

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

Marlow was not disconcerted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She cried from the distance desperately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her answer knocked me over.

"Not for a woman."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No one," I exclaimed.

"Practically," said curt Mrs. Fyne.

And my curiosity was aroused again.

"Ah!  I see.  An orphan."

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

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

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

I wondered--and wondering I doubted--whether she really understood
herself the theory she had propounded to me.  Everything may be
said--indeed ought to be said--providing we know how to say it.  She
probably did not.  She was not intelligent enough for that.  She had
no knowledge of the world.  She had got hold of words as a child
might get hold of some poisonous pills and play with them for "dear,
tiny little marbles."  No!  The domestic-slave daughter of Carleon
Anthony and the little Fyne of the Civil Service (that flower of
civilization) were not intelligent people.  They were commonplace,
earnest, without smiles and without guile.  But he had his
solemnities and she had her reveries, her lurid, violent, crude
reveries.  And I thought with some sadness that all these revolts
and indignations, all these protests, revulsions of feeling, pangs
of suffering and of rage, expressed but the uneasiness of sensual
beings trying for their share in the joys of form, colour,
sensations--the only riches of our world of senses.  A poet may be a
simple being but he is bound to be various and full of wiles,
ingenious and irritable.  I reflected on the variety of ways the
ingenuity of the late bard of civilization would be able to invent
for the tormenting of his dependants.  Poets not being generally
foresighted in practical affairs, no vision of consequences would
restrain him.  Yes.  The Fynes were excellent people, but Mrs. Fyne
wasn't the daughter of a domestic tyrant for nothing.  There were no
limits to her revolt.  But they were excellent people.  It was clear
that they must have been extremely good to that girl whose position
in the world seemed somewhat difficult, with her face of a victim,
her obvious lack of resignation and the bizarre status of orphan "to
a certain extent."

Such were my thoughts, but in truth I soon ceased to trouble about
all these people.  I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind
an awful smell.  I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the
dark.  My slumbers--I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise,
confound it, is that it helps our natural callousness--my slumbers
were deep, dreamless and refreshing.

My appetite at breakfast was not affected by my ignorance of the
facts, motives, events and conclusions.  I think that to understand
everything is not good for the intellect.  A well-stocked
intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads
gently to idiocy.  But Mrs. Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine,
naively unscrupulous, flitted through my mind.  The salad of
unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends' heads!  Good
innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent mother (of the strict
governess type), she was as guileless of consequences as any
determinist philosopher ever was.

As to honour--you know--it's a very fine medieval inheritance which
women never got hold of.  It wasn't theirs.  Since it may be laid as
a general principle that women always get what they want we must
suppose they didn't want it.  In addition they are devoid of
decency.  I mean masculine decency.  Cautiousness too is foreign to
them--the heavy reasonable cautiousness which is our glory.  And if
they had it they would make of it a thing of passion, so that its
own mother--I mean the mother of cautiousness--wouldn't recognize
it.  Prudence with them is a matter of thrill like the rest of
sublunary contrivances.  "Sensation at any cost," is their secret
device.  All the virtues are not enough for them; they want also all
the crimes for their own.  And why?  Because in such completeness
there is power--the kind of thrill they love most . . . "

"Do you expect me to agree to all this?" I interrupted.

"No, it isn't necessary," said Marlow, feeling the check to his
eloquence but with a great effort at amiability.  "You need not even
understand it.  I continue:  with such disposition what prevents
women--to use the phrase an old boatswain of my acquaintance applied
descriptively to his captain--what prevents them from "coming on
deck and playing hell with the ship" generally, is that something in
them precise and mysterious, acting both as restraint and as
inspiration; their femininity in short which they think they can get
rid of by trying hard, but can't, and never will.  Therefore we may
conclude that, for all their enterprises, the world is and remains
safe enough.  Feeling, in my character of a lover of peace, soothed
by that conclusion I prepared myself to enjoy a fine day.

And it was a fine day; a delicious day, with the horror of the
Infinite veiled by the splendid tent of blue; a day innocently
bright like a child with a washed face, fresh like an innocent young
girl, suave in welcoming one's respects like--like a Roman prelate.
I love such days.  They are perfection for remaining indoors.  And I
enjoyed it temperamentally in a chair, my feet up on the sill of the
open window, a book in my hands and the murmured harmonies of wind
and sun in my heart making an accompaniment to the rhythms of my
author.  Then looking up from the page I saw outside a pair of grey
eyes thatched by ragged yellowy-white eyebrows gazing at me solemnly
over the toes of my slippers.  There was a grave, furrowed brow
surmounting that portentous gaze, a brown tweed cap set far back on
the perspiring head.

"Come inside," I cried as heartily as my sinking heart would permit.

After a short but severe scuffle with his dog at the outer door,
Fyne entered.  I treated him without ceremony and only waved my hand
towards a chair.  Even before he sat down he gasped out:

"We've heard--midday post."

Gasped out!  The grave, immovable Fyne of the Civil Service, gasped!
This was enough, you'll admit, to cause me to put my feet to the
ground swiftly.  That fellow was always making me do things in
subtle discord with my meditative temperament.  No wonder that I had
but a qualified liking for him.  I said with just a suspicion of
jeering tone:

"Of course.  I told you last night on the road that it was a farce
we were engaged in."

He made the little parlour resound to its foundations with a note of
anger positively sepulchral in its depth of tone.  "Farce be hanged!
She has bolted with my wife's brother, Captain Anthony."  This
outburst was followed by complete subsidence.  He faltered miserably
as he added from force of habit:  "The son of the poet, you know."

A silence fell.  Fyne's several expressions were so many examples of
varied consistency.  This was the discomfiture of solemnity.  My
interest of course was revived.

"But hold on," I said.  "They didn't go together.  Is it a suspicion
or does she actually say that . . . "

"She has gone after him," stated Fyne in comminatory tones.  "By
previous arrangement.  She confesses that much."

He added that it was very shocking.  I asked him whether he should
have preferred them going off together; and on what ground he based
that preference.  This was sheer fun for me in regard of the fact
that Fyne's too was a runaway match, which even got into the papers
in its time, because the late indignant poet had no discretion and
sought to avenge this outrage publicly in some absurd way before a
bewigged judge.  The dejected gesture of little Fyne's hand disarmed
my mocking mood.  But I could not help expressing my surprise that
Mrs. Fyne had not detected at once what was brewing.  Women were
supposed to have an unerring eye.

He told me that his wife had been very much engaged in a certain
work.  I had always wondered how she occupied her time.  It was in
writing.  Like her husband she too published a little book.  Much
later on I came upon it.  It had nothing to do with pedestrianism.
It was a sort of hand-book for women with grievances (and all women
had them), a sort of compendious theory and practice of feminine
free morality.  It made you laugh at its transparent simplicity.
But that authorship was revealed to me much later.  I didn't of
course ask Fyne what work his wife was engaged on; but I marvelled
to myself at her complete ignorance of the world, of her own sex and
of the other kind of sinners.  Yet, where could she have got any
experience?  Her father had kept her strictly cloistered.  Marriage
with Fyne was certainly a change but only to another kind of
claustration.  You may tell me that the ordinary powers of
observation ought to have been enough.  Why, yes!  But, then, as she
had set up for a guide and teacher, there was nothing surprising for
me in the discovery that she was blind.  That's quite in order.  She
was a profoundly innocent person; only it would not have been proper
to tell her husband so.



CHAPTER THREE--THRIFT--AND THE CHILD



But there was nothing improper in my observing to Fyne that, last
night, Mrs. Fyne seemed to have some idea where that enterprising
young lady had gone to.  Fyne shook his head.  No; his wife had been
by no means so certain as she had pretended to be.  She merely had
her reasons to think, to hope, that the girl might have taken a room
somewhere in London, had buried herself in town--in readiness or
perhaps in horror of the approaching day -

He ceased and sat solemnly dejected, in a brown study.  "What day?"
I asked at last; but he did not hear me apparently.  He diffused
such portentous gloom into the atmosphere that I lost patience with
him.

"What on earth are you so dismal about?" I cried, being genuinely
surprised and puzzled.  "One would think the girl was a state
prisoner under your care."

And suddenly I became still more surprised at myself, at the way I
had somehow taken for granted things which did appear queer when one
thought them out.

"But why this secrecy?  Why did they elope--if it is an elopement?
Was the girl afraid of your wife?  And your brother-in-law?  What on
earth possesses him to make a clandestine match of it?  Was he
afraid of your wife too?"

Fyne made an effort to rouse himself.

"Of course my brother-in-law, Captain Anthony, the son of . . . "
He checked himself as if trying to break a bad habit.  "He would be
persuaded by her.  We have been most friendly to the girl!"

"She struck me as a foolish and inconsiderate little person.  But
why should you and your wife take to heart so strongly mere folly--
or even a want of consideration?"

"It's the most unscrupulous action," declared Fyne weightily--and
sighed.

"I suppose she is poor," I observed after a short silence.  "But
after all . . . "

"You don't know who she is."  Fyne had regained his average
solemnity.

I confessed that I had not caught her name when his wife had
introduced us to each other.  "It was something beginning with an S-
wasn't it?"  And then with the utmost coolness Fyne remarked that it
did not matter.  The name was not her name.

"Do you mean to say that you made a young lady known to me under a
false name?" I asked, with the amused feeling that the days of
wonders and portents had not passed away yet.  That the eminently
serious Fynes should do such an exceptional thing was simply
staggering.  With a more hasty enunciation than usual little Fyne
was sure that I would not demand an apology for this irregularity if
I knew what her real name was.  A sort of warmth crept into his deep
tone.

"We have tried to befriend that girl in every way.  She is the
daughter and only child of de Barral."

Evidently he expected to produce a sensation; he kept his eyes fixed
upon me prepared for some sign of it.  But I merely returned his
intense, awaiting gaze.  For a time we stared at each other.
Conscious of being reprehensibly dense I groped in the darkness of
my mind:  De Barral, De Barral--and all at once noise and light
burst on me as if a window of my memory had been suddenly flung open
on a street in the City.  De Barral!  But could it be the same?
Surely not!

"The financier?" I suggested half incredulous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Leaving the child?" I said interrogatively.

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

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

Marlow shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I raised my hand to stop my friend Marlow.

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER FOUR--THE GOVERNESS



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He waved his hand impatiently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

He had been only as far as the bank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For, at the end of his lesson, seizing his trusty stick and coming
out with his habitual vivacity, he very nearly cannoned just outside
the drawing-room door into the back of Miss de Barral's 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 embarrassment, 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
singular.  The good-looking young gentleman of questionable
appearance took not the slightest notice of him in the hall.  No
servant was to be seen.  He let himself 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 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 smartly up the stairs.  Already facing the door she
turned her head for a whispered taunt:  "Come!  Confess you were
dying to see her stupid little face once more,"--to which he
disdained to answer.

Flora de Barral, still seated before the table at which she had been
wording 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 than she knew her father.  There had been between
them an intimacy of relation as great as it can possibly be without
the final closeness of affection.  The delightful Charley walked in,
with 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 the altogether
unknown expression in the woman's face.  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 of
evil from her eyes and from the face of the other, who, exactly
behind her and overtopping her by half a head, kept his eyelids
lowered in a sinister fashion--which in the poor girl, reached,
stirred, set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive terror lying
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 bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up
and found herself 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 being personally attacked.  And that must have been very
terrifying.  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 security 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 merciful provision of nature to preserve an average
amount of sanity for working purposes in this world . . . "

"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 . . .

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 at once.  After we
had been silent for a while I asked whether the man took away the
girl next day.

Fyne said that he did; in the afternoon, in a fly, with a few
clothes the maid had got together and brought across from the big
house.  He only saw Flora again ten minutes before they left for the
railway station, in the Fynes' sitting-room at the hotel.  It was a
most painful ten minutes for the Fynes.  The respectable citizen
addressed Miss de Barral as "Florrie" and "my dear," remarking to
her that she was not very big "there's not much of you my dear" in a
familiarly disparaging tone.  Then turning to Mrs. Fyne, and quite
loud "She's very white in the face.  Why's that?"  To this Mrs. Fyne
made no reply.  She had put the girl's hair up that morning with her
own hands.  It changed her very much, observed Fyne.  He, naturally,
played a subordinate, merely approving part.  All he could do for
Miss de Barral personally was to go downstairs and put her into the
fly himself, while Miss de Barral's nearest relation, having been
shouldered out of the way, stood by, with an umbrella and a little
black bag, watching this proceeding with grim amusement, as it
seemed.  It was difficult to guess what the girl thought or what she
felt.  She no longer looked a child.  She whispered to Fyne a faint
"Thank you," from the fly, and he said to her in very distinct tones
and while still holding her hand:  "Pray don't forget to write fully
to my wife in a day or two, Miss de Barral."  Then Fyne stepped back
and the cousin climbed into the fly muttering quite audibly:  "I
don't think you'll be troubled much with her in the future;" without
however looking at Fyne on whom he did not even bestow a nod.  The
fly drove away.



CHAPTER FIVE--THE TEA-PARTY



"Amiable personality," I observed seeing Fyne on the point of
falling into a brown study.  But I could not help adding with
meaning:  "He hadn't the gift of prophecy though."

Fyne got up suddenly with a muttered "No, evidently not."  He was
gloomy, hesitating.  I supposed that he would not wish to play chess
that afternoon.  This would dispense me from leaving my rooms on a
day much too fine to be wasted in walking exercise.  And I was
disappointed when picking up his cap he intimated to me his hope of
seeing me at the cottage about four o'clock--as usual.

"It wouldn't be as usual."  I put a particular stress on that
remark.  He admitted, after a short reflection, that it would not
be.  No.  Not as usual.  In fact it was his wife who hoped, rather,
for my presence.  She had formed a very favourable opinion of my
practical sagacity.

This was the first I ever heard of it.  I had never suspected that
Mrs. Fyne had taken the trouble to distinguish in me the signs of
sagacity or folly.  The few words we had exchanged last night in the
excitement--or the bother--of the girl's disappearance, were the
first moderately significant words which had ever passed between us.
I had felt myself always to be in Mrs. Fyne's view her husband's
chess-player and nothing else--a convenience--almost an implement.

"I am highly flattered," I said.  "I have always heard that there
are no limits to feminine intuition; and now I am half inclined to
believe it is so.  But still I fail to see in what way my sagacity,
practical or otherwise, can be of any service to Mrs. Fyne.  One
man's sagacity is very much like any other man's sagacity.  And with
you at hand--"

Fyne, manifestly not attending to what I was saying, directed
straight at me his worried solemn eyes and struck in:

"Yes, yes.  Very likely.  But you will come--won't you?"

I had made up my mind that no Fyne of either sex would make me walk
three miles (there and back to their cottage) on this fine day.  If
the Fynes had been an average sociable couple one knows only because
leisure must be got through somehow, I would have made short work of
that special invitation.  But they were not that.  Their undeniable
humanity had to be acknowledged.  At the same time I wanted to have
my own way.  So I proposed that I should be allowed the pleasure of
offering them a cup of tea at my rooms.

A short reflective pause--and Fyne accepted eagerly in his own and
his wife's name.  A moment after I heard the click of the gate-latch
and then in an ecstasy of barking from his demonstrative dog his
serious head went past my window on the other side of the hedge, its
troubled gaze fixed forward, and the mind inside obviously employed
in earnest speculation of an intricate nature.  One at least of his
wife's girl-friends had become more than a mere shadow for him.  I
surmised however that it was not of the girl-friend but of his wife
that Fyne was thinking.  He was an excellent husband.

I prepared myself for the afternoon's hospitalities, calling in the
farmer's wife and reviewing with her the resources of the house and
the village.  She was a helpful woman.  But the resources of my
sagacity I did not review.  Except in the gross material sense of
the afternoon tea I made no preparations for Mrs. Fyne.

It was impossible for me to make any such preparations.  I could not
tell what sort of sustenance she would look for from my sagacity.
And as to taking stock of the wares of my mind no one I imagine is
anxious to do that sort of thing if it can be avoided.  A vaguely
grandiose state of mental self-confidence is much too agreeable to
be disturbed recklessly by such a delicate investigation.  Perhaps
if I had had a helpful woman at my elbow, a dear, flattering acute,
devoted woman . . . There are in life moments when one positively
regrets not being married.  No!  I don't exaggerate.  I have said--
moments, not years or even days.  Moments.  The farmer's wife
obviously could not be asked to assist.  She could not have been
expected to possess the necessary insight and I doubt whether she
would have known how to be flattering enough.  She was being helpful
in her own way, with an extraordinary black bonnet on her head, a
good mile off by that time, trying to discover in the village shops
a piece of eatable cake.  The pluck of women!  The optimism of the
dear creatures!

And she managed to find something which looked eatable.  That's all
I know as I had no opportunity to observe the more intimate effects
of that comestible.  I myself never eat cake, and Mrs. Fyne, when
she arrived punctually, brought with her no appetite for cake.  She
had no appetite for anything.  But she had a thirst--the sign of
deep, of tormenting emotion.  Yes it was emotion, not the brilliant
sunshine--more brilliant than warm as is the way of our discreet
self-repressed, distinguished, insular sun, which would not turn a
real lady scarlet--not on any account.  Mrs. Fyne looked even cool.
She wore a white skirt and coat; a white hat with a large brim
reposed on her smoothly arranged hair.  The coat was cut something
like an army mess-jacket and the style suited her.  I dare say there
are many youthful subalterns, and not the worst-looking too, who
resemble Mrs. Fyne in the type of face, in the sunburnt complexion,
down to that something alert in bearing.  But not many would have
had that aspect breathing a readiness to assume any responsibility
under Heaven.  This is the sort of courage which ripens late in life
and of course Mrs. Fyne was of mature years for all her unwrinkled
face.

She looked round the room, told me positively that I was very
comfortable there; to which I assented, humbly, acknowledging my
undeserved good fortune.

"Why undeserved?" she wanted to know.

"I engaged these rooms by letter without asking any questions.  It
might have been an abominable hole," I explained to her.  "I always
do things like that.  I don't like to be bothered.  This is no great
proof of sagacity--is it?  Sagacious people I believe like to
exercise that faculty.  I have heard that they can't even help
showing it in the veriest trifles.  It must be very delightful.  But
I know nothing of it.  I think that I have no sagacity--no practical
sagacity."

Fyne made an inarticulate bass murmur of protest.  I asked after the
children whom I had not seen yet since my return from town.  They
had been very well.  They were always well.  Both Fyne and Mrs. Fyne
spoke of the rude health of their children as if it were a result of
moral excellence; in a peculiar tone which seemed to imply some
contempt for people whose children were liable to be unwell at
times.  One almost felt inclined to apologize for the inquiry.  And
this annoyed me; unreasonably, I admit, because the assumption of
superior merit is not a very exceptional weakness.  Anxious to make
myself disagreeable by way of retaliation I observed in accents of
interested civility that the dear girls must have been wondering at
the sudden disappearance of their mother's young friend.  Had they
been putting any awkward questions about Miss Smith.  Wasn't it as
Miss Smith that Miss de Barral had been introduced to me?

Mrs. Fyne, staring fixedly but also colouring deeper under her tan,
told me that the children had never liked Flora very much.  She
hadn't the high spirits which endear grown-ups to healthy children,
Mrs. Fyne explained unflinchingly.  Flora had been staying at the
cottage several times before.  Mrs. Fyne assured me that she often
found it very difficult to have her in the house.

"But what else could we do?" she exclaimed.

That little cry of distress quite genuine in its inexpressiveness,
altered my feeling towards Mrs. Fyne.  It would have been so easy to
have done nothing and to have thought no more about it.  My liking
for her began while she was trying to tell me of the night she spent
by the girl's bedside, the night before her departure with her
unprepossessing relative.  That Mrs. Fyne found means to comfort the
child I doubt very much.  She had not the genius for the task of
undoing that which the hate of an infuriated woman had planned so
well.

You will tell me perhaps that children's impressions are not
durable.  That's true enough.  But here, child is only a manner of
speaking.  The girl was within a few days of her sixteenth birthday;
she was old enough to be matured by the shock.  The very effort she
had to make in conveying the impression to Mrs. Fyne, in remembering
the details, in finding adequate words--or any words at all--was in
itself a terribly enlightening, an ageing process.  She had talked a
long time, uninterrupted by Mrs. Fyne, childlike enough in her
wonder and pain, pausing now and then to interject the pitiful
query:  "It was cruel of her.  Wasn't it cruel, Mrs. Fyne?"

For Charley she found excuses.  He at any rate had not said
anything, while he had looked very gloomy and miserable.  He
couldn't have taken part against his aunt--could he?  But after all
he did, when she called upon him, take "that cruel woman away."  He
had dragged her out by the arm.  She had seen that plainly.  She
remembered it.  That was it!  The woman was mad.  "Oh!  Mrs. Fyne,
don't tell me she wasn't mad.  If you had only seen her face . . . "

But Mrs. Fyne was unflinching in her idea that as much truth as
could be told was due in the way of kindness to the girl, whose fate
she feared would be to live exposed to the hardest realities of
unprivileged existences.  She explained to her that there were in
the world evil-minded, selfish people.  Unscrupulous people . . .
These two persons had been after her father's money.  The best thing
she could do was to forget all about them.

"After papa's money?  I don't understand," poor Flora de Barral had
murmured, and lay still as if trying to think it out in the silence
and shadows of the room where only a night-light was burning.  Then
she had a long shivering fit while holding tight the hand of Mrs.
Fyne whose patient immobility by the bedside of that brutally
murdered childhood did infinite honour to her humanity.  That vigil
must have been the more trying because I could see very well that at
no time did she think the victim particularly charming or
sympathetic.  It was a manifestation of pure compassion, of
compassion in itself, so to speak, not many women would have been
capable of displaying with that unflinching steadiness.  The
shivering fit over, the girl's next words in an outburst of sobs
were, "Oh!  Mrs. Fyne, am I really such a horrid thing as she has
made me out to be?"

"No, no!" protested Mrs. Fyne.  "It is your former governess who is
horrid and odious.  She is a vile woman.  I cannot tell you that she
was mad but I think she must have been beside herself with rage and
full of evil thoughts.  You must try not to think of these
abominations, my dear child."

They were not fit for anyone to think of much, Mrs. Fyne commented
to me in a curt positive tone.  All that had been very trying.  The
girl was like a creature struggling under a net.

"But how can I forget? she called my father a cheat and a swindler!
Do tell me Mrs. Fyne that it isn't true.  It can't be true.  How can
it be true?"

She sat up in bed with a sudden wild motion as if to jump out and
flee away from the sound of the words which had just passed her own
lips.  Mrs. Fyne restrained her, soothed her, induced her at last to
lay her head on her pillow again, assuring her all the time that
nothing this woman had had the cruelty to say deserved to be taken
to heart.  The girl, exhausted, cried quietly for a time.  It may be
she had noticed something evasive in Mrs. Fyne's assurances.  After
a while, without stirring, she whispered brokenly:

"That awful woman told me that all the world would call papa these
awful names.  Is it possible?  Is it possible?"

Mrs. Fyne kept silent.

"Do say something to me, Mrs. Fyne," the daughter of de Barral
insisted in the same feeble whisper.

Again Mrs. Fyne assured me that it had been very trying.  Terribly
trying.  "Yes, thanks, I will."  She leaned back in the chair with
folded arms while I poured another cup of tea for her, and Fyne went
out to pacify the dog which, tied up under the porch, had become
suddenly very indignant at somebody having the audacity to walk
along the lane.  Mrs. Fyne stirred her tea for a long time, drank a
little, put the cup down and said with that air of accepting all the
consequences:

"Silence would have been unfair.  I don't think it would have been
kind either.  I told her that she must be prepared for the world
passing a very severe judgment on her father . . . "


"Wasn't it admirable," cried Marlow interrupting his narrative.
"Admirable!"  And as I looked dubiously at this unexpected
enthusiasm he started justifying it after his own manner.

"I say admirable because it was so characteristic.  It was perfect.
Nothing short of genius could have found better.  And this was
nature!  As they say of an artist's work:  this was a perfect Fyne.
Compassion--judiciousness--something correctly measured.  None of
your dishevelled sentiment.  And right!  You must confess that
nothing could have been more right.  I had a mind to shout "Brava!
Brava!" but I did not do that.  I took a piece of cake and went out
to bribe the Fyne dog into some sort of self-control.  His sharp
comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and
Fyne's deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal
no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger
minstrel on a popular beach.  Fyne was beginning to swear at him in
low, sepulchral tones when I appeared.  The dog became at once
wildly demonstrative, half strangling himself in his collar, his
eyes and tongue hanging out in the excess of his incomprehensible
affection for me.  This was before he caught sight of the cake in my
hand.  A series of vertical springs high up in the air followed, and
then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his interest in
everything else.

Fyne was slightly vexed with me.  As kind a master as any dog could
wish to have, he yet did not approve of cake being given to dogs.
The Fyne dog was supposed to lead a Spartan existence on a diet of
repulsive biscuits with an occasional dry, hygienic, bone thrown in.
Fyne looked down gloomily at the appeased animal, I too looked at
that fool-dog; and (you know how one's memory gets suddenly
stimulated) I was reminded visually, with an almost painful
distinctness, of the ghostly white face of the girl I saw last
accompanied by that dog--deserted by that dog.  I almost heard her
distressed voice as if on the verge of resentful tears calling to
the dog, the unsympathetic dog.  Perhaps she had not the power of
evoking sympathy, that personal gift of direct appeal to the
feelings.  I said to Fyne, mistrusting the supine attitude of the
dog:

"Why don't you let him come inside?"

Oh dear no!  He couldn't think of it!  I might indeed have saved my
breath, I knew it was one of the Fynes' rules of life, part of their
solemnity and responsibility, one of those things that were part of
their unassertive but ever present superiority, that their dog must
not be allowed in.  It was most improper to intrude the dog into the
houses of the people they were calling on--if it were only a
careless bachelor in farmhouse lodgings and a personal friend of the
dog.  It was out of the question.  But they would let him bark one's
sanity away outside one's window.  They were strangely consistent in
their lack of imaginative sympathy.  I didn't insist but simply led
the way back to the parlour, hoping that no wayfarer would happen
along the lane for the next hour or so to disturb the dog's
composure.

Mrs. Fyne seated immovable before the table charged with plates,
cups, jugs, a cold teapot, crumbs, and the general litter of the
entertainment turned her head towards us.

"You see, Mr. Marlow," she said in an unexpectedly confidential
tone:  "they are so utterly unsuited for each other."

At the moment I did not know how to apply this remark.  I thought at
first of Fyne and the dog.  Then I adjusted it to the matter in hand
which was neither more nor less than an elopement.  Yes, by Jove!
It was something very much like an elopement--with certain unusual
characteristics of its own which made it in a sense equivocal.  With
amused wonder I remembered that my sagacity was requisitioned in
such a connection.  How unexpected!  But we never know what tests
our gifts may be put to.  Sagacity dictated caution first of all.  I
believe caution to be the first duty of sagacity.  Fyne sat down as
if preparing himself to witness a joust, I thought.

"Do you think so, Mrs. Fyne?" I said sagaciously.  "Of course you
are in a position . . . "  I was continuing with caution when she
struck out vivaciously for immediate assent.

"Obviously!  Clearly!  You yourself must admit . . . "

"But, Mrs. Fyne," I remonstrated, "you forget that I don't know your
brother."

This argument which was not only sagacious but true, overwhelmingly
true, unanswerably true, seemed to surprise her.

I wondered why.  I did not know enough of her brother for the
remotest guess at what he might be like.  I had never set eyes on
the man.  I didn't know him so completely that by contrast I seemed
to have known Miss de Barral--whom I had seen twice (altogether
about sixty minutes) and with whom I had exchanged about sixty
words--from the cradle so to speak.  And perhaps, I thought, looking
down at Mrs. Fyne (I had remained standing) perhaps she thinks that
this ought to be enough for a sagacious assent.

She kept silent; and I looking at her with polite expectation, went
on addressing her mentally in a mood of familiar approval which
would have astonished her had it been audible:  You my dear at any
rate are a sincere woman . . . "

"I call a woman sincere," Marlow began again after giving me a cigar
and lighting one himself, "I call a woman sincere when she
volunteers a statement resembling remotely in form what she really
would like to say, what she really thinks ought to be said if it
were not for the necessity to spare the stupid sensitiveness of men.
The women's rougher, simpler, more upright judgment, embraces the
whole truth, which their tact, their mistrust of masculine idealism,
ever prevents them from speaking in its entirety.  And their tact is
unerring.  We could not stand women speaking the truth.  We could
not bear it.  It would cause infinite misery and bring about most
awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic
fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life--the
unit in the great sum of existence.  And they know it.  They are
merciful.  This generalization does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne's
outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor
my vanity were engaged.  That's why, may be, she ventured so far.
For a woman she chose to be as open as the day with me.  There was
not only the form but almost the whole substance of her thought in
what she said.  She believed she could risk it.  She had reasoned
somewhat in this way; there's a man, possessing a certain amount of
sagacity . . . "

Marlow paused with a whimsical look at me.  The last few words he
had spoken with the cigar in his teeth.  He took it out now by an
ample movement of his arm and blew a thin cloud.

"You smile?  It would have been more kind to spare my blushes.  But
as a matter of fact I need not blush.  This is not vanity; it is
analysis.  We'll let sagacity stand.  But we must also note what
sagacity in this connection stands for.  When you see this you shall
see also that there was nothing in it to alarm my modesty.  I don't
think Mrs. Fyne credited me with the possession of wisdom tempered
by common sense.  And had I had the wisdom of the Seven Sages of
Antiquity, she would not have been moved to confidence or
admiration.  The secret scorn of women for the capacity to consider
judiciously and to express profoundly a meditated conclusion is
unbounded.  They have no use for these lofty exercises which they
look upon as a sort of purely masculine game--game meaning a
respectable occupation devised to kill time in this man-arranged
life which must be got through somehow.  What women's acuteness
really respects are the inept "ideas" and the sheeplike impulses by
which our actions and opinions are determined in matters of real
importance.  For if women are not rational they are indeed acute.
Even Mrs. Fyne was acute.  The good woman was making up to her
husband's chess-player simply because she had scented in him that
small portion of 'femininity,' that drop of superior essence of
which I am myself aware; which, I gratefully acknowledge, has saved
me from one or two misadventures in my life either ridiculous or
lamentable, I am not very certain which.  It matters very little.
Anyhow misadventures.  Observe that I say 'femininity,' a privilege-
-not 'feminism,' an attitude.  I am not a feminist.  It was Fyne who
on certain solemn grounds had adopted that mental attitude; but it
was enough to glance at him sitting on one side, to see that he was
purely masculine to his finger-tips, masculine solidly, densely,
amusingly,--hopelessly.

I did glance at him.  You don't get your sagacity recognized by a
man's wife without feeling the propriety and even the need to glance
at the man now and again.  So I glanced at him.  Very masculine.  So
much so that "hopelessly" was not the last word of it.  He was
helpless.  He was bound and delivered by it.  And if by the obscure
promptings of my composite temperament I beheld him with malicious
amusement, yet being in fact, by definition and especially from
profound conviction, a man, I could not help sympathizing with him
largely.  Seeing him thus disarmed, so completely captive by the
very nature of things I was moved to speak to him kindly.

"Well.  And what do you think of it?"

"I don't know.  How's one to tell?  But I say that the thing is done
now and there's an end of it," said the masculine creature as
bluntly as his innate solemnity permitted.

Mrs. Fyne moved a little in her chair.  I turned to her and remarked
gently that this was a charge, a criticism, which was often made.
Some people always ask:  What could he see in her?  Others wonder
what she could have seen in him?  Expressions of unsuitability.

She said with all the emphasis of her quietly folded arms:

"I know perfectly well what Flora has seen in my brother."

I bowed my head to the gust but pursued my point.

"And then the marriage in most cases turns out no worse than the
average, to say the least of it."

Mrs. Fyne was disappointed by the optimistic turn of my sagacity.
She rested her eyes on my face as though in doubt whether I had
enough femininity in my composition to understand the case.

I waited for her to speak.  She seemed to be asking herself; Is it
after all, worth while to talk to that man?  You understand how
provoking this was.  I looked in my mind for something appallingly
stupid to say, with the object of distressing and teasing Mrs. Fyne.
It is humiliating to confess a failure.  One would think that a man
of average intelligence could command stupidity at will.  But it
isn't so.  I suppose it's a special gift or else the difficulty
consists in being relevant.  Discovering that I could find no really
telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a platitude.  I
advanced, in a common-sense tone, that, surely, in the matter of
marriage a man had only himself to please.

Mrs. Fyne received this without the flutter of an eyelid.  Fyne's
masculine breast, as might have been expected, was pierced by that
old, regulation shaft.  He grunted most feelingly.  I turned to him
with false simplicity.  "Don't you agree with me?"

"The very thing I've been telling my wife," he exclaimed in his
extra-manly bass.  "We have been discussing--"

A discussion in the Fyne menage!  How portentous!  Perhaps the very
first difference they had ever had:  Mrs. Fyne unflinching and ready
for any responsibility, Fyne solemn and shrinking--the children in
bed upstairs; and outside the dark fields, the shadowy contours of
the land on the starry background of the universe, with the crude
light of the open window like a beacon for the truant who would
never come back now; a truant no longer but a downright fugitive.
Yet a fugitive carrying off spoils.  It was the flight of a raider--
or a traitor?  This affair of the purloined brother, as I had named
it to myself, had a very puzzling physiognomy.  The girl must have
been desperate, I thought, hearing the grave voice of Fyne well
enough but catching the sense of his words not at all, except the
very last words which were:

"Of course, it's extremely distressing."

I looked at him inquisitively.  What was distressing him?  The
purloining of the son of the poet-tyrant by the daughter of the
financier-convict.  Or only, if I may say so, the wind of their
flight disturbing the solemn placidity of the Fynes' domestic
atmosphere.  My incertitude did not last long, for he added:

"Mrs. Fyne urges me to go to London at once."

One could guess at, almost see, his profound distaste for the
journey, his distress at a difference of feeling with his wife.
With his serious view of the sublunary comedy Fyne suffered from not
being able to agree solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed
to do, in recognition of having had his way in one supreme instance;
when he made her elope with him--the most momentous step imaginable
in a young lady's life.  He had been really trying to acknowledge it
by taking the rightness of her feeling for granted on every other
occasion.  It had become a sort of habit at last.  And it is never
pleasant to break a habit.  The man was deeply troubled.  I said:
"Really!  To go to London!"

He looked dumbly into my eyes.  It was pathetic and funny.  "And you
of course feel it would be useless," I pursued.

He evidently felt that, though he said nothing.  He only went on
blinking at me with a solemn and comical slowness.  "Unless it be to
carry there the family's blessing," I went on, indulging my chaffing
humour steadily, in a rather sneaking fashion, for I dared not look
at Mrs. Fyne, to my right.  No sound or movement came from that
direction.  "You think very naturally that to match mere good, sound
reasons, against the passionate conclusions of love is a waste of
intellect bordering on the absurd."

He looked surprised as if I had discovered something very clever.
He, dear man, had thought of nothing at all.

He simply knew that he did not want to go to London on that mission.
Mere masculine delicacy.  In a moment he became enthusiastic.

"Yes!  Yes!  Exactly.  A man in love . . . You hear, my dear?  Here
you have an independent opinion--"

"Can anything be more hopeless," I insisted to the fascinated little
Fyne, "than to pit reason against love.  I must confess however that
in this case when I think of that poor girl's sharp chin I wonder if
. . . "

My levity was too much for Mrs. Fyne.  Still leaning back in her
chair she exclaimed:

"Mr. Marlow!"


As if mysteriously affected by her indignation the absurd Fyne dog
began to bark in the porch.  It might have been at a trespassing
bumble-bee however.  That animal was capable of any eccentricity.
Fyne got up quickly and went out to him.  I think he was glad to
leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London.  A
sort of anti-sentimental journey.  He, too, apparently, had
confidence in my sagacity.  It was touching, this confidence.  It
was at any rate more genuine than the confidence his wife pretended
to have in her husband's chess-player, of three successive holidays.
Confidence be hanged!  Sagacity--indeed!  She had simply marched in
without a shadow of misgiving to make me back her up.  But she had
delivered herself into my hands . . . "

Interrupting his narrative Marlow addressed me in his tone between
grim jest and grim earnest:

"Perhaps you didn't know that my character is upon the whole rather
vindictive."

"No, I didn't know," I said with a grin.  "That's rather unusual for
a sailor.  They always seemed to me the least vindictive body of men
in the world."

"H'm!  Simple souls," Marlow muttered moodily.  "Want of
opportunity.  The world leaves them alone for the most part.  For
myself it's towards women that I feel vindictive mostly, in my small
way.  I admit that it is small.  But then the occasions in
themselves are not great.  Mainly I resent that pretence of winding
us round their dear little fingers, as of right.  Not that the
result ever amounts to much generally.  There are so very few
momentous opportunities.  It is the assumption that each of us is a
combination of a kid and an imbecile which I find provoking--in a
small way; in a very small way.  You needn't stare as though I were
breathing fire and smoke out of my nostrils.  I am not a women-
devouring monster.  I am not even what is technically called "a
brute."  I hope there's enough of a kid and an imbecile in me to
answer the requirements of some really good woman eventually--some
day . . . Some day.  Why do you gasp?  You don't suppose I should be
afraid of getting married?  That supposition would be offensive . .
. "

"I wouldn't dream of offending you," I said.

"Very well.  But meantime please remember that I was not married to
Mrs. Fyne.  That lady's little finger was none of my legal property.
I had not run off with it.  It was Fyne who had done that thing.
Let him be wound round as much as his backbone could stand--or even
more, for all I cared.  His rushing away from the discussion on the
transparent pretence of quieting the dog confirmed my notion of
there being a considerable strain on his elasticity.  I confronted
Mrs. Fyne resolved not to assist her in her eminently feminine
occupation of thrusting a stick in the spokes of another woman's
wheel.

She tried to preserve her calm-eyed superiority.  She was familiar
and olympian, fenced in by the tea-table, that excellent symbol of
domestic life in its lighter hour and its perfect security.  In a
few severely unadorned words she gave me to understand that she had
ventured to hope for some really helpful suggestion from me.  To
this almost chiding declaration--because my vindictiveness seldom
goes further than a bit of teasing--I said that I was really doing
my best.  And being a physiognomist . . . "

"Being what?" she interrupted me.

"A physiognomist," I repeated raising my voice a little.  "A
physiognomist, Mrs. Fyne.  And on the principles of that science a
pointed little chin is a sufficient ground for interference.  You
want to interfere--do you not?"

Her eyes grew distinctly bigger.  She had never been bantered before
in her life.  The late subtle poet's method of making himself
unpleasant was merely savage and abusive.  Fyne had been always
solemnly subservient.  What other men she knew I cannot tell but I
assume they must have been gentlemanly creatures.  The girl-friends
sat at her feet.  How could she recognize my intention.  She didn't
know what to make of my tone.

"Are you serious in what you say?" she asked slowly.  And it was
touching.  It was as if a very young, confiding girl had spoken.  I
felt myself relenting.

"No.  I am not, Mrs. Fyne," I said.  "I didn't know I was expected
to be serious as well as sagacious.  No.  That science is farcical
and therefore I am not serious.  It's true that most sciences are
farcical except those which teach us how to put things together."

"The question is how to keep these two people apart," she struck in.
She had recovered.  I admired the quickness of women's wit.  Mental
agility is a rare perfection.  And aren't they agile!  Aren't they--
just!  And tenacious!  When they once get hold you may uproot the
tree but you won't shake them off the branch.  In fact the more you
shake . . . But only look at the charm of contradictory perfections!
No wonder men give in--generally.  I won't say I was actually
charmed by Mrs. Fyne.  I was not delighted with her.  What affected
me was not what she displayed but something which she could not
conceal.  And that was emotion--nothing less.  The form of her
declaration was dry, almost peremptory--but not its tone.  Her voice
faltered just the least bit, she smiled faintly; and as we were
looking straight at each other I observed that her eyes were
glistening in a peculiar manner.  She was distressed.  And indeed
that Mrs. Fyne should have appealed to me at all was in itself the
evidence of her profound distress.  "By Jove she's desperate too," I
thought.  This discovery was followed by a movement of instinctive
shrinking from this unreasonable and unmasculine affair.  They were
all alike, with their supreme interest aroused only by fighting with
each other about some man:  a lover, a son, a brother.

"But do you think there's time yet to do anything?" I asked.

She had an impatient movement of her shoulders without detaching
herself from the back of the chair.  Time!  Of course?  It was less
than forty-eight hours since she had followed him to London . . . I
am no great clerk at those matters but I murmured vaguely an
allusion to special licences.  We couldn't tell what might have
happened to-day already.  But she knew better, scornfully.  Nothing
had happened.

"Nothing's likely to happen before next Friday week,--if then."

This was wonderfully precise.  Then after a pause she added that she
should never forgive herself if some effort were not made, an
appeal.

"To your brother?" I asked.

"Yes.  John ought to go to-morrow.  Nine o'clock train."

"So early as that!" I said.  But I could not find it in my heart to
pursue this discussion in a jocular tone.  I submitted to her
several obvious arguments, dictated apparently by common sense but
in reality by my secret compassion.  Mrs. Fyne brushed them aside,
with the semi-conscious egoism of all safe, established, existences.
They had known each other so little.  Just three weeks.  And of that
time, too short for the birth of any serious sentiment, the first
week had to be deducted.  They would hardly look at each other to
begin with.  Flora barely consented to acknowledge Captain Anthony's
presence.  Good morning--good night--that was all--absolutely the
whole extent of their intercourse.  Captain Anthony was a silent
man, completely unused to the society of girls of any sort and so
shy in fact that he avoided raising his eyes to her face at the
table.  It was perfectly absurd.  It was even inconvenient,
embarrassing to her--Mrs. Fyne.  After breakfast Flora would go off
by herself for a long walk and Captain Anthony (Mrs. Fyne referred
to him at times also as Roderick) joined the children.  But he was
actually too shy to get on terms with his own nieces.

This would have sounded pathetic if I hadn't known the Fyne children
who were at the same time solemn and malicious, and nursed a secret
contempt for all the world.  No one could get on terms with those
fresh and comely young monsters!  They just tolerated their parents
and seemed to have a sort of mocking understanding among themselves
against all outsiders, yet with no visible affection for each other.
They had the habit of exchanging derisive glances which to a shy man
must have been very trying.  They thought their uncle no doubt a
bore and perhaps an ass.

I was not surprised to hear that very soon Anthony formed the habit
of crossing the two neighbouring fields to seek the shade of a clump
of elms at a good distance from the cottage.  He lay on the grass
and smoked his pipe all the morning.  Mrs. Fyne wondered at her
brother's indolent habits.  He had asked for books it is true but
there were but few in the cottage.  He read them through in three
days and then continued to lie contentedly on his back with no other
companion but his pipe.  Amazing indolence!  The live-long morning,
Mrs. Fyne, busy writing upstairs in the cottage, could see him out
of the window.  She had a very long sight, and these elms were
grouped on a rise of the ground.  His indolence was plainly exposed
to her criticism on a gentle green slope.  Mrs. Fyne wondered at it;
she was disgusted too.  But having just then 'commenced author,' as
you know, she could not tear herself away from the fascinating
novelty.  She let him wallow in his vice.  I imagine Captain Anthony
must have had a rather pleasant time in a quiet way.  It was, I
remember, a hot dry summer, favourable to contemplative life out of
doors.  And Mrs. Fyne was scandalized.  Women don't understand the
force of a contemplative temperament.  It simply shocks them.  They
feel instinctively that it is the one which escapes best the
domination of feminine influences.  The dear girls were exchanging
jeering remarks about "lazy uncle Roderick" openly, in her indulgent
hearing.  And it was so strange, she told me, because as a boy he
was anything but indolent.  On the contrary.  Always active.

I remarked that a man of thirty-five was no longer a boy.  It was an
obvious remark but she received it without favour.  She told me
positively that the best, the nicest men remained boys all their
lives.  She was disappointed not to be able to detect anything
boyish in her brother.  Very, very sorry.  She had not seen him for
fifteen years or thereabouts, except on three or four occasions for
a few hours at a time.  No.  Not a trace of the boy, he used to be,
left in him.

She fell silent for a moment and I mused idly on the boyhood of
little Fyne.  I could not imagine what it might have been like.  His
dominant trait was clearly the remnant of still earlier days,
because I've never seen such staring solemnity as Fyne's except in a
very young baby.  But where was he all that time?  Didn't he suffer
contamination from the indolence of Captain Anthony, I inquired.  I
was told that Mr. Fyne was very little at the cottage at the time.
Some colleague of his was convalescing after a severe illness in a
little seaside village in the neighbourhood and Fyne went off every
morning by train to spend the day with the elderly invalid who had
no one to look after him.  It was a very praiseworthy excuse for
neglecting his brother-in-law "the son of the poet, you know," with
whom he had nothing in common even in the remotest degree.  If
Captain Anthony (Roderick) had been a pedestrian it would have been
sufficient; but he was not.  Still, in the afternoon, he went
sometimes for a slow casual stroll, by himself of course, the
children having definitely cold-shouldered him, and his only sister
being busy with that inflammatory book which was to blaze upon the
world a year or more afterwards.  It seems however that she was
capable of detaching her eyes from her task now and then, if only
for a moment, because it was from that garret fitted out for a study
that one afternoon she observed her brother and Flora de Barral
coming down the road side by side.  They had met somewhere
accidentally (which of them crossed the other's path, as the saying
is, I don't know), and were returning to tea together.  She noticed
that they appeared to be conversing without constraint.

"I had the simplicity to be pleased," Mrs. Fyne commented with a dry
little laugh.  "Pleased for both their sakes."  Captain Anthony
shook off his indolence from that day forth, and accompanied Miss
Flora frequently on her morning walks.  Mrs. Fyne remained pleased.
She could now forget them comfortably and give herself up to the
delights of audacious thought and literary composition.  Only a week
before the blow fell she, happening to raise her eyes from the
paper, saw two figures seated on the grass under the shade of the
elms.  She could make out the white blouse.  There could be no
mistake.

"I suppose they imagined themselves concealed by the hedge.  They
forgot no doubt I was working in the garret," she said bitterly.
"Or perhaps they didn't care.  They were right.  I am rather a
simple person . . . "  She laughed again . . . "I was incapable of
suspecting such duplicity."

"Duplicity is a strong word, Mrs. Fyne--isn't it?" I expostulated.
"And considering that Captain Anthony himself . . . "

"Oh well--perhaps," she interrupted me.  Her eyes which never
strayed away from mine, her set features, her whole immovable
figure, how well I knew those appearances of a person who has "made
up her mind."  A very hopeless condition that, specially in women.
I mistrusted her concession so easily, so stonily made.  She
reflected a moment.  "Yes.  I ought to have said--ingratitude,
perhaps."

After having thus disengaged her brother and pushed the poor girl a
little further off as it were--isn't women's cleverness perfectly
diabolic when they are really put on their mettle?--after having
done these things and also made me feel that I was no match for her,
she went on scrupulously:  "One doesn't like to use that word
either.  The claim is very small.  It's so little one could do for
her.  Still . . . "

"I dare say," I exclaimed, throwing diplomacy to the winds.  "But
really, Mrs. Fyne, it's impossible to dismiss your brother like this
out of the business . . . "

"She threw herself at his head," Mrs. Fyne uttered firmly.

"He had no business to put his head in the way, then," I retorted
with an angry laugh.  I didn't restrain myself because her fixed
stare seemed to express the purpose to daunt me.  I was not afraid
of her, but it occurred to me that I was within an ace of drifting
into a downright quarrel with a lady and, besides, my guest.  There
was the cold teapot, the emptied cups, emblems of hospitality.  It
could not be.  I cut short my angry laugh while Mrs. Fyne murmured
with a slight movement of her shoulders, "He!  Poor man!  Oh come .
. . "

By a great effort of will I found myself able to smile amiably, to
speak with proper softness.

"My dear Mrs. Fyne, you forget that I don't know him--not even by
sight.  It's difficult to imagine a victim as passive as all that;
but granting you the (I very nearly said:  imbecility, but checked
myself in time) innocence of Captain Anthony, don't you think now,
frankly, that there is a little of your own fault in what has
happened.  You bring them together, you leave your brother to
himself!"

She sat up and leaning her elbow on the table sustained her head in
her open palm casting down her eyes.  Compunction?  It was indeed a
very off-hand way of treating a brother come to stay for the first
time in fifteen years.  I suppose she discovered very soon that she
had nothing in common with that sailor, that stranger, fashioned and
marked by the sea of long voyages.  In her strong-minded way she had
scorned pretences, had gone to her writing which interested her
immensely.  A very praiseworthy thing your sincere conduct,--if it
didn't at times resemble brutality so much.  But I don't think it
was compunction.  That sentiment is rare in women . . . "

"Is it?" I interrupted indignantly.

"You know more women than I do," retorted the unabashed Marlow.
"You make it your business to know them--don't you?  You go about a
lot amongst all sorts of people.  You are a tolerably honest
observer.  Well, just try to remember how many instances of
compunction you have seen.  I am ready to take your bare word for
it.  Compunction!  Have you ever seen as much as its shadow?  Have
you ever?  Just a shadow--a passing shadow!  I tell you it is so
rare that you may call it non-existent.  They are too passionate.
Too pedantic.  Too courageous with themselves--perhaps.  No I don't
think for a moment that Mrs. Fyne felt the slightest compunction at
her treatment of her sea-going brother.  What HE thought of it who
can tell?  It is possible that he wondered why he had been so
insistently urged to come.  It is possible that he wondered
bitterly--or contemptuously--or humbly.  And it may be that he was
only surprised and bored.  Had he been as sincere in his conduct as
his only sister he would have probably taken himself off at the end
of the second day.  But perhaps he was afraid of appearing brutal.
I am not far removed from the conviction that between the
sincerities of his sister and of his dear nieces, Captain Anthony of
the Ferndale must have had his loneliness brought home to his bosom
for the first time of his life, at an age, thirty-five or
thereabouts, when one is mature enough to feel the pang of such a
discovery.  Angry or simply sad but certainly disillusioned he
wanders about and meets the girl one afternoon and under the sway of
a strong feeling forgets his shyness.  This is no supposition.  It
is a fact.  There was such a meeting in which the shyness must have
perished before we don't know what encouragement, or in the
community of mood made apparent by some casual word.  You remember
that Mrs. Fyne saw them one afternoon coming back to the cottage
together.  Don't you think that I have hit on the psychology of the
situation? . . . "

"Doubtless . . . "  I began to ponder.

"I was very certain of my conclusions at the time," Marlow went on
impatiently.  "But don't think for a moment that Mrs. Fyne in her
new attitude and toying thoughtfully with a teaspoon was about to
surrender.  She murmured:

"It's the last thing I should have thought could happen."

"You didn't suppose they were romantic enough," I suggested dryly.

She let it pass and with great decision but as if speaking to
herself,

"Roderick really must be warned."

She didn't give me the time to ask of what precisely.  She raised
her head and addressed me.

"I am surprised and grieved more than I can tell you at Mr. Fyne's
resistance.  We have been always completely at one on every
question.  And that we should differ now on a point touching my
brother so closely is a most painful surprise to me."  Her hand
rattled the teaspoon brusquely by an involuntary movement.  "It is
intolerable," she added tempestuously--for Mrs. Fyne that is.  I
suppose she had nerves of her own like any other woman.

Under the porch where Fyne had sought refuge with the dog there was
silence.  I took it for a proof of deep sagacity.  I don't mean on
the part of the dog.  He was a confirmed fool.

I said:

"You want absolutely to interfere . . . ?"  Mrs. Fyne nodded just
perceptibly . . . "Well--for my part . . . but I don't really know
how matters stand at the present time.  You have had a letter from
Miss de Barral.  What does that letter say?"

"She asks for her valise to be sent to her town address," Mrs. Fyne
uttered reluctantly and stopped.  I waited a bit--then exploded.

"Well!  What's the matter?  Where's the difficulty?  Does your
husband object to that?  You don't mean to say that he wants you to
appropriate the girl's clothes?"

"Mr. Marlow!"

"Well, but you talk of a painful difference of opinion with your
husband, and then, when I ask for information on the point, you
bring out a valise.  And only a few moments ago you reproached me
for not being serious.  I wonder who is the serious person of us two
now."

She smiled faintly and in a friendly tone, from which I concluded at
once that she did not mean to show me the girl's letter, she said
that undoubtedly the letter disclosed an understanding between
Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral.

"What understanding?" I pressed her.  "An engagement is an
understanding."

"There is no engagement--not yet," she said decisively.  "That
letter, Mr. Marlow, is couched in very vague terms.  That is why--"

I interrupted her without ceremony.

"You still hope to interfere to some purpose.  Isn't it so?  Yes?
But how should you have liked it if anybody had tried to interfere
between you and Mr. Fyne at the time when your understanding with
each other could still have been described in vague terms?"

She had a genuine movement of astonished indignation.  It is with
the accent of perfect sincerity that she cried out at me:

"But it isn't at all the same thing!  How can you!"

Indeed how could I!  The daughter of a poet and the daughter of a
convict are not comparable in the consequences of their conduct if
their necessity may wear at times a similar aspect.  Amongst these
consequences I could perceive undesirable cousins for these dear
healthy girls, and such like, possible causes of embarrassment in
the future.

"No!  You can't be serious," Mrs. Fyne's smouldering resentment
broke out again.  "You haven't thought--"

"Oh yes, Mrs. Fyne!  I have thought.  I am still thinking.  I am
even trying to think like you."

"Mr. Marlow," she said earnestly.  "Believe me that I really am
thinking of my brother in all this . . . "  I assured her that I
quite believed she was.  For there is no law of nature making it
impossible to think of more than one person at a time.  Then I said:

"She has told him all about herself of course."

"All about her life," assented Mrs. Fyne with an air, however, of
making some mental reservation which I did not pause to investigate.
"Her life!" I repeated.  "That girl must have had a mighty bad time
of it."

"Horrible," Mrs. Fyne admitted with a ready frankness very
creditable under the circumstances, and a warmth of tone which made
me look at her with a friendly eye.  "Horrible!  No!  You can't
imagine the sort of vulgar people she became dependent on . . . You
know her father never attempted to see her while he was still at
large.  After his arrest he instructed that relative of his--the
odious person who took her away from Brighton--not to let his
daughter come to the court during the trial.  He refused to hold any
communication with her whatever."

I remembered what Mrs. Fyne had told me before of the view she had
years ago of de Barral clinging to the child at the side of his
wife's grave and later on of these two walking hand in hand the
observed of all eyes by the sea.  Pictures from Dickens--pregnant
with pathos.



CHAPTER SIX--FLORA



"A very singular prohibition," remarked Mrs. Fyne after a short
silence.  "He seemed to love the child."

She was puzzled.  But I surmised that it might have been the
sullenness of a man unconscious of guilt and standing at bay to
fight his "persecutors," as he called them; or else the fear of a
softer emotion weakening his defiant attitude; perhaps, even, it was
a self-denying ordinance, in order to spare the girl the sight of
her father in the dock, accused of cheating, sentenced as a
swindler--proving the possession of a certain moral delicacy.

Mrs. Fyne didn't know what to think.  She supposed it might have
been mere callousness.  But the people amongst whom the girl had
fallen had positively not a grain of moral delicacy.  Of that she
was certain.  Mrs. Fyne could not undertake to give me an idea of
their abominable vulgarity.  Flora used to tell her something of her
life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way.  It was
incredible.  It passed Mrs. Fyne's comprehension.  It was a sort of
moral savagery which she could not have thought possible.

I, on the contrary, thought it very possible.  I could imagine
easily how the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her
reception in that household--envied for her past while delivered
defenceless to the tender mercies of people without any fineness
either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly
curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for
pride.  The wife of the "odious person" was witless and fatuously
conceited.  Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the
other a romp; both were coarse-minded--if they may be credited with
any mind at all.  The rather numerous men of the family were dense
and grumpy, or dense and jocose.  None in that grubbing lot had
enough humanity to leave her alone.  At first she was made much of,
in an offensively patronising manner.  The connection with the great
de Barral gratified their vanity even in the moment of the smash.
They dragged her to their place of worship, whatever it might have
been, where the congregation stared at her, and they gave parties to
other beings like themselves at which they exhibited her with
ignoble self-satisfaction.  She did not know how to defend herself
from their importunities, insolence and exigencies.  She lived
amongst them, a passive victim, quivering in every nerve, as if she
were flayed.  After the trial her position became still worse.  On
the least occasion and even on no occasions at all she was scolded,
or else taunted with her dependence.  The pious girl lectured her on
her defects, the romping girl teased her with contemptuous
references to her accomplishments, and was always trying to pick
insensate quarrels with her about some "fellow" or other.  The
mother backed up her girls invariably, adding her own silly,
wounding remarks.  I must say they were probably not aware of the
ugliness of their conduct.  They were nasty amongst themselves as a
matter of course; their disputes were nauseating in origin, in
manner, in the spirit of mean selfishness.  These women, too, seemed
to enjoy greatly any sort of row and were always ready to combine
together to make awful scenes to the luckless girl on incredibly
flimsy pretences.  Thus Flora on one occasion had been reduced to
rage and despair, had her most secret feelings lacerated, had
obtained a view of the utmost baseness to which common human nature
can descend--I won't say e propos de bottes as the French would
excellently put it, but literally e propos of some mislaid cheap
lace trimmings for a nightgown the romping one was making for
herself.  Yes, that was the origin of one of the grossest scenes
which, in their repetition, must have had a deplorable effect on the
unformed character of the most pitiful of de Barral's victims.  I
have it from Mrs. Fyne.  The girl turned up at the Fynes' house at
half-past nine on a cold, drizzly evening.  She had walked
bareheaded, I believe, just as she ran out of the house, from
somewhere in Poplar to the neighbourhood of Sloane Square--without
stopping, without drawing breath, if only for a sob.

"We were having some people to dinner," said the anxious sister of
Captain Anthony.

She had heard the front door bell and wondered what it might mean.
The parlourmaid managed to whisper to her without attracting
attention.  The servants had been frightened by the invasion of that
wild girl in a muddy skirt and with wisps of damp hair sticking to
her pale cheeks.  But they had seen her before.  This was not the
first occasion, nor yet the last.

Directly she could slip away from her guests Mrs. Fyne ran upstairs.

"I found her in the night nursery crouching on the floor, her head
resting on the cot of the youngest of my girls.  The eldest was
sitting up in bed looking at her across the room."

Only a nightlight was burning there.  Mrs. Fyne raised her up, took
her over to Mr. Fyne's little dressing-room on the other side of the
landing, to a fire by which she could dry herself, and left her
there.  She had to go back to her guests.

A most disagreeable surprise it must have been to the Fynes.
Afterwards they both went up and interviewed the girl.  She jumped
up at their entrance.  She had shaken her damp hair loose; her eyes
were dry--with the heat of rage.

I can imagine little Fyne solemnly sympathetic, solemnly listening,
solemnly retreating to the marital bedroom.  Mrs. Fyne pacified the
girl, and, fortunately, there was a bed which could be made up for
her in the dressing-room.

"But--what could one do after all!" concluded Mrs. Fyne.

And this stereotyped exclamation, expressing the difficulty of the
problem and the readiness (at any rate) of good intentions, made me,
as usual, feel more kindly towards her.

Next morning, very early, long before Fyne had to start for his
office, the "odious personage" turned up, not exactly unexpected
perhaps, but startling all the same, if only by the promptness of
his action.  From what Flora herself related to Mrs. Fyne, it seems
that without being very perceptibly less "odious" than his family he
had in a rather mysterious fashion interposed his authority for the
protection of the girl.  "Not that he cares," explained Flora.  "I
am sure he does not.  I could not stand being liked by any of these
people.  If I thought he liked me I would drown myself rather than
go back with him."

For of course he had come to take "Florrie" home.  The scene was the
dining-room--breakfast interrupted, dishes growing cold, little
Fyne's toast growing leathery, Fyne out of his chair with his back
to the fire, the newspaper on the carpet, servants shut out, Mrs.
Fyne rigid in her place with the girl sitting beside her--the
"odious person," who had bustled in with hardly a greeting, looking
from Fyne to Mrs. Fyne as though he were inwardly amused at
something he knew of them; and then beginning ironically his
discourse.  He did not apologize for disturbing Fyne and his "good
lady" at breakfast, because he knew they did not want (with a nod at
the girl) to have more of her than could be helped.  He came the
first possible moment because he had his business to attend to.  He
wasn't drawing a tip-top salary (this staring at Fyne) in a
luxuriously furnished office.  Not he.  He had risen to be an
employer of labour and was bound to give a good example.

I believe the fellow was aware of, and enjoyed quietly, the
consternation his presence brought to the bosom of Mr. and Mrs.
Fyne.  He turned briskly to the girl.  Mrs. Fyne confessed to me
that they had remained all three silent and inanimate.  He turned to
the girl:  "What's this game, Florrie?  You had better give it up.
If you expect me to run all over London looking for you every time
you happen to have a tiff with your auntie and cousins you are
mistaken.  I can't afford it."

Tiff--was the sort of definition to take one's breath away, having
regard to the fact that both the word convict and the word pauper
had been used a moment before Flora de Barral ran away from the
quarrel about the lace trimmings.  Yes, these very words!  So at
least the girl had told Mrs. Fyne the evening before.  The word tiff
in connection with her tale had a peculiar savour, a paralysing
effect.  Nobody made a sound.  The relative of de Barral proceeded
uninterrupted to a display of magnanimity.  "Auntie told me to tell
you she's sorry--there!  And Amelia (the romping sister) shan't
worry you again.  I'll see to that.  You ought to be satisfied.
Remember your position."

Emboldened by the utter stillness pervading the room he addressed
himself to Mrs. Fyne with stolid effrontery:

"What I say is that people should be good-natured.  She can't stand
being chaffed.  She puts on her grand airs.  She won't take a bit of
a joke from people as good as herself anyway.  We are a plain lot.
We don't like it.  And that's how trouble begins."

Insensible to the stony stare of three pairs of eyes, which, if the
stories of our childhood as to the power of the human eye are true,
ought to have been enough to daunt a tiger, that unabashed
manufacturer from the East End fastened his fangs, figuratively
speaking, into the poor girl and prepared to drag her away for a
prey to his cubs of both sexes.  "Auntie has thought of sending you
your hat and coat.  I've got them outside in the cab."

Mrs. Fyne looked mechanically out of the window.  A four-wheeler
stood before the gate under the weeping sky.  The driver in his
conical cape and tarpaulin hat, streamed with water.  The drooping
horse looked as though it had been fished out, half unconscious,
from a pond.  Mrs. Fyne found some relief in looking at that
miserable sight, away from the room in which the voice of the
amiable visitor resounded with a vulgar intonation exhorting the
strayed sheep to return to the delightful fold.  "Come, Florrie,
make a move.  I can't wait on you all day here."

Mrs. Fyne heard all this without turning her head away from the
window.  Fyne on the hearthrug had to listen and to look on too.  I
shall not try to form a surmise as to the real nature of the
suspense.  Their very goodness must have made it very anxious.  The
girl's hands were lying in her lap; her head was lowered as if in
deep thought; and the other went on delivering a sort of homily.
Ingratitude was condemned in it, the sinfulness of pride was pointed
out--together with the proverbial fact that it "goes before a fall."
There were also some sound remarks as to the danger of nonsensical
notions and the disadvantages of a quick temper.  It sets one's best
friends against one.  "And if anybody ever wanted friends in the
world it's you, my girl."  Even respect for parental authority was
invoked.  "In the first hour of his trouble your father wrote to me
to take care of you--don't forget it.  Yes, to me, just a plain man,
rather than to any of his fine West-End friends.  You can't get over
that.  And a father's a father no matter what a mess he's got
himself into.  You ain't going to throw over your own father--are
you?"

It was difficult to say whether he was more absurd than cruel or
more cruel than absurd.  Mrs. Fyne, with the fine ear of a woman,
seemed to detect a jeering intention in his meanly unctuous tone,
something more vile than mere cruelty.  She glanced quickly over her
shoulder and saw the girl raise her two hands to her head, then let
them fall again on her lap.  Fyne in front of the fire was like the
victim of an unholy spell--bereft of motion and speech but obviously
in pain.  It was a short pause of perfect silence, and then that
"odious creature" (he must have been really a remarkable individual
in his way) struck out into sarcasm.

"Well? . . . "  Again a silence.  "If you have fixed it up with the
lady and gentleman present here for your board and lodging you had
better say so.  I don't want to interfere in a bargain I know
nothing of.  But I wonder how your father will take it when he comes
out . . . or don't you expect him ever to come out?"

At that moment, Mrs. Fyne told me she met the girl's eyes.  There
was that in them which made her shut her own.  She also felt as
though she would have liked to put her fingers in her ears.  She
restrained herself, however; and the "plain man" passed in his
appalling versatility from sarcasm to veiled menace.

"You have--eh?  Well and good.  But before I go home let me ask you,
my girl, to think if by any chance you throwing us over like this
won't be rather bad for your father later on?  Just think it over."

He looked at his victim with an air of cunning mystery.  She jumped
up so suddenly that he started back.  Mrs. Fyne rose too, and even
the spell was removed from her husband.  But the girl dropped again
into the chair and turned her head to look at Mrs. Fyne.  This time
it was no accidental meeting of fugitive glances.  It was a
deliberate communication.  To my question as to its nature Mrs. Fyne
said she did not know.  "Was it appealing?" I suggested.  "No," she
said.  "Was it frightened, angry, crushed, resigned?"  "No!  No!
Nothing of these."  But it had frightened her.  She remembered it to
this day.  She had been ever since fancying she could detect the
lingering reflection of that look in all the girl's glances.  In the
attentive, in the casual--even in the grateful glances--in the
expression of the softest moods.

"Has she her soft moods, then?" I asked with interest.

Mrs Fyne, much moved by her recollections, heeded not my inquiry.
All her mental energy was concentrated on the nature of that
memorable glance.  The general tradition of mankind teaches us that
glances occupy a considerable place in the self-expression of women.
Mrs. Fyne was trying honestly to give me some idea, as much perhaps
to satisfy her own uneasiness as my curiosity.  She was frowning in
the effort as you see sometimes a child do (what is delightful in
women is that they so often resemble intelligent children--I mean
the crustiest, the sourest, the most battered of them do--at times).
She was frowning, I say, and I was beginning to smile faintly at her
when all at once she came out with something totally unexpected.

"It was horribly merry," she said.

I suppose she must have been satisfied by my sudden gravity because
she looked at me in a friendly manner.

"Yes, Mrs. Fyne," I said, smiling no longer.  "I see.  It would have
been horrible even on the stage."

"Ah!" she interrupted me--and I really believe her change of
attitude back to folded arms was meant to check a shudder.  "But it
wasn't on the stage, and it was not with her lips that she laughed."

"Yes.  It must have been horrible," I assented.  "And then she had
to go away ultimately--I suppose.  You didn't say anything?"

"No," said Mrs. Fyne.  "I rang the bell and told one of the maids to
go and bring the hat and coat out of the cab.  And then we waited."

I don't think that there ever was such waiting unless possibly in a
jail at some moment or other on the morning of an execution.  The
servant appeared with the hat and coat, and then, still as on the
morning of an execution, when the condemned, I believe, is offered a
breakfast, Mrs. Fyne, anxious that the white-faced girl should
swallow something warm (if she could) before leaving her house for
an interminable drive through raw cold air in a damp four-wheeler--
Mrs. Fyne broke the awful silence:  "You really must try to eat
something," in her best resolute manner.  She turned to the "odious
person" with the same determination.  "Perhaps you will sit down and
have a cup of coffee, too."

The worthy "employer of labour" sat down.  He might have been awed
by Mrs. Fyne's peremptory manner--for she did not think of
conciliating him then.  He sat down, provisionally, like a man who
finds himself much against his will in doubtful company.  He
accepted ungraciously the cup handed to him by Mrs. Fyne, took an
unwilling sip or two and put it down as if there were some moral
contamination in the coffee of these "swells."  Between whiles he
directed mysteriously inexpressive glances at little Fyne, who, I
gather, had no breakfast that morning at all.  Neither had the girl.
She never moved her hands from her lap till her appointed guardian
got up, leaving his cup half full.

"Well.  If you don't mean to take advantage of this lady's kind
offer I may just as well take you home at once.  I want to begin my
day--I do."

After a few more dumb, leaden-footed minutes while Flora was putting
on her hat and jacket, the Fynes without moving, without saying
anything, saw these two leave the room.

"She never looked back at us," said Mrs. Fyne.  "She just followed
him out.  I've never had such a crushing impression of the miserable
dependence of girls--of women.  This was an extreme case.  But a
young man--any man--could have gone to break stones on the roads or
something of that kind--or enlisted--or--"

It was very true.  Women can't go forth on the high roads and by-
ways to pick up a living even when dignity, independence, or
existence itself are at stake.  But what made me interrupt Mrs.
Fyne's tirade was my profound surprise at the fact of that
respectable citizen being so willing to keep in his home the poor
girl for whom it seemed there was no place in the world.  And not
only willing but anxious.  I couldn't credit him with generous
impulses.  For it seemed obvious to me from what I had learned that,
to put it mildly, he was not an impulsive person.

"I confess that I can't understand his motive," I exclaimed.

"This is exactly what John wondered at, at first," said Mrs. Fyne.
By that time an intimacy--if not exactly confidence--had sprung up
between us which permitted her in this discussion to refer to her
husband as John.  "You know he had not opened his lips all that
time," she pursued.  "I don't blame his restraint.  On the contrary.
What could he have said?  I could see he was observing the man very
thoughtfully."

"And so, Mr. Fyne listened, observed and meditated," I said.
"That's an excellent way of coming to a conclusion.  And may I ask
at what conclusion he had managed to arrive?  On what ground did he
cease to wonder at the inexplicable?  For I can't admit humanity to
be the explanation.  It would be too monstrous."

It was nothing of the sort, Mrs. Fyne assured me with some
resentment, as though I had aspersed little Fyne's sanity.  Fyne
very sensibly had set himself the mental task of discovering the
self-interest.  I should not have thought him capable of so much
cynicism.  He said to himself that for people of that sort
(religious fears or the vanity of righteousness put aside) money--
not great wealth, but money, just a little money--is the measure of
virtue, of expediency, of wisdom--of pretty well everything.  But
the girl was absolutely destitute.  The father was in prison after
the most terribly complete and disgraceful smash of modern times.
And then it dawned upon Fyne that this was just it.  The great
smash, in the great dust of vanishing millions!  Was it possible
that they all had vanished to the last penny?  Wasn't there,
somewhere, something palpable; some fragment of the fabric left?

"That's it," had exclaimed Fyne, startling his wife by this
explosive unseating of his lips less than half an hour after the
departure of de Barral's cousin with de Barral's daughter.  It was
still in the dining-room, very near the time for him to go forth
affronting the elements in order to put in another day's work in his
country's service.  All he could say at the moment in elucidation of
this breakdown from his usual placid solemnity was:

"The fellow imagines that de Barral has got some plunder put away
somewhere."

This being the theory arrived at by Fyne, his comment on it was that
a good many bankrupts had been known to have taken such a
precaution.  It was possible in de Barral's case.  Fyne went so far
in his display of cynical pessimism as to say that it was extremely
probable.

He explained at length to Mrs. Fyne that de Barral certainly did not
take anyone into his confidence.  But the beastly relative had made
up his low mind that it was so.  He was selfish and pitiless in his
stupidity, but he had clearly conceived the notion of making a claim
on de Barral when de Barral came out of prison on the strength of
having "looked after" (as he would have himself expressed it) his
daughter.  He nursed his hopes, such as they were, in secret, and it
is to be supposed kept them even from his wife.

I could see it very well.  That belief accounted for his mysterious
air while he interfered in favour of the girl.  He was the only
protector she had.  It was as though Flora had been fated to be
always surrounded by treachery and lies stifling every better
impulse, every instinctive aspiration of her soul to trust and to
love.  It would have been enough to drive a fine nature into the
madness of universal suspicion--into any sort of madness.  I don't
know how far a sense of humour will stand by one.  To the foot of
the gallows, perhaps.  But from my recollection of Flora de Barral I
feared that she hadn't much sense of humour.  She had cried at the
desertion of the absurd Fyne dog.  That animal was certainly free
from duplicity.  He was frank and simple and ridiculous.  The
indignation of the girl at his unhypocritical behaviour had been
funny but not humorous.

As you may imagine I was not very anxious to resume the discussion
on the justice, expediency, effectiveness or what not, of Fyne's
journey to London.  It isn't that I was unfaithful to little Fyne
out in the porch with the dog.  (They kept amazingly quiet there.
Could they have gone to sleep?)  What I felt was that either my
sagacity or my conscience would come out damaged from that campaign.
And no man will willingly put himself in the way of moral damage.  I
did not want a war with Mrs. Fyne.  I much preferred to hear
something more of the girl.  I said:

"And so she went away with that respectable ruffian."

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders slightly--"What else could she have
done?"  I agreed with her by another hopeless gesture.  It isn't so
easy for a girl like Flora de Barral to become a factory hand, a
pathetic seamstress or even a barmaid.  She wouldn't have known how
to begin.  She was the captive of the meanest conceivable fate.  And
she wasn't mean enough for it.  It is to be remarked that a good
many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them
on this earth.  As I don't want you to think that I am unduly
partial to the girl we shall say that she failed decidedly to endear
herself to that simple, virtuous and, I believe, teetotal household.
It's my conviction that an angel would have failed likewise.  It's
no use going into details; suffice it to state that before the year
was out she was again at the Fynes' door.

This time she was escorted by a stout youth.  His large pale face
wore a smile of inane cunning soured by annoyance.  His clothes were
new and the indescribable smartness of their cut, a genre which had
never been obtruded on her notice before, astonished Mrs. Fyne, who
came out into the hall with her hat on; for she was about to go out
to hear a new pianist (a girl) in a friend's house.  The youth
addressing Mrs. Fyne easily begged her not to let "that silly thing
go back to us any more."  There had been, he said, nothing but
"ructions" at home about her for the last three weeks.  Everybody in
the family was heartily sick of quarrelling.  His governor had
charged him to bring her to this address and say that the lady and
gentleman were quite welcome to all there was in it.  She hadn't
enough sense to appreciate a plain, honest English home and she was
better out of it.

The young, pimply-faced fellow was vexed by this job his governor
had sprung on him.  It was the cause of his missing an appointment
for that afternoon with a certain young lady.  The lady he was
engaged to.  But he meant to dash back and try for a sight of her
that evening yet "if he were to burst over it."  "Good-bye, Florrie.
Good luck to you--and I hope I'll never see your face again."

With that he ran out in lover-like haste leaving the hall-door wide
open.  Mrs. Fyne had not found a word to say.  She had been too much
taken aback even to gasp freely.  But she had the presence of mind
to grab the girl's arm just as she, too, was running out into the
street--with the haste, I suppose, of despair and to keep I don't
know what tragic tryst.

"You stopped her with your own hand, Mrs. Fyne," I said.  "I presume
she meant to get away.  That girl is no comedian--if I am any
judge."

"Yes!  I had to use some force to drag her in."

Mrs. Fyne had no difficulty in stating the truth.  "You see I was in
the very act of letting myself out when these two appeared.  So
that, when that unpleasant young man ran off, I found myself alone
with Flora.  It was all I could do to hold her in the hall while I
called to the servants to come and shut the door."

As is my habit, or my weakness, or my gift, I don't know which, I
visualized the story for myself.  I really can't help it.  And the
vision of Mrs. Fyne dressed for a rather special afternoon function,
engaged in wrestling with a wild-eyed, white-faced girl had a
certain dramatic fascination.

"Really!" I murmured.

"Oh!  There's no doubt that she struggled," said Mrs. Fyne.  She
compressed her lips for a moment and then added:  "As to her being a
comedian that's another question."

Mrs. Fyne had returned to her attitude of folded arms.  I saw before
me the daughter of the refined poet accepting life whole with its
unavoidable conditions of which one of the first is the instinct of
self-preservation and the egoism of every living creature.  "The
fact remains nevertheless that you--yourself--have, in your own
words, pulled her in," I insisted in a jocular tone, with a serious
intention.

"What was one to do," exclaimed Mrs. Fyne with almost comic
exasperation.  "Are you reproaching me with being too impulsive?"

And she went on telling me that she was not that in the least.  One
of the recommendations she always insisted on (to the girl-friends,
I imagine) was to be on guard against impulse.  Always!  But I had
not been there to see the face of Flora at the time.  If I had it
would be haunting me to this day.  Nobody unless made of iron would
have allowed a human being with a face like that to rush out alone
into the streets.

"And doesn't it haunt you, Mrs. Fyne?" I asked.

"No, not now," she said implacably.  "Perhaps if I had let her go it
might have done . . . Don't conclude, though, that I think she was
playing a comedy then, because after struggling at first she ended
by remaining.  She gave up very suddenly.  She collapsed in our
arms, mine and the maid's who came running up in response to my
calls, and . . . "

"And the door was then shut," I completed the phrase in my own way.

"Yes, the door was shut," Mrs. Fyne lowered and raised her head
slowly.

I did not ask her for details.  Of one thing I am certain, and that
is that Mrs. Fyne did not go out to the musical function that
afternoon.  She was no doubt considerably annoyed at missing the
privilege of hearing privately an interesting young pianist (a girl)
who, since, had become one of the recognized performers.  Mrs. Fyne
did not dare leave her house.  As to the feelings of little Fyne
when he came home from the office, via his club, just half an hour
before dinner, I have no information.  But I venture to affirm that
in the main they were kindly, though it is quite possible that in
the first moment of surprise he had to keep down a swear-word or
two.


The long and the short of it all is that next day the Fynes made up
their minds to take into their confidence a certain wealthy old
lady.  With certain old ladies the passing years bring back a sort
of mellowed youthfulness of feeling, an optimistic outlook, liking
for novelty, readiness for experiment.  The old lady was very much
interested:  "Do let me see the poor thing!"  She was accordingly
allowed to see Flora de Barral in Mrs. Fyne's drawing-room on a day
when there was no one else there, and she preached to her with
charming, sympathetic authority:  "The only way to deal with our
troubles, my dear child, is to forget them.  You must forget yours.
It's very simple.  Look at me.  I always forget mine.  At your age
one ought to be cheerful."

Later on when left alone with Mrs. Fyne she said to that lady:  "I
do hope the child will manage to be cheerful.  I can't have sad
faces near me.  At my age one needs cheerful companions."

And in this hope she carried off Flora de Barral to Bournemouth for
the winter months in the quality of reader and companion.  She had
said to her with kindly jocularity:  "We shall have a good time
together.  I am not a grumpy old woman."  But on their return to
London she sought Mrs. Fyne at once.  She had discovered that Flora
was not naturally cheerful.  When she made efforts to be it was
still worse.  The old lady couldn't stand the strain of that.  And
then, to have the whole thing out, she could not bear to have for a
companion anyone who did not love her.  She was certain that Flora
did not love her.  Why?  She couldn't say.  Moreover, she had caught
the girl looking at her in a peculiar way at times.  Oh no!--it was
not an evil look--it was an unusual expression which one could not
understand.  And when one remembered that her father was in prison
shut up together with a lot of criminals and so on--it made one
uncomfortable.  If the child had only tried to forget her troubles!
But she obviously was incapable or unwilling to do so.  And that was
somewhat perverse--wasn't it?  Upon the whole, she thought it would
be better perhaps -

Mrs. Fyne assented hurriedly to the unspoken conclusion:  "Oh
certainly!  Certainly," wondering to herself what was to be done
with Flora next; but she was not very much surprised at the change
in the old lady's view of Flora de Barral.  She almost understood
it.

What came next was a German family, the continental acquaintances of
the wife of one of Fyne's colleagues in the Home Office.  Flora of
the enigmatical glances was dispatched to them without much
reflection.  As it was not considered absolutely necessary to take
them into full confidence, they neither expected the girl to be
specially cheerful nor were they discomposed unduly by the
indescribable quality of her glances.  The German woman was quite
ordinary; there were two boys to look after; they were ordinary,
too, I presume; and Flora, I understand, was very attentive to them.
If she taught them anything it must have been by inspiration alone,
for she certainly knew nothing of teaching.  But it was mostly
"conversation" which was demanded from her.  Flora de Barral
conversing with two small German boys, regularly, industriously,
conscientiously, in order to keep herself alive in the world which
held for her the past we know and the future of an even more
undesirable quality--seems to me a very fantastic combination.  But
I believe it was not so bad.  She was being, she wrote, mercifully
drugged by her task.  She had learned to "converse" all day long,
mechanically, absently, as if in a trance.  An uneasy trance it must
have been!  Her worst moments were when off duty--alone in the
evening, shut up in her own little room, her dulled thoughts waking
up slowly till she started into the full consciousness of her
position, like a person waking up in contact with something
venomous--a snake, for instance--experiencing a mad impulse to fling
the thing away and run off screaming to hide somewhere.

At this period of her existence Flora de Barral used to write to
Mrs. Fyne not regularly but fairly often.  I don't know how long she
would have gone on "conversing" and, incidentally, helping to
supervise the beautifully stocked linen closets of that well-to-do
German household, if the man of it had not developed in the
intervals of his avocations (he was a merchant and a thoroughly
domesticated character) a psychological resemblance to the
Bournemouth old lady.  It appeared that he, too, wanted to be loved.

He was not, however, of a conquering temperament--a kiss-snatching,
door-bursting type of libertine.  In the very act of straying from
the path of virtue he remained a respectable merchant.  It would
have been perhaps better for Flora if he had been a mere brute.  But
he set about his sinister enterprise in a sentimental, cautious,
almost paternal manner; and thought he would be safe with a pretty
orphan.  The girl for all her experience was still too innocent, and
indeed not yet sufficiently aware of herself as a woman, to mistrust
these masked approaches.  She did not see them, in fact.  She
thought him sympathetic--the first expressively sympathetic person
she had ever met.  She was so innocent that she could not understand
the fury of the German woman.  For, as you may imagine, the wifely
penetration was not to be deceived for any great length of time--the
more so that the wife was older than the husband.  The man with the
peculiar cowardice of respectability never said a word in Flora's
defence.  He stood by and heard her reviled in the most abusive
terms, only nodding and frowning vaguely from time to time.  It will
give you the idea of the girl's innocence when I say that at first
she actually thought this storm of indignant reproaches was caused
by the discovery of her real name and her relation to a convict.
She had been sent out under an assumed name--a highly recommended
orphan of honourable parentage.  Her distress, her burning cheeks,
her endeavours to express her regret for this deception were taken
for a confession of guilt.  "You attempted to bring dishonour to my
home," the German woman screamed at her.

Here's a misunderstanding for you!  Flora de Barral, who felt the
shame but did not believe in the guilt of her father, retorted
fiercely, "Nevertheless I am as honourable as you are."  And then
the German woman nearly went into a fit from rage.  "I shall have
you thrown out into the street."

Flora was not exactly thrown out into the street, I believe, but she
was bundled bag and baggage on board a steamer for London.  Did I
tell you these people lived in Hamburg?  Well yes--sent to the docks
late on a rainy winter evening in charge of some sneering lackey or
other who behaved to her insolently and left her on deck burning
with indignation, her hair half down, shaking with excitement and,
truth to say, scared as near as possible into hysterics.  If it had
not been for the stewardess who, without asking questions, good
soul, took charge of her quietly in the ladies' saloon (luckily it
was empty) it is by no means certain she would ever have reached
England.  I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I
know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause.  For in
truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.
Suicide, I suspect, is very often the outcome of mere mental
weariness--not an act of savage energy but the final symptom of
complete collapse.  The quiet, matter-of-fact attentions of a ship's
stewardess, who did not seem aware of other human agonies than sea-
sickness, who talked of the probable weather of the passage--it
would be a rough night, she thought--and who insisted in a
professionally busy manner, "Let me make you comfortable down below
at once, miss," as though she were thinking of nothing else but her
tip--was enough to dissipate the shades of death gathering round the
mortal weariness of bewildered thinking which makes the idea of non-
existence welcome so often to the young.  Flora de Barral did lie
down, and it may be presumed she slept.  At any rate she survived
the voyage across the North Sea and told Mrs. Fyne all about it,
concealing nothing and receiving no rebuke--for Mrs. Fyne's opinions
had a large freedom in their pedantry.  She held, I suppose, that a
woman holds an absolute right--or possesses a perfect excuse--to
escape in her own way from a man-mismanaged world.


What is to be noted is that even in London, having had time to take
a reflective view, poor Flora was far from being certain as to the
true inwardness of her violent dismissal.  She felt the humiliation
of it with an almost maddened resentment.

"And did you enlighten her on the point?" I ventured to ask.

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders with a philosophical acceptance of all
the necessities which ought not to be.  Something had to be said,
she murmured.  She had told the girl enough to make her come to the
right conclusion by herself.

"And she did?"

"Yes.  Of course.  She isn't a goose," retorted Mrs. Fyne tartly.

"Then her education is completed," I remarked with some bitterness.
"Don't you think she ought to be given a chance?"

Mrs. Fyne understood my meaning.

"Not this one," she snapped in a quite feminine way.  "It's all very
well for you to plead, but I--"

"I do not plead.  I simply asked.  It seemed natural to ask what you
thought."

"It's what I feel that matters.  And I can't help my feelings.  You
may guess," she added in a softer tone, "that my feelings are mostly
concerned with my brother.  We were very fond of each other.  The
difference of our ages was not very great.  I suppose you know he is
a little younger than I am.  He was a sensitive boy.  He had the
habit of brooding.  It is no use concealing from you that neither of
us was happy at home.  You have heard, no doubt . . . Yes?  Well, I
was made still more unhappy and hurt--I don't mind telling you that.
He made his way to some distant relations of our mother's people who
I believe were not known to my father at all.  I don't wish to judge
their action."

I interrupted Mrs. Fyne here.  I had heard.  Fyne was not very
communicative in general, but he was proud of his father-in-law--
"Carleon Anthony, the poet, you know."  Proud of his celebrity
without approving of his character.  It was on that account, I
strongly suspect, that he seized with avidity upon the theory of
poetical genius being allied to madness, which he got hold of in
some idiotic book everybody was reading a few years ago.  It struck
him as being truth itself--illuminating like the sun.  He adopted it
devoutly.  He bored me with it sometimes.  Once, just to shut him
up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as so
incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife
and the dear girls?  He transfixed me with a pitying stare and
requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-
established fact" that genius was not transmissible.

I said only "Oh!  Isn't it?" and he thought he had silenced me by an
unanswerable argument.  But he continued to talk of his glorious
father-in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he
told me how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet's late wife
naturally addressed themselves to him in considerable concern,
suggesting a friendly consultation as to the boy's future, the
incensed (but always refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere
polished badinage which offended mortally the Liverpool people.
This witty outbreak of what was in fact mortification and rage
appeared to them so heartless that they simply kept the boy.  They
let him go to sea not because he was in their way but because he
begged hard to be allowed to go.

"Oh!  You do know," said Mrs. Fyne after a pause.  "Well--I felt
myself very much abandoned.  Then his choice of life--so
extraordinary, so unfortunate, I may say.  I was very much grieved.
I should have liked him to have been distinguished--or at any rate
to remain in the social sphere where we could have had common
interests, acquaintances, thoughts.  Don't think that I am estranged
from him.  But the precise truth is that I do not know him.  I was
most painfully affected when he was here by the difficulty of
finding a single topic we could discuss together."

While Mrs. Fyne was talking of her brother I let my thoughts wander
out of the room to little Fyne who by leaving me alone with his wife
had, so to speak, entrusted his domestic peace to my honour.

"Well, then, Mrs. Fyne, does it not strike you that it would be
reasonable under the circumstances to let your brother take care of
himself?"

"And suppose I have grounds to think that he can't take care of
himself in a given instance."  She hesitated in a funny, bashful
manner which roused my interest.  Then:

"Sailors I believe are very susceptible," she added with forced
assurance.

I burst into a laugh which only increased the coldness of her
observing stare.

"They are.  Immensely!  Hopelessly!  My dear Mrs. Fyne, you had
better give it up!  It only makes your husband miserable."

"And I am quite miserable too.  It is really our first difference .
. . "

"Regarding Miss de Barral?" I asked.

"Regarding everything.  It's really intolerable that this girl
should be the occasion.  I think he really ought to give way."

She turned her chair round a little and picking up the book I had
been reading in the morning began to turn the leaves absently.

Her eyes being off me, I felt I could allow myself to leave the
room.  Its atmosphere had become hopeless for little Fyne's domestic
peace.  You may smile.  But to the solemn all things are solemn.  I
had enough sagacity to understand that.

I slipped out into the porch.  The dog was slumbering at Fyne's
feet.  The muscular little man leaning on his elbow and gazing over
the fields presented a forlorn figure.  He turned his head quickly,
but seeing I was alone, relapsed into his moody contemplation of the
green landscape.

I said loudly and distinctly:  "I've come out to smoke a cigarette,"
and sat down near him on the little bench.  Then lowering my voice:
"Tolerance is an extremely difficult virtue," I said.  "More
difficult for some than heroism.  More difficult than compassion."

I avoided looking at him.  I knew well enough that he would not like
this opening.  General ideas were not to his taste.  He mistrusted
them.  I lighted a cigarette, not that I wanted to smoke, but to
give another moment to the consideration of the advice--the
diplomatic advice I had made up my mind to bowl him over with.  And
I continued in subdued tones.

"I have been led to make these remarks by what I have discovered
since you left us.  I suspected from the first.  And now I am
certain.  What your wife cannot tolerate in this affair is Miss de
Barral being what she is."

He made a movement, but I kept my eyes away from him and went on
steadily.  "That is--her being a woman.  I have some idea of Mrs.
Fyne's mental attitude towards society with its injustices, with its
atrocious or ridiculous conventions.  As against them there is no
audacity of action your wife's mind refuses to sanction.  The
doctrine which I imagine she stuffs into the pretty heads of your
girl-guests is almost vengeful.  A sort of moral fire-and-sword
doctrine.  How far the lesson is wise is not for me to say.  I don't
permit myself to judge.  I seem to see her very delightful disciples
singeing themselves with the torches, and cutting their fingers with
the swords of Mrs. Fyne's furnishing."

"My wife holds her opinions very seriously," murmured Fyne suddenly.

"Yes.  No doubt," I assented in a low voice as before.  "But it is a
mere intellectual exercise.  What I see is that in dealing with
reality Mrs. Fyne ceases to be tolerant.  In other words, that she
can't forgive Miss de Barral for being a woman and behaving like a
woman.  And yet this is not only reasonable and natural, but it is
her only chance.  A woman against the world has no resources but in
herself.  Her only means of action is to be what SHE IS.  You
understand what I mean."

Fyne mumbled between his teeth that he understood.  But he did not
seem interested.  What he expected of me was to extricate him from a
difficult situation.  I don't know how far credible this may sound,
to less solemn married couples, but to remain at variance with his
wife seemed to him a considerable incident.  Almost a disaster.

"It looks as though I didn't care what happened to her brother," he
said.  "And after all if anything . . . "

I became a little impatient but without raising my tone:

"What thing?" I asked.  "The liability to get penal servitude is so
far like genius that it isn't hereditary.  And what else can be
objected to the girl?  All the energy of her deeper feelings, which
she would use up vainly in the danger and fatigue of a struggle with
society may be turned into devoted attachment to the man who offers
her a way of escape from what can be only a life of moral anguish.
I don't mention the physical difficulties."

Glancing at Fyne out of the corner of one eye I discovered that he
was attentive.  He made the remark that I should have said all this
to his wife.  It was a sensible enough remark.  But I had given Mrs.
Fyne up.  I asked him if his impression was that his wife meant to
entrust him with a letter for her brother?

No.  He didn't think so.  There were certain reasons which made Mrs.
Fyne unwilling to commit her arguments to paper.  Fyne was to be
primed with them.  But he had no doubt that if he persisted in his
refusal she would make up her mind to write.

"She does not wish me to go unless with a full conviction that she
is right," said Fyne solemnly.

"She's very exacting," I commented.  And then I reflected that she
was used to it.  "Would nothing less do for once?"

"You don't mean that I should give way--do you?" asked Fyne in a
whisper of alarmed suspicion.

As this was exactly what I meant, I let his fright sink into him.
He fidgeted.  If the word may be used of so solemn a personage, he
wriggled.  And when the horrid suspicion had descended into his very
heels, so to speak, he became very still.  He sat gazing stonily
into space bounded by the yellow, burnt-up slopes of the rising
ground a couple of miles away.  The face of the down showed the
white scar of the quarry where not more than sixteen hours before
Fyne and I had been groping in the dark with horrible apprehension
of finding under our hands the shattered body of a girl.  For myself
I had in addition the memory of my meeting with her.  She was
certainly walking very near the edge--courting a sinister solution.
But, now, having by the most unexpected chance come upon a man, she
had found another way to escape from the world.  Such world as was
open to her--without shelter, without bread, without honour.  The
best she could have found in it would have been a precarious dole of
pity diminishing as her years increased.  The appeal of the
abandoned child Flora to the sympathies of the Fynes had been
irresistible.  But now she had become a woman, and Mrs. Fyne was
presenting an implacable front to a particularly feminine
transaction.  I may say triumphantly feminine.  It is true that Mrs.
Fyne did not want women to be women.  Her theory was that they
should turn themselves into unscrupulous sexless nuisances.  An
offended theorist dwelt in her bosom somewhere.  In what way she
expected Flora de Barral to set about saving herself from a most
miserable existence I can't conceive; but I verify believe that she
would have found it easier to forgive the girl an actual crime; say
the rifling of the Bournemouth old lady's desk, for instance.  And
then--for Mrs. Fyne was very much of a woman herself--her sense of
proprietorship was very strong within her; and though she had not
much use for her brother, yet she did not like to see him annexed by
another woman.  By a chit of a girl.  And such a girl, too.  Nothing
is truer than that, in this world, the luckless have no right to
their opportunities--as if misfortune were a legal disqualification.
Fyne's sentiments (as they naturally would be in a man) had more
stability.  A good deal of his sympathy survived.  Indeed I heard
him murmur "Ghastly nuisance," but I knew it was of the integrity of
his domestic accord that he was thinking.  With my eyes on the dog
lying curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in a
subdued impersonal tone:  "Yes.  Why not let yourself be persuaded?"

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

"Then what do you mean?  That I should pretend!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes.  Certainly," I said, very much disappointed.



CHAPTER SEVEN--ON THE PAVEMENT



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

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

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

Fyne ignored this little remark.  His wife, he said, was not the
sort of person to be addressed mockingly on a serious subject.
There was an unpleasant strain of levity in that letter, extending
even to the references to Captain Anthony himself.  Such a
disposition was enough, his wife had pointed out to him, to alarm
one for the future, had all the circumstances of that preposterous
project been as satisfactory as in fact they were not.  Other parts
of the letter seemed to have a challenging tone--as if daring them
(the Fynes) to approve her conduct.  And at the same time implying
that she did not care, that it was for their own sakes that she
hoped they would "go against the world--the horrid world which had
crushed poor papa."

Fyne called upon me to admit that this was pretty cool--considering.
And there was another thing, too.  It seems that for the last six
months (she had been assisting two ladies who kept a kindergarten
school in Bayswater--a mere pittance), Flora had insisted on
devoting all her spare time to the study of the trial.  She had been
looking up files of old newspapers, and working herself up into a
state of indignation with what she called the injustice and the
hypocrisy of the prosecution.  Her father, Fyne reminded me, had
made some palpable hits in his answers in Court, and she had
fastened on them triumphantly.  She had reached the conclusion of
her father's innocence, and had been brooding over it.  Mrs. Fyne
had pointed out to him the danger of this.

The train ran into the station and Fyne, jumping out directly it
came to a standstill, seemed glad to cut short the conversation.  We
walked in silence a little way, boarded a bus, then walked again.  I
don't suppose that since the days of his childhood, when surely he
was taken to see the Tower, he had been once east of Temple Bar.  He
looked about him sullenly; and when I pointed out in the distance
the rounded front of the Eastern Hotel at the bifurcation of two
very broad, mean, shabby thoroughfares, rising like a grey stucco
tower above the lowly roofs of the dirty-yellow, two-storey houses,
he only grunted disapprovingly.

"I wouldn't lay too much stress on what you have been telling me," I
observed quietly as we approached that unattractive building.  "No
man will believe a girl who has just accepted his suit to be not
well balanced,--you know."

"Oh!  Accepted his suit," muttered Fyne, who seemed to have been
very thoroughly convinced indeed.  "It may have been the other way
about."  And then he added:  "I am going through with it."

I said that this was very praiseworthy but that a certain moderation
of statement . . . He waved his hand at me and mended his pace.  I
guessed that he was anxious to get his mission over as quickly as
possible.  He barely gave himself time to shake hands with me and
made a rush at the narrow glass door with the words Hotel Entrance
on it.  It swung to behind his back with no more noise than the snap
of a toothless jaw.

The absurd temptation to remain and see what would come of it got
over my better judgment.  I hung about irresolute, wondering how
long an embassy of that sort would take, and whether Fyne on coming
out would consent to be communicative.  I feared he would be shocked
at finding me there, would consider my conduct incorrect,
conceivably treat me with contempt.  I walked off a few paces.
Perhaps it would be possible to read something on Fyne's face as he
came out; and, if necessary, I could always eclipse myself
discreetly through the door of one of the bars.  The ground floor of
the Eastern Hotel was an unabashed pub, with plate-glass fronts, a
display of brass rails, and divided into many compartments each
having its own entrance.

But of course all this was silly.  The marriage, the love, the
affairs of Captain Anthony were none of my business.  I was on the
point of moving down the street for good when my attention was
attracted by a girl approaching the hotel entrance from the west.
She was dressed very modestly in black.  It was the white straw hat
of a good form and trimmed with a bunch of pale roses which had
caught my eye.  The whole figure seemed familiar.  Of course!  Flora
de Barral.  She was making for the hotel, she was going in.  And
Fyne was with Captain Anthony!  To meet him could not be pleasant
for her.  I wished to save her from the awkwardness, and as I
hesitated what to do she looked up and our eyes happened to meet
just as she was turning off the pavement into the hotel doorway.
Instinctively I extended my arm.  It was enough to make her stop.  I
suppose she had some faint notion that she had seen me before
somewhere.  She walked slowly forward, prudent and attentive,
watching my faint smile.

"Excuse me," I said directly she had approached me near enough.
"Perhaps you would like to know that Mr. Fyne is upstairs with
Captain Anthony at this moment."

She uttered a faint "Ah!  Mr. Fyne!"  I could read in her eyes that
she had recognized me now.  Her serious expression extinguished the
imbecile grin of which I was conscious.  I raised my hat.  She
responded with a slow inclination of the head while her luminous,
mistrustful, maiden's glance seemed to whisper, "What is this one
doing here?"

"I came up to town with Fyne this morning," I said in a businesslike
tone.  "I have to see a friend in East India Dock.  Fyne and I
parted this moment at the door here . . . "   The girl regarded me
with darkening eyes . . . "Mrs. Fyne did not come with her husband,"
I went on, then hesitated before that white face so still in the
pearly shadow thrown down by the hat-brim.  "But she sent him," I
murmured by way of warning.

Her eyelids fluttered slowly over the fixed stare.  I imagine she
was not much disconcerted by this development.  "I live a long way
from here," she whispered.

I said perfunctorily, "Do you?"  And we remained gazing at each
other.  The uniform paleness of her complexion was not that of an
anaemic girl.  It had a transparent vitality and at that particular
moment the faintest possible rosy tinge, the merest suspicion of
colour; an equivalent, I suppose, in any other girl to blushing like
a peony while she told me that Captain Anthony had arranged to show
her the ship that morning.

It was easy to understand that she did not want to meet Fyne.  And
when I mentioned in a discreet murmur that he had come because of
her letter she glanced at the hotel door quickly, and moved off a
few steps to a position where she could watch the entrance without
being seen.  I followed her.  At the junction of the two
thoroughfares she stopped in the thin traffic of the broad pavement
and turned to me with an air of challenge.  "And so you know."

I told her that I had not seen the letter.  I had only heard of it.
She was a little impatient.  "I mean all about me."

Yes.  I knew all about her.  The distress of Mr. and Mrs. Fyne--
especially of Mrs. Fyne--was so great that they would have shared it
with anybody almost--not belonging to their circle of friends.  I
happened to be at hand--that was all.

"You understand that I am not their friend.  I am only a holiday
acquaintance."

"She was not very much upset?" queried Flora de Barral, meaning, of
course, Mrs. Fyne.  And I admitted that she was less so than her
husband--and even less than myself.  Mrs. Fyne was a very self-
possessed person which nothing could startle out of her extreme
theoretical position.  She did not seem startled when Fyne and I
proposed going to the quarry.

"You put that notion into their heads," the girl said.

I advanced that the notion was in their heads already.  But it was
much more vividly in my head since I had seen her up there with my
own eyes, tempting Providence.

She was looking at me with extreme attention, and murmured:

"Is that what you called it to them?  Tempting . . . "

"No.  I told them that you were making up your mind and I came along
just then.  I told them that you were saved by me.  My shout checked
you . . ."  "She moved her head gently from right to left in
negation . . . "No?  Well, have it your own way."

I thought to myself:  She has found another issue.  She wants to
forget now.  And no wonder.  She wants to persuade herself that she
had never known such an ugly and poignant minute in her life.
"After all," I conceded aloud, "things are not always what they
seem."

Her little head with its deep blue eyes, eyes of tenderness and
anger under the black arch of fine eyebrows was very still.  The
mouth looked very red in the white face peeping from under the veil,
the little pointed chin had in its form something aggressive.
Slight and even angular in her modest black dress she was an
appealing and--yes--she was a desirable little figure.

Her lips moved very fast asking me:

"And they believed you at once?"

"Yes, they believed me at once.  Mrs. Fyne's word to us was "Go!"

A white gleam between the red lips was so short that I remained
uncertain whether it was a smile or a ferocious baring of little
even teeth.  The rest of the face preserved its innocent, tense and
enigmatical expression.  She spoke rapidly.

"No, it wasn't your shout.  I had been there some time before you
saw me.  And I was not there to tempt Providence, as you call it.  I
went up there for--for what you thought I was going to do.  Yes.  I
climbed two fences.  I did not mean to leave anything to Providence.
There seem to be people for whom Providence can do nothing.  I
suppose you are shocked to hear me talk like that?"

I shook my head.  I was not shocked.  What had kept her back all
that time, till I appeared on the scene below, she went on, was
neither fear nor any other kind of hesitation.  One reaches a point,
she said with appalling youthful simplicity, where nothing that
concerns one matters any longer.  But something did keep her back.
I should have never guessed what it was.  She herself confessed that
it seemed absurd to say.  It was the Fyne dog.

Flora de Barral paused, looking at me, with a peculiar expression
and then went on.  You see, she imagined the dog had become
extremely attached to her.  She took it into her head that he might
fall over or jump down after her.  She tried to drive him away.  She
spoke sternly to him.  It only made him more frisky.  He barked and
jumped about her skirt in his usual, idiotic, high spirits.  He
scampered away in circles between the pines charging upon her and
leaping as high as her waist.  She commanded, "Go away.  Go home."
She even picked up from the ground a bit of a broken branch and
threw it at him.  At this his delight knew no bounds; his rushes
became faster, his yapping louder; he seemed to be having the time
of his life.  She was convinced that the moment she threw herself
down he would spring over after her as if it were part of the game.
She was vexed almost to tears.  She was touched too.  And when he
stood still at some distance as if suddenly rooted to the ground
wagging his tail slowly and watching her intensely with his shining
eyes another fear came to her.  She imagined herself gone and the
creature sitting on the brink, its head thrown up to the sky and
howling for hours.  This thought was not to be borne.  Then my shout
reached her ears.

She told me all this with simplicity.  My voice had destroyed her
poise--the suicide poise of her mind.  Every act of ours, the most
criminal, the most mad presupposes a balance of thought, feeling and
will, like a correct attitude for an effective stroke in a game.
And I had destroyed it.  She was no longer in proper form for the
act.  She was not very much annoyed.  Next day would do.  She would
have to slip away without attracting the notice of the dog.  She
thought of the necessity almost tenderly.  She came down the path
carrying her despair with lucid calmness.  But when she saw herself
deserted by the dog, she had an impulse to turn round, go up again
and be done with it.  Not even that animal cared for her--in the
end.

"I really did think that he was attached to me.  What did he want to
pretend for, like this?  I thought nothing could hurt me any more.
Oh yes.  I would have gone up, but I felt suddenly so tired.  So
tired.  And then you were there.  I didn't know what you would do.
You might have tried to follow me and I didn't think I could run--
not up hill--not then."

She had raised her white face a little, and it was queer to hear her
say these things.  At that time of the morning there are
comparatively few people out in that part of the town.  The broad
interminable perspective of the East India Dock Road, the great
perspective of drab brick walls, of grey pavement, of muddy roadway
rumbling dismally with loaded carts and vans lost itself in the
distance, imposing and shabby in its spacious meanness of aspect, in
its immeasurable poverty of forms, of colouring, of life--under a
harsh, unconcerned sky dried by the wind to a clear blue.  It had
been raining during the night.  The sunshine itself seemed poor.
From time to time a few bits of paper, a little dust and straw
whirled past us on the broad flat promontory of the pavement before
the rounded front of the hotel.

Flora de Barral was silent for a while.  I said:

"And next day you thought better of it."

Again she raised her eyes to mine with that peculiar expression of
informed innocence; and again her white cheeks took on the faintest
tinge of pink--the merest shadow of a blush.

"Next day," she uttered distinctly, "I didn't think.  I remembered.
That was enough.  I remembered what I should never have forgotten.
Never.  And Captain Anthony arrived at the cottage in the evening."

"Ah yes.  Captain Anthony," I murmured.  And she repeated also in a
murmur, "Yes!  Captain Anthony."  The faint flush of warm life left
her face.  I subdued my voice still more and not looking at her:
"You found him sympathetic?" I ventured.

Her long dark lashes went down a little with an air of calculated
discretion.  At least so it seemed to me.  And yet no one could say
that I was inimical to that girl.  But there you are!  Explain it as
you may, in this world the friendless, like the poor, are always a
little suspect, as if honesty and delicacy were only possible to the
privileged few.

"Why do you ask?" she said after a time, raising her eyes suddenly
to mine in an effect of candour which on the same principle (of the
disinherited not being to be trusted) might have been judged
equivocal.

"If you mean what right I have . . . "  She move slightly 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 discovered 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 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 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; that it is never 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.

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; are 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--composure.  One could not tell whether she
understood what she had 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 accounted 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 two and
threes; the inhabitants of that end of the town where 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 none appeared to me for the moment so
pathetic in 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 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 dare say, is useful or it
would not have endured.  But the human relation thus recognized 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 enormous piled-up
loads advanced swaying like mountains.  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
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.  This 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.

With that man in the hotel, whom I did not know, and this girl
standing before me in the street I felt that it was an exceptional
case.  He had broken away from his surroundings; she stood outside
the pale.  One aspect of conventions which people who declaim
against them lose sight of is that conventions make both joy and
suffering easier to bear in a becoming manner.  But those two were
outside all conventions.  They would be as untrammelled in a sense
as the first man and the first woman.  The trouble was that I could
not imagine anything about Flora de Barral and the brother of Mrs.
Fyne.  Or, if you like, I could imagine 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 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 continuous dreary
shuffling 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 it may ruin a man; not because it
is a joke, but because it is untimely.  And a confession of whatever
sort is always untimely.  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?"

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 subdued 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 that 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:

"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--not
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 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 inherited 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
authorized moral conventions.  Yes, I was surprised at her remorse.
But lowering her glance unexpectedly till her dark eye-lashes 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 believe 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 determined young
person.  Well, what happened that time?"

An almost imperceptible alteration in her bearing; a slight droop of
her head perhaps--a mere nothing--made her look more demure than
ever.

"I had left the cottage," she began a little hurriedly.  "I was
walking along the road--you know, THE road.  I had made up my mind I
was not coming back this time."

I won't deny that these words spoken from under the brim of her hat
(oh yes, certainly, her head was down--she had put it down) gave me
a thrill; for indeed I had never doubted her sincerity.  It could
never have been a make-believe despair.

"Yes," I whispered.  "You were going along the road."

"When . . . "  Again she hesitated with an effect of innocent
shyness worlds asunder from tragic issues; then glided on . . .
"When suddenly Captain Anthony came through a gate out of a field."

I coughed down the beginning of a most improper fit of laughter, and
felt ashamed of myself.  Her eyes raised for a moment seemed full of
innocent suffering and unexpressed menace in the depths of the
dilated pupils within the rings of sombre blue.  It was--how shall I
say it?--a night effect 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
sunshine, 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.

"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 ought to.  But he didn't.  He didn't seem to
notice that I would not talk 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,
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,
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 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, resentful and not particularly
distinguished, doing away with the mysterious aloofness of her
fragile 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 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.

"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 road 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 reached 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 could 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.  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.

Flora learned later 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 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 realized what he had done.  Some people were coming briskly
along the road and Captain Anthony 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 feet 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.

As if encouraged by this glance over the shoulder Captain Anthony
came up boldly, 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 the sense not to ask questions
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, 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 for
repairs.  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 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 proprieties and the ceremonies
and affectations.  He hated all that.  He wasn't fit for it.  There
was no rest and peace and security but on the sea.

This gave one 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.

"Mrs. Fyne is my best friend."

"So she is mine," he said without the slightest irony or bitterness,
but added with conviction:  "That shows 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 in the ugly surf 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, being a healthy girl under her frail appearance, 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 Captain
Anthony who had no appetite.  His sister commented on it in a curt,
business-like 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 that he did not
want to look in her direction when there were other people to hamper
his imagination.

You understand I am piecing here bits of disconnected 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 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 inert 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."

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 intimidated her.  He
seemed striving to look her through.  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 the inexplicable 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 hold of 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 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.

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 something 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 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 fell
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.  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, 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 wisp, you wreath of mist, you little ghost of all the sorrow
in the world.  You dare!  Haven't I been looking at you?  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 somewhere, leaving you behind.  Why!  You
would vanish . . . what little there is of you.  Some rough wind
will blow you away altogether.  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."

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 somebody else."

"Yes.  I am thinking of somebody else, of someone who has nobody to
think of him 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 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 nonsense 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, Roderick."  And then:  "Have you seen Miss Smith
anywhere?"

Flora shuddered, expecting Anthony to break out into betraying
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, 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.  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 in a long frock-coat, soft-voiced and
having but 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
band was playing; and there was the sea--the blue gaiety of the sea.
They were quietly happy together . . . It was all over!

An immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, and she nearly
cried aloud.  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 headlong panic which had
already driven her out twice to the top of the cliff-like quarry.
She jumped up 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 she had gone beyond the
point where things matter.  What would he think of her coming down
to him--as he would naturally suppose.  And even that didn't matter.
He could not despise her more than she despised herself.  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 painstaking precision
(her very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard
and no more), she said that, yes, the 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 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 tenderness, 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.

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

I noticed three abominable, drink-sodden loafers, sallow and dirty,
who had come 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 unexpectedly 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
ashamed.  The origin of our intimacy was too gruesome.  It was as if
listening to her I had taken advantage of having seen 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 of a piece of blue sky, of a stretch of
open water.  And for a moment I understood the 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.  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.  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."

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.

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, outside 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."

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 a striking 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 noisy 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 has established a dithyrambic
phraseology for the expression of love.  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 I was glad she was appreciative.  It is lucky that
small things please women.  And it is not silly of them to be thus
pleased.  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 motionless eyes rest
on the streaming jumble of traffic.  Suddenly she said:

"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.  "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 have seen the sea wear such an expression on one or two
occasions shortly before 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 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 to
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 scared, starved heart of that girl?
Perhaps had he been violent, she 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 meet Captain
Anthony--by any chance--anywhere--you are a sailor too, are you
not?--that you would never mention--never--that--that you had seen
me over there."

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

"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
granddaughter, I understand."

She sighed deeply.  She remembered her grandfather only a little.
He was a clean-shaven man with a ruddy complexion and long,
perfectly white hair.  He used to take her on his knee, and putting
his face near hers, 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.

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.  She was
dreadfully and pitifully forlorn.  It was almost in order to comfort
my own depression that I remarked 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 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.  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 as far as the corner.  He must have been thinking too
hard to be aware of his surroundings.  I put myself in his way, and
he nearly walked into me.

"Hallo!" I said.

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 happened to catch sight of him coming
out.

He stared at me with 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
profoundly perturbed.  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 while 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 these two 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 in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he
continued to relieve his outraged feelings.

"You would never believe!  They ARE mad!"

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 noncommittal 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.  He was leaving everything to his wife.  Naturally, a
request which involved him into sanctioning in a way a proceeding
which 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 this bond," declared Fyne
solemnly.  "Breaking it once for all.  And for what--for what?"

He 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 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, 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.

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 this is a
subject which, if approached with undue solemnity, is apt to elude
one's grasp entirely.  No doubt Fyne 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 tete-e-tete."

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

"What Mr. Smith?" I asked innocently.

Fyne made an extraordinary simiesque grimace.  I believe it was
quite involuntary, but you know that a grave, 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.  Asked me to tell Zoe this together with a lot
more nonsense."

Fyne gave me the impression of having escaped from a man inspired by
a grimly playful ebullition of high spirits.  It must have been most
distasteful 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, "if she thinks
him absolutely a saint, but she certainly imagines him to be a
martyr."

It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, 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 themselves or anyone else.  I had completely
forgotten the financier de Barral.  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 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 she would appear
to us saner if she thought only of herself."

"I am positive," Fyne 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.
For myself I don't blame her," added Fyne, giving me another view of
unsuspected 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 corrosive liquid as could be
imagined.  But I was surprised at Fyne obscurely feeling this.

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

"Does he?" I said doubtfully.

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

"You did?  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 . . . I was tired of this
wrangling.  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 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.  Do you see now?"

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
wonderful contrivances.  Shut--open.  Very neat.  Shut--open.  And
out comes some sort of corpse, to 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 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
remorseful 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; 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 perfectly aware of it.
Of course the girl never talked of her father with Mrs. Fyne.  I
suppose with her theory of innocence she found it difficult.  But
she must have been thinking of it day and night.  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 infatuated 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 unscrupulously.  She has owned up, then, for what else can it
mean, I should like to know.  And so they are to be married before
that 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--the profession 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 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
Fyne precisely meant by "wrangling" I don't know, but I had no doubt
that these two had "wrangled" to a profoundly 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, 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, 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 was the craziest thing.
Undesirable 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 I
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.  I saw something
fateful in that deliberate pacing towards the inconspicuous 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--with 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," 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.  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 as though I had meant to
interrupt him.  "Still another.  Something worse.  I need not tell
you what it is," he added with grim meaning.

"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--a distresses 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 it," he retorted on me with a solemn
stare.  "I go by her letter to my wife."

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

"No, but 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.  That's very true.  But this
seems an exaggeration."

"I should like to know what reasons 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.  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.  The fact is that I went
away.  My call was not like her call.  Mine was not urged on me with
passionate vehemence or tender gentleness made all the finer and
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 Flora went I
can't say.  But I will tell you my idea:  my idea is that she went
as far as she was able--as far as she could bear it--as far as she
had to . . . "




PART II--THE KNIGHT




CHAPTER ONE--THE FERNDALE



I have said that the story of Flora de Barral was imparted to me in
stages.  At this stage I did not see Marlow for some time.  At last,
one evening rather early, very soon after dinner, he turned up in my
rooms.

I had been waiting for his call primed with a remark which had not
occurred to me till after he had gone away.

"I say," I tackled him at once, "how can you be certain that Flora
de Barral ever went to sea?  After all, the wife of the captain of
the Ferndale--" the lady that mustn't be disturbed "of the old ship-
keeper--may not have been Flora."

"Well, I do know," he said, "if only because I have been keeping in
touch with Mr. Powell."

"You have!" I cried.  "This is the first I hear of it.  And since
when?"

"Why, since the first day.  You went up to town leaving me in the
inn.  I slept ashore.  In the morning Mr. Powell came in for
breakfast; and after the first awkwardness of meeting a man you have
been yarning with over-night had worn off, we discovered a liking
for each other."

As I had discovered the fact of their mutual liking before either of
them, I was not surprised.

"And so you kept in touch," I said.

"It was not so very difficult.  As he was always knocking about the
river I hired Dingle's sloop-rigged three-tonner to be more on an
equality.  Powell was friendly but elusive.  I don't think he ever
wanted to avoid me.  But it is a fact that he used to disappear out
of the river in a very mysterious manner sometimes.  A man may land
anywhere and bolt inland--but what about his five-ton cutter?  You
can't carry that in your hand like a suit-case.

"Then as suddenly he would reappear in the river, after one had
given him up.  I did not like to be beaten.  That's why I hired
Dingle's decked boat.  There was just the accommodation in her to
sleep a man and a dog.  But I had no dog-friend to invite.  Fyne's
dog who saved Flora de Barral's life is the last dog-friend I had.
I was rather lonely cruising about; but that, too, on the river has
its charm, sometimes.  I chased the mystery of the vanishing Powell
dreamily, looking about me at the ships, thinking of the girl Flora,
of life's chances--and, do you know, it was very simple."

"What was very simple?" I asked innocently.

"The mystery."

"They generally are that," I said.

Marlow eyed me for a moment in a peculiar manner.

"Well, I have discovered the mystery of Powell's disappearances.
The fellow used to run into one of these narrow tidal creeks on the
Essex shore.  These creeks are so inconspicuous that till I had
studied the chart pretty carefully I did not know of their
existence.  One afternoon, I made Powell's boat out, heading into
the shore.  By the time I got close to the mud-flat his craft had
disappeared inland.  But I could see the mouth of the creek by then.
The tide being on the turn I took the risk of getting stuck in the
mud suddenly and headed in.  All I had to guide me was the top of
the roof of some sort of small building.  I got in more by good luck
than by good management.  The sun had set some time before; my boat
glided in a sort of winding ditch between two low grassy banks; on
both sides of me was the flatness of the Essex marsh, perfectly
still.  All I saw moving was a heron; he was flying low, and
disappeared in the murk.  Before I had gone half a mile, I was up
with the building the roof of which I had seen from the river.  It
looked like a small barn.  A row of piles driven into the soft bank
in front of it and supporting a few planks made a sort of wharf.
All this was black in the falling dusk, and I could just distinguish
the whitish ruts of a cart-track stretching over the marsh towards
the higher land, far away.  Not a sound was to be heard.  Against
the low streak of light in the sky I could see the mast of Powell's
cutter moored to the bank some twenty yards, no more, beyond that
black barn or whatever it was.  I hailed him with a loud shout.  Got
no answer.  After making fast my boat just astern, I walked along
the bank to have a look at Powell's.  Being so much bigger than mine
she was aground already.  Her sails were furled; the slide of her
scuttle hatch was closed and padlocked.  Powell was gone.  He had
walked off into that dark, still marsh somewhere.  I had not seen a
single house anywhere near; there did not seem to be any human
habitation for miles; and now as darkness fell denser over the land
I couldn't see the glimmer of a single light.  However, I supposed
that there must be some village or hamlet not very far away; or only
one of these mysterious little inns one comes upon sometimes in most
unexpected and lonely places.

"The stillness was oppressive.  I went back to my boat, made some
coffee over a spirit-lamp, devoured a few biscuits, and stretched
myself aft, to smoke and gaze at the stars.  The earth was a mere
shadow, formless and silent, and empty, till a bullock turned up
from somewhere, quite shadowy too.  He came smartly to the very edge
of the bank as though he meant to step on board, stretched his
muzzle right over my boat, blew heavily once, and walked off
contemptuously into the darkness from which he had come.  I had not
expected a call from a bullock, though a moment's thought would have
shown me that there must be lots of cattle and sheep on that marsh.
Then everything became still as before.  I might have imagined
myself arrived on a desert island.  In fact, as I reclined smoking a
sense of absolute loneliness grew on me.  And just as it had become
intense, very abruptly and without any preliminary sound I heard
firm, quick footsteps on the little wharf.  Somebody coming along
the cart-track had just stepped at a swinging gait on to the planks.
That somebody could only have been Mr. Powell.  Suddenly he stopped
short, having made out that there were two masts alongside the bank
where he had left only one.  Then he came on silent on the grass.
When I spoke to him he was astonished.

"Who would have thought of seeing you here!" he exclaimed, after
returning my good evening.

"I told him I had run in for company.  It was rigorously true."

"You knew I was here?" he exclaimed.

"Of course," I said.  "I tell you I came in for company."

"He is a really good fellow," went on Marlow.  "And his capacity for
astonishment is quickly exhausted, it seems.  It was in the most
matter-of-fact manner that he said, 'Come on board of me, then; I
have here enough supper for two.'  He was holding a bulky parcel in
the crook of his arm.  I did not wait to be asked twice, as you may
guess.  His cutter has a very neat little cabin, quite big enough
for two men not only to sleep but to sit and smoke in.  We left the
scuttle wide open, of course.  As to his provisions for supper, they
were not of a luxurious kind.  He complained that the shops in the
village were miserable.  There was a big village within a mile and a
half.  It struck me he had been very long doing his shopping; but
naturally I made no remark.  I didn't want to talk at all except for
the purpose of setting him going."

"And did you set him going?" I asked.

"I did," said Marlow, composing his features into an impenetrable
expression which somehow assured me of his success better than an
air of triumph could have done.


"You made him talk?" I said after a silence.

"Yes, I made him . . . about himself."

"And to the point?"

"If you mean by this," said Marlow, "that it was about the voyage of
the Ferndale, then again, yes.  I brought him to talk about that
voyage, which, by the by, was not the first voyage of Flora de
Barral.  The man himself, as I told you, is simple, and his faculty
of wonder not very great.  He's one of those people who form no
theories about facts.  Straightforward people seldom do.  Neither
have they much penetration.  But in this case it did not matter.  I-
-we--have already the inner knowledge.  We know the history of Flora
de Barral.  We know something of Captain Anthony.  We have the
secret of the situation.  The man was intoxicated with the pity and
tenderness of his part.  Oh yes!  Intoxicated is not too strong a
word; for you know that love and desire take many disguises.  I
believe that the girl had been frank with him, with the frankness of
women to whom perfect frankness is impossible, because so much of
their safety depends on judicious reticences.  I am not indulging in
cheap sneers.  There is necessity in these things.  And moreover she
could not have spoken with a certain voice in the face of his
impetuosity, because she did not have time to understand either the
state of her feelings, or the precise nature of what she was doing.

Had she spoken ever so clearly he was, I take it, too elated to hear
her distinctly.  I don't mean to imply that he was a fool.  Oh dear
no!  But he had no training in the usual conventions, and we must
remember that he had no experience whatever of women.  He could only
have an ideal conception of his position.  An ideal is often but a
flaming vision of reality.

To him enters Fyne, wound up, if I may express myself so
irreverently, wound up to a high pitch by his wife's interpretation
of the girl's letter.  He enters with his talk of meanness and
cruelty, like a bucket of water on the flame.  Clearly a shock.  But
the effects of a bucket of water are diverse.  They depend on the
kind of flame.  A mere blaze of dry straw, of course . . . but there
can be no question of straw there.  Anthony of the Ferndale was not,
could not have been, a straw-stuffed specimen of a man.  There are
flames a bucket of water sends leaping sky-high.

We may well wonder what happened when, after Fyne had left him, the
hesitating girl went up at last and opened the door of that room
where our man, I am certain, was not extinguished.  Oh no!  Nor
cold; whatever else he might have been.

It is conceivable he might have cried at her in the first moment of
humiliation, of exasperation, "Oh, it's you!  Why are you here?  If
I am so odious to you that you must write to my sister to say so, I
give you back your word."  But then, don't you see, it could not
have been that.  I have the practical certitude that soon afterwards
they went together in a hansom to see the ship--as agreed.  That was
my reason for saying that Flora de Barral did go to sea . . . "

"Yes.  It seems conclusive," I agreed.  "But even without that--if,
as you seem to think, the very desolation of that girlish figure had
a sort of perversely seductive charm, making its way through his
compassion to his senses (and everything is possible)--then such
words could not have been spoken."

"They might have escaped him involuntarily," observed Marlow.
"However, a plain fact settles it.  They went off together to see
the ship."

"Do you conclude from this that nothing whatever was said?" I
inquired.

"I should have liked to see the first meeting of their glances
upstairs there," mused Marlow.  "And perhaps nothing was said.  But
no man comes out of such a 'wrangle' (as Fyne called it) without
showing some traces of it.  And you may be sure that a girl so
bruised all over would feel the slightest touch of anything
resembling coldness.  She was mistrustful; she could not be
otherwise; for the energy of evil is so much more forcible than the
energy of good that she could not help looking still upon her
abominable governess as an authority.  How could one have expected
her to throw off the unholy prestige of that long domination?  She
could not help believing what she had been told; that she was in
some mysterious way odious and unlovable.  It was cruelly true--TO
HER.  The oracle of so many years had spoken finally.  Only other
people did not find her out at once . . . I would not go so far as
to say she believed it altogether.  That would be hardly possible.
But then haven't the most flattered, the most conceited of us their
moments of doubt?  Haven't they?  Well, I don't know.  There may be
lucky beings in this world unable to believe any evil of themselves.
For my own part I'll tell you that once, many years ago now, it came
to my knowledge that a fellow I had been mixed up with in a certain
transaction--a clever fellow whom I really despised--was going
around telling people that I was a consummate hypocrite.  He could
know nothing of it.  It suited his humour to say so.  I had given
him no ground for that particular calumny.  Yet to this day there
are moments when it comes into my mind, and involuntarily I ask
myself, 'What if it were true?'  It's absurd, but it has on one or
two occasions nearly affected my conduct.  And yet I was not an
impressionable ignorant young girl.  I had taken the exact measure
of the fellow's utter worthlessness long before.  He had never been
for me a person of prestige and power, like that awful governess to
Flora de Barral.  See the might of suggestion?  We live at the mercy
of a malevolent word.  A sound, a mere disturbance of the air, sinks
into our very soul sometimes.  Flora de Barral had been more
astounded than convinced by the first impetuosity of Roderick
Anthony.  She let herself be carried along by a mysterious force
which her person had called into being, as her father had been
carried away out of his depth by the unexpected power of successful
advertising.

They went on board that morning.  The Ferndale had just come to her
loading berth.  The only living creature on board was the ship-
keeper--whether the same who had been described to us by Mr. Powell,
or another, I don't know.  Possibly some other man.  He, looking
over the side, saw, in his own words, 'the captain come sailing
round the corner of the nearest cargo-shed, in company with a girl.'
He lowered the accommodation ladder down on to the jetty . . . "

"How do you know all this?" I interrupted.

Marlow interjected an impatient:

"You shall see by and by . . . Flora went up first, got down on deck
and stood stock-still till the captain took her by the arm and led
her aft.  The ship-keeper let them into the saloon.  He had the keys
of all the cabins, and stumped in after them.  The captain ordered
him to open all the doors, every blessed door; state-rooms,
passages, pantry, fore-cabin--and then sent him away.

"The Ferndale had magnificent accommodation.  At the end of a
passage leading from the quarter-deck there was a long saloon, its
sumptuosity slightly tarnished perhaps, but having a grand air of
roominess and comfort.  The harbour carpets were down, the swinging
lamps hung, and everything in its place, even to the silver on the
sideboard.  Two large stern cabins opened out of it, one on each
side of the rudder casing.  These two cabins communicated through a
small bathroom between them, and one was fitted up as the captain's
state-room.  The other was vacant, and furnished with arm-chairs and
a round table, more like a room on shore, except for the long curved
settee following the shape of the ship's stern.  In a dim inclined
mirror, Flora caught sight down to the waist of a pale-faced girl in
a white straw hat trimmed with roses, distant, shadowy, as if
immersed in water, and was surprised to recognize herself in those
surroundings.  They seemed to her arbitrary, bizarre, strange.
Captain Anthony moved on, and she followed him.  He showed her the
other cabins.  He talked all the time loudly in a voice she seemed
to have known extremely well for a long time; and yet, she
reflected, she had not heard it often in her life.  What he was
saying she did not quite follow.  He was speaking of comparatively
indifferent things in a rather moody tone, but she felt it round her
like a caress.  And when he stopped she could hear, alarming in the
sudden silence, the precipitated beating of her heart.

The ship-keeper dodged about the quarter-deck, out of hearing, and
trying to keep out of sight.  At the same time, taking advantage of
the open doors with skill and prudence, he could see the captain and
"that girl" the captain had brought aboard.  The captain was showing
her round very thoroughly.  Through the whole length of the passage,
far away aft in the perspective of the saloon the ship-keeper had
interesting glimpses of them as they went in and out of the various
cabins, crossing from side to side, remaining invisible for a time
in one or another of the state-rooms, and then reappearing again in
the distance.  The girl, always following the captain, had her
sunshade in her hands.  Mostly she would hang her head, but now and
then she would look up.  They had a lot to say to each other, and
seemed to forget they weren't alone in the ship.  He saw the captain
put his hand on her shoulder, and was preparing himself with a
certain zest for what might follow, when the "old man" seemed to
recollect himself, and came striding down all the length of the
saloon.  At this move the ship-keeper promptly dodged out of sight,
as you may believe, and heard the captain slam the inner door of the
passage.  After that disappointment the ship-keeper waited
resentfully for them to clear out of the ship.  It happened much
sooner than he had expected.  The girl walked out on deck first.  As
before she did not look round.  She didn't look at anything; and she
seemed to be in such a hurry to get ashore that she made for the
gangway and started down the ladder without waiting for the captain.

What struck the ship-keeper most was the absent, unseeing expression
of the captain, striding after the girl.  He passed him, the ship-
keeper, without notice, without an order, without so much as a look.
The captain had never done so before.  Always had a nod and a
pleasant word for a man.  From this slight the ship-keeper drew a
conclusion unfavourable to the strange girl.  He gave them time to
get down on the wharf before crossing the deck to steal one more
look at the pair over the rail.  The captain took hold of the girl's
arm just before a couple of railway trucks drawn by a horse came
rolling along and hid them from the ship-keeper's sight for good.

Next day, when the chief mate joined the ship, he told him the tale
of the visit, and expressed himself about the girl "who had got hold
of the captain" disparagingly.  She didn't look healthy, he
explained.  "Shabby clothes, too," he added spitefully.

The mate was very much interested.  He had been with Anthony for
several years, and had won for himself in the course of many long
voyages, a footing of familiarity, which was to be expected with a
man of Anthony's character.  But in that slowly-grown intimacy of
the sea, which in its duration and solitude had its unguarded
moments, no words had passed, even of the most casual, to prepare
him for the vision of his captain associated with any kind of girl.
His impression had been that women did not exist for Captain
Anthony.  Exhibiting himself with a girl!  A girl!  What did he want
with a girl?  Bringing her on board and showing her round the cabin!
That was really a little bit too much.  Captain Anthony ought to
have known better.

Franklin (the chief mate's name was Franklin) felt disappointed;
almost disillusioned.  Silly thing to do!  Here was a confounded old
ship-keeper set talking.  He snubbed the ship-keeper, and tried to
think of that insignificant bit of foolishness no more; for it
diminished Captain Anthony in his eyes of a jealously devoted
subordinate.

Franklin was over forty; his mother was still alive.  She stood in
the forefront of all women for him, just as Captain Anthony stood in
the forefront of all men.  We may suppose that these groups were not
very large.  He had gone to sea at a very early age.  The feeling
which caused these two people to partly eclipse the rest of mankind
were of course not similar; though in time he had acquired the
conviction that he was "taking care" of them both.  The "old lady"
of course had to be looked after as long as she lived.  In regard to
Captain Anthony, he used to say that:  why should he leave him?  It
wasn't likely that he would come across a better sailor or a better
man or a more comfortable ship.  As to trying to better himself in
the way of promotion, commands were not the sort of thing one picked
up in the streets, and when it came to that, Captain Anthony was as
likely to give him a lift on occasion as anyone in the world.

From Mr. Powell's description Franklin was a short, thick black-
haired man, bald on the top.  His head sunk between the shoulders,
his staring prominent eyes and a florid colour, gave him a rather
apoplectic appearance.  In repose, his congested face had a
humorously melancholy expression.

The ship-keeper having given him up all the keys and having been
chased forward with the admonition to mind his own business and not
to chatter about what did not concern him, Mr. Franklin went under
the poop.  He opened one door after another; and, in the saloon, in
the captain's state-room and everywhere, he stared anxiously as if
expecting to see on the bulkheads, on the deck, in the air,
something unusual--sign, mark, emanation, shadow--he hardly knew
what--some subtle change wrought by the passage of a girl.  But
there was nothing.  He entered the unoccupied stern cabin and spent
some time there unscrewing the two stern ports.  In the absence of
all material evidences his uneasiness was passing away.  With a last
glance round he came out and found himself in the presence of his
captain advancing from the other end of the saloon.

Franklin, at once, looked for the girl.  She wasn't to be seen.  The
captain came up quickly.  'Oh! you are here, Mr. Franklin.'  And the
mate said, 'I was giving a little air to the place, sir.'  Then the
captain, his hat pulled down over his eyes, laid his stick on the
table and asked in his kind way:  'How did you find your mother,
Franklin?'--'The old lady's first-rate, sir, thank you.'  And then
they had nothing to say to each other.  It was a strange and
disturbing feeling for Franklin.  He, just back from leave, the ship
just come to her loading berth, the captain just come on board, and
apparently nothing to say!  The several questions he had been
anxious to ask as to various things which had to be done had slipped
out of his mind.  He, too, felt as though he had nothing to say.

The captain, picking up his stick off the table, marched into his
state-room and shut the door after him.  Franklin remained still for
a moment and then started slowly to go on deck.  But before he had
time to reach the other end of the saloon he heard himself called by
name.  He turned round.  The captain was staring from the doorway of
his state-room.  Franklin said, "Yes, sir."  But the captain,
silent, leaned a little forward grasping the door handle.  So he,
Franklin, walked aft keeping his eyes on him.  When he had come up
quite close he said again, "Yes, sir?" interrogatively.  Still
silence.  The mate didn't like to be stared at in that manner, a
manner quite new in his captain, with a defiant and self-conscious
stare, like a man who feels ill and dares you to notice it.
Franklin gazed at his captain, felt that there was something wrong,
and in his simplicity voiced his feelings by asking point-blank:

"What's wrong, sir?"

The captain gave a slight start, and the character of his stare
changed to a sort of sinister surprise.  Franklin grew very
uncomfortable, but the captain asked negligently:

"What makes you think that there's something wrong?"

"I can't say exactly.  You don't look quite yourself, sir," Franklin
owned up.

"You seem to have a confoundedly piercing eye," said the captain in
such an aggressive tone that Franklin was moved to defend himself.

"We have been together now over six years, sir, so I suppose I know
you a bit by this time.  I could see there was something wrong
directly you came on board."

"Mr. Franklin," said the captain, "we have been more than six years
together, it is true, but I didn't know you for a reader of faces.
You are not a correct reader though.  It's very far from being
wrong.  You understand?  As far from being wrong as it can very well
be.  It ought to teach you not to make rash surmises.  You should
leave that to the shore people.  They are great hands at spying out
something wrong.  I dare say they know what they have made of the
world.  A dam' poor job of it and that's plain.  It's a confoundedly
ugly place, Mr. Franklin.  You don't know anything of it?  Well--no,
we sailors don't.  Only now and then one of us runs against
something cruel or underhand, enough to make your hair stand on end.
And when you do see a piece of their wickedness you find that to set
it right is not so easy as it looks . . . Oh!  I called you back to
tell you that there will be a lot of workmen, joiners and all that
sent down on board first thing to-morrow morning to start making
alterations in the cabin.  You will see to it that they don't loaf.
There isn't much time."

Franklin was impressed by this unexpected lecture upon the
wickedness of the solid world surrounded by the salt, uncorruptible
waters on which he and his captain had dwelt all their lives in
happy innocence.  What he could not understand was why it should
have been delivered, and what connection it could have with such a
matter as the alterations to be carried out in the cabin.  The work
did not seem to him to be called for in such a hurry.  What was the
use of altering anything?  It was a very good accommodation,
spacious, well-distributed, on a rather old-fashioned plan, and with
its decorations somewhat tarnished.  But a dab of varnish, a touch
of gilding here and there, was all that was necessary.  As to
comfort, it could not be improved by any alterations.  He resented
the notion of change; but he said dutifully that he would keep his
eye on the workmen if the captain would only let him know what was
the nature of the work he had ordered to be done.

"You'll find a note of it on this table.  I'll leave it for you as I
go ashore," said Captain Anthony hastily.  Franklin thought there
was no more to hear, and made a movement to leave the saloon.  But
the captain continued after a slight pause, "You will be surprised,
no doubt, when you look at it.  There'll be a good many alterations.
It's on account of a lady coming with us.  I am going to get
married, Mr. Franklin!"



CHAPTER TWO--YOUNG POWELL SEES AND HEARS



"You remember," went on Marlow, "how I feared that Mr. Powell's want
of experience would stand in his way of appreciating the unusual.
The unusual I had in my mind was something of a very subtle sort:
the unusual in marital relations.  I may well have doubted the
capacity of a young man too much concerned with the creditable
performance of his professional duties to observe what in the nature
of things is not easily observable in itself, and still less so
under the special circumstances.  In the majority of ships a second
officer has not many points of contact with the captain's wife.  He
sits at the same table with her at meals, generally speaking; he may
now and then be addressed more or less kindly on insignificant
matters, and have the opportunity to show her some small attentions
on deck.  And that is all.  Under such conditions, signs can be seen
only by a sharp and practised eye.  I am alluding now to troubles
which are subtle often to the extent of not being understood by the
very hearts they devastate or uplift.

Yes, Mr. Powell, whom the chance of his name had thrown upon the
floating stage of that tragicomedy would have been perfectly useless
for my purpose if the unusual of an obvious kind had not aroused his
attention from the first.

We know how he joined that ship so suddenly offered to his anxious
desire to make a real start in his profession.  He had come on board
breathless with the hurried winding up of his shore affairs,
accompanied by two horrible night-birds, escorted by a dock
policeman on the make, received by an asthmatic shadow of a ship-
keeper, warned not to make a noise in the darkness of the passage
because the captain and his wife were already on board.  That in
itself was already somewhat unusual.  Captains and their wives do
not, as a rule, join a moment sooner than is necessary.  They prefer
to spend the last moments with their friends and relations.  A ship
in one of London's older docks with their restrictions as to lights
and so on is not the place for a happy evening.  Still, as the tide
served at six in the morning, one could understand them coming on
board the evening before.

Just then young Powell felt as if anybody ought to be glad enough to
be quit of the shore.  We know he was an orphan from a very early
age, without brothers or sisters--no near relations of any kind, I
believe, except that aunt who had quarrelled with his father.  No
affection stood in the way of the quiet satisfaction with which he
thought that now all the worries were over, that there was nothing
before him but duties, that he knew what he would have to do as soon
as the dawn broke and for a long succession of days.  A most
soothing certitude.  He enjoyed it in the dark, stretched out in his
bunk with his new blankets pulled over him.  Some clock ashore
beyond the dock-gates struck two.  And then he heard nothing more,
because he went off into a light sleep from which he woke up with a
start.  He had not taken his clothes off, it was hardly worth while.
He jumped up and went on deck.

The morning was clear, colourless, grey overhead; the dock like a
sheet of darkling glass crowded with upside-down reflections of
warehouses, of hulls and masts of silent ships.  Rare figures moved
here and there on the distant quays.  A knot of men stood alongside
with clothes-bags and wooden chests at their feet.  Others were
coming down the lane between tall, blind walls, surrounding a hand-
cart loaded with more bags and boxes.  It was the crew of the
Ferndale.  They began to come on board.  He scanned their faces as
they passed forward filling the roomy deck with the shuffle of their
footsteps and the murmur of voices, like the awakening to life of a
world about to be launched into space.

Far away down the clear glassy stretch in the middle of the long
dock Mr. Powell watched the tugs coming in quietly through the open
gates.  A subdued firm voice behind him interrupted this
contemplation.  It was Franklin, the thick chief mate, who was
addressing him with a watchful appraising stare of his prominent
black eyes:  "You'd better take a couple of these chaps with you and
look out for her aft.  We are going to cast off."

"Yes, sir," Powell said with proper alacrity; but for a moment they
remained looking at each other fixedly.  Something like a faint
smile altered the set of the chief mate's lips just before he moved
off forward with his brisk step.

Mr. Powell, getting up on the poop, touched his cap to Captain
Anthony, who was there alone.  He tells me that it was only then
that he saw his captain for the first time.  The day before, in the
shipping office, what with the bad light and his excitement at this
berth obtained as if by a brusque and unscrupulous miracle, did not
count.  He had then seemed to him much older and heavier.  He was
surprised at the lithe figure, broad of shoulder, narrow at the
hips, the fire of the deep-set eyes, the springiness of the walk.
The captain gave him a steady stare, nodded slightly, and went on
pacing the poop with an air of not being aware of what was going on,
his head rigid, his movements rapid.

Powell stole several glances at him with a curiosity very natural
under the circumstances.  He wore a short grey jacket and a grey
cap.  In the light of the dawn, growing more limpid rather than
brighter, Powell noticed the slightly sunken cheeks under the
trimmed beard, the perpendicular fold on the forehead, something
hard and set about the mouth.

It was too early yet for the work to have begun in the dock.  The
water gleamed placidly, no movement anywhere on the long straight
lines of the quays, no one about to be seen except the few dock
hands busy alongside the Ferndale, knowing their work, mostly silent
or exchanging a few words in low tones as if they, too, had been
aware of that lady 'who mustn't be disturbed.'  The Ferndale was the
only ship to leave that tide.  The others seemed still asleep,
without a sound, and only here and there a figure, coming up on the
forecastle, leaned on the rail to watch the proceedings idly.
Without trouble and fuss and almost without a sound was the Ferndale
leaving the land, as if stealing away.  Even the tugs, now with
their engines stopped, were approaching her without a ripple, the
burly-looking paddle-boat sheering forward, while the other, a
screw, smaller and of slender shape, made for her quarter so gently
that she did not divide the smooth water, but seemed to glide on its
surface as if on a sheet of plate-glass, a man in her bow, the
master at the wheel visible only from the waist upwards above the
white screen of the bridge, both of them so still-eyed as to
fascinate young Powell into curious self-forgetfulness and
immobility.  He was steeped, sunk in the general quietness,
remembering the statement 'she's a lady that mustn't be disturbed,'
and repeating to himself idly:  'No.  She won't be disturbed.  She
won't be disturbed.'  Then the first loud words of that morning
breaking that strange hush of departure with a sharp hail:  'Look
out for that line there,' made him start.  The line whizzed past his
head, one of the sailors aft caught it, and there was an end to the
fascination, to the quietness of spirit which had stolen on him at
the very moment of departure.  From that moment till two hours
afterwards, when the ship was brought up in one of the lower reaches
of the Thames off an apparently uninhabited shore, near some sort of
inlet where nothing but two anchored barges flying a red flag could
be seen, Powell was too busy to think of the lady 'that mustn't be
disturbed,' or of his captain--or of anything else unconnected with
his immediate duties.  In fact, he had no occasion to go on the
poop, or even look that way much; but while the ship was about to
anchor, casting his eyes in that direction, he received an absurd
impression that his captain (he was up there, of course) was sitting
on both sides of the aftermost skylight at once.  He was too
occupied to reflect on this curious delusion, this phenomenon of
seeing double as though he had had a drop too much.  He only smiled
at himself.

As often happens after a grey daybreak the sun had risen in a warm
and glorious splendour above the smooth immense gleam of the
enlarged estuary.  Wisps of mist floated like trails of luminous
dust, and in the dazzling reflections of water and vapour, the
shores had the murky semi-transparent darkness of shadows cast
mysteriously from below.  Powell, who had sailed out of London all
his young sea-man's life, told me that it was then, in a moment of
entranced vision an hour or so after sunrise, that the river was
revealed to him for all time, like a fair face often seen before,
which is suddenly perceived to be the expression of an inner and
unsuspected beauty, of that something unique and only its own which
rouses a passion of wonder and fidelity and an unappeasable memory
of its charm.  The hull of the Ferndale, swung head to the eastward,
caught the light, her tall spars and rigging steeped in a bath of
red-gold, from the water-line full of glitter to the trucks slight
and gleaming against the delicate expanse of the blue.

"Time we had a mouthful to eat," said a voice at his side.  It was
Mr. Franklin, the chief mate, with his head sunk between his
shoulders, and melancholy eyes.  "Let the men have their breakfast,
bo'sun," he went on, "and have the fire out in the galley in half an
hour at the latest, so that we can call these barges of explosives
alongside.  Come along, young man.  I don't know your name.  Haven't
seen the captain, to speak to, since yesterday afternoon when he
rushed off to pick up a second mate somewhere.  How did he get you?"

Young Powell, a little shy notwithstanding the friendly disposition
of the other, answered him smilingly, aware somehow that there was
something marked in this inquisitiveness, natural, after all--
something anxious.  His name was Powell, and he was put in the way
of this berth by Mr. Powell, the shipping master.  He blushed.

"Ah, I see.  Well, you have been smart in getting ready.  The ship-
keeper, before he went away, told me you joined at one o'clock.  I
didn't sleep on board last night.  Not I.  There was a time when I
never cared to leave this ship for more than a couple of hours in
the evening, even while in London, but now, since--"

He checked himself with a roll of his prominent eyes towards that
youngster, that stranger.  Meantime, he was leading the way across
the quarter-deck under the poop into the long passage with the door
of the saloon at the far end.  It was shut.  But Mr. Franklin did
not go so far.  After passing the pantry he opened suddenly a door
on the left of the passage, to Powell's great surprise.

"Our mess-room," he said, entering a small cabin painted white,
bare, lighted from part of the foremost skylight, and furnished only
with a table and two settees with movable backs.  "That surprises
you?  Well, it isn't usual.  And it wasn't so in this ship either,
before.  It's only since--"

He checked himself again.  "Yes.  Here we shall feed, you and I,
facing each other for the next twelve months or more--God knows how
much more!  The bo'sun keeps the deck at meal-times in fine
weather."

He talked not exactly wheezing, but like a man whose breath is
somewhat short, and the spirit (young Powell could not help
thinking) embittered by some mysterious grievance.

There was enough of the unusual there to be recognized even by
Powell's inexperience.  The officers kept out of the cabin against
the custom of the service, and then this sort of accent in the
mate's talk.  Franklin did not seem to expect conversational ease
from the new second mate.  He made several remarks about the old,
deploring the accident.  Awkward.  Very awkward this thing to happen
on the very eve of sailing.

"Collar-bone and arm broken," he sighed.  "Sad, very sad.  Did you
notice if the captain was at all affected?  Eh?  Must have been."

Before this congested face, these globular eyes turned yearningly
upon him, young Powell (one must keep in mind he was but a youngster
then) who could not remember any signs of visible grief, confessed
with an embarrassed laugh that, owing to the suddenness of this
lucky chance coming to him, he was not in a condition to notice the
state of other people.

"I was so pleased to get a ship at last," he murmured, further
disconcerted by the sort of pent-up gravity in Mr. Franklin's
aspect.

"One man's food another man's poison," the mate remarked.  "That
holds true beyond mere victuals.  I suppose it didn't occur to you
that it was a dam' poor way for a good man to be knocked out."

Mr. Powell admitted openly that he had not thought of that.  He was
ready to admit that it was very reprehensible of him.  But Franklin
had no intention apparently to moralize.  He did not fall silent
either.  His further remarks were to the effect that there had been
a time when Captain Anthony would have showed more than enough
concern for the least thing happening to one of his officers.  Yes,
there had been a time!

"And mind," he went on, laying down suddenly a half-consumed piece
of bread and butter and raising his voice, "poor Mathews was the
second man the longest on board.  I was the first.  He joined a
month later--about the same time as the steward by a few days.  The
bo'sun and the carpenter came the voyage after.  Steady men.  Still
here.  No good man need ever have thought of leaving the Ferndale
unless he were a fool.  Some good men are fools.  Don't know when
they are well off.  I mean the best of good men; men that you would
do anything for.  They go on for years, then all of a sudden--"

Our young friend listened to the mate with a queer sense of
discomfort growing on him.  For it was as though Mr. Franklin were
thinking aloud, and putting him into the delicate position of an
unwilling eavesdropper.  But there was in the mess-room another
listener.  It was the steward, who had come in carrying a tin
coffee-pot with a long handle, and stood quietly by:  a man with a
middle-aged, sallow face, long features, heavy eyelids, a soldierly
grey moustache.  His body encased in a short black jacket with
narrow sleeves, his long legs in very tight trousers, made up an
agile, youthful, slender figure.  He moved forward suddenly, and
interrupted the mate's monologue.

"More coffee, Mr. Franklin?  Nice fresh lot.  Piping hot.  I am
going to give breakfast to the saloon directly, and the cook is
raking his fire out.  Now's your chance."

The mate who, on account of his peculiar build, could not turn his
head freely, twisted his thick trunk slightly, and ran his black
eyes in the corners towards the steward.

"And is the precious pair of them out?" he growled.

The steward, pouring out the coffee into the mate's cup, muttered
moodily but distinctly:  "The lady wasn't when I was laying the
table."

Powell's ears were fine enough to detect something hostile in this
reference to the captain's wife.  For of what other person could
they be speaking?  The steward added with a gloomy sort of fairness:
"But she will be before I bring the dishes in.  She never gives that
sort of trouble.  That she doesn't."

"No.  Not in that way," Mr. Franklin agreed, and then both he and
the steward, after glancing at Powell--the stranger to the ship--
said nothing more.

But this had been enough to rouse his curiosity.  Curiosity is
natural to man.  Of course it was not a malevolent curiosity which,
if not exactly natural, is to be met fairly frequently in men and
perhaps more frequently in women--especially if a woman be in
question; and that woman under a cloud, in a manner of speaking.
For under a cloud Flora de Barral was fated to be even at sea.  Yes.
Even that sort of darkness which attends a woman for whom there is
no clear place in the world hung over her.  Yes.  Even at sea!


And this is the pathos of being a woman.  A man can struggle to get
a place for himself or perish.  But a woman's part is passive, say
what you like, and shuffle the facts of the world as you may,
hinting at lack of energy, of wisdom, of courage.  As a matter of
fact, almost all women have all that--of their own kind.  But they
are not made for attack.  Wait they must.  I am speaking here of
women who are really women.  And it's no use talking of
opportunities, either.  I know that some of them do talk of it.  But
not the genuine women.  Those know better.  Nothing can beat a true
woman for a clear vision of reality; I would say a cynical vision if
I were not afraid of wounding your chivalrous feelings--for which,
by the by, women are not so grateful as you may think, to fellows of
your kind . . .

"Upon my word, Marlow," I cried, "what are you flying out at me for
like this?  I wouldn't use an ill-sounding word about women, but
what right have you to imagine that I am looking for gratitude?"

Marlow raised a soothing hand.

"There!  There!  I take back the ill-sounding word, with the remark,
though, that cynicism seems to me a word invented by hypocrites.
But let that pass.  As to women, they know that the clamour for
opportunities for them to become something which they cannot be is
as reasonable as if mankind at large started asking for
opportunities of winning immortality in this world, in which death
is the very condition of life.  You must understand that I am not
talking here of material existence.  That naturally is implied; but
you won't maintain that a woman who, say, enlisted, for instance
(there have been cases) has conquered her place in the world.  She
has only got her living in it--which is quite meritorious, but not
quite the same thing.

All these reflections which arise from my picking up the thread of
Flora de Barral's existence did not, I am certain, present
themselves to Mr. Powell--not the Mr. Powell we know taking solitary
week-end cruises in the estuary of the Thames (with mysterious
dashes into lonely creeks) but to the young Mr. Powell, the chance
second officer of the ship Ferndale, commanded (and for the most
part owned) by Roderick Anthony, the son of the poet--you know.  A
Mr. Powell, much slenderer than our robust friend is now, with the
bloom of innocence not quite rubbed off his smooth cheeks, and apt
not only to be interested but also to be surprised by the experience
life was holding in store for him.  This would account for his
remembering so much of it with considerable vividness.  For
instance, the impressions attending his first breakfast on board the
Ferndale, both visual and mental, were as fresh to him as if
received yesterday.

The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the
inability to interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing
mysterious in itself) makes to our understanding and emotions.  For
it is never more than that.  Our experience never gets into our
blood and bones.  It always remains outside of us.  That's why we
look with wonder at the past.  And this persists even when from
practice and through growing callousness of fibre we come to the
point when nothing that we meet in that rapid blinking stumble
across a flick of sunshine--which our life is--nothing, I say, which
we run against surprises us any more.  Not at the time, I mean.  If,
later on, we recover the faculty with some such exclamation:  'Well!
Well!  I'll be hanged if I ever, . . . ' it is probably because this
very thing that there should be a past to look back upon, other
people's, is very astounding in itself when one has the time, a
fleeting and immense instant to think of it . . . "

I was on the point of interrupting Marlow when he stopped of
himself, his eyes fixed on vacancy, or--perhaps--(I wouldn't be too
hard on him) on a vision.  He has the habit, or, say, the fault, of
defective mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very
fulness of the tick.  If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted
with that perversity, you know how vexing it is--such a stoppage.  I
was vexed with Marlow.  He was smiling faintly while I waited.  He
even laughed a little.  And then I said acidly:

"Am I to understand that you have ferreted out something comic in
the history of Flora de Barral?"

"Comic!" he exclaimed.  "No!  What makes you say?  . . . Oh, I
laughed--did I?  But don't you know that people laugh at absurdities
that are very far from being comic?  Didn't you read the latest
books about laughter written by philosophers, psychologists?  There
is a lot of them . . . "

"I dare say there has been a lot of nonsense written about laughter-
-and tears, too, for that matter," I said impatiently.

"They say," pursued the unabashed Marlow, "that we laugh from a
sense of superiority.  Therefore, observe, simplicity, honesty,
warmth of feeling, delicacy of heart and of conduct, self-
confidence, magnanimity are laughed at, because the presence of
these traits in a man's character often puts him into difficult,
cruel or absurd situations, and makes us, the majority who are
fairly free as a rule from these peculiarities, feel pleasantly
superior."

"Speak for yourself," I said.  "But have you discovered all these
fine things in the story; or has Mr. Powell discovered them to you
in his artless talk?  Have you two been having good healthy laughs
together?  Come!  Are your sides aching yet, Marlow?"

Marlow took no offence at my banter.  He was quite serious.

"I should not like to say off-hand how much of that there was," he
pursued with amusing caution.  "But there was a situation, tense
enough for the signs of it to give many surprises to Mr. Powell--
neither of them shocking in itself, but with a cumulative effect
which made the whole unforgettable in the detail of its progress.
And the first surprise came very soon, when the explosives (to which
he owed his sudden chance of engagement)--dynamite in cases and
blasting powder in barrels--taken on board, main hatch battened for
sea, cook restored to his functions in the galley, anchor fished and
the tug ahead, rounding the South Foreland, and with the sun sinking
clear and red down the purple vista of the channel, he went on the
poop, on duty, it is true, but with time to take the first freer
breath in the busy day of departure.  The pilot was still on board,
who gave him first a silent glance, and then passed an insignificant
remark before resuming his lounging to and fro between the steering
wheel and the binnacle.  Powell took his station modestly at the
break of the poop.  He had noticed across the skylight a head in a
grey cap.  But when, after a time, he crossed over to the other side
of the deck he discovered that it was not the captain's head at all.
He became aware of grey hairs curling over the nape of the neck.
How could he have made that mistake?  But on board ship away from
the land one does not expect to come upon a stranger.

Powell walked past the man.  A thin, somewhat sunken face, with a
tightly closed mouth, stared at the distant French coast, vague like
a suggestion of solid darkness, lying abeam beyond the evening light
reflected from the level waters, themselves growing more sombre than
the sky; a stare, across which Powell had to pass and did pass with
a quick side glance, noting its immovable stillness.  His passage
disturbed those eyes no more than if he had been as immaterial as a
ghost.  And this failure of his person in producing an impression
affected him strangely.  Who could that old man be?

He was so curious that he even ventured to ask the pilot in a low
voice.  The pilot turned out to be a good-natured specimen of his
kind, condescending, sententious.  He had been down to his meals in
the main cabin, and had something to impart.

"That?  Queer fish--eh?  Mrs. Anthony's father.  I've been
introduced to him in the cabin at breakfast time.  Name of Smith.
Wonder if he has all his wits about him.  They take him about with
them, it seems.  Don't look very happy--eh?"

Then, changing his tone abruptly, he desired Powell to get all hands
on deck and make sail on the ship.  "I shall be leaving you in half
an hour.  You'll have plenty of time to find out all about the old
gent," he added with a thick laugh.


In the secret emotion of giving his first order as a fully
responsible officer, young Powell forgot the very existence of that
old man in a moment.  The following days, in the interest of getting
in touch with the ship, with the men in her, with his duties, in the
rather anxious period of settling down, his curiosity slumbered; for
of course the pilot's few words had not extinguished it.

This settling down was made easy for him by the friendly character
of his immediate superior--the chief.  Powell could not defend
himself from some sympathy for that thick, bald man, comically
shaped, with his crimson complexion and something pathetic in the
rolling of his very movable black eyes in an apparently immovable
head, who was so tactfully ready to take his competency for granted.

There can be nothing more reassuring to a young man tackling his
life's work for the first time.  Mr. Powell, his mind at ease about
himself, had time to observe the people around with friendly
interest.  Very early in the beginning of the passage, he had
discovered with some amusement that the marriage of Captain Anthony
was resented by those to whom Powell (conscious of being looked upon
as something of an outsider) referred in his mind as 'the old lot.'

They had the funny, regretful glances, intonations, nods of men who
had seen other, better times.  What difference it could have made to
the bo'sun and the carpenter Powell could not very well understand.
Yet these two pulled long faces and even gave hostile glances to the
poop.  The cook and the steward might have been more directly
concerned.  But the steward used to remark on occasion, 'Oh, she
gives no extra trouble,' with scrupulous fairness of the most gloomy
kind.  He was rather a silent man with a great sense of his personal
worth which made his speeches guarded.  The cook, a neat man with
fair side whiskers, who had been only three years in the ship,
seemed the least concerned.  He was even known to have inquired once
or twice as to the success of some of his dishes with the captain's
wife.  This was considered a sort of disloyal falling away from the
ruling feeling.

The mate's annoyance was yet the easiest to understand.  As he let
it out to Powell before the first week of the passage was over:
'You can't expect me to be pleased at being chucked out of the
saloon as if I weren't good enough to sit down to meat with that
woman.'  But he hastened to add:  'Don't you think I'm blaming the
captain.  He isn't a man to be found fault with.  You, Mr. Powell,
are too young yet to understand such matters.'

Some considerable time afterwards, at the end of a conversation of
that aggrieved sort, he enlarged a little more by repeating:  'Yes!
You are too young to understand these things.  I don't say you
haven't plenty of sense.  You are doing very well here.  Jolly sight
better than I expected, though I liked your looks from the first.'

It was in the trade-winds, at night, under a velvety, bespangled
sky; a great multitude of stars watching the shadows of the sea
gleaming mysteriously in the wake of the ship; while the leisurely
swishing of the water to leeward was like a drowsy comment on her
progress.  Mr. Powell expressed his satisfaction by a half-bashful
laugh.  The mate mused on:  'And of course you haven't known the
ship as she used to be.  She was more than a home to a man.  She was
not like any other ship; and Captain Anthony was not like any other
master to sail with.  Neither is she now.  But before one never had
a care in the world as to her--and as to him, too.  No, indeed,
there was never anything to worry about.'

Young Powell couldn't see what there was to worry about even then.
The serenity of the peaceful night seemed as vast as all space, and
as enduring as eternity itself.  It's true the sea is an uncertain
element, but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its
bewitching power any more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial
inconstancy of women.  And Mr. Powell, being young, thought naively
that the captain being married, there could be no occasion for
anxiety as to his condition.  I suppose that to him life, perhaps
not so much his own as that of others, was something still in the
nature of a fairy-tale with a 'they lived happy ever after'
termination.  We are the creatures of our light literature much more
than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on being
scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible
theories.  Powell felt in that way the more because the captain of a
ship at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a
prince of a fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not
to be called to account except by powers practically invisible and
so distant, that they might well be looked upon as supernatural for
all that the rest of the crew knows of them, as a rule.

So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate--or
rather he understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which
did not seem to him adequate.  He would have dismissed all this out
of his mind with a contemptuous:  'What the devil do I care?' if the
captain's wife herself had not been so young.  To see her the first
time had been something of a shock to him.  He had some preconceived
ideas as to captain's wives which, while he did not believe the
testimony of his eyes, made him open them very wide.  He had stared
till the captain's wife noticed it plainly and turned her face away.
Captain's wife!  That girl covered with rugs in a long chair.
Captain's . . . !  He gasped mentally.  It had never occurred to him
that a captain's wife could be anything but a woman to be described
as stout or thin, as jolly or crabbed, but always mature, and even,
in comparison with his own years, frankly old.  But this!  It was a
sort of moral upset as though he had discovered a case of abduction
or something as surprising as that.  You understand that nothing is
more disturbing than the upsetting of a preconceived idea.  Each of
us arranges the world according to his own notion of the fitness of
things.  To behold a girl where your average mediocre imagination
had placed a comparatively old woman may easily become one of the
strongest shocks . . . "

Marlow paused, smiling to himself.

"Powell remained impressed after all these years by the very
recollection," he continued in a voice, amused perhaps but not
mocking.  "He said to me only the other day with something like the
first awe of that discovery lingering in his tone--he said to me:
"Why, she seemed so young, so girlish, that I looked round for some
woman which would be the captain's wife, though of course I knew
there was no other woman on board that voyage."  The voyage before,
it seems, there had been the steward's wife to act as maid to Mrs.
Anthony; but she was not taken that time for some reason he didn't
know.  Mrs. Anthony . . . !  If it hadn't been the captain's wife he
would have referred to her mentally as a kid, he said.  I suppose
there must be a sort of divinity hedging in a captain's wife
(however incredible) which prevented him applying to her that
contemptuous definition in the secret of his thoughts.

I asked him when this had happened; and he told me that it was three
days after parting from the tug, just outside the channel--to be
precise.  A head wind had set in with unpleasant damp weather.  He
had come up to leeward of the poop, still feeling very much of a
stranger, and an untried officer, at six in the evening to take his
watch.  To see her was quite as unexpected as seeing a vision.  When
she turned away her head he recollected himself and dropped his
eyes.  What he could see then was only, close to the long chair on
which she reclined, a pair of long, thin legs ending in black cloth
boots tucked in close to the skylight seat.  Whence he concluded
that the 'old gentleman,' who wore a grey cap like the captain's,
was sitting by her--his daughter.  In his first astonishment he had
stopped dead short, with the consequence that now he felt very much
abashed at having betrayed his surprise.  But he couldn't very well
turn tail and bolt off the poop.  He had come there on duty.  So,
still with downcast eyes, he made his way past them.  Only when he
got as far as the wheel-grating did he look up.  She was hidden from
him by the back of her deck-chair; but he had the view of the owner
of the thin, aged legs seated on the skylight, his clean-shaved
cheek, his thin compressed mouth with a hollow in each corner, the
sparse grey locks escaping from under the tweed cap, and curling
slightly on the collar of the coat.  He leaned forward a little over
Mrs. Anthony, but they were not talking.  Captain Anthony, walking
with a springy hurried gait on the other side of the poop from end
to end, gazed straight before him.  Young Powell might have thought
that his captain was not aware of his presence either.  However, he
knew better, and for that reason spent a most uncomfortable hour
motionless by the compass before his captain stopped in his swift
pacing and with an almost visible effort made some remark to him
about the weather in a low voice.  Before Powell, who was startled,
could find a word of answer, the captain swung off again on his
endless tramp with a fixed gaze.  And till the supper bell rang
silence dwelt over that poop like an evil spell.  The captain walked
up and down looking straight before him, the helmsman steered,
looking upwards at the sails, the old gent on the skylight looked
down on his daughter--and Mr. Powell confessed to me that he didn't
know where to look, feeling as though he had blundered in where he
had no business--which was absurd.  At last he fastened his eyes on
the compass card, took refuge, in spirit, inside the binnacle.  He
felt chilled more than he should have been by the chilly dusk
falling on the muddy green sea of the soundings from a smoothly
clouded sky.  A fitful wind swept the cheerless waste, and the ship,
hauled up so close as to check her way, seemed to progress by
languid fits and starts against the short seas which swept along her
sides with a snarling sound.

Young Powell thought that this was the dreariest evening aspect of
the sea he had ever seen.  He was glad when the other occupants of
the poop left it at the sound of the bell.  The captain first, with
a sudden swerve in his walk towards the companion, and not even
looking once towards his wife and his wife's father.  Those two got
up and moved towards the companion, the old gent very erect, his
thin locks stirring gently about the nape of his neck, and carrying
the rugs over his arm.  The girl who was Mrs. Anthony went down
first.  The murky twilight had settled in deep shadow on her face.
She looked at Mr. Powell in passing.  He thought that she was very
pale.  Cold perhaps.  The old gent stopped a moment, thin and stiff,
before the young man, and in a voice which was low but distinct
enough, and without any particular accent--not even of inquiry--he
said:

"You are the new second officer, I believe."

Mr. Powell answered in the affirmative, wondering if this were a
friendly overture.  He had noticed that Mr. Smith's eyes had a sort
of inward look as though he had disliked or disdained his
surroundings.  The captain's wife had disappeared then down the
companion stairs.  Mr. Smith said 'Ah!' and waited a little longer
to put another question in his incurious voice.

"And did you know the man who was here before you?"

"No," said young Powell, "I didn't know anybody belonging to this
ship before I joined."

"He was much older than you.  Twice your age.  Perhaps more.  His
hair was iron grey.  Yes.  Certainly more."

The low, repressed voice paused, but the old man did not move away.
He added:  "Isn't it unusual?"

Mr. Powell was surprised not only by being engaged in conversation,
but also by its character.  It might have been the suggestion of the
word uttered by this old man, but it was distinctly at that moment
that he became aware of something unusual not only in this encounter
but generally around him, about everybody, in the atmosphere.  The
very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in
the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man
from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick
glance he threw to windward where the already effaced horizon traced
no reassuring limit to the eye.  In the expiring, diffused twilight,
and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the
immensity of space made visible--almost palpable.  Young Powell felt
it.  He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the
trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a
speck, to something almost undistinguishable, the mere support for
the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so
suddenly articulate in a darkening universe.

It took him a moment or so to seize the drift of the question.  He
repeated slowly:  'Unusual . . . Oh, you mean for an elderly man to
be the second of a ship.  I don't know.  There are a good many of us
who don't get on.  He didn't get on, I suppose.'

The other, his head bowed a little, had the air of listening with
acute attention.

"And now he has been taken to the hospital," he said.

"I believe so.  Yes.  I remember Captain Anthony saying so in the
shipping office."

"Possibly about to die," went on the old man, in his careful
deliberate tone.  "And perhaps glad enough to die."

Mr. Powell was young enough to be startled at the suggestion, which
sounded confidential and blood-curdling in the dusk.  He said
sharply that it was not very likely, as if defending the absent
victim of the accident from an unkind aspersion.  He felt, in fact,
indignant.  The other emitted a short stifled laugh of a
conciliatory nature.  The second bell rang under the poop.  He made
a movement at the sound, but lingered.

"What I said was not meant seriously," he murmured, with that
strange air of fearing to be overheard.  "Not in this case.  I know
the man."

The occasion, or rather the want of occasion, for this conversation,
had sharpened the perceptions of the unsophisticated second officer
of the Ferndale.  He was alive to the slightest shade of tone, and
felt as if this "I know the man" should have been followed by a "he
was no friend of mine."  But after the shortest possible break the
old gentleman continued to murmur distinctly and evenly:

"Whereas you have never seen him.  Nevertheless, when you have gone
through as many years as I have, you will understand how an event
putting an end to one's existence may not be altogether unwelcome.
Of course there are stupid accidents.  And even then one needn't be
very angry.  What is it to be deprived of life?  It's soon done.
But what would you think of the feelings of a man who should have
had his life stolen from him?  Cheated out of it, I say!"

He ceased abruptly, and remained still long enough for the
astonished Powell to stammer out an indistinct:  "What do you mean?
I don't understand."  Then, with a low 'Good-night' glided a few
steps, and sank through the shadow of the companion into the
lamplight below which did not reach higher than the turn of the
staircase.

The strange words, the cautious tone, the whole person left a strong
uneasiness in the mind of Mr. Powell.  He started walking the poop
in great mental confusion.  He felt all adrift.  This was funny talk
and no mistake.  And this cautious low tone as though he were
watched by someone was more than funny.  The young second officer
hesitated to break the established rule of every ship's discipline;
but at last could not resist the temptation of getting hold of some
other human being, and spoke to the man at the wheel.

"Did you hear what this gentleman was saying to me?"

"No, sir," answered the sailor quietly.  Then, encouraged by this
evidence of laxity in his officer, made bold to add, "A queer fish,
sir."  This was tentative, and Mr. Powell, busy with his own view,
not saying anything, he ventured further.  "They are more like
passengers.  One sees some queer passengers."

"Who are like passengers?" asked Powell gruffly.

"Why, these two, sir."



CHAPTER THREE--DEVOTED SERVANTS--AND THE LIGHT OF A FLARE



Young Powell thought to himself:  "The men, too, are noticing it."
Indeed, the captain's behaviour to his wife and to his wife's father
was noticeable enough.  It was as if they had been a pair of not
very congenial passengers.  But perhaps it was not always like that.
The captain might have been put out by something.

When the aggrieved Franklin came on deck Mr. Powell made a remark to
that effect.  For his curiosity was aroused.

The mate grumbled "Seems to you? . . . Putout?  . . . eh?"  He
buttoned his thick jacket up to the throat, and only then added a
gloomy "Aye, likely enough," which discouraged further conversation.
But no encouragement would have induced the newly-joined second mate
to enter the way of confidences.  His was an instinctive prudence.
Powell did not know why it was he had resolved to keep his own
counsel as to his colloquy with Mr. Smith.  But his curiosity did
not slumber.  Some time afterwards, again at the relief of watches,
in the course of a little talk, he mentioned Mrs. Anthony's father
quite casually, and tried to find out from the mate who he was.

"It would take a clever man to find that out, as things are on board
now," Mr. Franklin said, unexpectedly communicative.  "The first I
saw of him was when she brought him alongside in a four-wheeler one
morning about half-past eleven.  The captain had come on board
early, and was down in the cabin that had been fitted out for him.
Did I tell you that if you want the captain for anything you must
stamp on the port side of the deck?  That's so.  This ship is not
only unlike what she used to be, but she is like no other ship,
anyhow.  Did you ever hear of the captain's room being on the port
side?  Both of them stern cabins have been fitted up afresh like a
blessed palace.  A gang of people from some tip-top West-End house
were fussing here on board with hangings and furniture for a
fortnight, as if the Queen were coming with us.  Of course the
starboard cabin is the bedroom one, but the poor captain hangs out
to port on a couch, so that in case we want him on deck at night,
Mrs. Anthony should not be startled.  Nervous!  Phoo!  A woman who
marries a sailor and makes up her mind to come to sea should have no
blamed jumpiness about her, I say.  But never mind.  Directly the
old cab pointed round the corner of the warehouse I called out to
the captain that his lady was coming aboard.  He answered me, but as
I didn't see him coming, I went down the gangway myself to help her
alight.  She jumps out excitedly without touching my arm, or as much
as saying "thank you" or "good morning" or anything, turns back to
the cab, and then that old joker comes out slowly.  I hadn't noticed
him inside.  I hadn't expected to see anybody.  It gave me a start.
She says:  "My father--Mr. Franklin."  He was staring at me like an
owl.  "How do you do, sir?" says I.  Both of them looked funny.  It
was as if something had happened to them on the way.  Neither of
them moved, and I stood by waiting.  The captain showed himself on
the poop; and I saw him at the side looking over, and then he
disappeared; on the way to meet them on shore, I expected.  But he
just went down below again.  So, not seeing him, I said:  "Let me
help you on board, sir."  "On board!" says he in a silly fashion.
"On board!"  "It's not a very good ladder, but it's quite firm,"
says I, as he seemed to be afraid of it.  And he didn't look a
broken-down old man, either.  You can see yourself what he is.
Straight as a poker, and life enough in him yet.  But he made no
move, and I began to feel foolish.  Then she comes forward.  "Oh!
Thank you, Mr. Franklin.  I'll help my father up."  Flabbergasted
me--to be choked off like this.  Pushed in between him and me
without as much as a look my way.  So of course I dropped it.  What
do you think?  I fell back.  I would have gone up on board at once
and left them on the quay to come up or stay there till next week,
only they were blocking the way.  I couldn't very well shove them on
one side.  Devil only knows what was up between them.  There she
was, pale as death, talking to him very fast.  He got as red as a
turkey-cock--dash me if he didn't.  A bad-tempered old bloke, I can
tell you.  And a bad lot, too.  Never mind.  I couldn't hear what
she was saying to him, but she put force enough into it to shake
her.  It seemed--it seemed, mind!--that he didn't want to go on
board.  Of course it couldn't have been that.  I know better.  Well,
she took him by the arm, above the elbow, as if to lead him, or push
him rather.  I was standing not quite ten feet off.  Why should I
have gone away?  I was anxious to get back on board as soon as they
would let me.  I didn't want to overhear her blamed whispering
either.  But I couldn't stay there for ever, so I made a move to get
past them if I could.  And that's how I heard a few words.  It was
the old chap--something nasty about being "under the heel" of
somebody or other.  Then he says, "I don't want this sacrifice."
What it meant I can't tell.  It was a quarrel--of that I am certain.
She looks over her shoulder, and sees me pretty close to them.  I
don't know what she found to say into his ear, but he gave way
suddenly.  He looked round at me too, and they went up together so
quickly then that when I got on the quarter-deck I was only in time
to see the inner door of the passage close after them.  Queer--eh?
But if it were only queerness one wouldn't mind.  Some luggage in
new trunks came on board in the afternoon.  We undocked at midnight.
And may I be hanged if I know who or what he was or is.  I haven't
been able to find out.  No, I don't know.  He may have been
anything.  All I know is that once, years ago when I went to see the
Derby with a friend, I saw a pea-and-thimble chap who looked just
like that old mystery father out of a cab."

All this the goggle-eyed mate had said in a resentful and melancholy
voice, with pauses, to the gentle murmur of the sea.  It was for him
a bitter sort of pleasure to have a fresh pair of ears, a newcomer,
to whom he could repeat all these matters of grief and suspicion
talked over endlessly by the band of Captain Anthony's faithful
subordinates.  It was evidently so refreshing to his worried spirit
that it made him forget the advisability of a little caution with a
complete stranger.  But really with Mr. Powell there was no danger.
Amused, at first, at these plaints, he provoked them for fun.
Afterwards, turning them over in his mind, he became impressed, and
as the impression grew stronger with the days his resolution to keep
it to himself grew stronger too.


What made it all the easier to keep--I mean the resolution--was that
Powell's sentiment of amused surprise at what struck him at first as
mere absurdity was not unmingled with indignation.  And his years
were too few, his position too novel, his reliance on his own
opinion not yet firm enough to allow him to express it with any
effect.  And then--what would have been the use, anyhow--and where
was the necessity?

But this thing, familiar and mysterious at the same time, occupied
his imagination.  The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts
and the facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very
centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains
the centre figure of the round horizon.  He viewed the apoplectic,
goggle-eyed mate and the saturnine, heavy-eyed steward as the
victims of a peculiar and secret form of lunacy which poisoned their
lives.  But he did not give them his sympathy on that account.  No.
That strange affliction awakened in him a sort of suspicious wonder.

Once--and it was at night again; for the officers of the Ferndale
keeping watch and watch as was customary in those days, had but few
occasions for intercourse--once, I say, the thick Mr. Franklin, a
quaintly bulky figure under the stars, the usual witnesses of his
outpourings, asked him with an abruptness which was not callous, but
in his simple way:

"I believe you have no parents living?"

Mr. Powell said that he had lost his father and mother at a very
early age.

"My mother is still alive," declared Mr. Franklin in a tone which
suggested that he was gratified by the fact.  "The old lady is
lasting well.  Of course she's got to be made comfortable.  A woman
must be looked after, and, if it comes to that, I say, give me a
mother.  I dare say if she had not lasted it out so well I might
have gone and got married.  I don't know, though.  We sailors
haven't got much time to look about us to any purpose.  Anyhow, as
the old lady was there I haven't, I may say, looked at a girl in all
my life.  Not that I wasn't partial to female society in my time,"
he added with a pathetic intonation, while the whites of his goggle
eyes gleamed amorously under the clear night sky.  "Very partial, I
may say."

Mr. Powell was amused; and as these communications took place only
when the mate was relieved off duty he had no serious objection to
them.  The mate's presence made the first half-hour and sometimes
even more of his watch on deck pass away.  If his senior did not
mind losing some of his rest it was not Mr. Powell's affair.
Franklin was a decent fellow.  His intention was not to boast of his
filial piety.

"Of course I mean respectable female society," he explained.  "The
other sort is neither here nor there.  I blame no man's conduct, but
a well-brought-up young fellow like you knows that there's precious
little fun to be got out of it."  He fetched a deep sigh.  "I wish
Captain Anthony's mother had been a lasting sort like my old lady.
He would have had to look after her and he would have done it well.
Captain Anthony is a proper man.  And it would have saved him from
the most foolish--"

He did not finish the phrase which certainly was turning bitter in
his mouth.  Mr. Powell thought to himself:  "There he goes again."
He laughed a little.

"I don't understand why you are so hard on the captain, Mr.
Franklin.  I thought you were a great friend of his."

Mr. Franklin exclaimed at this.  He was not hard on the captain.
Nothing was further from his thoughts.  Friend!  Of course he was a
good friend and a faithful servant.  He begged Powell to understand
that if Captain Anthony chose to strike a bargain with Old Nick to-
morrow, and Old Nick were good to the captain, he (Franklin) would
find it in his heart to love Old Nick for the captain's sake.  That
was so.  On the other hand, if a saint, an angel with white wings
came along and--"

He broke off short again as if his own vehemence had frightened him.
Then in his strained pathetic voice (which he had never raised) he
observed that it was no use talking.  Anybody could see that the man
was changed.

"As to that," said young Powell, "it is impossible for me to judge."

"Good Lord!" whispered the mate.  "An educated, clever young fellow
like you with a pair of eyes on him and some sense too!  Is that how
a happy man looks?  Eh?  Young you may be, but you aren't a kid; and
I dare you to say 'Yes!'"

Mr. Powell did not take up the challenge.  He did not know what to
think of the mate's view.  Still, it seemed as if it had opened his
understanding in a measure.  He conceded that the captain did not
look very well.

"Not very well," repeated the mate mournfully.  "Do you think a man
with a face like that can hope to live his life out?  You haven't
knocked about long in this world yet, but you are a sailor, you have
been in three or four ships, you say.  Well, have you ever seen a
shipmaster walking his own deck as if he did not know what he had
underfoot?  Have you?  Dam'me if I don't think that he forgets where
he is.  Of course he can be no other than a prime seaman; but it's
lucky, all the same, he has me on board.  I know by this time what
he wants done without being told.  Do you know that I have had no
order given me since we left port?  Do you know that he has never
once opened his lips to me unless I spoke to him first?  I?  His
chief officer; his shipmate for full six years, with whom he had no
cross word--not once in all that time.  Aye.  Not a cross look even.
True that when I do make him speak to me, there is his dear old
self, the quick eye, the kind voice.  Could hardly be other to his
old Franklin.  But what's the good?  Eyes, voice, everything's miles
away.  And for all that I take good care never to address him when
the poop isn't clear.  Yes!  Only we two and nothing but the sea
with us.  You think it would be all right; the only chief mate he
ever had--Mr. Franklin here and Mr. Franklin there--when anything
went wrong the first word you would hear about the decks was
'Franklin!'--I am thirteen years older than he is--you would think
it would be all right, wouldn't you?  Only we two on this poop on
which we saw each other first--he a young master--told me that he
thought I would suit him very well--we two, and thirty-one days out
at sea, and it's no good!  It's like talking to a man standing on
shore.  I can't get him back.  I can't get at him.  I feel sometimes
as if I must shake him by the arm:  "Wake up!  Wake up!  You are
wanted, sir . . . !"

Young Powell recognized the expression of a true sentiment, a thing
so rare in this world where there are so many mutes and so many
excellent reasons even at sea for an articulate man not to give
himself away, that he felt something like respect for this outburst.
It was not loud.  The grotesque squat shape, with the knob of the
head as if rammed down between the square shoulders by a blow from a
club, moved vaguely in a circumscribed space limited by the two
harness-casks lashed to the front rail of the poop, without
gestures, hands in the pockets of the jacket, elbows pressed closely
to its side; and the voice without resonance, passed from anger to
dismay and back again without a single louder word in the hurried
delivery, interrupted only by slight gasps for air as if the speaker
were being choked by the suppressed passion of his grief.

Mr. Powell, though moved to a certain extent, was by no means
carried away.  And just as he thought that it was all over, the
other, fidgeting in the darkness, was heard again explosive,
bewildered but not very loud in the silence of the ship and the
great empty peace of the sea.

"They have done something to him!  What is it?  What can it be?
Can't you guess?  Don't you know?"

"Good heavens!" Young Powell was astounded on discovering that this
was an appeal addressed to him.  "How on earth can I know?"

"You do talk to that white-faced, black-eyed . . . I've seen you
talking to her more than a dozen times."

Young Powell, his sympathy suddenly chilled, remarked in a
disdainful tone that Mrs. Anthony's eyes were not black.

"I wish to God she had never set them on the captain, whatever
colour they are," retorted Franklin.  "She and that old chap with
the scraped jaws who sits over her and stares down at her dead-white
face with his yellow eyes--confound them!  Perhaps you will tell us
that his eyes are not yellow?"

Powell, not interested in the colour of Mr. Smith's eyes, made a
vague gesture.  Yellow or not yellow, it was all one to him.

The mate murmured to himself.  "No.  He can't know.  No!  No more
than a baby.  It would take an older head."

"I don't even understand what you mean," observed Mr. Powell coldly.

"And even the best head would be puzzled by such devil-work," the
mate continued, muttering.  "Well, I have heard tell of women doing
for a man in one way or another when they got him fairly ashore.
But to bring their devilry to sea and fasten on such a man! . . .
It's something I can't understand.  But I can watch.  Let them look
out--I say!"

His short figure, unable to stoop, without flexibility, could not
express dejection.  He was very tired suddenly; he dragged his feet
going off the poop.  Before he left it with nearly an hour of his
watch below sacrificed, he addressed himself once more to our young
man who stood abreast of the mizzen rigging in an unreceptive mood
expressed by silence and immobility.  He did not regret, he said,
having spoken openly on this very serious matter.

"I don't know about its seriousness, sir," was Mr. Powell's frank
answer.  "But if you think you have been telling me something very
new you are mistaken.  You can't keep that matter out of your
speeches.  It's the sort of thing I've been hearing more or less
ever since I came on board."

Mr. Powell, speaking truthfully, did not mean to speak offensively.
He had instincts of wisdom; he felt that this was a serious affair,
for it had nothing to do with reason.  He did not want to raise an
enemy for himself in the mate.  And Mr. Franklin did not take
offence.  To Mr. Powell's truthful statement he answered with equal
truth and simplicity that it was very likely, very likely.  With a
thing like that (next door to witchcraft almost) weighing on his
mind, the wonder was that he could think of anything else.  The poor
man must have found in the restlessness of his thoughts the illusion
of being engaged in an active contest with some power of evil; for
his last words as he went lingeringly down the poop ladder expressed
the quaint hope that he would get him, Powell, "on our side yet."

Mr. Powell--just imagine a straightforward youngster assailed in
this fashion on the high seas--answered merely by an embarrassed and
uneasy laugh which reflected exactly the state of his innocent soul.
The apoplectic mate, already half-way down, went up again three
steps of the poop ladder.  Why, yes.  A proper young fellow, the
mate expected, wouldn't stand by and see a man, a good sailor and
his own skipper, in trouble without taking his part against a couple
of shore people who--Mr. Powell interrupted him impatiently, asking
what was the trouble?

"What is it you are hinting at?" he cried with an inexplicable
irritation.

"I don't like to think of him all alone down there with these two,"
Franklin whispered impressively.  "Upon my word I don't.  God only
knows what may be going on there . . . Don't laugh . . . It was bad
enough last voyage when Mrs. Brown had a cabin aft; but now it's
worse.  It frightens me.  I can't sleep sometimes for thinking of
him all alone there, shut off from us all."

Mrs. Brown was the steward's wife.  You must understand that shortly
after his visit to the Fyne cottage (with all its consequences),
Anthony had got an offer to go to the Western Islands, and bring
home the cargo of some ship which, damaged in a collision or a
stranding, took refuge in St. Michael, and was condemned there.
Roderick Anthony had connections which would put such paying jobs in
his way.  So Flora de Barral had but a five months' voyage, a mere
excursion, for her first trial of sea-life.  And Anthony, dearly
trying to be most attentive, had induced this Mrs. Brown, the wife
of his faithful steward, to come along as maid to his bride.  But
for some reason or other this arrangement was not continued.  And
the mate, tormented by indefinite alarms and forebodings, regretted
it.  He regretted that Jane Brown was no longer on board--as a sort
of representative of Captain Anthony's faithful servants, to watch
quietly what went on in that part of the ship this fatal marriage
had closed to their vigilance.  That had been excellent.  For she
was a dependable woman.

Powell did not detect any particular excellence in what seemed a
spying employment.  But in his simplicity he said that he should
have thought Mrs. Anthony would have been glad anyhow to have
another woman on board.  He was thinking of the white-faced girlish
personality which it seemed to him ought to have been cared for.
The innocent young man always looked upon the girl as immature;
something of a child yet.

"She! glad!  Why it was she who had her fired out.  She didn't want
anybody around the cabin.  Mrs. Brown is certain of it.  She told
her husband so.  You ask the steward and hear what he has to say
about it.  That's why I don't like it.  A capable woman who knew her
place.  But no.  Out she must go.  For no fault, mind you.  The
captain was ashamed to send her away.  But that wife of his--aye the
precious pair of them have got hold of him.  I can't speak to him
for a minute on the poop without that thimble-rigging coon coming
gliding up.  I'll tell you what.  I overheard once--God knows I
didn't try to--only he forgot I was on the other side of the
skylight with my sextant--I overheard him--you know how he sits
hanging over her chair and talking away without properly opening his
mouth--yes I caught the word right enough.  He was alluding to the
captain as "the jailer."  The jail . . . !"

Franklin broke off with a profane execration.  A silence reigned for
a long time and the slight, very gentle rolling of the ship slipping
before the N.E. trade-wind seemed to be a soothing device for
lulling to sleep the suspicions of men who trust themselves to the
sea.

A deep sigh was heard followed by the mate's voice asking dismally
if that was the way one would speak of a man to whom one wished
well?  No better proof of something wrong was needed.  Therefore he
hoped, as he vanished at last, that Mr. Powell would be on their
side.  And this time Mr. Powell did not answer this hope with an
embarrassed laugh.

That young officer was more and more surprised at the nature of the
incongruous revelations coming to him in the surroundings and in the
atmosphere of the open sea.  It is difficult for us to understand
the extent, the completeness, the comprehensiveness of his
inexperience, for us who didn't go to sea out of a small private
school at the age of fourteen years and nine months.  Leaning on his
elbow in the mizzen rigging and so still that the helmsman over
there at the other end of the poop might have (and he probably did)
suspect him of being criminally asleep on duty, he tried to "get
hold of that thing" by some side which would fit in with his simple
notions of psychology.  "What the deuce are they worrying about?" he
asked himself in a dazed and contemptuous impatience.  But all the
same "jailer" was a funny name to give a man; unkind, unfriendly,
nasty.  He was sorry that Mr. Smith was guilty in that matter
because, the truth must be told, he had been to a certain extent
sensible of having been noticed in a quiet manner by the father of
Mrs. Anthony.  Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is
the subtlest form of flattery age can offer.  Mr. Smith seized
opportunities to approach him on deck.  His remarks were sometimes
weird and enigmatical.

He was doubtless an eccentric old gent.  But from that to calling
his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind
his back was a long step.

And Mr. Powell marvelled . . . "

"While he was telling me all this,"--Marlow changed his tone--"I
marvelled even more.  It was as if misfortune marked its victims on
the forehead for the dislike of the crowd.  I am not thinking here
of numbers.  Two men may behave like a crowd, three certainly will
when their emotions are engaged.  It was as if the forehead of Flora
de Barral were marked.  Was the girl born to be a victim; to be
always disliked and crushed as if she were too fine for this world?
Or too luckless--since that also is often counted as sin.

Yes, I marvelled more since I knew more of the girl than Mr. Powell-
-if only her true name; and more of Captain Anthony--if only the
fact that he was the son of a delicate erotic poet of a markedly
refined and autocratic temperament.  Yes, I knew their joint stories
which Mr. Powell did not know.  The chapter in it he was opening to
me, the sea-chapter, with such new personages as the sentimental and
apoplectic chief-mate and the morose steward, however astounding to
him in its detached condition was much more so to me as a member of
a series, following the chapter outside the Eastern Hotel in which I
myself had played my part.  In view of her declarations and my sage
remarks it was very unexpected.  She had meant well, and I had
certainly meant well too.  Captain Anthony--as far as I could gather
from little Fyne--had meant well.  As far as such lofty words may be
applied to the obscure personages of this story we were all filled
with the noblest sentiments and intentions.  The sea was there to
give them the shelter of its solitude free from the earth's petty
suggestions.  I could well marvel in myself, as to what had
happened.

I hope that if he saw it, Mr. Powell forgave me the smile of which I
was guilty at that moment.  The light in the cabin of his little
cutter was dim.  And the smile was dim too.  Dim and fleeting.  The
girl's life had presented itself to me as a tragi-comical adventure,
the saddest thing on earth, slipping between frank laughter and
unabashed tears.  Yes, the saddest facts and the most common, and,
being common perhaps the most worthy of our unreserved pity.

The purely human reality is capable of lyrism but not of
abstraction.  Nothing will serve for its understanding but the
evidence of rational linking up of characters and facts.  And
beginning with Flora de Barral, in the light of my memories I was
certain that she at least must have been passive; for that is of
necessity the part of women, this waiting on fate which some of
them, and not the most intelligent, cover up by the vain appearances
of agitation.  Flora de Barral was not exceptionally intelligent but
she was thoroughly feminine.  She would be passive (and that does
not mean inanimate) in the circumstances, where the mere fact of
being a woman was enough to give her an occult and supreme
significance.  And she would be enduring which is the essence of
woman's visible, tangible power.  Of that I was certain.  Had she
not endured already?  Yet it is so true that the germ of destruction
lies in wait for us mortals, even at the very source of our
strength, that one may die of too much endurance as well as of too
little of it.

Such was my train of thought.  And I was mindful also of my first
view of her--toying or perhaps communing in earnest with the
possibilities of a precipice.  But I did not ask Mr. Powell
anxiously what had happened to Mrs. Anthony in the end.  I let him
go on in his own way feeling that no matter what strange facts he
would have to disclose, I was certain to know much more of them than
he ever did know or could possibly guess . . . "

Marlow paused for quite a long time.  He seemed uncertain as though
he had advanced something beyond my grasp.  Purposely I made no
sign.  "You understand?" he asked.

"Perfectly," I said.  "You are the expert in the psychological
wilderness.  This is like one of those Red-skin stories where the
noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his
incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her
fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinket dropped by
the way.  I have always liked such stories.  Go on."

Marlow smiled indulgently at my jesting.  "It is not exactly a story
for boys," he said.  "I go on then.  The sign, as you call it, was
not very plentiful but very much to the purpose, and when Mr. Powell
heard (at a certain moment I felt bound to tell him) when he heard
that I had known Mrs. Anthony before her marriage, that, to a
certain extent, I was her confidant . . . For you can't deny that to
a certain extent . . . Well let us say that I had a look in . . . A
young girl, you know, is something like a temple.  You pass by and
wonder what mysterious rites are going on in there, what prayers,
what visions?  The privileged men, the lover, the husband, who are
given the key of the sanctuary do not always know how to use it.
For myself, without claim, without merit, simply by chance I had
been allowed to look through the half-opened door and I had seen the
saddest possible desecration, the withered brightness of youth, a
spirit neither made cringing nor yet dulled but as if bewildered in
quivering hopelessness by gratuitous cruelty; self-confidence
destroyed and, instead, a resigned recklessness, a mournful
callousness (and all this simple, almost naive)--before the material
and moral difficulties of the situation.  The passive anguish of the
luckless!

I asked myself:  wasn't that ill-luck exhausted yet?  Ill-luck which
is like the hate of invisible powers interpreted, made sensible and
injurious by the actions of men?

Mr. Powell as you may well imagine had opened his eyes at my
statement.  But he was full of his recalled experiences on board the
Ferndale, and the strangeness of being mixed up in what went on
aboard, simply because his name was also the name of a shipping-
master, kept him in a state of wonder which made other coincidences,
however unlikely, not so very surprising after all.

This astonishing occurrence was so present to his mind that he
always felt as though he were there under false pretences.  And this
feeling was so uncomfortable that it nerved him to break through the
awe-inspiring aloofness of his captain.  He wanted to make a clean
breast of it.  I imagine that his youth stood in good stead to Mr.
Powell.  Oh, yes.  Youth is a power.  Even Captain Anthony had to
take some notice of it, as if it refreshed him to see something
untouched, unscarred, unhardened by suffering.  Or perhaps the very
novelty of that face, on board a ship where he had seen the same
faces for years, attracted his attention.

Whether one day he dropped a word to his new second officer or only
looked at him I don't know; but Mr. Powell seized the opportunity
whatever it was.  The captain who had started and stopped in his
everlasting rapid walk smoothed his brow very soon, heard him to the
end and then laughed a little.

"Ah!  That's the story.  And you felt you must put me right as to
this."

"Yes, sir."

"It doesn't matter how you came on board," said Anthony.  And then
showing that perhaps he was not so utterly absent from his ship as
Franklin supposed:  "That's all right.  You seem to be getting on
very well with everybody," he said in his curt hurried tone, as if
talking hurt him, and his eyes already straying over the sea as
usual.

"Yes, sir."

Powell tells me that looking then at the strong face to which that
haggard expression was returning, he had the impulse, from some
confused friendly feeling, to add:  "I am very happy on board here,
sir."

The quickly returning glance, its steadiness, abashed Mr. Powell and
made him even step back a little.  The captain looked as though he
had forgotten the meaning of the word.

"You--what?  Oh yes . . . You . . . of course . . . Happy.  Why
not?"

This was merely muttered; and next moment Anthony was off on his
headlong tramp his eyes turned to the sea away from his ship.

A sailor indeed looks generally into the great distances, but in
Captain Anthony's case there was--as Powell expressed it--something
particular, something purposeful like the avoidance of pain or
temptation.  It was very marked once one had become aware of it.
Before, one felt only a pronounced strangeness.  Not that the
captain--Powell was careful to explain--didn't see things as a ship-
master should.  The proof of it was that on that very occasion he
desired him suddenly after a period of silent pacing, to have all
the staysails sheets eased off, and he was going on with some other
remarks on the subject of these staysails when Mrs. Anthony followed
by her father emerged from the companion.  She established herself
in her chair to leeward of the skylight as usual.  Thereupon the
captain cut short whatever he was going to say, and in a little
while went down below.

I asked Mr. Powell whether the captain and his wife never conversed
on deck.  He said no--or at any rate they never exchanged more than
a couple of words.  There was some constraint between them.  For
instance, on that very occasion, when Mrs. Anthony came out they did
look at each other; the captain's eyes indeed followed her till she
sat down; but he did not speak to her; he did not approach her; and
afterwards left the deck without turning his head her way after this
first silent exchange of glances.

I asked Mr. Powell what did he do then, the captain being out of the
way.  "I went over and talked to Mrs. Anthony.  I was thinking that
it must be very dull for her.  She seemed to be such a stranger to
the ship."

"The father was there of course?"

"Always," said Powell.  "He was always there sitting on the
skylight, as if he were keeping watch over her.  And I think," he
added, "that he was worrying her.  Not that she showed it in any
way.  Mrs. Anthony was always very quiet and always ready to look
one straight in the face."

"You talked together a lot?" I pursued my inquiries.  "She mostly
let me talk to her," confessed Mr. Powell.  "I don't know that she
was very much interested--but still she let me.  She never cut me
short."

All the sympathies of Mr. Powell were for Flora Anthony nee de
Barral.  She was the only human being younger than himself on board
that ship since the Ferndale carried no boys and was manned by a
full crew of able seamen.  Yes! their youth had created a sort of
bond between them.  Mr. Powell's open countenance must have appeared
to her distinctly pleasing amongst the mature, rough, crabbed or
even inimical faces she saw around her.  With the warm generosity of
his age young Powell was on her side, as it were, even before he
knew that there were sides to be taken on board that ship, and what
this taking sides was about.  There was a girl.  A nice girl.  He
asked himself no questions.  Flora de Barral was not so much younger
in years than himself; but for some reason, perhaps by contrast with
the accepted idea of a captain's wife, he could not regard her
otherwise but as an extremely youthful creature.  At the same time,
apart from her exalted position, she exercised over him the
supremacy a woman's earlier maturity gives her over a young man of
her own age.  As a matter of fact we can see that, without ever
having more than a half an hour's consecutive conversation together,
and the distances duly preserved, these two were becoming friends--
under the eye of the old man, I suppose.

How he first got in touch with his captain's wife Powell relates in
this way.  It was long before his memorable conversation with the
mate and shortly after getting clear of the channel.  It was gloomy
weather; dead head wind, blowing quite half a gale; the Ferndale
under reduced sail was stretching close-hauled across the track of
the homeward bound ships, just moving through the water and no more,
since there was no object in pressing her and the weather looked
threatening.  About ten o'clock at night he was alone on the poop,
in charge, keeping well aft by the weather rail and staring to
windward, when amongst the white, breaking seas, under the black
sky, he made out the lights of a ship.  He watched them for some
time.  She was running dead before the wind of course.  She will
pass jolly close--he said to himself; and then suddenly he felt a
great mistrust of that approaching ship.  She's heading straight for
us--he thought.  It was not his business to get out of the way.  On
the contrary.  And his uneasiness grew by the recollection of the
forty tons of dynamite in the body of the Ferndale; not the sort of
cargo one thinks of with equanimity in connection with a threatened
collision.  He gazed at the two small lights in the dark immensity
filled with the angry noise of the seas.  They fascinated him till
their plainness to his sight gave him a conviction that there was
danger there.  He knew in his mind what to do in the emergency, but
very properly he felt that he must call the captain out at once.

He crossed the deck in one bound.  By the immemorial custom and
usage of the sea the captain's room is on the starboard side.  You
would just as soon expect your captain to have his nose at the back
of his head as to have his stateroom on the port side of the ship.
Powell forgot all about the direction on that point given him by the
chief.  He flew over as I said, stamped with his foot and then
putting his face to the cowl of the big ventilator shouted down
there:  "Please come on deck, sir," in a voice which was not
trembling or scared but which we may call fairly expressive.  There
could not be a mistake as to the urgence of the call.  But instead
of the expected alert "All right!" and the sound of a rush down
there, he heard only a faint exclamation--then silence.

Think of his astonishment!  He remained there, his ear in the cowl
of the ventilator, his eyes fastened on those menacing sidelights
dancing on the gusts of wind which swept the angry darkness of the
sea.  It was as though he had waited an hour but it was something
much less than a minute before he fairly bellowed into the wide tube
"Captain Anthony!"  An agitated "What is it?" was what he heard down
there in Mrs. Anthony's voice, light rapid footsteps . . . Why
didn't she try to wake him up!  "I want the captain," he shouted,
then gave it up, making a dash at the companion where a blue light
was kept, resolved to act for himself.

On the way he glanced at the helmsman whose face lighted up by the
binnacle lamps was calm.  He said rapidly to him:  "Stand by to spin
that helm up at the first word."  The answer "Aye, aye, sir," was
delivered in a steady voice.  Then Mr. Powell after a shout for the
watch on deck to "lay aft," ran to the ship's side and struck the
blue light on the rail.

A sort of nasty little spitting of sparks was all that came.  The
light (perhaps affected by damp) had failed to ignite.  The time of
all these various acts must be counted in seconds.  Powell confessed
to me that at this failure he experienced a paralysis of thought, of
voice, of limbs.  The unexpectedness of this misfire positively
overcame his faculties.  It was the only thing for which his
imagination was not prepared.  It was knocked clean over.  When it
got up it was with the suggestion that he must do something at once
or there would be a broadside smash accompanied by the explosion of
dynamite, in which both ships would be blown up and every soul on
board of them would vanish off the earth in an enormous flame and
uproar.

He saw the catastrophe happening and at the same moment, before he
could open his mouth or stir a limb to ward off the vision, a voice
very near his ear, the measured voice of Captain Anthony said:
"Wouldn't light--eh?  Throw it down!  Jump for the flare-up."

The spring of activity in Mr. Powell was released with great force.
He jumped.  The flare-up was kept inside the companion with a box of
matches ready to hand.  Almost before he knew he had moved he was
diving under the companion slide.  He got hold of the can in the
dark and tried to strike a light.  But he had to press the flare-
holder to his breast with one arm, his fingers were damp and stiff,
his hands trembled a little.  One match broke.  Another went out.
In its flame he saw the colourless face of Mrs. Anthony a little
below him, standing on the cabin stairs.  Her eyes which were very
close to his (he was in a crouching posture on the top step) seemed
to burn darkly in the vanishing light.  On deck the captain's voice
was heard sudden and unexpectedly sardonic:  "You had better look
sharp, if you want to be in time."

"Let me have the box," said Mrs. Anthony in a hurried and familiar
whisper which sounded amused as if they had been a couple of
children up to some lark behind a wall.  He was glad of the offer
which seemed to him very natural, and without ceremony -

"Here you are.  Catch hold."

Their hands touched in the dark and she took the box while he held
the paraffin soaked torch in its iron holder.  He thought of warning
her:  "Look out for yourself."  But before he had the time to finish
the sentence the flare blazed up violently between them and he saw
her throw herself back with an arm across her face.  "Hallo," he
exclaimed; only he could not stop a moment to ask if she was hurt.
He bolted out of the companion straight into his captain who took
the flare from him and held it high above his head.

The fierce flame fluttered like a silk flag, throwing an angry
swaying glare mingled with moving shadows over the poop, lighting up
the concave surfaces of the sails, gleaming on the wet paint of the
white rails.  And young Powell turned his eyes to windward with a
catch in his breath.

The strange ship, a darker shape in the night, did not seem to be
moving onwards but only to grow more distinct right abeam, staring
at the Ferndale with one green and one red eye which swayed and
tossed as if they belonged to the restless head of some invisible
monster ambushed in the night amongst the waves.  A moment, long
like eternity, elapsed, and, suddenly, the monster which seemed to
take to itself the shape of a mountain shut its green eye without as
much as a preparatory wink.

Mr. Powell drew a free breath.  "All right now," said Captain
Anthony in a quiet undertone.  He gave the blazing flare to Powell
and walked aft to watch the passing of that menace of destruction
coming blindly with its parti-coloured stare out of a blind night on
the wings of a sweeping wind.  Her very form could be distinguished
now black and elongated amongst the hissing patches of foam bursting
along her path.

As is always the case with a ship running before wind and sea she
did not seem to an onlooker to move very fast; but to be progressing
indolently in long leisurely bounds and pauses in the midst of the
overtaking waves.  It was only when actually passing the stern
within easy hail of the Ferndale, that her headlong speed became
apparent to the eye.  With the red light shut off and soaring like
an immense shadow on the crest of a wave she was lost to view in one
great, forward swing, melting into the lightless space.

"Close shave," said Captain Anthony in an indifferent voice just
raised enough to be heard in the wind.  "A blind lot on board that
ship.  Put out the flare now."

Silently Mr. Powell inverted the holder, smothering the flame in the
can, bringing about by the mere turn of his wrist the fall of
darkness upon the poop.  And at the same time vanished out of his
mind's eye the vision of another flame enormous and fierce shooting
violently from a white churned patch of the sea, lighting up the
very clouds and carrying upwards in its volcanic rush flying spars,
corpses, the fragments of two destroyed ships.  It vanished and
there was an immense relief.  He told me he did not know how scared
he had been, not generally but of that very thing his imagination
had conjured, till it was all over.  He measured it (for fear is a
great tension) by the feeling of slack weariness which came over him
all at once.

He walked to the companion and stooping low to put the flare in its
usual place saw in the darkness the motionless pale oval of Mrs.
Anthony's face.  She whispered quietly:

"Is anything going to happen?  What is it?"

"It's all over now," he whispered back.

He remained bent low, his head inside the cover staring at that
white ghostly oval.  He wondered she had not rushed out on deck.
She had remained quietly there.  This was pluck.  Wonderful self-
restraint.  And it was not stupidity on her part.  She knew there
was imminent danger and probably had some notion of its nature.

"You stayed here waiting for what would come," he murmured
admiringly.

"Wasn't that the best thing to do?" she asked.

He didn't know.  Perhaps.  He confessed he could not have done it.
Not he.  His flesh and blood could not have stood it.  He would have
felt he must see what was coming.  Then he remembered that the flare
might have scorched her face, and expressed his concern.

"A bit.  Nothing to hurt.  Smell the singed hair?"

There was a sort of gaiety in her tone.  She might have been
frightened but she certainly was not overcome and suffered from no
reaction.  This confirmed and augmented if possible Mr. Powell's
good opinion of her as a "jolly girl," though it seemed to him
positively monstrous to refer in such terms to one's captain's wife.
"But she doesn't look it," he thought in extenuation and was going
to say something more to her about the lighting of that flare when
another voice was heard in the companion, saying some indistinct
words.  Its tone was contemptuous; it came from below, from the
bottom of the stairs.  It was a voice in the cabin.  And the only
other voice which could be heard in the main cabin at this time of
the evening was the voice of Mrs. Anthony's father.  The indistinct
white oval sank from Mr. Powell's sight so swiftly as to take him by
surprise.  For a moment he hung at the opening of the companion and
now that her slight form was no longer obstructing the narrow and
winding staircase the voices came up louder but the words were still
indistinct.  The old gentleman was excited about something and Mrs.
Anthony was "managing him" as Powell expressed it.  They moved away
from the bottom of the stairs and Powell went away from the
companion.  Yet he fancied he had heard the words "Lost to me"
before he withdrew his head.  They had been uttered by Mr. Smith.

Captain Anthony had not moved away from the taffrail.  He remained
in the very position he took up to watch the other ship go by
rolling and swinging all shadowy in the uproar of the following
seas.  He stirred not; and Powell keeping near by did not dare speak
to him, so enigmatical in its contemplation of the night did his
figure appear to his young eyes:  indistinct--and in its immobility
staring into gloom, the prey of some incomprehensible grief, longing
or regret.

Why is it that the stillness of a human being is often so
impressive, so suggestive of evil--as if our proper fate were a
ceaseless agitation?  The stillness of Captain Anthony became almost
intolerable to his second officer.  Mr. Powell loitering about the
skylight wanted his captain off the deck now.  "Why doesn't he go
below?" he asked himself impatiently.  He ventured a cough.

Whether the effect of the cough or not Captain Anthony spoke.  He
did not move the least bit.  With his back remaining turned to the
whole length of the ship he asked Mr. Powell with some brusqueness
if the chief mate had neglected to instruct him that the captain was
to be found on the port side.

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Powell approaching his back.  "The mate told me
to stamp on the port side when I wanted you; but I didn't remember
at the moment."

"You should remember," the captain uttered with an effort.  Then
added mumbling "I don't want Mrs. Anthony frightened.  Don't you
see? . . ."

"She wasn't this time," Powell said innocently:  "She lighted the
flare-up for me, sir."

"This time," Captain Anthony exclaimed and turned round.  "Mrs.
Anthony lighted the flare?  Mrs. Anthony! . . . "  Powell explained
that she was in the companion all the time.

"All the time," repeated the captain.  It seemed queer to Powell
that instead of going himself to see the captain should ask him:

"Is she there now?"

Powell said that she had gone below after the ship had passed clear
of the Ferndale.  Captain Anthony made a movement towards the
companion himself, when Powell added the information.  "Mr. Smith
called to Mrs. Anthony from the saloon, sir.  I believe they are
talking there now."

He was surprised to see the captain give up the idea of going below
after all.

He began to walk the poop instead regardless of the cold, of the
damp wind and of the sprays.  And yet he had nothing on but his
sleeping suit and slippers.  Powell placing himself on the break of
the poop kept a look-out.  When after some time he turned his head
to steal a glance at his eccentric captain he could not see his
active and shadowy figure swinging to and fro.  The second mate of
the Ferndale walked aft peering about and addressed the seaman who
steered.

"Captain gone below?"

"Yes, sir," said the fellow who with a quid of tobacco bulging out
his left cheek kept his eyes on the compass card.  "This minute.  He
laughed."

"Laughed," repeated Powell incredulously.  "Do you mean the captain
did?  You must be mistaken.  What would he want to laugh for?"

"Don't know, sir."

The elderly sailor displayed a profound indifference towards human
emotions.  However, after a longish pause he conceded a few words
more to the second officer's weakness.  "Yes.  He was walking the
deck as usual when suddenly he laughed a little and made for the
companion.  Thought of something funny all at once."

Something funny!  That Mr. Powell could not believe.  He did not ask
himself why, at the time.  Funny thoughts come to men, though, in
all sorts of situations; they come to all sorts of men.
Nevertheless Mr. Powell was shocked to learn that Captain Anthony
had laughed without visible cause on a certain night.  The
impression for some reason was disagreeable.  And it was then, while
finishing his watch, with the chilly gusts of wind sweeping at him
out of the darkness where the short sea of the soundings growled
spitefully all round the ship, that it occurred to his
unsophisticated mind that perhaps things are not what they are
confidently expected to be; that it was possible that Captain
Anthony was not a happy man . . . In so far you will perceive he was
to a certain extent prepared for the apoplectic and sensitive
Franklin's lamentations about his captain.  And though he treated
them with a contempt which was in a great measure sincere, yet he
admitted to me that deep down within him an inexplicable and uneasy
suspicion that all was not well in that cabin, so unusually cut off
from the rest of the ship, came into being and grew against his
will.



CHAPTER FOUR--ANTHONY AND FLORA



Marlow emerged out of the shadow of the book-case to get himself a
cigar from a box which stood on a little table by my side.  In the
full light of the room I saw in his eyes that slightly mocking
expression with which he habitually covers up his sympathetic
impulses of mirth and pity before the unreasonable complications the
idealism of mankind puts into the simple but poignant problem of
conduct on this earth.

He selected and lit the cigar with affected care, then turned upon
me, I had been looking at him silently.

"I suppose," he said, the mockery of his eyes giving a pellucid
quality to his tone, "that you think it's high time I told you
something definite.  I mean something about that psychological cabin
mystery of discomfort (for it's obvious that it must be
psychological) which affected so profoundly Mr. Franklin the chief
mate, and had even disturbed the serene innocence of Mr. Powell, the
second of the ship Ferndale, commanded by Roderick Anthony--the son
of the poet, you know."

"You are going to confess now that you have failed to find it out,"
I said in pretended indignation.

"It would serve you right if I told you that I have.  But I won't.
I haven't failed.  I own though that for a time, I was puzzled.
However, I have now seen our Powell many times under the most
favourable conditions--and besides I came upon a most unexpected
source of information . . . But never mind that.  The means don't
concern you except in so far as they belong to the story.  I'll
admit that for some time the old-maiden-lady-like occupation of
putting two and two together failed to procure a coherent theory.  I
am speaking now as an investigator--a man of deductions.  With what
we know of Roderick Anthony and Flora de Barral I could not deduct
an ordinary marital quarrel beautifully matured in less than a year-
-could I?  If you ask me what is an ordinary marital quarrel I will
tell you, that it is a difference about nothing; I mean, these
nothings which, as Mr. Powell told us when we first met him, shore
people are so prone to start a row about, and nurse into hatred from
an idle sense of wrong, from perverted ambition, for spectacular
reasons too.  There are on earth no actors too humble and obscure
not to have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms the play by
stealthy jeers, counsels of anger, amused comments or words of
perfidious compassion.  However, the Anthonys were free from all
demoralizing influences.  At sea, you know, there is no gallery.
You hear no tormenting echoes of your own littleness there, where
either a great elemental voice roars defiantly under the sky or else
an elemental silence seems to be part of the infinite stillness of
the universe.

Remembering Flora de Barral in the depths of moral misery, and
Roderick Anthony carried away by a gust of tempestuous tenderness, I
asked myself, Is it all forgotten already?  What could they have
found to estrange them from each other with this rapidity and this
thoroughness so far from all temptations, in the peace of the sea
and in an isolation so complete that if it had not been the jealous
devotion of the sentimental Franklin stimulating the attention of
Powell, there would have been no record, no evidence of it at all.

I must confess at once that it was Flora de Barral whom I suspected.
In this world as at present organized women are the suspected half
of the population.  There are good reasons for that.  These reasons
are so discoverable with a little reflection that it is not worth my
while to set them out for you.  I will only mention this:  that the
part falling to women's share being all "influence" has an air of
occult and mysterious action, something not altogether trustworthy
like all natural forces which, for us, work in the dark because of
our imperfect comprehension.

If women were not a force of nature, blind in its strength and
capricious in its power, they would not be mistrusted.  As it is one
can't help it.  You will say that this force having been in the
person of Flora de Barral captured by Anthony . . . Why yes.  He had
dealt with her masterfully.  But man has captured electricity too.
It lights him on his way, it warms his home, it will even cook his
dinner for him--very much like a woman.  But what sort of conquest
would you call it?  He knows nothing of it.  He has got to be mighty
careful what he is about with his captive.  And the greater the
demand he makes on it in the exultation of his pride the more likely
it is to turn on him and burn him to a cinder . . . "

"A far-fetched enough parallel," I observed coldly to Marlow.  He
had returned to the arm-chair in the shadow of the bookcase.  "But
accepting the meaning you have in your mind it reduces itself to the
knowledge of how to use it.  And if you mean that this ravenous
Anthony--"

"Ravenous is good," interrupted Marlow.  "He was a-hungering and a-
thirsting for femininity to enter his life in a way no mere feminist
could have the slightest conception of.  I reckon that this accounts
for much of Fyne's disgust with him.  Good little Fyne.  You have no
idea what infernal mischief he had worked during his call at the
hotel.  But then who could have suspected Anthony of being a heroic
creature.  There are several kinds of heroism and one of them at
least is idiotic.  It is the one which wears the aspect of sublime
delicacy.  It is apparently the one of which the son of the delicate
poet was capable.

He certainly resembled his father, who, by the way, wore out two
women without any satisfaction to himself, because they did not come
up to his supra-refined standard of the delicacy which is so
perceptible in his verses.  That's your poet.  He demands too much
from others.  The inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself
with that need for embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion,
the impulses the poet puts into arrangements of verses, which are
dearer to him than his own self--and may make his own self appear
sublime in the eyes of other people, and even in his own eyes.

Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes?  I should not
like to make that charge; though indeed there are other, less noble,
ambitions at which the world does not dare to smile.  But I don't
think so; I do not even think that there was in what he did a
conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced
sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal
situations.  Looked at abstractedly (the way in which truth is often
seen in its real shape) his life had been a life of solitude and
silence--and desire.

Chance had thrown that girl in his way; and if we may smile at his
violent conquest of Flora de Barral we must admit also that this
eager appropriation was truly the act of a man of solitude and
desire; a man also, who, unless a complete imbecile, must have been
a man of long and ardent reveries wherein the faculty of sincere
passion matures slowly in the unexplored recesses of the heart.  And
I know also that a passion, dominating or tyrannical, invading the
whole man and subjugating all his faculties to its own unique end,
may conduct him whom it spurs and drives, into all sorts of
adventures, to the brink of unfathomable dangers, to the limits of
folly, and madness, and death.

To the man then of a silence made only more impressive by the
inarticulate thunders and mutters of the great seas, an utter
stranger to the clatter of tongues, there comes the muscular little
Fyne, the most marked representative of that mankind whose voice is
so strange to him, the husband of his sister, a personality standing
out from the misty and remote multitude.  He comes and throws at him
more talk than he had ever heard boomed out in an hour, and
certainly touching the deepest things Anthony had ever discovered in
himself, and flings words like "unfair" whose very sound is
abhorrent to him.  Unfair!  Undue advantage!  He!  Unfair to that
girl?  Cruel to her!

No scorn could stand against the impression of such charges advanced
with heat and conviction.  They shook him.  They were yet vibrating
in the air of that stuffy hotel-room, terrific, disturbing,
impossible to get rid of, when the door opened and Flora de Barral
entered.

He did not even notice that she was late.  He was sitting on a sofa
plunged in gloom.  Was it true?  Having himself always said exactly
what he meant he imagined that people (unless they were liars, which
of course his brother-in-law could not be) never said more than they
meant.  The deep chest voice of little Fyne was still in his ear.
"He knows," Anthony said to himself.  He thought he had better go
away and never see her again.  But she stood there before him
accusing and appealing.  How could he abandon her?  That was out of
the question.  She had no one.  Or rather she had someone.  That
father.  Anthony was willing to take him at her valuation.  This
father may have been the victim of the most atrocious injustice.
But what could a man coming out of jail do?  An old man too.  And
then--what sort of man?  What would become of them both?  Anthony
shuddered slightly and the faint smile with which Flora had entered
the room faded on her lips.  She was used to his impetuous
tenderness.  She was no longer afraid of it.  But she had never seen
him look like this before, and she suspected at once some new
cruelty of life.  He got up with his usual ardour but as if sobered
by a momentous resolve and said:

"No.  I can't let you out of my sight.  I have seen you.  You have
told me your story.  You are honest.  You have never told me you
loved me."

She waited, saying to herself that he had never given her time, that
he had never asked her!  And that, in truth, she did not know!

I am inclined to believe that she did not.  As abundance of
experience is not precisely her lot in life, a woman is seldom an
expert in matters of sentiment.  It is the man who can and generally
does "see himself" pretty well inside and out.  Women's self-
possession is an outward thing; inwardly they flutter, perhaps
because they are, or they feel themselves to be, engaged.  All this
speaking generally.  In Flora de Barral's particular case ever since
Anthony had suddenly broken his way into her hopeless and cruel
existence she lived like a person liberated from a condemned cell by
a natural cataclysm, a tempest, an earthquake; not absolutely
terrified, because nothing can be worse than the eve of execution,
but stunned, bewildered--abandoning herself passively.  She did not
want to make a sound, to move a limb.  She hadn't the strength.
What was the good?  And deep down, almost unconsciously she was
seduced by the feeling of being supported by this violence.  A
sensation she had never experienced before in her life.

She felt as if this whirlwind were calming down somehow!  As if this
feeling of support, which was tempting her to close her eyes
deliciously and let herself be carried on and on into the unknown
undefiled by vile experiences, were less certain, had wavered
threateningly.  She tried to read something in his face, in that
energetic kindly face to which she had become accustomed so soon.
But she was not yet capable of understanding its expression.
Scared, discouraged on the threshold of adolescence, plunged in
moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not learned to read--not
that sort of language.

If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it
would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity--or of his
generosity, if you like--and all this could not have happened.  He
would not have hit upon that renunciation at which one does not know
whether to grin or shudder.  It is true too that then his love would
not have fastened itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral.
But it was a love born of that rare pity which is not akin to
contempt because rooted in an overwhelmingly strong capacity for
tenderness--the tenderness of the fiery kind--the tenderness of
silent solitary men, the voluntary, passionate outcasts of their
kind.  At the time I am forced to think that his vanity must have
been enormous.

"What big eyes she has," he said to himself amazed.  No wonder.  She
was staring at him with all the might of her soul awakening slowly
from a poisoned sleep, in which it could only quiver with pain but
could neither expand nor move.  He plunged into them breathless and
tense, deep, deep, like a mad sailor taking a desperate dive from
the masthead into the blue unfathomable sea so many men have
execrated and loved at the same time.  And his vanity was immense.
It had been touched to the quick by that muscular little feminist,
Fyne.  "I!  I!  Take advantage of her helplessness.  I!  Unfair to
that creature--that wisp of mist, that white shadow homeless in an
ugly dirty world.  I could blow her away with a breath," he was
saying to himself with horror.  "Never!"  All the supremely refined
delicacy of tenderness, expressed in so many fine lines of verse by
Carleon Anthony, grew to the size of a passion filling with inward
sobs the big frame of the man who had never in his life read a
single one of those famous sonnets singing of the most highly
civilized, chivalrous love, of those sonnets which . . . You know
there's a volume of them.  My edition has the portrait of the author
at thirty, and when I showed it to Mr. Powell the other day he
exclaimed:  "Wonderful!  One would think this the portrait of
Captain Anthony himself if . . ."  I wanted to know what that if
was.  But Powell could not say.  There was something--a difference.
No doubt there was--in fineness perhaps.  The father, fastidious,
cerebral, morbidly shrinking from all contacts, could only sing in
harmonious numbers of what the son felt with a dumb and reckless
sincerity.


Possessed by most strong men's touching illusion as to the frailness
of women and their spiritual fragility, it seemed to Anthony that he
would be destroying, breaking something very precious inside that
being.  In fact nothing less than partly murdering her.  This seems
a very extreme effect to flow from Fyne's words.  But Anthony,
unaccustomed to the chatter of the firm earth, never stayed to ask
himself what value these words could have in Fyne's mouth.  And
indeed the mere dark sound of them was utterly abhorrent to his
native rectitude, sea-salted, hardened in the winds of wide
horizons, open as the day.

He wished to blurt out his indignation but she regarded him with an
expectant air which checked him.  His visible discomfort made her
uneasy.  He could only repeat "Oh yes.  You are perfectly honest.
You might have, but I dare say you are right.  At any rate you have
never said anything to me which you didn't mean."

"Never," she whispered after a pause.

He seemed distracted, choking with an emotion she could not
understand because it resembled embarrassment, a state of mind
inconceivable in that man.

She wondered what it was she had said; remembering that in very
truth she had hardly spoken to him except when giving him the bare
outline of her story which he seemed to have hardly had the patience
to hear, waving it perpetually aside with exclamations of horror and
anger, with fiercely sombre mutters "Enough!  Enough!" and with
alarming starts from a forced stillness, as though he meant to rush
out at once and take vengeance on somebody.  She was saying to
herself that he caught her words in the air, never letting her
finish her thought.  Honest.  Honest.  Yes certainly she had been
that.  Her letter to Mrs. Fyne had been prompted by honesty.  But
she reflected sadly that she had never known what to say to him.
That perhaps she had nothing to say.

"But you'll find out that I can be honest too," he burst out in a
menacing tone, she had learned to appreciate with an amused thrill.

She waited for what was coming.  But he hung in the wind.  He looked
round the room with disgust as if he could see traces on the walls
of all the casual tenants that had ever passed through it.  People
had quarrelled in that room; they had been ill in it, there had been
misery in that room, wickedness, crime perhaps--death most likely.
This was not a fit place.  He snatched up his hat.  He had made up
his mind.  The ship--the ship he had known ever since she came off
the stocks, his home--her shelter--the uncontaminated, honest ship,
was the place.

"Let us go on board.  We'll talk there," he said.  "And you will
have to listen to me.  For whatever happens, no matter what they
say, I cannot let you go."

You can't say that (misgivings or no misgivings) she could have done
anything else but go on board.  It was the appointed business of
that morning.  During the drive he was silent.  Anthony was the last
man to condemn conventionally any human being, to scorn and despise
even deserved misfortune.  He was ready to take old de Barral--the
convict--on his daughter's valuation without the slightest reserve.
But love like his, though it may drive one into risky folly by the
proud consciousness of its own strength, has a sagacity of its own.
And now, as if lifted up into a higher and serene region by its
purpose of renunciation, it gave him leisure to reflect for the
first time in these last few days.  He said to himself:  "I don't
know that man.  She does not know him either.  She was barely
sixteen when they locked him up.  She was a child.  What will he
say?  What will he do?  No, he concluded, I cannot leave her behind
with that man who would come into the world as if out of a grave.

They went on board in silence, and it was after showing her round
and when they had returned to the saloon that he assailed her in his
fiery, masterful fashion.  At first she did not understand.  Then
when she understood that he was giving her her liberty she went
stiff all over, her hand resting on the edge of the table, her face
set like a carving of white marble.  It was all over.  It was as
that abominable governess had said.  She was insignificant,
contemptible.  Nobody could love her.  Humiliation clung to her like
a cold shroud--never to be shaken off, unwarmed by this madness of
generosity.

"Yes.  Here.  Your home.  I can't give it to you and go away, but it
is big enough for us two.  You need not be afraid.  If you say so I
shall not even look at you.  Remember that grey head of which you
have been thinking night and day.  Where is it going to rest?  Where
else if not here, where nothing evil can touch it.  Don't you
understand that I won't let you buy shelter from me at the cost of
your very soul.  I won't.  You are too much part of me.  I have
found myself since I came upon you and I would rather sell my own
soul to the devil than let you go out of my keeping.  But I must
have the right."

He went away brusquely to shut the door leading on deck and came
back the whole length of the cabin repeating:

"I must have the legal right.  Are you ashamed of letting people
think you are my wife?"

He opened his arms as if to clasp her to his breast but mastered the
impulse and shook his clenched hands at her, repeating:  "I must
have the right if only for your father's sake.  I must have the
right.  Where would you take him?  To that infernal cardboard box-
maker.  I don't know what keeps me from hunting him up in his
virtuous home and bashing his head in.  I can't bear the thought.
Listen to me, Flora!  Do you hear what I am saying to you?  You are
not so proud that you can't understand that I as a man have my pride
too?"

He saw a tear glide down her white cheek from under each lowered
eyelid.  Then, abruptly, she walked out of the cabin.  He stood for
a moment, concentrated, reckoning his own strength, interrogating
his heart, before he followed her hastily.  Already she had reached
the wharf.

At the sound of his pursuing footsteps her strength failed her.
Where could she escape from this?  From this new perfidy of life
taking upon itself the form of magnanimity.  His very voice was
changed.  The sustaining whirlwind had let her down, to stumble on
again, weakened by the fresh stab, bereft of moral support which is
wanted in life more than all the charities of material help.  She
had never had it.  Never.  Not from the Fynes.  But where to go?  Oh
yes, this dock--a placid sheet of water close at hand.  But there
was that old man with whom she had walked hand in hand on the parade
by the sea.  She seemed to see him coming to meet her, pitiful, a
little greyer, with an appealing look and an extended, tremulous
arm.  It was for her now to take the hand of that wronged man more
helpless than a child.  But where could she lead him?  Where?  And
what was she to say to him?  What words of cheer, of courage and of
hope?  There were none.  Heaven and earth were mute, unconcerned at
their meeting.  But this other man was coming up behind her.  He was
very close now.  His fiery person seemed to radiate heat, a tingling
vibration into the atmosphere.  She was exhausted, careless, afraid
to stumble, ready to fall.  She fancied she could hear his
breathing.  A wave of languid warmth overtook her, she seemed to
lose touch with the ground under her feet; and when she felt him
slip his hand under her arm she made no attempt to disengage herself
from that grasp which closed upon her limb, insinuating and firm.

He conducted her through the dangers of the quayside.  Her sight was
dim.  A moving truck was like a mountain gliding by.  Men passed by
as if in a mist; and the buildings, the sheds, the unexpected open
spaces, the ships, had strange, distorted, dangerous shapes.  She
said to herself that it was good not to be bothered with what all
these things meant in the scheme of creation (if indeed anything had
a meaning), or were just piled-up matter without any sense.  She
felt how she had always been unrelated to this world.  She was
hanging on to it merely by that one arm grasped firmly just above
the elbow.  It was a captivity.  So be it.  Till they got out into
the street and saw the hansom waiting outside the gates Anthony
spoke only once, beginning brusquely but in a much gentler tone than
she had ever heard from his lips.

"Of course I ought to have known that you could not care for a man
like me, a stranger.  Silence gives consent.  Yes?  Eh?  I don't
want any of that sort of consent.  And unless some day you find you
can speak . . . No!  No!  I shall never ask you.  For all the sign I
will give you you may go to your grave with sealed lips.  But what I
have said you must do!"

He bent his head over her with tender care.  At the same time she
felt her arm pressed and shaken inconspicuously, but in an
undeniable manner.  "You must do it."  A little shake that no
passer-by could notice; and this was going on in a deserted part of
the dock.  "It must be done.  You are listening to me--eh?  or would
you go again to my sister?"

His ironic tone, perhaps from want of use, had an awful grating
ferocity.

"Would you go to her?" he pursued in the same strange voice.  "Your
best friend!  And say nicely--I am sorry.  Would you?  No!  You
couldn't.  There are things that even you, poor dear lost girl,
couldn't stand.  Eh?  Die rather.  That's it.  Of course.  Or can
you be thinking of taking your father to that infernal cousin's
house.  No!  Don't speak.  I can't bear to think of it.  I would
follow you there and smash the door!"

The catch in his voice astonished her by its resemblance to a sob.
It frightened her too.  The thought that came to her head was:  "He
mustn't."  He was putting her into the hansom.  "Oh!  He mustn't, he
mustn't."  She was still more frightened by the discovery that he
was shaking all over.  Bewildered, shrinking into the far off
corner, avoiding his eyes, she yet saw the quivering of his mouth
and made a wild attempt at a smile, which broke the rigidity of her
lips and set her teeth chattering suddenly.

"I am not coming with you," he was saying.  "I'll tell the man . . .
I can't.  Better not.  What is it?  Are you cold?  Come!  What is
it?  Only to go to a confounded stuffy room, a hole of an office.
Not a quarter of an hour.  I'll come for you--in ten days.  Don't
think of it too much.  Think of no man, woman or child of all that
silly crowd cumbering the ground.  Don't think of me either.  Think
of yourself.  Ha!  Nothing will be able to touch you then--at last.
Say nothing.  Don't move.  I'll have everything arranged; and as
long as you don't hate the sight of me--and you don't--there's
nothing to be frightened about.  One of their silly offices with a
couple of ink-slingers of no consequence; poor, scribbling devils."

The hansom drove away with Flora de Barral inside, without movement,
without thought, only too glad to rest, to be alone and still moving
away without effort, in solitude and silence.

Anthony roamed the streets for hours without being able to remember
in the evening where he had been--in the manner of a happy and
exulting lover.  But nobody could have thought so from his face,
which bore no signs of blissful anticipation.  Exulting indeed he
was but it was a special sort of exultation which seemed to take him
by the throat like an enemy.

Anthony's last words to Flora referred to the registry office where
they were married ten days later.  During that time Anthony saw no
one or anything, though he went about restlessly, here and there,
amongst men and things.  This special state is peculiar to common
lovers, who are known to have no eyes for anything except for the
contemplation, actual or inward, of one human form which for them
contains the soul of the whole world in all its beauty, perfection,
variety and infinity.  It must be extremely pleasant.  But felicity
was denied to Roderick Anthony's contemplation.  He was not a common
sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is
said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor every
sort of exceptional conduct.  Roderick Anthony had begun already to
suffer.  That is why perhaps he was so industrious in going about
amongst his fellowmen who would have been surprised and humiliated,
had they known how little solidity and even existence they had in
his eyes.  But they could not suspect anything so queer.  They saw
nothing extraordinary in him during that fortnight.  The proof of
this is that they were willing to transact business with him.
Obviously they were; since it is then that the offer of chartering
his ship for the special purpose of proceeding to the Western
Islands was put in his way by a firm of shipbrokers who had no doubt
of his sanity.

He probably looked sane enough for all the practical purposes of
commercial life.  But I am not so certain that he really was quite
sane at that time.

However, he jumped at the offer.  Providence itself was offering him
this opportunity to accustom the girl to sea-life by a comparatively
short trip.  This was the time when everything that happened,
everything he heard, casual words, unrelated phrases, seemed a
provocation or an encouragement, confirmed him in his resolution.
And indeed to be busy with material affairs is the best preservative
against reflection, fears, doubts--all these things which stand in
the way of achievement.  I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his
throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping
his razor carefully.

And Anthony was extremely careful in preparing for himself and for
the luckless Flora, an impossible existence.  He went about it with
no more tremors than if he had been stuffed with rags or made of
iron instead of flesh and blood.  An existence, mind you, which, on
shore, in the thick of mankind, of varied interests, of
distractions, of infinite opportunities to preserve your distance
from each other, is hardly conceivable; but on board ship, at sea,
en tete-e-tete for days and weeks and months together, could mean
nothing but mental torture, an exquisite absurdity of torment.  He
was a simple soul.  His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is
displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some woman to
attend on Flora.  The condition of guaranteed perfect respectability
gave him moments of anxious thought.  When he remembered suddenly
his steward's wife he must have exclaimed eureka with particular
exultation.  One does not like to call Anthony an ass.  But really
to put any woman within scenting distance of such a secret and
suppose that she would not track it out!

No woman, however simple, could be as ingenuous as that.  I don't
know how Flora de Barral qualified him in her thoughts when he told
her of having done this amongst other things intended to make her
comfortable.  I should think that, for all HER simplicity, she must
have been appalled.  He stood before her on the appointed day
outwardly calmer than she had ever seen him before.  And this very
calmness, that scrupulous attitude which he felt bound in honour to
assume then and for ever, unless she would condescend to make a sign
at some future time, added to the heaviness of her heart innocent of
the most pardonable guile.

The night before she had slept better than she had done for the past
ten nights.  Both youth and weariness will assert themselves in the
end against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress.  She had slept but
she woke up with her eyes full of tears.  There were no traces of
them when she met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs.  She
had swallowed them up.  She was not going to let him see.  She felt
bound in honour to accept the situation for ever and ever unless . .
. Ah, unless . . . She dissembled all her sentiments but it was not
duplicity on her part.  All she wanted was to get at the truth; to
see what would come of it.

She beat him at his own honourable game and the thoroughness of her
serenity disconcerted Anthony a bit.  It was he who stammered when
it came to talking.  The suppressed fierceness of his character
carried him on after the first word or two masterfully enough.  But
it was as if they both had taken a bite of the same bitter fruit.
He was thinking with mournful regret not unmixed with surprise:
"That fellow Fyne has been telling me the truth.  She does not care
for me a bit."  It humiliated him and also increased his compassion
for the girl who in this darkness of life, buffeted and despairing,
had fallen into the grip of his stronger will, abandoning herself to
his arms as on a night of shipwreck.  Flora on her side with partial
insight (for women are never blind with the complete masculine
blindness) looked on him with some pity; and she felt pity for
herself too.  It was a rejection, a casting out; nothing new to her.
But she who supposed all her sensibility dead by this time,
discovered in herself a resentment of this ultimate betrayal.  She
had no resignation for this one.  With a sort of mental sullenness
she said to herself:  "Well, I am here.  I am here without any
nonsense.  It is not my fault that I am a mere worthless object of
pity."

And these things which she could tell herself with a clear
conscience served her better than the passionate obstinacy of
purpose could serve Roderick Anthony.  She was much more sure of
herself than he was.  Such are the advantages of mere rectitude over
the most exalted generosity.

And so they went out to get married, the people of the house where
she lodged having no suspicion of anything of the sort.  They were
only excited at a "gentleman friend" (a very fine man too) calling
on Miss Smith for the first time since she had come to live in the
house.  When she returned, for she did come back alone, there were
allusions made to that outing.  She had to take her meals with these
rather vulgar people.  The woman of the house, a scraggy, genteel
person, tried even to provoke confidences.  Flora's white face with
the deep blue eyes did not strike their hearts as it did the heart
of Captain Anthony, as the very face of the suffering world.  Her
pained reserve had no power to awe them into decency.

Well, she returned alone--as in fact might have been expected.
After leaving the Registry Office Flora de Barral and Roderick
Anthony had gone for a walk in a park.  It must have been an East-
End park but I am not sure.  Anyway that's what they did.  It was a
sunny day.  He said to her:  "Everything I have in the world belongs
to you.  I have seen to that without troubling my brother-in-law.
They have no call to interfere."

She walked with her hand resting lightly on his arm.  He had offered
it to her on coming out of the Registry Office, and she had accepted
it silently.  Her head drooped, she seemed to be turning matters
over in her mind.  She said, alluding to the Fynes:  "They have been
very good to me."  At that he exclaimed:

"They have never understood you.  Well, not properly.  My sister is
not a bad woman, but . . . "

Flora didn't protest; asking herself whether he imagined that he
himself understood her so much better.  Anthony dismissing his
family out of his thoughts went on:  "Yes.  Everything is yours.  I
have kept nothing back.  As to the piece of paper we have just got
from that miserable quill-driver if it wasn't for the law, I
wouldn't mind if you tore it up here, now, on this spot.  But don't
you do it.  Unless you should some day feel that--"

He choked, unexpectedly.  She, reflective, hesitated a moment then
making up her mind bravely.

"Neither am I keeping anything back from you."

She had said it!  But he in his blind generosity assumed that she
was alluding to her deplorable history and hastened to mutter:

"Of course!  Of course!  Say no more.  I have been lying awake
thinking of it all no end of times."

He made a movement with his other arm as if restraining himself from
shaking an indignant fist at the universe; and she never even
attempted to look at him.  His voice sounded strangely, incredibly
lifeless in comparison with these tempestuous accents that in the
broad fields, in the dark garden had seemed to shake the very earth
under her weary and hopeless feet.

She regretted them.  Hearing the sigh which escaped her Anthony
instead of shaking his fist at the universe began to pat her hand
resting on his arm and then desisted, suddenly, as though he had
burnt himself.  Then after a silence:

"You will have to go by yourself to-morrow.  I . . . No, I think I
mustn't come.  Better not.  What you two will have to say to each
other--"

She interrupted him quickly:

"Father is an innocent man.  He was cruelly wronged."

"Yes.  That's why," Anthony insisted earnestly.  "And you are the
only human being that can make it up to him.  You alone must
reconcile him with the world if anything can.  But of course you
shall.  You'll have to find words.  Oh you'll know.  And then the
sight of you, alone, would soothe--"

"He's the gentlest of men," she interrupted again.

Anthony shook his head.  "It would take no end of generosity, no end
of gentleness to forgive such a dead set.  For my part I would have
liked better to have been killed and done with at once.  It could
not have been worse for you--and I suppose it was of you that he was
thinking most while those infernal lawyers were badgering him in
court.  Of you.  And now I think of it perhaps the sight of you may
bring it all back to him.  All these years, all these years--and you
his child left alone in the world.  I would have gone crazy.  For
even if he had done wrong--"

"But he hasn't," insisted Flora de Barral with a quite unexpected
fierceness.  "You mustn't even suppose it.  Haven't you read the
accounts of the trial?"

"I am not supposing anything," Anthony defended himself.  He just
remembered hearing of the trial.  He assured her that he was away
from England, the second voyage of the Ferndale.  He was crossing
the Pacific from Australia at the time and didn't see any papers for
weeks and weeks.  He interrupted himself to suggest:

"You had better tell him at once that you are happy."

He had stammered a little, and Flora de Barral uttered a deliberate
and concise "Yes."

A short silence ensued.  She withdrew her hand from his arm.  They
stopped.  Anthony looked as if a totally unexpected catastrophe had
happened.

"Ah," he said.  "You mind . . . "

"No!  I think I had better," she murmured.

"I dare say.  I dare say.  Bring him along straight on board to-
morrow.  Stop nowhere."

She had a movement of vague gratitude, a momentary feeling of peace
which she referred to the man before her.  She looked up at Anthony.
His face was sombre.  He was miles away and muttered as if to
himself:

"Where could he want to stop though?"

"There's not a single being on earth that I would want to look at
his dear face now, to whom I would willingly take him," she said
extending her hand frankly and with a slight break in her voice,
"but you--Roderick."

He took that hand, felt it very small and delicate in his broad
palm.

"That's right.  That's right," he said with a conscious and hasty
heartiness and, as if suddenly ashamed of the sound of his voice,
turned half round and absolutely walked away from the motionless
girl.  He even resisted the temptation to look back till it was too
late.  The gravel path lay empty to the very gate of the park.  She
was gone--vanished.  He had an impression that he had missed some
sort of chance.  He felt sad.  That excited sense of his own conduct
which had kept him up for the last ten days buoyed him no more.  He
had succeeded!

He strolled on aimlessly a prey to gentle melancholy.  He walked and
walked.  There were but few people about in this breathing space of
a poor neighbourhood.  Under certain conditions of life there is
precious little time left for mere breathing.  But still a few here
and there were indulging in that luxury; yet few as they were
Captain Anthony, though the least exclusive of men, resented their
presence.  Solitude had been his best friend.  He wanted some place
where he could sit down and be alone.  And in his need his thoughts
turned to the sea which had given him so much of that congenial
solitude.  There, if always with his ship (but that was an integral
part of him) he could always be as solitary as he chose.  Yes.  Get
out to sea!

The night of the town with its strings of lights, rigid, and crossed
like a net of flames, thrown over the sombre immensity of walls,
closed round him, with its artificial brilliance overhung by an
emphatic blackness, its unnatural animation of a restless,
overdriven humanity.  His thoughts which somehow were inclined to
pity every passing figure, every single person glimpsed under a
street lamp, fixed themselves at last upon a figure which certainly
could not have been seen under the lamps on that particular night.
A figure unknown to him.  A figure shut up within high unscaleable
walls of stone or bricks till next morning . . . The figure of Flora
de Barral's father.  De Barral the financier--the convict.

There is something in that word with its suggestions of guilt and
retribution which arrests the thought.  We feel ourselves in the
presence of the power of organized society--a thing mysterious in
itself and still more mysterious in its effect.  Whether guilty or
innocent, it was as if old de Barral had been down to the Nether
Regions.  Impossible to imagine what he would bring out from there
to the light of this world of uncondemned men.  What would he think?
What would he have to say?  And what was one to say to him?

Anthony, a little awed, as one is by a range of feelings stretching
beyond one's grasp, comforted himself by the thought that probably
the old fellow would have little to say.  He wouldn't want to talk
about it.  No man would.  It must have been a real hell to him.

And then Anthony, at the end of the day in which he had gone through
a marriage ceremony with Flora de Barral, ceased to think of Flora's
father except, as in some sort, the captive of his triumph.  He
turned to the mental contemplation of the white, delicate and
appealing face with great blue eyes which he had seen weep and
wonder and look profoundly at him, sometimes with incredulity,
sometimes with doubt and pain, but always irresistible in the power
to find their way right into his breast, to stir there a deep
response which was something more than love--he said to himself,--as
men understand it.  More?  Or was it only something other?  Yes.  It
was something other.  More or less.  Something as incredible as the
fulfilment of an amazing and startling dream in which he could take
the world in his arms--all the suffering world--not to possess its
pathetic fairness but to console and cherish its sorrow.

Anthony walked slowly to the ship and that night slept without
dreams.



CHAPTER FIVE--THE GREAT DE BARRAL



Renovated certainly the saloon of the Ferndale was to receive the
"strange woman."  The mellowness of its old-fashioned, tarnished
decoration was gone.  And Anthony looking round saw the glitter, the
gleams, the colour of new things, untried, unused, very bright--too
bright.  The workmen had gone only last night; and the last piece of
work they did was the hanging of the heavy curtains which looped
midway the length of the saloon--divided it in two if released,
cutting off the after end with its companion-way leading direct on
the poop, from the forepart with its outlet on the deck; making a
privacy within a privacy, as though Captain Anthony could not place
obstacles enough between his new happiness and the men who shared
his life at sea.  He inspected that arrangement with an approving
eye then made a particular visitation of the whole, ending by
opening a door which led into a large stateroom made of two knocked
into one.  It was very well furnished and had, instead of the usual
bedplace of such cabins, an elaborate swinging cot of the latest
pattern.  Anthony tilted it a little by way of trial.  "The old man
will be very comfortable in here," he said to himself, and stepped
back into the saloon closing the door gently.  Then another thought
occurred to him obvious under the circumstances but strangely enough
presenting itself for the first time.  "Jove!  Won't he get a
shock," thought Roderick Anthony.

He went hastily on deck.  "Mr. Franklin, Mr. Franklin."  The mate
was not very far.  "Oh!  Here you are.  Miss . . . Mrs. Anthony'll
be coming on board presently.  Just give me a call when you see the
cab."

Then, without noticing the gloominess of the mate's countenance he
went in again.  Not a friendly word, not a professional remark, or a
small joke, not as much as a simple and inane "fine day."  Nothing.
Just turned about and went in.

We know that, when the moment came, he thought better of it and
decided to meet Flora's father in that privacy of the main cabin
which he had been so careful to arrange.  Why Anthony appeared to
shrink from the contact, he who was sufficiently self-confident not
only to face but to absolutely create a situation almost insane in
its audacious generosity, is difficult to explain.  Perhaps when he
came on the poop for a glance he found that man so different
outwardly from what he expected that he decided to meet him for the
first time out of everybody's sight.  Possibly the general secrecy
of his relation to the girl might have influenced him.  Truly he may
well have been dismayed.  That man's coming brought him face to face
with the necessity to speak and act a lie; to appear what he was not
and what he could never be, unless, unless -

In short, we'll say if you like that for various reasons, all having
to do with the delicate rectitude of his nature, Roderick Anthony (a
man of whom his chief mate used to say:  he doesn't know what fear
is) was frightened.  There is a Nemesis which overtakes generosity
too, like all the other imprudences of men who dare to be lawless
and proud . . . "

"Why do you say this?" I inquired, for Marlow had stopped abruptly
and kept silent in the shadow of the bookcase.

"I say this because that man whom chance had thrown in Flora's way
was both:  lawless and proud.  Whether he knew anything about it or
not it does not matter.  Very likely not.  One may fling a glove in
the face of nature and in the face of one's own moral endurance
quite innocently, with a simplicity which wears the aspect of
perfectly Satanic conceit.  However, as I have said it does not
matter.  It's a transgression all the same and has got to be paid
for in the usual way.  But never mind that.  I paused because, like
Anthony, I find a difficulty, a sort of dread in coming to grips
with old de Barral.

You remember I had a glimpse of him once.  He was not an imposing
personality:  tall, thin, straight, stiff, faded, moving with short
steps and with a gliding motion, speaking in an even low voice.
When the sea was rough he wasn't much seen on deck--at least not
walking.  He caught hold of things then and dragged himself along as
far as the after skylight where he would sit for hours.  Our, then
young, friend offered once to assist him and this service was the
first beginning of a sort of friendship.  He clung hard to one--
Powell says, with no figurative intention.  Powell was always on the
lookout to assist, and to assist mainly Mrs. Anthony, because he
clung so jolly hard to her that Powell was afraid of her being
dragged down notwithstanding that she very soon became very sure-
footed in all sorts of weather.  And Powell was the only one ready
to assist at hand because Anthony (by that time) seemed to be afraid
to come near them; the unforgiving Franklin always looked wrathfully
the other way; the boatswain, if up there, acted likewise but
sheepishly; and any hands that happened to be on the poop (a feeling
spreads mysteriously all over a ship) shunned him as though he had
been the devil.

We know how he arrived on board.  For my part I know so little of
prisons that I haven't the faintest notion how one leaves them.  It
seems as abominable an operation as the other, the shutting up with
its mental suggestions of bang, snap, crash and the empty silence
outside--where an instant before you were--you WERE--and now no
longer are.  Perfectly devilish.  And the release!  I don't know
which is worse.  How do they do it?  Pull the string, door flies
open, man flies through:  Out you go!  Adios!  And in the space
where a second before you were not, in the silent space there is a
figure going away, limping.  Why limping?  I don't know.  That's how
I see it.  One has a notion of a maiming, crippling process; of the
individual coming back damaged in some subtle way.  I admit it is a
fantastic hallucination, but I can't help it.  Of course I know that
the proceedings of the best machine-made humanity are employed with
judicious care and so on.  I am absurd, no doubt, but still . . . Oh
yes it's idiotic.  When I pass one of these places . . . did you
notice that there is something infernal about the aspect of every
individual stone or brick of them, something malicious as if matter
were enjoying its revenge of the contemptuous spirit of man.  Did
you notice?  You didn't?  Eh?  Well I am perhaps a little mad on
that point.  When I pass one of these places I must avert my eyes.
I couldn't have gone to meet de Barral.  I should have shrunk from
the ordeal.  You'll notice that it looks as if Anthony (a brave man
indubitably) had shirked it too.  Little Fyne's flight of fancy
picturing three people in the fatal four wheeler--you remember?--
went wide of the truth.  There were only two people in the four
wheeler.  Flora did not shrink.  Women can stand anything.  The dear
creatures have no imagination when it comes to solid facts of life.
In sentimental regions--I won't say.  It's another thing altogether.
There they shrink from or rush to embrace ghosts of their own
creation just the same as any fool-man would.

No.  I suppose the girl Flora went on that errand reasonably.  And
then, why!  This was the moment for which she had lived.  It was her
only point of contact with existence.  Oh yes.  She had been
assisted by the Fynes.  And kindly.  Certainly.  Kindly.  But that's
not enough.  There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures
which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer
envelope.  How cold, how infernally cold she must have felt--unless
when she was made to burn with indignation or shame.  Man, we know,
cannot live by bread alone but hang me if I don't believe that some
women could live by love alone.  If there be a flame in human beings
fed by varied ingredients earthly and spiritual which tinge it in
different hues, then I seem to see the colour of theirs.  It is
azure . . . What the devil are you laughing at . . . "

Marlow jumped up and strode out of the shadow as if lifted by
indignation but there was the flicker of a smile on his lips.  "You
say I don't know women.  Maybe.  It's just as well not to come too
close to the shrine.  But I have a clear notion of WOMAN.  In all of
them, termagant, flirt, crank, washerwoman, blue-stocking, outcast
and even in the ordinary fool of the ordinary commerce there is
something left, if only a spark.  And when there is a spark there
can always be a flame . . . "

He went back into the shadow and sat down again.

"I don't mean to say that Flora de Barral was one of the sort that
could live by love alone.  In fact she had managed to live without.
But still, in the distrust of herself and of others she looked for
love, any kind of love, as women will.  And that confounded jail was
the only spot where she could see it--for she had no reason to
distrust her father.

She was there in good time.  I see her gazing across the road at
these walls which are, properly speaking, awful.  You do indeed seem
to feel along the very lines and angles of the unholy bulk, the fall
of time, drop by drop, hour by hour, leaf by leaf, with a gentle and
implacable slowness.  And a voiceless melancholy comes over one,
invading, overpowering like a dream, penetrating and mortal like
poison.

When de Barral came out she experienced a sort of shock to see that
he was exactly as she remembered him.  Perhaps a little smaller.
Otherwise unchanged.  You come out in the same clothes, you know.  I
can't tell whether he was looking for her.  No doubt he was.
Whether he recognized her?  Very likely.  She crossed the road and
at once there was reproduced at a distance of years, as if by some
mocking witchcraft, the sight so familiar on the Parade at Brighton
of the financier de Barral walking with his only daughter.  One
comes out of prison in the same clothes one wore on the day of
condemnation, no matter how long one has been put away there.  Oh,
they last!  They last!  But there is something which is preserved by
prison life even better than one's discarded clothing.  It is the
force, the vividness of one's sentiments.  A monastery will do that
too; but in the unholy claustration of a jail you are thrown back
wholly upon yourself--for God and Faith are not there.  The people
outside disperse their affections, you hoard yours, you nurse them
into intensity.  What they let slip, what they forget in the
movement and changes of free life, you hold on to, amplify,
exaggerate into a rank growth of memories.  They can look with a
smile at the troubles and pains of the past; but you can't.  Old
pains keep on gnawing at your heart, old desires, old deceptions,
old dreams, assailing you in the dead stillness of your present
where nothing moves except the irrecoverable minutes of your life.

De Barral was out and, for a time speechless, being led away almost
before he had taken possession of the free world, by his daughter.
Flora controlled herself well.  They walked along quickly for some
distance.  The cab had been left round the corner--round several
corners for all I know.  He was flustered, out of breath, when she
helped him in and followed herself.  Inside that rolling box,
turning towards that recovered presence with her heart too full for
words she felt the desire of tears she had managed to keep down
abandon her suddenly, her half-mournful, half-triumphant exultation
subside, every fibre of her body, relaxed in tenderness, go stiff in
the close look she took at his face.  He WAS different.  There was
something.  Yes, there was something between them, something hard
and impalpable, the ghost of these high walls.

How old he was, how unlike!

She shook off this impression, amazed and frightened by it of
course.  And remorseful too.  Naturally.  She threw her arms round
his neck.  He returned that hug awkwardly, as if not in perfect
control of his arms, with a fumbling and uncertain pressure.  She
hid her face on his breast.  It was as though she were pressing it
against a stone.  They released each other and presently the cab was
rolling along at a jog-trot to the docks with those two people as
far apart as they could get from each other, in opposite corners.

After a silence given up to mutual examination he uttered his first
coherent sentence outside the walls of the prison.

"What has done for me was envy.  Envy.  There was a lot of them just
bursting with it every time they looked my way.  I was doing too
well.  So they went to the Public Prosecutor--"

She said hastily "Yes!  Yes!  I know," and he glared as if resentful
that the child had turned into a young woman without waiting for him
to come out.  "What do you know about it?" he asked.  "You were too
young."  His speech was soft.  The old voice, the old voice!  It
gave her a thrill.  She recognized its pointless gentleness always
the same no matter what he had to say.  And she remembered that he
never had much to say when he came down to see her.  It was she who
chattered, chattered, on their walks, while stiff and with a
rigidly-carried head, he dropped a gentle word now and then.

Moved by these recollections waking up within her, she explained to
him that within the last year she had read and studied the report of
the trial.

"I went through the files of several papers, papa."

He looked at her suspiciously.  The reports were probably very
incomplete.  No doubt the reporters had garbled his evidence.  They
were determined to give him no chance either in court or before the
public opinion.  It was a conspiracy . . . "My counsel was a fool
too," he added.  "Did you notice?  A perfect fool."

She laid her hand on his arm soothingly.  "Is it worth while talking
about that awful time?  It is so far away now."  She shuddered
slightly at the thought of all the horrible years which had passed
over her young head; never guessing that for him the time was but
yesterday.  He folded his arms on his breast, leaned back in his
corner and bowed his head.  But in a little while he made her jump
by asking suddenly:

"Who has got hold of the Lone Valley Railway?  That's what they were
after mainly.  Somebody has got it.  Parfitts and Co. grabbed it--
eh?  Or was it that fellow Warner . . . "

"I--I don't know," she said quite scared by the twitching of his
lips.

"Don't know!" he exclaimed softly.  Hadn't her cousin told her?  Oh
yes.  She had left them--of course.  Why did she?  It was his first
question about herself but she did not answer it.  She did not want
to talk of these horrors.  They were impossible to describe.  She
perceived though that he had not expected an answer, because she
heard him muttering to himself that:  "There was half a million's
worth of work done and material accumulated there."

"You mustn't think of these things, papa," she said firmly.  And he
asked her with that invariable gentleness, in which she seemed now
to detect some rather ugly shades, what else had he to think about?
Another year or two, if they had only left him alone, he and
everybody else would have been all right, rolling in money; and she,
his daughter, could have married anybody--anybody.  A lord.

All this was to him like yesterday, a long yesterday, a yesterday
gone over innumerable times, analysed, meditated upon for years.  It
had a vividness and force for that old man of which his daughter who
had not been shut out of the world could have no idea.  She was to
him the only living figure out of that past, and it was perhaps in
perfect good faith that he added, coldly, inexpressive and thin-
lipped:  "I lived only for you, I may say.  I suppose you understand
that.  There were only you and me."

Moved by this declaration, wondering that it did not warm her heart
more, she murmured a few endearing words while the uppermost thought
in her mind was that she must tell him now of the situation.  She
had expected to be questioned anxiously about herself--and while she
desired it she shrank from the answers she would have to make.  But
her father seemed strangely, unnaturally incurious.  It looked as if
there would be no questions.  Still this was an opening.  This
seemed to be the time for her to begin.  And she began.  She began
by saying that she had always felt like that.  There were two of
them, to live for each other.  And if he only knew what she had gone
through!

Ensconced in his corner, with his arms folded, he stared out of the
cab window at the street.  How little he was changed after all.  It
was the unmovable expression, the faded stare she used to see on the
esplanade whenever walking by his side hand in hand she raised her
eyes to his face--while she chattered, chattered.  It was the same
stiff, silent figure which at a word from her would turn rigidly
into a shop and buy her anything it occurred to her that she would
like to have.  Flora de Barral's voice faltered.  He bent on her
that well-remembered glance in which she had never read anything as
a child, except the consciousness of her existence.  And that was
enough for a child who had never known demonstrative affection.  But
she had lived a life so starved of all feeling that this was no
longer enough for her.  What was the good of telling him the story
of all these miseries now past and gone, of all those bewildering
difficulties and humiliations?  What she must tell him was difficult
enough to say.  She approached it by remarking cheerfully:

"You haven't even asked me where I am taking you."  He started like
a somnambulist awakened suddenly, and there was now some meaning in
his stare; a sort of alarmed speculation.  He opened his mouth
slowly.  Flora struck in with forced gaiety.  "You would never,
guess."

He waited, still more startled and suspicious.  "Guess!  Why don't
you tell me?"

He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward towards her.  She got hold
of one of his hands.  "You must know first . . . "  She paused, made
an effort:  "I am married, papa."

For a moment they kept perfectly still in that cab rolling on at a
steady jog-trot through a narrow city street full of bustle.
Whatever she expected she did not expect to feel his hand snatched
away from her grasp as if from a burn or a contamination.  De Barral
fresh from the stagnant torment of the prison (where nothing
happens) had not expected that sort of news.  It seemed to stick in
his throat.  In strangled low tones he cried out, "You--married?
You, Flora!  When?  Married!  What for?  Who to?  Married!"

His eyes which were blue like hers, only faded, without depth,
seemed to start out of their orbits.  He did really look as if he
were choking.  He even put his hand to his collar . . . "


"You know," continued Marlow out of the shadow of the bookcase and
nearly invisible in the depths of the arm-chair, "the only time I
saw him he had given me the impression of absolute rigidity, as
though he had swallowed a poker.  But it seems that he could
collapse.  I can hardly picture this to myself.  I understand that
he did collapse to a certain extent in his corner of the cab.  The
unexpected had crumpled him up.  She regarded him perplexed,
pitying, a little disillusioned, and nodded at him gravely:  Yes.
Married.  What she did not like was to see him smile in a manner far
from encouraging to the devotion of a daughter.  There was something
unintentionally savage in it.  Old de Barral could not quite command
his muscles, as yet.  But he had recovered command of his gentle
voice.

"You were just saying that in this wide world there we were, only
you and I, to stick to each other."

She was dimly aware of the scathing intention lurking in these soft
low tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly.  She
defended herself.  Never, never for a single moment had she ceased
to think of him.  Neither did he cease to think of her, he said,
with as much sinister emphasis as he was capable of.

"But, papa," she cried, "I haven't been shut up like you."  She
didn't mind speaking of it because he was innocent.  He hadn't been
understood.  It was a misfortune of the most cruel kind but no more
disgraceful than an illness, a maiming accident or some other
visitation of blind fate.  "I wish I had been too.  But I was alone
out in the world, the horrid world, that very world which had used
you so badly."

"And you couldn't go about in it without finding somebody to fall in
love with?" he said.  A jealous rage affected his brain like the
fumes of wine, rising from some secret depths of his being so long
deprived of all emotions.  The hollows at the corners of his lips
became more pronounced in the puffy roundness of his cheeks.
Images, visions, obsess with particular force, men withdrawn from
the sights and sounds of active life.  "And I did nothing but think
of you!" he exclaimed under his breath, contemptuously.  "Think of
you!  You haunted me, I tell you."

Flora said to herself that there was a being who loved her.  "Then
we have been haunting each other," she declared with a pang of
remorse.  For indeed he had haunted her nearly out of the world,
into a final and irremediable desertion.  "Some day I shall tell you
. . . No.  I don't think I can ever tell you.  There was a time when
I was mad.  But what's the good?  It's all over now.  We shall
forget all this.  There shall be nothing to remind us."

De Barral moved his shoulders.

"I should think you were mad to tie yourself to . . . How long is it
since you are married?"

She answered "Not long" that being the only answer she dared to
make.  Everything was so different from what she imagined it would
be.  He wanted to know why she had said nothing of it in any of her
letters; in her last letter.  She said:

"It was after."

"So recently!" he wondered.  "Couldn't you wait at least till I came
out?  You could have told me; asked me; consulted me!  Let me see--"

She shook her head negatively.  And he was appalled.  He thought to
himself:  Who can he be?  Some miserable, silly youth without a
penny.  Or perhaps some scoundrel?  Without making any expressive
movement he wrung his loosely-clasped hands till the joints cracked.
He looked at her.  She was pretty.  Some low scoundrel who will cast
her off.  Some plausible vagabond . . . "You couldn't wait--eh?"

Again she made a slight negative sign.

"Why not?  What was the hurry?"  She cast down her eyes.  "It had to
be.  Yes.  It was sudden, but it had to be."

He leaned towards her, his mouth open, his eyes wild with virtuous
anger, but meeting the absolute candour of her raised glance threw
himself back into his corner again.

"So tremendously in love with each other--was that it?  Couldn't let
a father have his daughter all to himself even for a day after--
after such a separation.  And you know I never had anyone, I had no
friends.  What did I want with those people one meets in the City.
The best of them are ready to cut your throat.  Yes!  Business men,
gentlemen, any sort of men and women--out of spite, or to get
something.  Oh yes, they can talk fair enough if they think there's
something to be got out of you . . . "  His voice was a mere breath
yet every word came to Flora as distinctly as if charged with all
the moving power of passion . . . "My girl, I looked at them making
up to me and I would say to myself:  What do I care for all that!  I
am a business man.  I am the great Mr. de Barral (yes, yes, some of
them twisted their mouths at it, but I WAS the great Mr. de Barral)
and I have my little girl.  I wanted nobody and I have never had
anybody."

A true emotion had unsealed his lips but the words that came out of
them were no louder than the murmur of a light wind.  It died away.

"That's just it," said Flora de Barral under her breath.  Without
removing his eyes from her he took off his hat.  It was a tall hat.
The hat of the trial.  The hat of the thumb-nail sketches in the
illustrated papers.  One comes out in the same clothes, but
seclusion counts!  It is well known that lurid visions haunt
secluded men, monks, hermits--then why not prisoners?  De Barral the
convict took off the silk hat of the financier de Barral and
deposited it on the front seat of the cab.  Then he blew out his
cheeks.  He was red in the face.

"And then what happens?" he began again in his contained voice.
"Here I am, overthrown, broken by envy, malice and all
uncharitableness.  I come out--and what do I find?  I find that my
girl Flora has gone and married some man or other, perhaps a fool,
how do I know; or perhaps--anyway not good enough."

"Stop, papa."

"A silly love affair as likely as not," he continued monotonously,
his thin lips writhing between the ill-omened sunk corners.  "And a
very suspicious thing it is too, on the part of a loving daughter."

She tried to interrupt him but he went on till she actually clapped
her hand on his mouth.  He rolled his eyes a bit but when she took
her hand away he remained silent.

"Wait.  I must tell you . . .  And first of all, papa, understand
this, for everything's in that:  he is the most generous man in the
world.  He is . . . "

De Barral very still in his corner uttered with an effort "You are
in love with him."

"Papa!  He came to me.  I was thinking of you.  I had no eyes for
anybody.  I could no longer bear to think of you.  It was then that
he came.  Only then.  At that time when--when I was going to give
up."

She gazed into his faded blue eyes as if yearning to be understood,
to be given encouragement, peace--a word of sympathy.  He declared
without animation "I would like to break his neck."

She had the mental exclamation of the overburdened.

"Oh my God!" and watched him with frightened eyes.  But he did not
appear insane or in any other way formidable.  This comforted her.
The silence lasted for some little time.  Then suddenly he asked:

"What's your name then?"

For a moment in the profound trouble of the task before her she did
not understand what the question meant.  Then, her face faintly
flushing, she whispered:  "Anthony."

Her father, a red spot on each cheek, leaned his head back wearily
in the corner of the cab.

"Anthony.  What is he?  Where did he spring from?"

"Papa, it was in the country, on a road--"

He groaned, "On a road," and closed his eyes.

"It's too long to explain to you now.  We shall have lots of time.
There are things I could not tell you now.  But some day.  Some day.
For now nothing can part us.  Nothing.  We are safe as long as we
live--nothing can ever come between us."

"You are infatuated with the fellow," he remarked, without opening
his eyes.  And she said:  "I believe in him," in a low voice.  "You
and I must believe in him."

"Who the devil is he?"

"He's the brother of the lady--you know Mrs. Fyne, she knew mother--
who was so kind to me.  I was staying in the country, in a cottage,
with Mr. and Mrs. Fyne.  It was there that we met.  He came on a
visit.  He noticed me.  I--well--we are married now."

She was thankful that his eyes were shut.  It made it easier to talk
of the future she had arranged, which now was an unalterable thing.
She did not enter on the path of confidences.  That was impossible.
She felt he would not understand her.  She felt also that he
suffered.  Now and then a great anxiety gripped her heart with a
mysterious sense of guilt--as though she had betrayed him into the
hands of an enemy.  With his eyes shut he had an air of weary and
pious meditation.  She was a little afraid of it.  Next moment a
great pity for him filled her heart.  And in the background there
was remorse.  His face twitched now and then just perceptibly.  He
managed to keep his eyelids down till he heard that the 'husband'
was a sailor and that he, the father, was being taken straight on
board ship ready to sail away from this abominable world of
treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over the
blue sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and
spacious refuge for wounded souls.

Something like that.  Not the very words perhaps but such was the
general sense of her overwhelming argument--the argument of refuge.

I don't think she gave a thought to material conditions.  But as
part of that argument set forth breathlessly, as if she were afraid
that if she stopped for a moment she could never go on again, she
mentioned that generosity of a stormy type, which had come to her
from the sea, had caught her up on the brink of unmentionable
failure, had whirled her away in its first ardent gust and could be
trusted now, implicitly trusted, to carry them both, side by side,
into absolute safety.

She believed it, she affirmed it.  He understood thoroughly at last,
and at once the interior of that cab, of an aspect so pacific in the
eyes of the people on the pavements, became the scene of a great
agitation.  The generosity of Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet-
-affected the ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have
brought home to Flora de Barral the extreme arduousness of the
business of being a woman.  Being a woman is a terribly difficult
trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.  This man-
-the man inside the cab--cast oft his stiff placidity and behaved
like an animal.  I don't mean it in an offensive sense.  What he did
was to give way to an instinctive panic.  Like some wild creature
scared by the first touch of a net falling on its back, old de
Barral began to struggle, lank and angular, against the empty air--
as much of it as there was in the cab--with staring eyes and gasping
mouth from which his daughter shrank as far as she could in the
confined space.

"Stop the cab.  Stop him I tell you.  Let me get out!" were the
strangled exclamations she heard.  Why?  What for?  To do what?  He
would hear nothing.  She cried to him "Papa!  Papa!  What do you
want to do?"  And all she got from him was:  "Stop.  I must get out.
I want to think.  I must get out to think."

It was a mercy that he didn't attempt to open the door at once.  He
only stuck his head and shoulders out of the window crying to the
cabman.  She saw the consequences, the cab stopping, a crowd
collecting around a raving old gentleman . . . In this terrible
business of being a woman so full of fine shades, of delicate
perplexities (and very small rewards) you can never know what rough
work you may have to do, at any moment.  Without hesitation Flora
seized her father round the body and pulled back--being astonished
at the ease with which she managed to make him drop into his seat
again.  She kept him there resolutely with one hand pressed against
his breast, and leaning across him, she, in her turn put her head
and shoulders out of the window.  By then the cab had drawn up to
the curbstone and was stopped.  "No!  I've changed my mind.  Go on
please where you were told first.  To the docks."

She wondered at the steadiness of her own voice.  She heard a grunt
from the driver and the cab began to roll again.  Only then she sank
into her place keeping a watchful eye on her companion.  He was
hardly anything more by this time.  Except for her childhood's
impressions he was just--a man.  Almost a stranger.  How was one to
deal with him?  And there was the other too.  Also almost a
stranger.  The trade of being a woman was very difficult.  Too
difficult.  Flora closed her eyes saying to herself:  "If I think
too much about it I shall go mad."  And then opening them she asked
her father if the prospect of living always with his daughter and
being taken care of by her affection away from the world, which had
no honour to give to his grey hairs, was such an awful prospect.

"Tell me, is it so bad as that?"

She put that question sadly, without bitterness.  The famous--or
notorious--de Barral had lost his rigidity now.  He was bent.
Nothing more deplorably futile than a bent poker.  He said nothing.
She added gently, suppressing an uneasy remorseful sigh:

"And it might have been worse.  You might have found no one, no one
in all this town, no one in all the world, not even me!  Poor papa!"

She made a conscience-stricken movement towards him thinking:  "Oh!
I am horrible, I am horrible."  And old de Barral, scared, tired,
bewildered by the extraordinary shocks of his liberation, swayed
over and actually leaned his head on her shoulder, as if sorrowing
over his regained freedom.

The movement by itself was touching.  Flora supporting him lightly
imagined that he was crying; and at the thought that had she smashed
in a quarry that shoulder, together with some other of her bones,
this grey and pitiful head would have had nowhere to rest, she too
gave way to tears.  They flowed quietly, easing her overstrained
nerves.  Suddenly he pushed her away from him so that her head
struck the side of the cab, pushing himself away too from her as if
something had stung him.

All the warmth went out of her emotion.  The very last tears turned
cold on her cheek.  But their work was done.  She had found courage,
resolution, as women do, in a good cry.  With his hand covering the
upper part of his face whether to conceal his eyes or to shut out an
unbearable sight, he was stiffening up in his corner to his usual
poker-like consistency.  She regarded him in silence.  His thin
obstinate lips moved.  He uttered the name of the cousin--the man,
you remember, who did not approve of the Fynes, and whom rightly or
wrongly little Fyne suspected of interested motives, in view of de
Barral having possibly put away some plunder, somewhere before the
smash.

I may just as well tell you at once that I don't know anything more
of him.  But de Barral was of the opinion, speaking in his low voice
from under his hand, that this relation would have been only too
glad to have secured his guidance.

"Of course I could not come forward in my own name, or person.  But
the advice of a man of my experience is as good as a fortune to
anybody wishing to venture into finance.  The same sort of thing can
be done again."

He shuffled his feet a little, let fall his hand; and turning
carefully toward his daughter his puffy round cheeks, his round chin
resting on his collar, he bent on her the faded, resentful gaze of
his pale eyes, which were wet.

"The start is really only a matter of judicious advertising.
There's no difficulty.  And here you go and . . . "

He turned his face away.  "After all I am still de Barral, THE de
Barral.  Didn't you remember that?"

"Papa," said Flora; "listen.  It's you who must remember that there
is no longer a de Barral . . . "  He looked at her sideways
anxiously.  "There is Mr. Smith, whom no harm, no trouble, no wicked
lies of evil people can ever touch."

"Mr. Smith," he breathed out slowly.  "Where does he belong to?
There's not even a Miss Smith."

"There is your Flora."

"My Flora!  You went and . . . I can't bear to think of it.  It's
horrible."

"Yes.  It was horrible enough at times," she said with feeling,
because somehow, obscurely, what this man said appealed to her as if
it were her own thought clothed in an enigmatic emotion.  "I think
with shame sometimes how I . . . No not yet.  I shall not tell you.
At least not now."

The cab turned into the gateway of the dock.  Flora handed the tall
hat to her father.  "Here, papa.  And please be good.  I suppose you
love me.  If you don't, then I wonder who--"

He put the hat on, and stiffened hard in his corner, kept a sidelong
glance on his girl.  "Try to be nice for my sake.  Think of the
years I have been waiting for you.  I do indeed want support--and
peace.  A little peace."

She clasped his arm suddenly with both hands pressing with all her
might as if to crush the resistance she felt in him.  "I could not
have peace if I did not have you with me.  I won't let you go.  Not
after all I went through.  I won't."  The nervous force of her grip
frightened him a little.  She laughed suddenly.  "It's absurd.  It's
as if I were asking you for a sacrifice.  What am I afraid of?
Where could you go?  I mean now, to-day, to-night?  You can't tell
me.  Have you thought of it?  Well I have been thinking of it for
the last year.  Longer.  I nearly went mad trying to find out.  I
believe I was mad for a time or else I should never have thought . .
. "


"This was as near as she came to a confession," remarked Marlow in a
changed tone.  "The confession I mean of that walk to the top of the
quarry which she reproached herself with so bitterly.  And he made
of it what his fancy suggested.  It could not possibly be a just
notion.  The cab stopped alongside the ship and they got out in the
manner described by the sensitive Franklin.  I don't know if they
suspected each other's sanity at the end of that drive.  But that is
possible.  We all seem a little mad to each other; an excellent
arrangement for the bulk of humanity which finds in it an easy
motive of forgiveness.  Flora crossed the quarter-deck with a
rapidity born of apprehension.  It had grown unbearable.  She wanted
this business over.  She was thankful on looking back to see he was
following her.  "If he bolts away," she thought, "then I shall know
that I am of no account indeed!  That no one loves me, that words
and actions and protestations and everything in the world is false--
and I shall jump into the dock.  THAT at least won't lie."

Well I don't know.  If it had come to that she would have been most
likely fished out, what with her natural want of luck and the good
many people on the quay and on board.  And just where the Ferndale
was moored there hung on a wall (I know the berth) a coil of line, a
pole, and a life-buoy kept there on purpose to save people who
tumble into the dock.  It's not so easy to get away from life's
betrayals as she thought.  However it did not come to that.  He
followed her with his quick gliding walk.  Mr. Smith!  The liberated
convict de Barral passed off the solid earth for the last time,
vanished for ever, and there was Mr. Smith added to that world of
waters which harbours so many queer fishes.  An old gentleman in a
silk hat, darting wary glances.  He followed, because mere existence
has its claims which are obeyed mechanically.  I have no doubt he
presented a respectable figure.  Father-in-law.  Nothing more
respectable.  But he carried in his heart the confused pain of
dismay and affection, of involuntary repulsion and pity.  Very much
like his daughter.  Only in addition he felt a furious jealousy of
the man he was going to see.

A residue of egoism remains in every affection--even paternal.  And
this man in the seclusion of his prison had thought himself into
such a sense of ownership of that single human being he had to think
about, as may well be inconceivable to us who have not had to serve
a long (and wickedly unjust) sentence of penal servitude.  She was
positively the only thing, the one point where his thoughts found a
resting-place, for years.  She was the only outlet for his
imagination.  He had not much of that faculty to be sure, but there
was in it the force of concentration.  He felt outraged, and perhaps
it was an absurdity on his part, but I venture to suggest rather in
degree than in kind.  I have a notion that no usual, normal father
is pleased at parting with his daughter.  No.  Not even when he
rationally appreciates "Jane being taken off his hands" or perhaps
is able to exult at an excellent match.  At bottom, quite deep down,
down in the dark (in some cases only by digging), there is to be
found a certain repugnance . . .  With mothers of course it is
different.  Women are more loyal, not to each other, but to their
common femininity which they behold triumphant with a secret and
proud satisfaction.

The circumstances of that match added to Mr. Smith's indignation.
And if he followed his daughter into that ship's cabin it was as if
into a house of disgrace and only because he was still bewildered by
the suddenness of the thing.  His will, so long lying fallow, was
overborne by her determination and by a vague fear of that regained
liberty.

You will be glad to hear that Anthony, though he did shirk the
welcome on the quay, behaved admirably, with the simplicity of a man
who has no small meannesses and makes no mean reservations.  His
eyes did not flinch and his tongue did not falter.  He was, I have
it on the best authority, admirable in his earnestness, in his
sincerity and also in his restraint.  He was perfect.  Nevertheless
the vital force of his unknown individuality addressing him so
familiarly was enough to fluster Mr. Smith.  Flora saw her father
trembling in all his exiguous length, though he held himself stiffer
than ever if that was possible.  He muttered a little and at last
managed to utter, not loud of course but very distinctly:  "I am
here under protest," the corners of his mouth sunk disparagingly,
his eyes stony.  "I am here under protest.  I have been locked up by
a conspiracy.  I--"

He raised his hands to his forehead--his silk hat was on the table
rim upwards; he had put it there with a despairing gesture as he
came in--he raised his hands to his forehead.  "It seems to me
unfair.  I--"  He broke off again.  Anthony looked at Flora who
stood by the side of her father.

"Well, sir, you will soon get used to me.  Surely you and she must
have had enough of shore-people and their confounded half-and-half
ways to last you both for a life-time.  A particularly merciful lot
they are too.  You ask Flora.  I am alluding to my own sister, her
best friend, and not a bad woman either as they go."

The captain of the Ferndale checked himself.  "Lucky thing I was
there to step in.  I want you to make yourself at home, and before
long--"

The faded stare of the Great de Barral silenced Anthony by its
inexpressive fixity.  He signalled with his eyes to Flora towards
the door of the state-room fitted specially to receive Mr. Smith,
the free man.  She seized the free man's hat off the table and took
him caressingly under the arm.  "Yes!  This is home, come and see
your room, papa!"

Anthony himself threw open the door and Flora took care to shut it
carefully behind herself and her father.  "See," she began but
desisted because it was clear that he would look at none of the
contrivances for his comfort.  She herself had hardly seen them
before.  He was looking only at the new carpet and she waited till
he should raise his eyes.

He didn't do that but spoke in his usual voice.  "So this is your
husband, that . . . And I locked up!"

"Papa, what's the good of harping on that," she remonstrated no
louder.  "He is kind."

"And you went and . . . married him so that he should be kind to me.
Is that it?  How did you know that I wanted anybody to be kind to
me?"

"How strange you are!" she said thoughtfully.

"It's hard for a man who has gone through what I have gone through
to feel like other people.  Has that occurred to you?  . . . "  He
looked up at last . . .  "Mrs. Anthony, I can't bear the sight of
the fellow."  She met his eyes without flinching and he added, "You
want to go to him now."  His mild automatic manner seemed the effect
of tremendous self-restraint--and yet she remembered him always like
that.  She felt cold all over.

"Why, of course, I must go to him," she said with a slight start.

He gnashed his teeth at her and she went out.

Anthony had not moved from the spot.  One of his hands was resting
on the table.  She went up to him, stopped, then deliberately moved
still closer.  "Thank you, Roderick."

"You needn't thank me," he murmured.  "It's I who . . . "

"No, perhaps I needn't.  You do what you like.  But you are doing it
well."

He sighed then hardly above a whisper because they were near the
state-room door, "Upset, eh?"

She made no sign, no sound of any kind.  The thorough falseness of
the position weighed on them both.  But he was the braver of the
two.  "I dare say.  At first.  Did you think of telling him you were
happy?"

"He never asked me," she smiled faintly at him.  She was
disappointed by his quietness.  "I did not say more than I was
absolutely obliged to say--of myself."  She was beginning to be
irritated with this man a little.  "I told him I had been very
lucky," she said suddenly despondent, missing Anthony's masterful
manner, that something arbitrary and tender which, after the first
scare, she had accustomed herself to look forward to with
pleasurable apprehension.  He was contemplating her rather blankly.
She had not taken off her outdoor things, hat, gloves.  She was like
a caller.  And she had a movement suggesting the end of a not very
satisfactory business call.  "Perhaps it would be just as well if we
went ashore.  Time yet."

He gave her a glimpse of his unconstrained self in the low vehement
"You dare!" which sprang to his lips and out of them with a most
menacing inflexion.

"You dare . . . What's the matter now?"

These last words were shot out not at her but at some target behind
her back.  Looking over her shoulder she saw the bald head with
black bunches of hair of the congested and devoted Franklin (he had
his cap in his hand) gazing sentimentally from the saloon doorway
with his lobster eyes.  He was heard from the distance in a tone of
injured innocence reporting that the berthing master was alongside
and that he wanted to move the ship into the basin before the crew
came on board.

His captain growled "Well, let him," and waved away the ulcerated
and pathetic soul behind these prominent eyes which lingered on the
offensive woman while the mate backed out slowly.  Anthony turned to
Flora.

"You could not have meant it.  You are as straight as they make
them."

"I am trying to be."

"Then don't joke in that way.  Think of what would become of--me."

"Oh yes.  I forgot.  No, I didn't mean it.  It wasn't a joke.  It
was forgetfulness.  You wouldn't have been wronged.  I couldn't have
gone.  I--I am too tired."

He saw she was swaying where she stood and restrained himself
violently from taking her into his arms, his frame trembling with
fear as though he had been tempted to an act of unparalleled
treachery.  He stepped aside and lowering his eyes pointed to the
door of the stern-cabin.  It was only after she passed by him that
he looked up and thus he did not see the angry glance she gave him
before she moved on.  He looked after her.  She tottered slightly
just before reaching the door and flung it to behind her nervously.

Anthony--he had felt this crash as if the door had been slammed
inside his very breast--stood for a moment without moving and then
shouted for Mrs. Brown.  This was the steward's wife, his lucky
inspiration to make Flora comfortable.  "Mrs. Brown!  Mrs. Brown!"
At last she appeared from somewhere.  "Mrs. Anthony has come on
board.  Just gone into the cabin.  Hadn't you better see if you can
be of any assistance?"

"Yes, sir."

And again he was alone with the situation he had created in the
hardihood and inexperience of his heart.  He thought he had better
go on deck.  In fact he ought to have been there before.  At any
rate it would be the usual thing for him to be on deck.  But a sound
of muttering and of faint thuds somewhere near by arrested his
attention.  They proceeded from Mr. Smith's room, he perceived.  It
was very extraordinary.  "He's talking to himself," he thought.  "He
seems to be thumping the bulkhead with his fists--or his head."

Anthony's eyes grew big with wonder while he listened to these
noises.  He became so attentive that he did not notice Mrs. Brown
till she actually stopped before him for a moment to say:

"Mrs. Anthony doesn't want any assistance, sir."


This was you understand the voyage before Mr. Powell--young Powell
then--joined the Ferndale; chance having arranged that he should get
his start in life in that particular ship of all the ships then in
the port of London.  The most unrestful ship that ever sailed out of
any port on earth.  I am not alluding to her sea-going qualities.
Mr. Powell tells me she was as steady as a church.  I mean unrestful
in the sense, for instance in which this planet of ours is
unrestful--a matter of an uneasy atmosphere disturbed by passions,
jealousies, loves, hates and the troubles of transcendental good
intentions, which, though ethically valuable, I have no doubt cause
often more unhappiness than the plots of the most evil tendency.
For those who refuse to believe in chance he, I mean Mr. Powell,
must have been obviously predestined to add his native ingenuousness
to the sum of all the others carried by the honest ship Ferndale.
He was too ingenuous.  Everybody on board was, exception being made
of Mr. Smith who, however, was simple enough in his way, with that
terrible simplicity of the fixed idea, for which there is also
another name men pronounce with dread and aversion.  His fixed idea
was to save his girl from the man who had possessed himself of her
(I use these words on purpose because the image they suggest was
clearly in Mr. Smith's mind), possessed himself unfairly of her
while he, the father, was locked up.

"I won't rest till I have got you away from that man," he would
murmur to her after long periods of contemplation.  We know from
Powell how he used to sit on the skylight near the long deck-chair
on which Flora was reclining, gazing into her face from above with
an air of guardianship and investigation at the same time.

It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event
rationally.  The avatar of de Barral into Mr. Smith had not been
effected without a shock--that much one must recognize.  It may be
that it drove all practical considerations out of his mind, making
room for awful and precise visions which nothing could dislodge
afterwards.

And it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent tenacity, of
the man who had persisted in throwing millions of other people's
thrift into the Lone Valley Railway, the Labrador Docks, the Spotted
Leopard Copper Mine, and other grotesque speculations exposed during
the famous de Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled
with bursts of laughter.  For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy
finds its last refuge in our deadly serious world.  As to tears and
lamentations, these were not heard in the august precincts of
comedy, because they were indulged in privately in several thousand
homes, where, with a fine dramatic effect, hunger had taken the
place of Thrift.

But there was one at least who did not laugh in court.  That person
was the accused.  The notorious de Barral did not laugh because he
was indignant.  He was impervious to words, to facts, to inferences.
It would have been impossible to make him see his guilt or his
folly--either by evidence or argument--if anybody had tried to
argue.

Neither did his daughter Flora try to argue with him.  The cruelty
of her position was so great, its complications so thorny, if I may
express myself so, that a passive attitude was yet her best refuge--
as it had been before her of so many women.

For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore
menacing.  It makes one pause.  A woman may be a fool, a sleepy
fool, an agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even
be simply stupid.  But she is never dense.  She's never made of wood
through and through as some men are.  There is in woman always,
somewhere, a spring.  Whatever men don't know about women (and it
may be a lot or it may be very little) men and even fathers do know
that much.  And that is why so many men are afraid of them.

Mr. Smith I believe was afraid of his daughter's quietness though of
course he interpreted it in his own way.

He would, as Mr. Powell depicts, sit on the skylight and bend over
the reclining girl, wondering what there was behind the lost gaze
under the darkened eyelids in the still eyes.  He would look and
look and then he would say, whisper rather, it didn't take much for
his voice to drop to a mere breath--he would declare, transferring
his faded stare to the horizon, that he would never rest till he had
"got her away from that man."

"You don't know what you are saying, papa."

She would try not to show her weariness, the nervous strain of these
two men's antagonism around her person which was the cause of her
languid attitudes.  For as a matter of fact the sea agreed with her.

As likely as not Anthony would be walking on the other side of the
deck.  The strain was making him restless.  He couldn't sit still
anywhere.  He had tried shutting himself up in his cabin; but that
was no good.  He would jump up to rush on deck and tramp, tramp up
and down that poop till he felt ready to drop, without being able to
wear down the agitation of his soul, generous indeed, but weighted
by its envelope of blood and muscle and bone; handicapped by the
brain creating precise images and everlastingly speculating,
speculating--looking out for signs, watching for symptoms.

And Mr. Smith with a slight backward jerk of his small head at the
footsteps on the other side of the skylight would insist in his
awful, hopelessly gentle voice that he knew very well what he was
saying.  Hadn't she given herself to that man while he was locked
up.

"Helpless, in jail, with no one to think of, nothing to look forward
to, but my daughter.  And then when they let me out at last I find
her gone--for it amounts to this.  Sold.  Because you've sold
yourself; you know you have."

With his round unmoved face, a lot of fine white hair waving in the
wind-eddies of the spanker, his glance levelled over the sea he
seemed to be addressing the universe across her reclining form.  She
would protest sometimes.

"I wish you would not talk like this, papa.  You are only tormenting
me, and tormenting yourself."

"Yes, I am tormented enough," he admitted meaningly.  But it was not
talking about it that tormented him.  It was thinking of it.  And to
sit and look at it was worse for him than it possibly could have
been for her to go and give herself up, bad as that must have been.

"For of course you suffered.  Don't tell me you didn't?  You must
have."

She had renounced very soon all attempts at protests.  It was
useless.  It might have made things worse; and she did not want to
quarrel with her father, the only human being that really cared for
her, absolutely, evidently, completely--to the end.  There was in
him no pity, no generosity, nothing whatever of these fine things--
it was for her, for her very own self such as it was, that this
human being cared.  This certitude would have made her put up with
worse torments.  For, of course, she too was being tormented.  She
felt also helpless, as if the whole enterprise had been too much for
her.  This is the sort of conviction which makes for quietude.  She
was becoming a fatalist.

What must have been rather appalling were the necessities of daily
life, the intercourse of current trifles.  That naturally had to go
on.  They wished good morning to each other, they sat down together
to meals--and I believe there would be a game of cards now and then
in the evening, especially at first.  What frightened her most was
the duplicity of her father, at least what looked like duplicity,
when she remembered his persistent, insistent whispers on deck.
However her father was a taciturn person as far back as she could
remember him best--on the Parade.  It was she who chattered, never
troubling herself to discover whether he was pleased or displeased.
And now she couldn't fathom his thoughts.  Neither did she chatter
to him.  Anthony with a forced friendly smile as if frozen to his
lips seemed only too thankful at not being made to speak.  Mr. Smith
sometimes forgot himself while studying his hand so long that Flora
had to recall him to himself by a murmured "Papa--your lead."  Then
he apologized by a faint as if inward ejaculation "Beg your pardon,
Captain."  Naturally she addressed Anthony as Roderick and he
addressed her as Flora.  This was all the acting that was necessary
to judge from the wincing twitch of the old man's mouth at every
uttered "Flora."  On hearing the rare "Rodericks" he had sometimes a
scornful grimace as faint and faded and colourless as his whole
stiff personality.

He would be the first to retire.  He was not infirm.  With him too
the life on board ship seemed to agree; but from a sense of duty, of
affection, or to placate his hidden fury, his daughter always
accompanied him to his state-room "to make him comfortable."  She
lighted his lamp, helped him into his dressing-gown or got him a
book from a bookcase fitted in there--but this last rarely, because
Mr. Smith used to declare "I am no reader" with something like pride
in his low tones.  Very often after kissing her good-night on the
forehead he would treat her to some such fretful remark:  "It's like
being in jail--'pon my word.  I suppose that man is out there
waiting for you.  Head jailer!  Ough!"

She would smile vaguely; murmur a conciliatory "How absurd."  But
once, out of patience, she said quite sharply "Leave off.  It hurts
me.  One would think you hate me."

"It isn't you I hate," he went on monotonously breathing at her.
"No, it isn't you.  But if I saw that you loved that man I think I
could hate you too."

That word struck straight at her heart.  "You wouldn't be the first
then," she muttered bitterly.  But he was busy with his fixed idea
and uttered an awfully equable "But you don't!  Unfortunate girl!"

She looked at him steadily for a time then said "Good-night, papa."

As a matter of fact Anthony very seldom waited for her alone at the
table with the scattered cards, glasses, water-jug, bottles and
soon.  He took no more opportunities to be alone with her than was
absolutely necessary for the edification of Mrs. Brown.  Excellent,
faithful woman; the wife of his still more excellent and faithful
steward.  And Flora wished all these excellent people, devoted to
Anthony, she wished them all further; and especially the nice,
pleasant-spoken Mrs. Brown with her beady, mobile eyes and her "Yes
certainly, ma'am," which seemed to her to have a mocking sound.  And
so this short trip--to the Western Islands only--came to an end.  It
was so short that when young Powell joined the Ferndale by a
memorable stroke of chance, no more than seven months had elapsed
since the--let us say the liberation of the convict de Barral and
his avatar into Mr. Smith.


For the time the ship was loading in London Anthony took a cottage
near a little country station in Essex, to house Mr. Smith and Mr.
Smith's daughter.  It was altogether his idea.  How far it was
necessary for Mr. Smith to seek rural retreat I don't know.  Perhaps
to some extent it was a judicious arrangement.  There were some
obligations incumbent on the liberated de Barral (in connection with
reporting himself to the police I imagine) which Mr. Smith was not
anxious to perform.  De Barral had to vanish; the theory was that de
Barral had vanished, and it had to be upheld.  Poor Flora liked the
country, even if the spot had nothing more to recommend it than its
retired character.

Now and then Captain Anthony ran down; but as the station was a real
wayside one, with no early morning trains up, he could never stay
for more than the afternoon.  It appeared that he must sleep in town
so as to be early on board his ship.  The weather was magnificent
and whenever the captain of the Ferndale was seen on a brilliant
afternoon coming down the road Mr. Smith would seize his stick and
toddle off for a solitary walk.  But whether he would get tired or
because it gave him some satisfaction to see "that man" go away--or
for some cunning reason of his own, he was always back before the
hour of Anthony's departure.  On approaching the cottage he would
see generally "that man" lying on the grass in the orchard at some
distance from his daughter seated in a chair brought out of the
cottage's living room.  Invariably Mr. Smith made straight for them
and as invariably had the feeling that his approach was not
disturbing a very intimate conversation.  He sat with them, through
a silent hour or so, and then it would be time for Anthony to go.
Mr. Smith, perhaps from discretion, would casually vanish a minute
or so before, and then watch through the diamond panes of an
upstairs room "that man" take a lingering look outside the gate at
the invisible Flora, lift his hat, like a caller, and go off down
the road.  Then only Mr. Smith would join his daughter again.

These were the bad moments for her.  Not always, of course, but
frequently.  It was nothing extraordinary to hear Mr. Smith begin
gently with some observation like this:

"That man is getting tired of you."

He would never pronounce Anthony's name.  It was always "that man."

Generally she would remain mute with wide open eyes gazing at
nothing between the gnarled fruit trees.  Once, however, she got up
and walked into the cottage.  Mr. Smith followed her carrying the
chair.  He banged it down resolutely and in that smooth inexpressive
tone so many ears used to bend eagerly to catch when it came from
the Great de Barral he said:

"Let's get away."

She had the strength of mind not to spin round.  On the contrary she
went on to a shabby bit of a mirror on the wall.  In the greenish
glass her own face looked far off like the livid face of a drowned
corpse at the bottom of a pool.  She laughed faintly.

"I tell you that man's getting--"

"Papa," she interrupted him.  "I have no illusions as to myself.  It
has happened to me before but--"

Her voice failing her suddenly her father struck in with quite an
unwonted animation.  "Let's make a rush for it, then."

Having mastered both her fright and her bitterness, she turned
round, sat down and allowed her astonishment to be seen.  Mr. Smith
sat down too, his knees together and bent at right angles, his thin
legs parallel to each other and his hands resting on the arms of the
wooden arm-chair.  His hair had grown long, his head was set
stiffly, there was something fatuously venerable in his aspect.

"You can't care for him.  Don't tell me.  I understand your motive.
And I have called you an unfortunate girl.  You are that as much as
if you had gone on the streets.  Yes.  Don't interrupt me, Flora.  I
was everlastingly being interrupted at the trial and I can't stand
it any more.  I won't be interrupted by my own child.  And when I
think that it is on the very day before they let me out that you . .
. "

He had wormed this fact out of her by that time because Flora had
got tired of evading the question.  He had been very much struck and
distressed.  Was that the trust she had in him?  Was that a proof of
confidence and love?  The very day before!  Never given him even
half a chance.  It was as at the trial.  They never gave him a
chance.  They would not give him time.  And there was his own
daughter acting exactly as his bitterest enemies had done.  Not
giving him time!

The monotony of that subdued voice nearly lulled her dismay to
sleep.  She listened to the unavoidable things he was saying.

"But what induced that man to marry you?  Of course he's a
gentleman.  One can see that.  And that makes it worse.  Gentlemen
don't understand anything about city affairs--finance.  Why!--the
people who started the cry after me were a firm of gentlemen.  The
counsel, the judge--all gentlemen--quite out of it!  No notion of .
. . And then he's a sailor too.  Just a skipper--"

"My grandfather was nothing else," she interrupted.  And he made an
angular gesture of impatience.

"Yes.  But what does a silly sailor know of business?  Nothing.  No
conception.  He can have no idea of what it means to be the daughter
of Mr. de Barral--even after his enemies had smashed him.  What on
earth induced him--"

She made a movement because the level voice was getting on her
nerves.  And he paused, but only to go on again in the same tone
with the remark:

"Of course you are pretty.  And that's why you are lost--like many
other poor girls.  Unfortunate is the word for you."

She said:  "It may be.  Perhaps it is the right word; but listen,
papa.  I mean to be honest."

He began to exhale more speeches.

"Just the sort of man to get tired and then leave you and go off
with his beastly ship.  And anyway you can never be happy with him.
Look at his face.  I want to save you.  You see I was not perhaps a
very good husband to your poor mother.  She would have done better
to have left me long before she died.  I have been thinking it all
over.  I won't have you unhappy."

He ran his eyes over her with an attention which was surprisingly
noticeable.  Then said, "H'm!  Yes.  Let's clear out before it is
too late.  Quietly, you and I."

She said as if inspired and with that calmness which despair often
gives:  "There is no money to go away with, papa."

He rose up straightening himself as though he were a hinged figure.
She said decisively:

"And of course you wouldn't think of deserting me, papa?"

"Of course not," sounded his subdued tone.  And he left her, gliding
away with his walk which Mr. Powell described to me as being as
level and wary as his voice.  He walked as if he were carrying a
glass full of water on his head.

Flora naturally said nothing to Anthony of that edifying
conversation.  His generosity might have taken alarm at it and she
did not want to be left behind to manage her father alone.  And
moreover she was too honest.  She would be honest at whatever cost.
She would not be the first to speak.  Never.  And the thought came
into her head:  "I am indeed an unfortunate creature!"

It was by the merest coincidence that Anthony coming for the
afternoon two days later had a talk with Mr. Smith in the orchard.
Flora for some reason or other had left them for a moment; and
Anthony took that opportunity to be frank with Mr. Smith.  He said:
"It seems to me, sir, that you think Flora has not done very well
for herself.  Well, as to that I can't say anything.  All I want you
to know is that I have tried to do the right thing."  And then he
explained that he had willed everything he was possessed of to her.
"She didn't tell you, I suppose?"

Mr. Smith shook his head slightly.  And Anthony, trying to be
friendly, was just saying that he proposed to keep the ship away
from home for at least two years.  "I think, sir, that from every
point of view it would be best," when Flora came back and the
conversation, cut short in that direction, languished and died.
Later in the evening, after Anthony had been gone for hours, on the
point of separating for the night, Mr. Smith remarked suddenly to
his daughter after a long period of brooding:

"A will is nothing.  One tears it up.  One makes another."  Then
after reflecting for a minute he added unemotionally:

"One tells lies about it."

Flora, patient, steeled against every hurt and every disgust to the
point of wondering at herself, said:  "You push your dislike of--of-
-Roderick too far, papa.  You have no regard for me.  You hurt me."

He, as ever inexpressive to the point of terrifying her sometimes by
the contrast of his placidity and his words, turned away from her a
pair of faded eyes.

"I wonder how far your dislike goes," he began.  "His very name
sticks in your throat.  I've noticed it.  It hurts me.  What do you
think of that?  You might remember that you are not the only person
that's hurt by your folly, by your hastiness, by your recklessness."
He brought back his eyes to her face.  "And the very day before they
were going to let me out."  His feeble voice failed him altogether,
the narrow compressed lips only trembling for a time before he added
with that extraordinary equanimity of tone, "I call it sinful."

Flora made no answer.  She judged it simpler, kinder and certainly
safer to let him talk himself out.  This, Mr. Smith, being naturally
taciturn, never took very long to do.  And we must not imagine that
this sort of thing went on all the time.  She had a few good days in
that cottage.  The absence of Anthony was a relief and his visits
were pleasurable.  She was quieter.  He was quieter too.  She was
almost sorry when the time to join the ship arrived.  It was a
moment of anguish, of excitement; they arrived at the dock in the
evening and Flora after "making her father comfortable" according to
established usage lingered in the state-room long enough to notice
that he was surprised.  She caught his pale eyes observing her quite
stonily.  Then she went out after a cheery good-night.

Contrary to her hopes she found Anthony yet in the saloon.  Sitting
in his arm-chair at the head of the table he was picking up some
business papers which he put hastily in his breast pocket and got
up.  He asked her if her day, travelling up to town and then doing
some shopping, had tired her.  She shook her head.  Then he wanted
to know in a half-jocular way how she felt about going away, and for
a long voyage this time.

"Does it matter how I feel?" she asked in a tone that cast a gloom
over his face.  He answered with repressed violence which she did
not expect:

"No, it does not matter, because I cannot go without you.  I've told
you . . . You know it.  You don't think I could."

"I assure you I haven't the slightest wish to evade my obligations,"
she said steadily.  "Even if I could.  Even if I dared, even if I
had to die for it!"

He looked thunderstruck.  They stood facing each other at the end of
the saloon.  Anthony stuttered.  "Oh no.  You won't die.  You don't
mean it.  You have taken kindly to the sea."

She laughed, but she felt angry.

"No, I don't mean it.  I tell you I don't mean to evade my
obligations.  I shall live on . . . feeling a little crushed,
nevertheless."

"Crushed!" he repeated.  "What's crushing you?"

"Your magnanimity," she said sharply.  But her voice was softened
after a time.  "Yet I don't know.  There is a perfection in it--do
you understand me, Roderick?--which makes it almost possible to
bear."

He sighed, looked away, and remarked that it was time to put out the
lamp in the saloon.  The permission was only till ten o'clock.

"But you needn't mind that so much in your cabin.  Just see that the
curtains of the ports are drawn close and that's all.  The steward
might have forgotten to do it.  He lighted your reading lamp in
there before he went ashore for a last evening with his wife.  I
don't know if it was wise to get rid of Mrs. Brown.  You will have
to look after yourself, Flora."

He was quite anxious; but Flora as a matter of fact congratulated
herself on the absence of Mrs. Brown.  No sooner had she closed the
door of her state-room than she murmured fervently, "Yes!  Thank
goodness, she is gone."  There would be no gentle knock, followed by
her appearance with her equivocal stare and the intolerable:  "Can I
do anything for you, ma'am?" which poor Flora had learned to fear
and hate more than any voice or any words on board that ship--her
only refuge from the world which had no use for her, for her
imperfections and for her troubles.


Mrs. Brown had been very much vexed at her dismissal.  The Browns
were a childless couple and the arrangement had suited them
perfectly.  Their resentment was very bitter.  Mrs. Brown had to
remain ashore alone with her rage, but the steward was nursing his
on board.  Poor Flora had no greater enemy, the aggrieved mate had
no greater sympathizer.  And Mrs. Brown, with a woman's quick power
of observation and inference (the putting of two and two together)
had come to a certain conclusion which she had imparted to her
husband before leaving the ship.  The morose steward permitted
himself once to make an allusion to it in Powell's hearing.  It was
in the officers' mess-room at the end of a meal while he lingered
after putting a fruit pie on the table.  He and the chief mate
started a dialogue about the alarming change in the captain, the
sallow steward looking down with a sinister frown, Franklin rolling
upwards his eyes, sentimental in a red face.  Young Powell had heard
a lot of that sort of thing by that time.  It was growing
monotonous; it had always sounded to him a little absurd.  He struck
in impatiently with the remark that such lamentations over a man
merely because he had taken a wife seemed to him like lunacy.

Franklin muttered, "Depends on what the wife is up to."  The steward
leaning against the bulkhead near the door glowered at Powell, that
newcomer, that ignoramus, that stranger without right or privileges.
He snarled:

"Wife!  Call her a wife, do you?"

"What the devil do you mean by this?" exclaimed young Powell.

"I know what I know.  My old woman has not been six months on board
for nothing.  You had better ask her when we get back."

And meeting sullenly the withering stare of Mr. Powell the steward
retreated backwards.

Our young friend turned at once upon the mate.  "And you let that
confounded bottle-washer talk like this before you, Mr. Franklin.
Well, I am astonished."

"Oh, it isn't what you think.  It isn't what you think."  Mr.
Franklin looked more apoplectic than ever.  "If it comes to that I
could astonish you.  But it's no use.  I myself can hardly . . . You
couldn't understand.  I hope you won't try to make mischief.  There
was a time, young fellow, when I would have dared any man--any man,
you hear?--to make mischief between me and Captain Anthony.  But not
now.  Not now.  There's a change!  Not in me though . . . "

Young Powell rejected with indignation any suggestion of making
mischief.  "Who do you take me for?" he cried.  "Only you had better
tell that steward to be careful what he says before me or I'll spoil
his good looks for him for a month and will leave him to explain the
why of it to the captain the best way he can."

This speech established Powell as a champion of Mrs. Anthony.
Nothing more bearing on the question was ever said before him.  He
did not care for the steward's black looks; Franklin, never
conversational even at the best of times and avoiding now the only
topic near his heart, addressed him only on matters of duty.  And
for that, too, Powell cared very little.  The woes of the apoplectic
mate had begun to bore him long before.  Yet he felt lonely a bit at
times.  Therefore the little intercourse with Mrs. Anthony either in
one dog-watch or the other was something to be looked forward to.
The captain did not mind it.  That was evident from his manner.  One
night he inquired (they were then alone on the poop) what they had
been talking about that evening?  Powell had to confess that it was
about the ship.  Mrs. Anthony had been asking him questions.

"Takes interest--eh?" jerked out the captain moving rapidly up and
down the weather side of the poop.

"Yes, sir.  Mrs. Anthony seems to get hold wonderfully of what one's
telling her."

"Sailor's granddaughter.  One of the old school.  Old sea-dog of the
best kind, I believe," ejaculated the captain, swinging past his
motionless second officer and leaving the words behind him like a
trail of sparks succeeded by a perfect conversational darkness,
because, for the next two hours till he left the deck, he didn't
open his lips again.

On another occasion . . . we mustn't forget that the ship had
crossed the line and was adding up south latitude every day by then
. . . on another occasion, about seven in the evening, Powell on
duty, heard his name uttered softly in the companion.  The captain
was on the stairs, thin-faced, his eyes sunk, on his arm a Shetland
wool wrap.

"Mr. Powell--here."

"Yes, sir."

"Give this to Mrs. Anthony.  Evenings are getting chilly."

And the haggard face sank out of sight.  Mrs. Anthony was surprised
on seeing the shawl.

"The captain wants you to put this on," explained young Powell, and
as she raised herself in her seat he dropped it on her shoulders.
She wrapped herself up closely.

"Where was the captain?" she asked.

"He was in the companion.  Called me on purpose," said Powell, and
then retreated discreetly, because she looked as though she didn't
want to talk any more that evening.  Mr. Smith--the old gentleman--
was as usual sitting on the skylight near her head, brooding over
the long chair but by no means inimical, as far as his unreadable
face went, to those conversations of the two youngest people on
board.  In fact they seemed to give him some pleasure.  Now and then
he would raise his faded china eyes to the animated face of Mr.
Powell thoughtfully.  When the young sailor was by, the old man
became less rigid, and when his daughter, on rare occasions, smiled
at some artless tale of Mr. Powell, the inexpressive face of Mr.
Smith reflected dimly that flash of evanescent mirth.  For Mr.
Powell had come now to entertain his captain's wife with anecdotes
from the not very distant past when he was a boy, on board various
ships,--funny things do happen on board ship.  Flora was quite
surprised at times to find herself amused.  She was even heard to
laugh twice in the course of a month.  It was not a loud sound but
it was startling enough at the after-end of the Ferndale where low
tones or silence were the rule.  The second time this happened the
captain himself must have been startled somewhere down below;
because he emerged from the depths of his unobtrusive existence and
began his tramping on the opposite side of the poop.

Almost immediately he called his young second officer over to him.
This was not done in displeasure.  The glance he fastened on Mr.
Powell conveyed a sort of approving wonder.  He engaged him in
desultory conversation as if for the only purpose of keeping a man
who could provoke such a sound, near his person.  Mr. Powell felt
himself liked.  He felt it.  Liked by that haggard, restless man who
threw at him disconnected phrases to which his answers were, "Yes,
sir," "No, sir," "Oh, certainly," "I suppose so, sir,"--and might
have been clearly anything else for all the other cared.

It was then, Mr. Powell told me, that he discovered in himself an
already old-established liking for Captain Anthony.  He also felt
sorry for him without being able to discover the origins of that
sympathy of which he had become so suddenly aware.

Meantime Mr. Smith, bending forward stiffly as though he had a
hinged back, was speaking to his daughter.

She was a child no longer.  He wanted to know if she believed in--in
hell.  In eternal punishment?

His peculiar voice, as if filtered through cotton-wool was inaudible
on the other side of the deck.  Poor Flora, taken very much
unawares, made an inarticulate murmur, shook her head vaguely, and
glanced in the direction of the pacing Anthony who was not looking
her way.  It was no use glancing in that direction.  Of young
Powell, leaning against the mizzen-mast and facing his captain she
could only see the shoulder and part of a blue serge back.

And the unworried, unaccented voice of her father went on tormenting
her.

"You see, you must understand.  When I came out of jail it was with
joy.  That is, my soul was fairly torn in two--but anyway to see you
happy--I had made up my mind to that.  Once I could be sure that you
were happy then of course I would have had no reason to care for
life--strictly speaking--which is all right for an old man; though
naturally . . . no reason to wish for death either.  But this sort
of life!  What sense, what meaning, what value has it either for you
or for me?  It's just sitting down to look at the death, that's
coming, coming.  What else is it?  I don't know how you can put up
with that.  I don't think you can stand it for long.  Some day you
will jump overboard."

Captain Anthony had stopped for a moment staring ahead from the
break of the poop, and poor Flora sent at his back a look of
despairing appeal which would have moved a heart of stone.  But as
though she had done nothing he did not stir in the least.  She got
out of the long chair and went towards the companion.  Her father
followed carrying a few small objects, a handbag, her handkerchief,
a book.  They went down together.

It was only then that Captain Anthony turned, looked at the place
they had vacated and resumed his tramping, but not his desultory
conversation with his second officer.  His nervous exasperation had
grown so much that now very often he used to lose control of his
voice.  If he did not watch himself it would suddenly die in his
throat.  He had to make sure before he ventured on the simplest
saying, an order, a remark on the wind, a simple good-morning.
That's why his utterance was abrupt, his answers to people
startlingly brusque and often not forthcoming at all.

It happens to the most resolute of men to find himself at grips not
only with unknown forces, but with a well-known force the real might
of which he had not understood.  Anthony had discovered that he was
not the proud master but the chafing captive of his generosity.  It
rose in front of him like a wall which his respect for himself
forbade him to scale.  He said to himself:  "Yes, I was a fool--but
she has trusted me!"  Trusted!  A terrible word to any man somewhat
exceptional in a world in which success has never been found in
renunciation and good faith.  And it must also be said, in order not
to make Anthony more stupidly sublime than he was, that the
behaviour of Flora kept him at a distance.  The girl was afraid to
add to the exasperation of her father.  It was her unhappy lot to be
made more wretched by the only affection which she could not
suspect.  She could not be angry with it, however, and out of
deference for that exaggerated sentiment she hardly dared to look
otherwise than by stealth at the man whose masterful compassion had
carried her off.  And quite unable to understand the extent of
Anthony's delicacy, she said to herself that "he didn't care."  He
probably was beginning at bottom to detest her--like the governess,
like the maiden lady, like the German woman, like Mrs. Fyne, like
Mr. Fyne--only he was extraordinary, he was generous.  At the same
time she had moments of irritation.  He was violent, headstrong--
perhaps stupid.  Well, he had had his way.

A man who has had his way is seldom happy, for generally he finds
that the way does not lead very far on this earth of desires which
can never be fully satisfied.  Anthony had entered with extreme
precipitation the enchanted gardens of Armida saying to himself "At
last!"  As to Armida, herself, he was not going to offer her any
violence.  But now he had discovered that all the enchantment was in
Armida herself, in Armida's smiles.  This Armida did not smile.  She
existed, unapproachable, behind the blank wall of his renunciation.
His force, fit for action, experienced the impatience, the
indignation, almost the despair of his vitality arrested, bound,
stilled, progressively worn down, frittered away by Time; by that
force blind and insensible, which seems inert and yet uses one's
life up by its imperceptible action, dropping minute after minute on
one's living heart like drops of water wearing down a stone.

He upbraided himself.  What else could he have expected?  He had
rushed in like a ruffian; he had dragged the poor defenceless thing
by the hair of her head, as it were, on board that ship.  It was
really atrocious.  Nothing assured him that his person could be
attractive to this or any other woman.  And his proceedings were
enough in themselves to make anyone odious.  He must have been
bereft of his senses.  She must fatally detest and fear him.
Nothing could make up for such brutality.  And yet somehow he
resented this very attitude which seemed to him completely
justifiable.  Surely he was not too monstrous (morally) to be looked
at frankly sometimes.  But no!  She wouldn't.  Well, perhaps, some
day . . . Only he was not going ever to attempt to beg for
forgiveness.  With the repulsion she felt for his person she would
certainly misunderstand the most guarded words, the most careful
advances.  Never!  Never!

It would occur to Anthony at the end of such meditations that death
was not an unfriendly visitor after all.  No wonder then that even
young Powell, his faculties having been put on the alert, began to
think that there was something unusual about the man who had given
him his chance in life.  Yes, decidedly, his captain was "strange."
There was something wrong somewhere, he said to himself, never
guessing that his young and candid eyes were in the presence of a
passion profound, tyrannical and mortal, discovering its own
existence, astounded at feeling itself helpless and dismayed at
finding itself incurable.

Powell had never before felt this mysterious uneasiness so strongly
as on that evening when it had been his good fortune to make Mrs.
Anthony laugh a little by his artless prattle.  Standing out of the
way, he had watched his captain walk the weather-side of the poop,
he took full cognizance of his liking for that inexplicably strange
man and saw him swerve towards the companion and go down below with
sympathetic if utterly uncomprehending eyes.

Shortly afterwards, Mr. Smith came up alone and manifested a desire
for a little conversation.  He, too, if not so mysterious as the
captain, was not very comprehensible to Mr. Powell's uninformed
candour.  He often favoured thus the second officer.  His talk
alluded somewhat enigmatically and often without visible connection
to Mr. Powell's friendliness towards himself and his daughter.  "For
I am well aware that we have no friends on board this ship, my dear
young man," he would add, "except yourself.  Flora feels that too."

And Mr. Powell, flattered and embarrassed, could but emit a vague
murmur of protest.  For the statement was true in a sense, though
the fact was in itself insignificant.  The feelings of the ship's
company could not possibly matter to the captain's wife and to Mr.
Smith--her father.  Why the latter should so often allude to it was
what surprised our Mr. Powell.  This was by no means the first
occasion.  More like the twentieth rather.  And in his weak voice,
with his monotonous intonation, leaning over the rail and looking at
the water the other continued this conversation, or rather his
remarks, remarks of such a monstrous nature that Mr. Powell had no
option but to accept them for gruesome jesting.

"For instance," said Mr. Smith, "that mate, Franklin, I believe he
would just as soon see us both overboard as not."

"It's not so bad as that," laughed Mr. Powell, feeling
uncomfortable, because his mind did not accommodate itself easily to
exaggeration of statement.  "He isn't a bad chap really," he added,
very conscious of Mr. Franklin's offensive manner of which instances
were not far to seek.  "He's such a fool as to be jealous.  He has
been with the captain for years.  It's not for me to say, perhaps,
but I think the captain has spoiled all that gang of old servants.
They are like a lot of pet old dogs.  Wouldn't let anybody come near
him if they could help it.  I've never seen anything like it.  And
the second mate, I believe, was like that too."

"Well, he isn't here, luckily.  There would have been one more
enemy," said Mr. Smith.  "There's enough of them without him.  And
you being here instead of him makes it much more pleasant for my
daughter and myself.  One feels there may be a friend in need.  For
really, for a woman all alone on board ship amongst a lot of
unfriendly men . . . "

"But Mrs Anthony is not alone," exclaimed Powell.  "There's you, and
there's the . . . "

Mr. Smith interrupted him.

"Nobody's immortal.  And there are times when one feels ashamed to
live.  Such an evening as this for instance."

It was a lovely evening; the colours of a splendid sunset had died
out and the breath of a warm breeze seemed to have smoothed out the
sea.  Away to the south the sheet lightning was like the flashing of
an enormous lantern hidden under the horizon.  In order to change
the conversation Mr. Powell said:

"Anyway no one can charge you with being a Jonah, Mr. Smith.  We
have had a magnificent quick passage so far.  The captain ought to
be pleased.  And I suppose you are not sorry either."

This diversion was not successful.  Mr. Smith emitted a sort of
bitter chuckle and said:  "Jonah!  That's the fellow that was thrown
overboard by some sailors.  It seems to me it's very easy at sea to
get rid of a person one does not like.  The sea does not give up its
dead as the earth does."

"You forget the whale, sir," said young Powell.

Mr. Smith gave a start.  "Eh?  What whale?  Oh!  Jonah.  I wasn't
thinking of Jonah.  I was thinking of this passage which seems so
quick to you.  But only think what it is to me?  It isn't a life,
going about the sea like this.  And, for instance, if one were to
fall ill, there isn't a doctor to find out what's the matter with
one.  It's worrying.  It makes me anxious at times."

"Is Mrs. Anthony not feeling well?" asked Powell.  But Mr. Smith's
remark was not meant for Mrs. Anthony.  She was well.  He himself
was well.  It was the captain's health that did not seem quite
satisfactory.  Had Mr. Powell noticed his appearance?

Mr. Powell didn't know enough of the captain to judge.  He couldn't
tell.  But he observed thoughtfully that Mr. Franklin had been
saying the same thing.  And Franklin had known the captain for
years.  The mate was quite worried about it.

This intelligence startled Mr. Smith considerably.  "Does he think
he is in danger of dying?" he exclaimed with an animation quite
extraordinary for him, which horrified Mr. Powell.

"Heavens!  Die!  No!  Don't you alarm yourself, sir.  I've never
heard a word about danger from Mr. Franklin."

"Well, well," sighed Mr. Smith and left the poop for the saloon
rather abruptly.

As a matter of fact Mr. Franklin had been on deck for some
considerable time.  He had come to relieve young Powell; but seeing
him engaged in talk with the "enemy"--with one of the "enemies" at
least--had kept at a distance, which, the poop of the Ferndale being
aver seventy feet long, he had no difficulty in doing.  Mr. Powell
saw him at the head of the ladder leaning on his elbow, melancholy
and silent.  "Oh!  Here you are, sir."

"Here I am.  Here I've been ever since six o'clock.  Didn't want to
interrupt the pleasant conversation.  If you like to put in half of
your watch below jawing with a dear friend, that's not my affair.
Funny taste though."

"He isn't a bad chap," said the impartial Powell.

The mate snorted angrily, tapping the deck with his foot; then:
"Isn't he?  Well, give him my love when you come together again for
another nice long yarn."

"I say, Mr. Franklin, I wonder the captain don't take offence at
your manners."

"The captain.  I wish to goodness he would start a row with me.
Then I should know at least I am somebody on board.  I'd welcome it,
Mr. Powell.  I'd rejoice.  And dam' me I would talk back too till I
roused him.  He's a shadow of himself.  He walks about his ship like
a ghost.  He's fading away right before our eyes.  But of course you
don't see.  You don't care a hang.  Why should you?"

Mr. Powell did not wait for more.  He went down on the main deck.
Without taking the mate's jeremiads seriously he put them beside the
words of Mr. Smith.  He had grown already attached to Captain
Anthony.  There was something not only attractive but compelling in
the man.  Only it is very difficult for youth to believe in the
menace of death.  Not in the fact itself, but in its proximity to a
breathing, moving, talking, superior human being, showing no sign of
disease.  And Mr. Powell thought that this talk was all nonsense.
But his curiosity was awakened.  There was something, and at any
time some circumstance might occur . . . No, he would never find out
. . . There was nothing to find out, most likely.  Mr. Powell went
to his room where he tried to read a book he had already read a good
many times.  Presently a bell rang for the officers' supper.



CHAPTER SIX--. . . A MOONLESS NIGHT, THICK WITH STARS ABOVE, VERY
DARK ON THE WATER



In the mess-room Powell found Mr. Franklin hacking at a piece of
cold salt beef with a table knife.  The mate, fiery in the face and
rolling his eyes over that task, explained that the carver belonging
to the mess-room could not be found.  The steward, present also,
complained savagely of the cook.  The fellow got things into his
galley and then lost them.  Mr. Franklin tried to pacify him with
mournful firmness.

"There, there!  That will do.  We who have been all these years
together in the ship have other things to think about than
quarrelling among ourselves."

Mr. Powell thought with exasperation:  "Here he goes again," for
this utterance had nothing cryptic for him.  The steward having
withdrawn morosely, he was not surprised to hear the mate strike the
usual note.  That morning the mizzen topsail tie had carried away
(probably a defective link) and something like forty feet of chain
and wire-rope, mixed up with a few heavy iron blocks, had crashed
down from aloft on the poop with a terrifying racket.

"Did you notice the captain then, Mr. Powell.  Did you notice?"

Powell confessed frankly that he was too scared himself when all
that lot of gear came down on deck to notice anything.

"The gin-block missed his head by an inch," went on the mate
impressively.  "I wasn't three feet from him.  And what did he do?
Did he shout, or jump, or even look aloft to see if the yard wasn't
coming down too about our ears in a dozen pieces?  It's a marvel it
didn't.  No, he just stopped short--no wonder; he must have felt the
wind of that iron gin-block on his face--looked down at it, there,
lying close to his foot--and went on again.  I believe he didn't
even blink.  It isn't natural.  The man is stupefied."

He sighed ridiculously and Mr. Powell had suppressed a grin, when
the mate added as if he couldn't contain himself:

"He will be taking to drink next.  Mark my words.  That's the next
thing."

Mr. Powell was disgusted.

"You are so fond of the captain and yet you don't seem to care what
you say about him.  I haven't been with him for seven years, but I
know he isn't the sort of man that takes to drink.  And then--why
the devil should he?"

"Why the devil, you ask.  Devil--eh?  Well, no man is safe from the
devil--and that's answer enough for you," wheezed Mr. Franklin not
unkindly.  "There was a time, a long time ago, when I nearly took to
drink myself.  What do you say to that?"

Mr. Powell expressed a polite incredulity.  The thick, congested
mate seemed on the point of bursting with despondency.  "That was
bad example though.  I was young and fell into dangerous company,
made a fool of myself--yes, as true as you see me sitting here.
Drank to forget.  Thought it a great dodge."

Powell looked at the grotesque Franklin with awakened interest and
with that half-amused sympathy with which we receive unprovoked
confidences from men with whom we have no sort of affinity.  And at
the same time he began to look upon him more seriously.  Experience
has its prestige.  And the mate continued:

"If it hadn't been for the old lady, I would have gone to the devil.
I remembered her in time.  Nothing like having an old lady to look
after to steady a chap and make him face things.  But as bad luck
would have it, Captain Anthony has no mother living, not a blessed
soul belonging to him as far as I know.  Oh, aye, I fancy he said
once something to me of a sister.  But she's married.  She don't
need him.  Yes.  In the old days he used to talk to me as if we had
been brothers," exaggerated the mate sentimentally.  "'Franklin,'--
he would say--'this ship is my nearest relation and she isn't likely
to turn against me.  And I suppose you are the man I've known the
longest in the world.'  That's how he used to speak to me.  Can I
turn my back on him?  He has turned his back on his ship; that's
what it has come to.  He has no one now but his old Franklin.  But
what's a fellow to do to put things back as they were and should be.
Should be--I say!"

His starting eyes had a terrible fixity.  Mr. Powell's irresistible
thought, "he resembles a boiled lobster in distress," was followed
by annoyance.  "Good Lord," he said, "you don't mean to hint that
Captain Anthony has fallen into bad company.  What is it you want to
save him from?"

"I do mean it," affirmed the mate, and the very absurdity of the
statement made it impressive--because it seemed so absolutely
audacious.  "Well, you have a cheek," said young Powell, feeling
mentally helpless.  "I have a notion the captain would half kill you
if he were to know how you carry on."

"And welcome," uttered the fervently devoted Franklin.  "I am
willing, if he would only clear the ship afterwards of that . . .
You are but a youngster and you may go and tell him what you like.
Let him knock the stuffing out of his old Franklin first and think
it over afterwards.  Anything to pull him together.  But of course
you wouldn't.  You are all right.  Only you don't know that things
are sometimes different from what they look.  There are friendships
that are no friendships, and marriages that are no marriages.  Phoo!
Likely to be right--wasn't it?  Never a hint to me.  I go off on
leave and when I come back, there it is--all over, settled!  Not a
word beforehand.  No warning.  If only:  'What do you think of it,
Franklin?'--or anything of the sort.  And that's a man who hardly
ever did anything without asking my advice.  Why!  He couldn't take
over a new coat from the tailor without . . . first thing, directly
the fellow came on board with some new clothes, whether in London or
in China, it would be:  'Pass the word along there for Mr. Franklin.
Mr. Franklin wanted in the cabin.'  In I would go.  'Just look at my
back, Franklin.  Fits all right, doesn't it?'  And I would say:
'First rate, sir,' or whatever was the truth of it.  That or
anything else.  Always the truth of it.  Always.  And well he knew
it; and that's why he dared not speak right out.  Talking about
workmen, alterations, cabins . . .  Phoo! . . . instead of a
straightforward--'Wish me joy, Mr. Franklin!'  Yes, that was the way
to let me know.  God only knows what they are--perhaps she isn't his
daughter any more than she is . . . She doesn't resemble that old
fellow.  Not a bit.  Not a bit.  It's very awful.  You may well open
your mouth, young man.  But for goodness' sake, you who are mixed up
with that lot, keep your eyes and ears open too in case--in case of
. . . I don't know what.  Anything.  One wonders what can happen
here at sea!  Nothing.  Yet when a man is called a jailer behind his
back."

Mr. Franklin hid his face in his hands for a moment and Powell shut
his mouth, which indeed had been open.  He slipped out of the mess-
room noiselessly.  "The mate's crazy," he thought.  It was his firm
conviction.  Nevertheless, that evening, he felt his inner
tranquillity disturbed at last by the force and obstinacy of this
craze.  He couldn't dismiss it with the contempt it deserved.  Had
the word "jailer" really been pronounced?  A strange word for the
mate to even IMAGINE he had heard.  A senseless, unlikely word.  But
this word being the only clear and definite statement in these
grotesque and dismal ravings was comparatively restful to his mind.
Powell's mind rested on it still when he came up at eight o'clock to
take charge of the deck.  It was a moonless night, thick with stars
above, very dark on the water.  A steady air from the west kept the
sails asleep.  Franklin mustered both watches in low tones as if for
a funeral, then approaching Powell:

"The course is east-south-east," said the chief mate distinctly.

"East-south-east, sir."

"Everything's set, Mr. Powell."

"All right, sir."

The other lingered, his sentimental eyes gleamed silvery in the
shadowy face.  "A quiet night before us.  I don't know that there
are any special orders.  A settled, quiet night.  I dare say you
won't see the captain.  Once upon a time this was the watch he used
to come up and start a chat with either of us then on deck.  But now
he sits in that infernal stern-cabin and mopes.  Jailer--eh?"

Mr. Powell walked away from the mate and when at some distance said,
"Damn!" quite heartily.  It was a confounded nuisance.  It had
ceased to be funny; that hostile word "jailer" had given the
situation an air of reality.


Franklin's grotesque mortal envelope had disappeared from the poop
to seek its needful repose, if only the worried soul would let it
rest a while.  Mr. Powell, half sorry for the thick little man,
wondered whether it would let him.  For himself, he recognized that
the charm of a quiet watch on deck when one may let one's thoughts
roam in space and time had been spoiled without remedy.  What
shocked him most was the implied aspersion of complicity on Mrs.
Anthony.  It angered him.  In his own words to me, he felt very
"enthusiastic" about Mrs. Anthony.  "Enthusiastic" is good;
especially as he couldn't exactly explain to me what he meant by it.
But he felt enthusiastic, he says.  That silly Franklin must have
been dreaming.  That was it.  He had dreamed it all.  Ass.  Yet the
injurious word stuck in Powell's mind with its associated ideas of
prisoner, of escape.  He became very uncomfortable.  And just then
(it might have been half an hour or more since he had relieved
Franklin) just then Mr. Smith came up on the poop alone, like a
gliding shadow and leaned over the rail by his side.  Young Powell
was affected disagreeably by his presence.  He made a movement to go
away but the other began to talk--and Powell remained where he was
as if retained by a mysterious compulsion.  The conversation started
by Mr. Smith had nothing peculiar.  He began to talk of mail-boats
in general and in the end seemed anxious to discover what were the
services from Port Elizabeth to London.  Mr. Powell did not know for
certain but imagined that there must be communication with England
at least twice a month.  "Are you thinking of leaving us, sir; of
going home by steam?  Perhaps with Mrs. Anthony," he asked
anxiously.

"No!  No!  How can I?"  Mr. Smith got quite agitated, for him, which
did not amount to much.  He was just asking for the sake of
something to talk about.  No idea at all of going home.  One could
not always do what one wanted and that's why there were moments when
one felt ashamed to live.  This did not mean that one did not want
to live.  Oh no!

He spoke with careless slowness, pausing frequently and in such a
low voice that Powell had to strain his hearing to catch the phrases
dropped overboard as it were.  And indeed they seemed not worth the
effort.  It was like the aimless talk of a man pursuing a secret
train of thought far removed from the idle words we so often utter
only to keep in touch with our fellow beings.  An hour passed.  It
seemed as though Mr. Smith could not make up his mind to go below.
He repeated himself.  Again he spoke of lives which one was ashamed
of.  It was necessary to put up with such lives as long as there was
no way out, no possible issue.  He even alluded once more to mail-
boat services on the East coast of Africa and young Powell had to
tell him once more that he knew nothing about them.

"Every fortnight, I thought you said," insisted Mr. Smith.  He
stirred, seemed to detach himself from the rail with difficulty.
His long, slender figure straightened into stiffness, as if hostile
to the enveloping soft peace of air and sea and sky, emitted into
the night a weak murmur which Mr. Powell fancied was the word,
"Abominable" repeated three times, but which passed into the faintly
louder declaration:  "The moment has come--to go to bed," followed
by a just audible sigh.

"I sleep very well," added Mr. Smith in his restrained tone.  "But
it is the moment one opens one's eyes that is horrible at sea.
These days!  Oh, these days!  I wonder how anybody can . . . "

"I like the life," observed Mr. Powell.

"Oh, you.  You have only yourself to think of.  You have made your
bed.  Well, it's very pleasant to feel that you are friendly to us.
My daughter has taken quite a liking to you, Mr. Powell."

He murmured, "Good-night" and glided away rigidly.  Young Powell
asked himself with some distaste what was the meaning of these
utterances.  His mind had been worried at last into that questioning
attitude by no other person than the grotesque Franklin.  Suspicion
was not natural to him.  And he took good care to carefully separate
in his thoughts Mrs. Anthony from this man of enigmatic words--her
father.  Presently he observed that the sheen of the two deck dead-
lights of Mr. Smith's room had gone out.  The old gentleman had been
surprisingly quick in getting into bed.  Shortly afterwards the lamp
in the foremost skylight of the saloon was turned out; and this was
the sign that the steward had taken in the tray and had retired for
the night.

Young Powell had settled down to the regular officer-of-the-watch
tramp in the dense shadow of the world decorated with stars high
above his head, and on earth only a few gleams of light about the
ship.  The lamp in the after skylight was kept burning through the
night.  There were also the dead-lights of the stern-cabins
glimmering dully in the deck far aft, catching his eye when he
turned to walk that way.  The brasses of the wheel glittered too,
with the dimly lit figure of the man detached, as if phosphorescent,
against the black and spangled background of the horizon.

Young Powell, in the silence of the ship, reinforced by the great
silent stillness of the world, said to himself that there was
something mysterious in such beings as the absurd Franklin, and even
in such beings as himself.  It was a strange and almost improper
thought to occur to the officer of the watch of a ship on the high
seas on no matter how quiet a night.  Why on earth was he bothering
his head?  Why couldn't he dismiss all these people from his mind?
It was as if the mate had infected him with his own diseased
devotion.  He would not have believed it possible that he should be
so foolish.  But he was--clearly.  He was foolish in a way totally
unforeseen by himself.  Pushing this self-analysis further, he
reflected that the springs of his conduct were just as obscure.

"I may be catching myself any time doing things of which I have no
conception," he thought.  And as he was passing near the mizzen-mast
he perceived a coil of rope left lying on the deck by the oversight
of the sweepers.  By an impulse which had nothing mysterious in it,
he stooped as he went by with the intention of picking it up and
hanging it up on its proper pin.  This movement brought his head
down to the level of the glazed end of the after skylight--the
lighted skylight of the most private part of the saloon, consecrated
to the exclusiveness of Captain Anthony's married life; the part,
let me remind you, cut off from the rest of that forbidden space by
a pair of heavy curtains.  I mention these curtains because at this
point Mr. Powell himself recalled the existence of that unusual
arrangement to my mind.

He recalled them with simple-minded compunction at that distance of
time.  He said:  "You understand that directly I stooped to pick up
that coil of running gear--the spanker foot-outhaul, it was--I
perceived that I could see right into that part of the saloon the
curtains were meant to make particularly private.  Do you understand
me?" he insisted.

I told him that I understood; and he proceeded to call my attention
to the wonderful linking up of small facts, with something of awe
left yet, after all these years, at the precise workmanship of
chance, fate, providence, call it what you will!  "For, observe,
Marlow," he said, making at me very round eyes which contrasted
funnily with the austere touch of grey on his temples, "observe, my
dear fellow, that everything depended on the men who cleared up the
poop in the evening leaving that coil of rope on the deck, and on
the topsail-tie carrying away in a most incomprehensible and
surprising manner earlier in the day, and the end of the chain
whipping round the coaming and shivering to bits the coloured glass-
pane at the end of the skylight.  It had the arms of the city of
Liverpool on it; I don't know why unless because the Ferndale was
registered in Liverpool.  It was very thick plate glass.  Anyhow,
the upper part got smashed, and directly we had attended to things
aloft Mr. Franklin had set the carpenter to patch up the damage with
some pieces of plain glass.  I don't know where they got them; I
think the people who fitted up new bookcases in the captain's room
had left some spare panes.  Chips was there the whole afternoon on
his knees, messing with putty and red-lead.  It wasn't a neat job
when it was done, not by any means, but it would serve to keep the
weather out and let the light in.  Clear glass.  And of course I was
not thinking of it.  I just stooped to pick up that rope and found
my head within three inches of that clear glass, and--dash it all!
I found myself out.  Not half an hour before I was saying to myself
that it was impossible to tell what was in people's heads or at the
back of their talk, or what they were likely to be up to.  And here
I found myself up to as low a trick as you can well think of.  For,
after I had stooped, there I remained prying, spying, anyway
looking, where I had no business to look.  Not consciously at first,
may be.  He who has eyes, you know, nothing can stop him from seeing
things as long as there are things to see in front of him.  What I
saw at first was the end of the table and the tray clamped on to it,
a patent tray for sea use, fitted with holders for a couple of
decanters, water-jug and glasses.  The glitter of these things
caught my eye first; but what I saw next was the captain down there,
alone as far as I could see; and I could see pretty well the whole
of that part up to the cottage piano, dark against the satin-wood
panelling of the bulkhead.  And I remained looking.  I did.  And I
don't know that I was ashamed of myself either, then.  It was the
fault of that Franklin, always talking of the man, making free with
him to that extent that really he seemed to have become our
property, his and mine, in a way.  It's funny, but one had that
feeling about Captain Anthony.  To watch him was not so much worse
than listening to Franklin talking him over.  Well, it's no use
making excuses for what's inexcusable.  I watched; but I dare say
you know that there could have been nothing inimical in this low
behaviour of mine.  On the contrary.  I'll tell you now what he was
doing.  He was helping himself out of a decanter.  I saw every
movement, and I said to myself mockingly as though jeering at
Franklin in my thoughts, 'Hallo!  Here's the captain taking to drink
at last.'  He poured a little brandy or whatever it was into a long
glass, filled it with water, drank about a fourth of it and stood
the glass back into the holder.  Every sign of a bad drinking bout,
I was saying to myself, feeling quite amused at the notions of that
Franklin.  He seemed to me an enormous ass, with his jealousy and
his fears.  At that rate a month would not have been enough for
anybody to get drunk.  The captain sat down in one of the swivel
arm-chairs fixed around the table; I had him right under me and as
he turned the chair slightly, I was looking, I may say, down his
back.  He took another little sip and then reached for a book which
was lying on the table.  I had not noticed it before.  Altogether
the proceedings of a desperate drunkard--weren't they?  He opened
the book and held it before his face.  If this was the way he took
to drink, then I needn't worry.  He was in no danger from that, and
as to any other, I assure you no human being could have looked safer
than he did down there.  I felt the greatest contempt for Franklin
just then, while I looked at Captain Anthony sitting there with a
glass of weak brandy-and-water at his elbow and reading in the cabin
of his ship, on a quiet night--the quietest, perhaps the finest, of
a prosperous passage.  And if you wonder why I didn't leave off my
ugly spying I will tell you how it was.  Captain Anthony was a great
reader just about that time; and I, too, I have a great liking for
books.  To this day I can't come near a book but I must know what it
is about.  It was a thickish volume he had there, small close print,
double columns--I can see it now.  What I wanted to make out was the
title at the top of the page.  I have very good eyes but he wasn't
holding it conveniently--I mean for me up there.  Well, it was a
history of some kind, that much I read and then suddenly he bangs
the book face down on the table, jumps up as if something had bitten
him and walks away aft.

"Funny thing shame is.  I had been behaving badly and aware of it in
a way, but I didn't feel really ashamed till the fright of being
found out in my honourable occupation drove me from it.  I slunk
away to the forward end of the poop and lounged about there, my face
and ears burning and glad it was a dark night, expecting every
moment to hear the captain's footsteps behind me.  For I made sure
he was coming on deck.  Presently I thought I had rather meet him
face to face and I walked slowly aft prepared to see him emerge from
the companion before I got that far.  I even thought of his having
detected me by some means.  But it was impossible, unless he had
eyes in the top of his head.  I had never had a view of his face
down there.  It was impossible; I was safe; and I felt very mean,
yet, explain it as you may, I seemed not to care.  And the captain
not appearing on deck, I had the impulse to go on being mean.  I
wanted another peep.  I really don't know what was the beastly
influence except that Mr. Franklin's talk was enough to demoralize
any man by raising a sort of unhealthy curiosity which did away in
my case with all the restraints of common decency.

"I did not mean to run the risk of being caught squatting in a
suspicious attitude by the captain.  There was also the helmsman to
consider.  So what I did--I am surprised at my low cunning--was to
sit down naturally on the skylight-seat and then by bending forward
I found that, as I expected, I could look down through the upper
part of the end-pane.  The worst that could happen to me then, if I
remained too long in that position, was to be suspected by the
seaman aft at the wheel of having gone to sleep there.  For the rest
my ears would give me sufficient warning of any movements in the
companion.

"But in that way my angle of view was changed.  The field too was
smaller.  The end of the table, the tray and the swivel-chair I had
right under my eyes.  The captain had not come back yet.  The piano
I could not see now; but on the other hand I had a very oblique
downward view of the curtains drawn across the cabin and cutting off
the forward part of it just about the level of the skylight-end and
only an inch or so from the end of the table.  They were heavy
stuff, travelling on a thick brass rod with some contrivance to keep
the rings from sliding to and fro when the ship rolled.  But just
then the ship was as still almost as a model shut up in a glass case
while the curtains, joined closely, and, perhaps on purpose, made a
little too long moved no more than a solid wall."


Marlow got up to get another cigar.  The night was getting on to
what I may call its deepest hour, the hour most favourable to evil
purposes of men's hate, despair or greed--to whatever can whisper
into their ears the unlawful counsels of protest against things that
are; the hour of ill-omened silence and chill and stagnation, the
hour when the criminal plies his trade and the victim of
sleeplessness reaches the lowest depth of dreadful discouragement;
the hour before the first sight of dawn.  I know it, because while
Marlow was crossing the room I looked at the clock on the
mantelpiece.  He however never looked that way though it is possible
that he, too, was aware of the passage of time.  He sat down
heavily.

"Our friend Powell," he began again, "was very anxious that I should
understand the topography of that cabin.  I was interested more by
its moral atmosphere, that tension of falsehood, of desperate
acting, which tainted the pure sea-atmosphere into which the
magnanimous Anthony had carried off his conquest and--well--his
self-conquest too, trying to act at the same time like a beast of
prey, a pure spirit and the "most generous of men."  Too big an
order clearly because he was nothing of a monster but just a common
mortal, a little more self-willed and self-confident than most, may
be, both in his roughness and in his delicacy.

As to the delicacy of Mr. Powell's proceedings I'll say nothing.  He
found a sort of depraved excitement in watching an unconscious man--
and such an attractive and mysterious man as Captain Anthony at
that.  He wanted another peep at him.  He surmised that the captain
must come back soon because of the glass two-thirds full and also of
the book put down so brusquely.  God knows what sudden pang had made
Anthony jump up so.  I am convinced he used reading as an opiate
against the pain of his magnanimity which like all abnormal growths
was gnawing at his healthy substance with cruel persistence.
Perhaps he had rushed into his cabin simply to groan freely in
absolute and delicate secrecy.  At any rate he tarried there.  And
young Powell would have grown weary and compunctious at last if it
had not become manifest to him that he had not been alone in the
highly incorrect occupation of watching the movements of Captain
Anthony.

Powell explained to me that no sound did or perhaps could reach him
from the saloon.  The first sign--and we must remember that he was
using his eyes for all they were worth--was an unaccountable
movement of the curtain.  It was wavy and very slight; just
perceptible in fact to the sharpened faculties of a secret watcher;
for it can't be denied that our wits are much more alert when
engaged in wrong-doing (in which one mustn't be found out) than in a
righteous occupation.

He became suspicious, with no one and nothing definite in his mind.
He was suspicious of the curtain itself and observed it.  It looked
very innocent.  Then just as he was ready to put it down to a trick
of imagination he saw trembling movements where the two curtains
joined.  Yes!  Somebody else besides himself had been watching
Captain Anthony.  He owns artlessly that this roused his
indignation.  It was really too much of a good thing.  In this state
of intense antagonism he was startled to observe tips of fingers
fumbling with the dark stuff.  Then they grasped the edge of the
further curtain and hung on there, just fingers and knuckles and
nothing else.  It made an abominable sight.  He was looking at it
with unaccountable repulsion when a hand came into view; a short,
puffy, old, freckled hand projecting into the lamplight, followed by
a white wrist, an arm in a grey coat-sleeve, up to the elbow, beyond
the elbow, extended tremblingly towards the tray.  Its appearance
was weird and nauseous, fantastic and silly.  But instead of
grabbing the bottle as Powell expected, this hand, tremulous with
senile eagerness, swerved to the glass, rested on its edge for a
moment (or so it looked from above) and went back with a jerk.  The
gripping fingers of the other hand vanished at the same time, and
young Powell staring at the motionless curtains could indulge for a
moment the notion that he had been dreaming.

But that notion did not last long.  Powell, after repressing his
first impulse to spring for the companion and hammer at the
captain's door, took steps to have himself relieved by the
boatswain.  He was in a state of distraction as to his feelings and
yet lucid as to his mind.  He remained on the skylight so as to keep
his eye on the tray.

Still the captain did not appear in the saloon.  "If he had," said
Mr. Powell, "I knew what to do.  I would have put my elbow through
the pane instantly--crash."

I asked him why?

"It was the quickest dodge for getting him away from that tray," he
explained.  "My throat was so dry that I didn't know if I could
shout loud enough.  And this was not a case for shouting, either."

The boatswain, sleepy and disgusted, arriving on the poop, found the
second officer doubled up over the end of the skylight in a pose
which might have been that of severe pain.  And his voice was so
changed that the man, though naturally vexed at being turned out,
made no comment on the plea of sudden indisposition which young
Powell put forward.

The rapidity with which the sick man got off the poop must have
astonished the boatswain.  But Powell, at the moment he opened the
door leading into the saloon from the quarter-deck, had managed to
control his agitation.  He entered swiftly but without noise and
found himself in the dark part of the saloon, the strong sheen of
the lamp on the other side of the curtains visible only above the
rod on which they ran.  The door of Mr. Smith's cabin was in that
dark part.  He passed by it assuring himself by a quick side glance
that it was imperfectly closed.  "Yes," he said to me.  "The old man
must have been watching through the crack.  Of that I am certain;
but it was not for me that he was watching and listening.  Horrible!
Surely he must have been startled to hear and see somebody he did
not expect.  He could not possibly guess why I was coming in, but I
suppose he must have been concerned."  Concerned indeed!  He must
have been thunderstruck, appalled.

Powell's only distinct aim was to remove the suspected tumbler.  He
had no other plan, no other intention, no other thought.  Do away
with it in some manner.  Snatch it up and run out with it.

You know that complete mastery of one fixed idea, not a reasonable
but an emotional mastery, a sort of concentrated exaltation.  Under
its empire men rush blindly through fire and water and opposing
violence, and nothing can stop them--unless, sometimes, a grain of
sand.  For his blind purpose (and clearly the thought of Mrs.
Anthony was at the bottom of it) Mr. Powell had plenty of time.
What checked him at the crucial moment was the familiar, harmless
aspect of common things, the steady light, the open book on the
table, the solitude, the peace, the home-like effect of the place.
He held the glass in his hand; all he had to do was to vanish back
beyond the curtains, flee with it noiselessly into the night on
deck, fling it unseen overboard.  A minute or less.  And then all
that would have happened would have been the wonder at the utter
disappearance of a glass tumbler, a ridiculous riddle in pantry-
affairs beyond the wit of anyone on board to solve.  The grain of
sand against which Powell stumbled in his headlong career was a
moment of incredulity as to the truth of his own conviction because
it had failed to affect the safe aspect of familiar things.  He
doubted his eyes too.  He must have dreamt it all!  "I am dreaming
now," he said to himself.  And very likely for a few seconds he must
have looked like a man in a trance or profoundly asleep on his feet,
and with a glass of brandy-and-water in his hand.

What woke him up and, at the same time, fixed his feet immovably to
the spot, was a voice asking him what he was doing there in tones of
thunder.  Or so it sounded to his ears.  Anthony, opening the door
of his stern-cabin had naturally exclaimed.  What else could you
expect?  And the exclamation must have been fairly loud if you
consider the nature of the sight which met his eye.  There, before
him, stood his second officer, a seemingly decent, well-bred young
man, who, being on duty, had left the deck and had sneaked into the
saloon, apparently for the inexpressibly mean purpose of drinking up
what was left of his captain's brandy-and-water.  There he was,
caught absolutely with the glass in his hand.

But the very monstrosity of appearances silenced Anthony after the
first exclamation; and young Powell felt himself pierced through and
through by the overshadowed glance of his captain.  Anthony advanced
quietly.  The first impulse of Mr. Powell, when discovered, had been
to dash the glass on the deck.  He was in a sort of panic.  But deep
down within him his wits were working, and the idea that if he did
that he could prove nothing and that the story he had to tell was
completely incredible, restrained him.  The captain came forward
slowly.  With his eyes now close to his, Powell, spell-bound, numb
all over, managed to lift one finger to the deck above mumbling the
explanatory words, "Boatswain on the poop."

The captain moved his head slightly as much as to say, "That's all
right"--and this was all.  Powell had no voice, no strength.  The
air was unbreathable, thick, sticky, odious, like hot jelly in which
all movements became difficult.  He raised the glass a little with
immense difficulty and moved his trammelled lips sufficiently to
form the words:

"Doctored."

Anthony glanced at it for an instant, only for an instant, and again
fastened his eyes on the face of his second mate.  Powell added a
fervent "I believe" and put the glass down on the tray.  The
captain's glance followed the movement and returned sternly to his
face.  The young man pointed a finger once more upwards and squeezed
out of his iron-bound throat six consecutive words of further
explanation.  "Through the skylight.  The white pane."

The captain raised his eyebrows very much at this, while young
Powell, ashamed but desperate, nodded insistently several times.  He
meant to say that:  Yes.  Yes.  He had done that thing.  He had been
spying . . .  The captain's gaze became thoughtful.  And, now the
confession was over, the iron-bound feeling of Powell's throat
passed away giving place to a general anxiety which from his breast
seemed to extend to all the limbs and organs of his body.  His legs
trembled a little, his vision was confused, his mind became blankly
expectant.  But he was alert enough.  At a movement of Anthony he
screamed in a strangled whisper.

"Don't, sir!  Don't touch it."

The captain pushed aside Powell's extended arm, took up the glass
and raised it slowly against the lamplight.  The liquid, of very
pale amber colour, was clear, and by a glance the captain seemed to
call Powell's attention to the fact.  Powell tried to pronounce the
word, "dissolved" but he only thought of it with great energy which
however failed to move his lips.  Only when Anthony had put down the
glass and turned to him he recovered such a complete command of his
voice that he could keep it down to a hurried, forcible whisper--a
whisper that shook him.

"Doctored!  I swear it!  I have seen.  Doctored!  I have seen."

Not a feature of the captain's face moved.  His was a calm to take
one's breath away.  It did so to young Powell.  Then for the first
time Anthony made himself heard to the point.

"You did! . . . Who was it?"

And Powell gasped freely at last.  "A hand," he whispered fearfully,
"a hand and the arm--only the arm--like that."

He advanced his own, slow, stealthy, tremulous in faithful
reproduction, the tips of two fingers and the thumb pressed together
and hovering above the glass for an instant--then the swift jerk
back, after the deed.

"Like that," he repeated growing excited.  "From behind this."  He
grasped the curtain and glaring at the silent Anthony flung it back
disclosing the forepart of the saloon.  There was on one to be seen.

Powell had not expected to see anybody.  "But," he said to me, "I
knew very well there was an ear listening and an eye glued to the
crack of a cabin door.  Awful thought.  And that door was in that
part of the saloon remaining in the shadow of the other half of the
curtain.  I pointed at it and I suppose that old man inside saw me
pointing.  The captain had a wonderful self-command.  You couldn't
have guessed anything from his face.  Well, it was perhaps more
thoughtful than usual.  And indeed this was something to think
about.  But I couldn't think steadily.  My brain would give a sort
of jerk and then go dead again.  I had lost all notion of time, and
I might have been looking at the captain for days and months for all
I knew before I heard him whisper to me fiercely:  "Not a word!"
This jerked me out of that trance I was in and I said "No!  No!  I
didn't mean even you."

"I wanted to explain my conduct, my intentions, but I read in his
eyes that he understood me and I was only too glad to leave off.
And there we were looking at each other, dumb, brought up short by
the question "What next?"

"I thought Captain Anthony was a man of iron till I saw him suddenly
fling his head to the right and to the left fiercely, like a wild
animal at bay not knowing which way to break out . . . "


"Truly," commented Marlow, "brought to bay was not a bad comparison;
a better one than Mr. Powell was aware of.  At that moment the
appearance of Flora could not but bring the tension to the breaking
point.  She came out in all innocence but not without vague dread.
Anthony's exclamation on first seeing Powell had reached her in her
cabin, where, it seems, she was brushing her hair.  She had heard
the very words.  "What are you doing here?"  And the unwonted
loudness of the voice--his voice--breaking the habitual stillness of
that hour would have startled a person having much less reason to be
constantly apprehensive, than the captive of Anthony's masterful
generosity.  She had no means to guess to whom the question was
addressed and it echoed in her heart, as Anthony's voice always did.
Followed complete silence.  She waited, anxious, expectant, till she
could stand the strain no longer, and with the weary mental appeal
of the overburdened.  "My God!  What is it now?" she opened the door
of her room and looked into the saloon.  Her first glance fell on
Powell.  For a moment, seeing only the second officer with Anthony,
she felt relieved and made as if to draw back; but her sharpened
perception detected something suspicious in their attitudes, and she
came forward slowly.

"I was the first to see Mrs. Anthony," related Powell, "because I
was facing aft.  The captain, noticing my eyes, looked quickly over
his shoulder and at once put his finger to his lips to caution me.
As if I were likely to let out anything before her!  Mrs. Anthony
had on a dressing-gown of some grey stuff with red facings and a
thick red cord round her waist.  Her hair was down.  She looked a
child; a pale-faced child with big blue eyes and a red mouth a
little open showing a glimmer of white teeth.  The light fell
strongly on her as she came up to the end of the table.  A strange
child though; she hardly affected one like a child, I remember.  Do
you know," exclaimed Mr. Powell, who clearly must have been, like
many seamen, an industrious reader, "do you know what she looked
like to me with those big eyes and something appealing in her whole
expression.  She looked like a forsaken elf.  Captain Anthony had
moved towards her to keep her away from my end of the table, where
the tray was.  I had never seen them so near to each other before,
and it made a great contrast.  It was wonderful, for, with his beard
cut to a point, his swarthy, sunburnt complexion, thin nose and his
lean head there was something African, something Moorish in Captain
Anthony.  His neck was bare; he had taken off his coat and collar
and had drawn on his sleeping jacket in the time that he had been
absent from the saloon.  I seem to see him now.  Mrs. Anthony too.
She looked from him to me--I suppose I looked guilty or frightened--
and from me to him, trying to guess what there was between us two.
Then she burst out with a "What has happened?" which seemed
addressed to me.  I mumbled "Nothing!  Nothing, ma'am," which she
very likely did not hear.

"You must not think that all this had lasted a long time.  She had
taken fright at our behaviour and turned to the captain pitifully.
"What is it you are concealing from me?"  A straight question--eh?
I don't know what answer the captain would have made.  Before he
could even raise his eyes to her she cried out "Ah!  Here's papa" in
a sharp tone of relief, but directly afterwards she looked to me as
if she were holding her breath with apprehension.  I was so
interested in her that, how shall I say it, her exclamation made no
connection in my brain at first.  I also noticed that she had sidled
up a little nearer to Captain Anthony, before it occurred to me to
turn my head.  I can tell you my neck stiffened in the twisted
position from the shock of actually seeing that old man!  He had
dared!  I suppose you think I ought to have looked upon him as mad.
But I couldn't.  It would have been certainly easier.  But I could
NOT.  You should have seen him.  First of all he was completely
dressed with his very cap still on his head just as when he left me
on deck two hours before, saying in his soft voice:  "The moment has
come to go to bed"--while he meant to go and do that thing and hide
in his dark cabin, and watch the stuff do its work.  A cold shudder
ran down my back.  He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket,
his arms were pressed close to his thin, upright body, and he
shuffled across the cabin with his short steps.  There was a red
patch on each of his old soft cheeks as if somebody had been
pinching them.  He drooped his head a little, and looked with a sort
of underhand expectation at the captain and Mrs. Anthony standing
close together at the other end of the saloon.  The calculating
horrible impudence of it!  His daughter was there; and I am certain
he had seen the captain putting his finger on his lips to warn me.
And then he had coolly come out!  He passed my imagination, I assure
you.  After that one shiver his presence killed every faculty in me-
-wonder, horror, indignation.  I felt nothing in particular just as
if he were still the old gentleman who used to talk to me familiarly
every day on deck.  Would you believe it?"

"Mr. Powell challenged my powers of wonder at this internal
phenomenon," went on Marlow after a slight pause.  "But even if they
had not been fully engaged, together with all my powers of attention
in following the facts of the case, I would not have been astonished
by his statements about himself.  Taking into consideration his
youth they were by no means incredible; or, at any rate, they were
the least incredible part of the whole.  They were also the least
interesting part.  The interest was elsewhere, and there of course
all he could do was to look at the surface.  The inwardness of what
was passing before his eyes was hidden from him, who had looked on,
more impenetrably than from me who at a distance of years was
listening to his words.  What presently happened at this crisis in
Flora de Barral's fate was beyond his power of comment, seemed in a
sense natural.  And his own presence on the scene was so strangely
motived that it was left for me to marvel alone at this young man, a
completely chance-comer, having brought it about on that night.

Each situation created either by folly or wisdom has its
psychological moment.  The behaviour of young Powell with its
mixture of boyish impulses combined with instinctive prudence, had
not created it--I can't say that--but had discovered it to the very
people involved.  What would have happened if he had made a noise
about his discovery?  But he didn't.  His head was full of Mrs.
Anthony and he behaved with a discretion beyond his years.  Some
nice children often do; and surely it is not from reflection.  They
have their own inspirations.  Young Powell's inspiration consisted
in being "enthusiastic" about Mrs. Anthony.  'Enthusiastic' is
really good.  And he was amongst them like a child, sensitive,
impressionable, plastic--but unable to find for himself any sort of
comment.

I don't know how much mine may be worth; but I believe that just
then the tension of the false situation was at its highest.  Of all
the forms offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to
realize it fully, which is the most imperative.  Pairing off is the
fate of mankind.  And if two beings thrown together, mutually
attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and
voluntarily stop short of the--the embrace, in the noblest meaning
of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call
of which is simple.  Perhaps sacred.  And the punishment of it is an
invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution
of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed
something significant may come at last, which may be criminal or
heroic, may be madness or wisdom--or even a straight if despairing
decision.

Powell on taking his eyes off the old gentleman noticed Captain
Anthony, swarthy as an African, by the side of Flora whiter than the
lilies, take his handkerchief out and wipe off his forehead the
sweat of anguish--like a man who is overcome.  "And no wonder,"
commented Mr. Powell here.  Then the captain said, "Hadn't you
better go back to your room."  This was to Mrs. Anthony.  He tried
to smile at her.  "Why do you look startled?  This night is like any
other night."

"Which," Powell again commented to me earnestly, "was a lie . . . No
wonder he sweated."  You see from this the value of Powell's
comments.  Mrs. Anthony then said:  "Why are you sending me away?"

"Why!  That you should go to sleep.  That you should rest."  And
Captain Anthony frowned.  Then sharply, "You stay here, Mr. Powell.
I shall want you presently."

As a matter of fact Powell had not moved.  Flora did not mind his
presence.  He himself had the feeling of being of no account to
those three people.  He was looking at Mrs. Anthony as unabashed as
the proverbial cat looking at a king.  Mrs. Anthony glanced at him.
She did not move, gripped by an inexplicable premonition.  She had
arrived at the very limit of her endurance as the object of
Anthony's magnanimity; she was the prey of an intuitive dread of she
did not know what mysterious influence; she felt herself being
pushed back into that solitude, that moral loneliness, which had
made all her life intolerable.  And then, in that close communion
established again with Anthony, she felt--as on that night in the
garden--the force of his personal fascination.  The passive
quietness with which she looked at him gave her the appearance of a
person bewitched--or, say, mesmerically put to sleep--beyond any
notion of her surroundings.

After telling Mr. Powell not to go away the captain remained silent.
Suddenly Mrs. Anthony pushed back her loose hair with a decisive
gesture of her arms and moved still nearer to him.  "Here's papa up
yet," she said, but she did not look towards Mr. Smith.  "Why is it?
And you?  I can't go on like this, Roderick--between you two.
Don't."

Anthony interrupted her as if something had untied his tongue.

"Oh yes.  Here's your father.  And . . . Why not.  Perhaps it is
just as well you came out.  Between us two?  Is that it?  I won't
pretend I don't understand.  I am not blind.  But I can't fight any
longer for what I haven't got.  I don't know what you imagine has
happened.  Something has though.  Only you needn't be afraid.  No
shadow can touch you--because I give up.  I can't say we had much
talk about it, your father and I, but, the long and the short of it
is, that I must learn to live without you--which I have told you was
impossible.  I was speaking the truth.  But I have done fighting, or
waiting, or hoping.  Yes.  You shall go."

At this point Mr. Powell who (he confessed to me) was listening with
uncomprehending awe, heard behind his back a triumphant chuckling
sound.  It gave him the shudders, he said, to mention it now; but at
the time, except for another chill down the spine, it had not the
power to destroy his absorption in the scene before his eyes, and
before his ears too, because just then Captain Anthony raised his
voice grimly.  Perhaps he too had heard the chuckle of the old man.

"Your father has found an argument which makes me pause, if it does
not convince me.  No!  I can't answer it.  I--I don't want to answer
it.  I simply surrender.  He shall have his way with you--and with
me.  Only," he added in a gloomy lowered tone which struck Mr.
Powell as if a pedal had been put down, "only it shall take a little
time.  I have never lied to you.  Never.  I renounce not only my
chance but my life.  In a few days, directly we get into port, the
very moment we do, I, who have said I could never let you go, I
shall let you go."

To the innocent beholder Anthony seemed at this point to become
physically exhausted.  My view is that the utter falseness of his, I
may say, aspirations, the vanity of grasping the empty air, had come
to him with an overwhelming force, leaving him disarmed before the
other's mad and sinister sincerity.  As he had said himself he could
not fight for what he did not possess; he could not face such a
thing as this for the sake of his mere magnanimity.  The normal
alone can overcome the abnormal.  He could not even reproach that
man over there.  "I own myself beaten," he said in a firmer tone.
"You are free.  I let you off since I must."

Powell, the onlooker, affirms that at these incomprehensible words
Mrs. Anthony stiffened into the very image of astonishment, with a
frightened stare and frozen lips.  But next minute a cry came out
from her heart, not very loud but of a quality which made not only
Captain Anthony (he was not looking at her), not only him but also
the more distant (and equally unprepared) young man, catch their
breath:  "But I don't want to be let off," she cried.

She was so still that one asked oneself whether the cry had come
from her.  The restless shuffle behind Powell's back stopped short,
the intermittent shadowy chuckling ceased too.  Young Powell,
glancing round, saw Mr. Smith raise his head with his faded eyes
very still, puckered at the corners, like a man perceiving something
coming at him from a great distance.  And Mrs. Anthony's voice
reached Powell's ears, entreating and indignant.

"You can't cast me off like this, Roderick.  I won't go away from
you.  I won't--"

Powell turned about and discovered then that what Mr. Smith was
puckering his eyes at, was the sight of his daughter clinging round
Captain Anthony's neck--a sight not in itself improper, but which
had the power to move young Powell with a bashfully profound
emotion.  It was different from his emotion while spying at the
revelations of the skylight, but in this case too he felt the
discomfort, if not the guilt, of an unseen beholder.  Experience was
being piled up on his young shoulders.  Mrs. Anthony's hair hung
back in a dark mass like the hair of a drowned woman.  She looked as
if she would let go and sink to the floor if the captain were to
withhold his sustaining arm.  But the captain obviously had no such
intention.  Standing firm and still he gazed with sombre eyes at Mr.
Smith.  For a time the low convulsive sobbing of Mr. Smith's
daughter was the only sound to trouble the silence.  The strength of
Anthony's clasp pressing Flora to his breast could not be doubted
even at that distance, and suddenly, awakening to his opportunity,
he began to partly support her, partly carry her in the direction of
her cabin.  His head was bent over her solicitously, then
recollecting himself, with a glance full of unwonted fire, his voice
ringing in a note unknown to Mr. Powell, he cried to him, "Don't you
go on deck yet.  I want you to stay down here till I come back.
There are some instructions I want to give you."

And before the young man could answer, Anthony had disappeared in
the stern-cabin, burdened and exulting.

"Instructions," commented Mr. Powell.  "That was all right.  Very
likely; but they would be such instructions as, I thought to myself,
no ship's officer perhaps had ever been given before.  It made me
feel a little sick to think what they would be dealing with,
probably.  But there!  Everything that happens on board ship on the
high seas has got to be dealt with somehow.  There are no special
people to fly to for assistance.  And there I was with that old man
left in my charge.  When he noticed me looking at him he started to
shuffle again athwart the saloon.  He kept his hands rammed in his
pockets, he was as stiff-backed as ever, only his head hung down.
After a bit he says in his gentle soft tone:  "Did you see it?"

There were in Powell's head no special words to fit the horror of
his feelings.  So he said--he had to say something, "Good God!  What
were you thinking of, Mr. Smith, to try to . . . "   And then he
left off.  He dared not utter the awful word poison.  Mr. Smith
stopped his prowl.

"Think!  What do you know of thinking.  I don't think.  There is
something in my head that thinks.  The thoughts in men, it's like
being drunk with liquor or--You can't stop them.  A man who thinks
will think anything.  No!  But have you seen it.  Have you?"

"I tell you I have!  I am certain!" said Powell forcibly.  "I was
looking at you all the time.  You've done something to the drink in
that glass."

Then Powell lost his breath somehow.  Mr. Smith looked at him
curiously, with mistrust.

"My good young man, I don't know what you are talking about.  I ask
you--have you seen?  Who would have believed it? with her arms round
his neck.  When!  Oh!  Ha!  Ha!  You did see!  Didn't you?  It
wasn't a delusion--was it?  Her arms round . . . But I have never
wholly trusted her."

"Then I flew out at him, said Mr. Powell.  I told him he was jolly
lucky to have fallen upon Captain Anthony.  A man in a million.  He
started again shuffling to and fro.  "You too," he said mournfully,
keeping his eyes down.  "Eh?  Wonderful man?  But have you a notion
who I am?  Listen!  I have been the Great Mr. de Barral.  So they
printed it in the papers while they were getting up a conspiracy.
And I have been doing time.  And now I am brought low."  His voice
died down to a mere breath.  "Brought low."

He took his hands out of his pocket, dragged the cap down on his
head and stuck them back into his pockets, exactly as if preparing
himself to go out into a great wind.  "But not so low as to put up
with this disgrace, to see her, fast in this fellow's clutches,
without doing something.  She wouldn't listen to me.  Frightened?
Silly?  I had to think of some way to get her out of this.  Did you
think she cared for him?  No!  Would anybody have thought so?  No!
She pretended it was for my sake.  She couldn't understand that if I
hadn't been an old man I would have flown at his throat months ago.
As it was I was tempted every time he looked at her.  My girl.
Ough!  Any man but this.  And all the time the wicked little fool
was lying to me.  It was their plot, their conspiracy!  These
conspiracies are the devil.  She has been leading me on, till she
has fairly put my head under the heel of that jailer, of that
scoundrel, of her husband . . .  Treachery!  Bringing me low.  Lower
than herself.  In the dirt.  That's what it means.  Doesn't it?
Under his heel!"

He paused in his restless shuffle and again, seizing his cap with
both hands, dragged it furiously right down on his ears.  Powell had
lost himself in listening to these broken ravings, in looking at
that old feverish face when, suddenly, quick as lightning, Mr. Smith
spun round, snatched up the captain's glass and with a stifled,
hurried exclamation, "Here's luck," tossed the liquor down his
throat.

"I know now the meaning of the word 'Consternation,'" went on Mr.
Powell.  "That was exactly my state of mind.  I thought to myself
directly:  There's nothing in that drink.  I have been dreaming, I
have made the awfulest mistake! . . ."

Mr. Smith put the glass down.  He stood before Powell unharmed,
quieted down, in a listening attitude, his head inclined on one
side, chewing his thin lips.  Suddenly he blinked queerly, grabbed
Powell's shoulder and collapsed, subsiding all at once as though he
had gone soft all over, as a piece of silk stuff collapses.  Powell
seized his arm instinctively and checked his fall; but as soon as
Mr. Smith was fairly on the floor he jerked himself free and backed
away.  Almost as quick he rushed forward again and tried to lift up
the body.  But directly he raised his shoulders he knew that the man
was dead!  Dead!

He lowered him down gently.  He stood over him without fear or any
other feeling, almost indifferent, far away, as it were.  And then
he made another start and, if he had not kept Mrs. Anthony always in
his mind, he would have let out a yell for help.  He staggered to
her cabin-door, and, as it was, his call for "Captain Anthony" burst
out of him much too loud; but he made a great effort of self-
control.  "I am waiting for my orders, sir," he said outside that
door distinctly, in a steady tone.

It was very still in there; still as death.  Then he heard a shuffle
of feet and the captain's voice "All right.  Coming."  He leaned his
back against the bulkhead as you see a drunken man sometimes propped
up against a wall, half doubled up.  In that attitude the captain
found him, when he came out, pulling the door to after him quickly.
At once Anthony let his eyes run all over the cabin.  Powell,
without a word, clutched his forearm, led him round the end of the
table and began to justify himself.  "I couldn't stop him," he
whispered shakily.  "He was too quick for me.  He drank it up and
fell down."  But the captain was not listening.  He was looking down
at Mr. Smith, thinking perhaps that it was a mere chance his own
body was not lying there.  They did not want to speak.  They made
signs to each other with their eyes.  The captain grasped Powell's
shoulder as if in a vice and glanced at Mrs. Anthony's cabin door,
and it was enough.  He knew that the young man understood him.
Rather!  Silence!  Silence for ever about this.  Their very glances
became stealthy.  Powell looked from the body to the door of the
dead man's state-room.  The captain nodded and let him go; and then
Powell crept over, hooked the door open and crept back with fearful
glances towards Mrs. Anthony's cabin.  They stooped over the corpse.
Captain Anthony lifted up the shoulders.

Mr. Powell shuddered.  "I'll never forget that interminable journey
across the saloon, step by step, holding our breath.  For part of
the way the drawn half of the curtain concealed us from view had
Mrs. Anthony opened her door; but I didn't draw a free breath till
after we laid the body down on the swinging cot.  The reflection of
the saloon light left most of the cabin in the shadow.  Mr. Smith's
rigid, extended body looked shadowy too, shadowy and alive.  You
know he always carried himself as stiff as a poker.  We stood by the
cot as though waiting for him to make us a sign that he wanted to be
left alone.  The captain threw his arm over my shoulder and said in
my very ear:  "The steward'll find him in the morning."

"I made no answer.  It was for him to say.  It was perhaps the best
way.  It's no use talking about my thoughts.  They were not
concerned with myself, nor yet with that old man who terrified me
more now than when he was alive.  Him whom I pitied was the captain.
He whispered.  "I am certain of you, Mr. Powell.  You had better go
on deck now.  As to me . . . " and I saw him raise his hands to his
head as if distracted.  But his last words before we stole out that
cabin stick to my mind with the very tone of his mutter--to himself,
not to me:

"No!  No!  I am not going to stumble now over that corpse."

* * *

"This is what our Mr. Powell had to tell me," said Marlow, changing
his tone.  I was glad to learn that Flora de Barral had been saved
from THAT sinister shadow at least falling upon her path.

We sat silent then, my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the
irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience,
scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre
and venomous irony in the obsession which had mastered that old man.

"Well," I said.

"The steward found him," Mr. Powell roused himself.  "He went in
there with a cup of tea at five and of course dropped it.  I was on
watch again.  He reeled up to me on deck pale as death.  I had been
expecting it; and yet I could hardly speak.  "Go and tell the
captain quietly," I managed to say.  He ran off muttering "My God!
My God!" and I'm hanged if he didn't get hysterical while trying to
tell the captain, and start screaming in the saloon, "Fully dressed!
Dead!  Fully dressed!"  Mrs. Anthony ran out of course but she
didn't get hysterical.  Franklin, who was there too, told me that
she hid her face on the captain's breast and then he went out and
left them there.  It was days before Mrs. Anthony was seen on deck.
The first time I spoke to her she gave me her hand and said, "My
poor father was quite fond of you, Mr. Powell."  She started wiping
her eyes and I fled to the other side of the deck.  One would like
to forget all this had ever come near her."

But clearly he could not, because after lighting his pipe he began
musing aloud:  "Very strong stuff it must have been.  I wonder where
he got it.  It could hardly be at a common chemist.  Well, he had it
from somewhere--a mere pinch it must have been, no more."

"I have my theory," observed Marlow, "which to a certain extent does
away with the added horror of a coldly premeditated crime.  Chance
had stepped in there too.  It was not Mr. Smith who obtained the
poison.  It was the Great de Barral.  And it was not meant for the
obscure, magnanimous conqueror of Flora de Barral; it was meant for
the notorious financier whose enterprises had nothing to do with
magnanimity.  He had his physician in his days of greatness.  I even
seem to remember that the man was called at the trial on some small
point or other.  I can imagine that de Barral went to him when he
saw, as he could hardly help seeing, the possibility of a "triumph
of envious rivals"--a heavy sentence.

I doubt if for love or even for money, but I think possibly, from
pity that man provided him with what Mr. Powell called "strong
stuff."  From what Powell saw of the very act I am fairly certain it
must have been contained in a capsule and that he had it about him
on the last day of his trial, perhaps secured by a stitch in his
waistcoat pocket.  He didn't use it.  Why?  Did he think of his
child at the last moment?  Was it want of courage?  We can't tell.
But he found it in his clothes when he came out of jail.  It had
escaped investigation if there was any.  Chance had armed him.  And
chance alone, the chance of Mr. Powell's life, forced him to turn
the abominable weapon against himself.

I imparted my theory to Mr. Powell who accepted it at once as, in a
sense, favourable to the father of Mrs. Anthony.  Then he waved his
hand.  "Don't let us think of it."

I acquiesced and very soon he observed dreamily:

"I was with Captain and Mrs. Anthony sailing all over the world for
near on six years.  Almost as long as Franklin."

"Oh yes!  What about Franklin?" I asked.

Powell smiled.  "He left the Ferndale a year or so afterwards, and I
took his place.  Captain Anthony recommended him for a command.  You
don't think Captain Anthony would chuck a man aside like an old
glove.  But of course Mrs. Anthony did not like him very much.  I
don't think she ever let out a whisper against him but Captain
Anthony could read her thoughts.

And again Powell seemed to lose himself in the past.  I asked, for
suddenly the vision of the Fynes passed through my mind.

"Any children?"

Powell gave a start.  "No!  No!  Never had any children," and again
subsided, puffing at his short briar pipe.

"Where are they now?" I inquired next as if anxious to ascertain
that all Fyne's fears had been misplaced and vain as our fears often
are; that there were no undesirable cousins for his dear girls, no
danger of intrusion on their spotless home.  Powell looked round at
me slowly, his pipe smouldering in his hand.

"Don't you know?" he uttered in a deep voice.

"Know what?"

"That the Ferndale was lost this four years or more.  Sunk.
Collision.  And Captain Anthony went down with her."

"You don't say so!" I cried quite affected as if I had known Captain
Anthony personally.  "Was--was Mrs. Anthony lost too?"

"You might as well ask if I was lost," Mr. Powell rejoined so
testily as to surprise me.  "You see me here,--don't you."

He was quite huffy, but noticing my wondering stare he smoothed his
ruffled plumes.  And in a musing tone.

"Yes.  Good men go out as if there was no use for them in the world.
It seems as if there were things that, as the Turks say, are
written.  Or else fate has a try and sometimes misses its mark.  You
remember that close shave we had of being run down at night, I told
you of, my first voyage with them.  This go it was just at dawn.  A
flat calm and a fog thick enough to slice with a knife.  Only there
were no explosives on board.  I was on deck and I remember the
cursed, murderous thing looming up alongside and Captain Anthony (we
were both on deck) calling out, "Good God!  What's this!  Shout for
all hands, Powell, to save themselves.  There's no dynamite on board
now.  I am going to get the wife! . . "  I yelled, all the watch on
deck yelled.  Crash!"

Mr. Powell gasped at the recollection.  "It was a Belgian Green Star
liner, the Westland," he went on, "commanded by one of those stop-
for-nothing skippers.  Flaherty was his name and I hope he will die
without absolution.  She cut half through the old Ferndale and after
the blow there was a silence like death.  Next I heard the captain
back on deck shouting, "Set your engines slow ahead," and a howl of
"Yes, yes," answering him from her forecastle; and then a whole
crowd of people up there began making a row in the fog.  They were
throwing ropes down to us in dozens, I must say.  I and the captain
fastened one of them under Mrs. Anthony's arms:  I remember she had
a sort of dim smile on her face."

"Haul up carefully," I shouted to the people on the steamer's deck.
"You've got a woman on that line."

The captain saw her landed up there safe.  And then we made a rush
round our decks to see no one was left behind.  As we got back the
captain says:  "Here she's gone at last, Powell; the dear old thing!
Run down at sea."

"Indeed she is gone," I said.  "But it might have been worse.  Shin
up this rope, sir, for God's sake.  I will steady it for you."

"What are you thinking about," he says angrily.  "It isn't my turn.
Up with you."

These were the last words he ever spoke on earth I suppose.  I knew
he meant to be the last to leave his ship, so I swarmed up as quick
as I could, and those damned lunatics up there grab at me from
above, lug me in, drag me along aft through the row and the riot of
the silliest excitement I ever did see.  Somebody hails from the
bridge, "Have you got them all on board?" and a dozen silly asses
start yelling all together, "All saved!  All saved," and then that
accursed Irishman on the bridge, with me roaring No!  No! till I
thought my head would burst, rings his engines astern.  He rings the
engines astern--I fighting like mad to make myself heard!  And of
course . . . "

I saw tears, a shower of them fall down Mr. Powell's face.  His
voice broke.

"The Ferndale went down like a stone and Captain Anthony went down
with her, the finest man's soul that ever left a sailor's body.  I
raved like a maniac, like a devil, with a lot of fools crowding
round me and asking, "Aren't you the captain?"

"I wasn't fit to tie the shoe-strings of the man you have drowned,"
I screamed at them . . .  Well!  Well!  I could see for myself that
it was no good lowering a boat.  You couldn't have seen her
alongside.  No use.  And only think, Marlow, it was I who had to go
and tell Mrs. Anthony.  They had taken her down below somewhere,
first-class saloon.  I had to go and tell her!  That Flaherty, God
forgive him, comes to me as white as a sheet, "I think you are the
proper person."  God forgive him.  I wished to die a hundred times.
A lot of kind ladies, passengers, were chattering excitedly around
Mrs. Anthony--a real parrot house.  The ship's doctor went before
me.  He whispers right and left and then there falls a sudden hush.
Yes, I wished myself dead.  But Mrs. Anthony was a brick.

Here Mr. Powell fairly burst into tears.  "No one could help loving
Captain Anthony.  I leave you to imagine what he was to her.  Yet
before the week was out it was she who was helping me to pull myself
together."

"Is Mrs. Anthony in England now?" I asked after a while.

He wiped his eyes without any false shame.  "Oh yes."  He began to
look for matches, and while diving for the box under the table
added:  "And not very far from here either.  That little village up
there--you know."

"No!  Really!  Oh I see!"

Mr. Powell smoked austerely, very detached.  But I could not let him
off like this.  The sly beggar.  So this was the secret of his
passion for sailing about the river, the reason of his fondness for
that creek.

"And I suppose," I said, "that you are still as 'enthusiastic' as
ever.  Eh?  If I were you I would just mention my enthusiasm to Mrs.
Anthony.  Why not?"

He caught his falling pipe neatly.  But if what the French call
effarement was ever expressed on a human countenance it was on this
occasion, testifying to his modesty, his sensibility and his
innocence.  He looked afraid of somebody overhearing my audacious--
almost sacrilegious hint--as if there had not been a mile and a half
of lonely marshland and dykes between us and the nearest human
habitation.  And then perhaps he remembered the soothing fact for he
allowed a gleam to light up his eyes, like the reflection of some
inward fire tended in the sanctuary of his heart by a devotion as
pure as that of any vestal.

It flashed and went out.  He smiled a bashful smile, sighed:

"Pah!  Foolishness.  You ought to know better," he said, more sad
than annoyed.  "But I forgot that you never knew Captain Anthony,"
he added indulgently.

I reminded him that I knew Mrs. Anthony; even before he--an old
friend now--had ever set eyes on her.  And as he told me that Mrs.
Anthony had heard of our meetings I wondered whether she would care
to see me.  Mr. Powell volunteered no opinion then; but next time we
lay in the creek he said, "She will be very pleased.  You had better
go to-day."

The afternoon was well advanced before I approached the cottage.
The amenity of a fine day in its decline surrounded me with a
beneficent, a calming influence; I felt it in the silence of the
shady lane, in the pure air, in the blue sky.  It is difficult to
retain the memory of the conflicts, miseries, temptations and crimes
of men's self-seeking existence when one is alone with the charming
serenity of the unconscious nature.  Breathing the dreamless peace
around the picturesque cottage I was approaching, it seemed to me
that it must reign everywhere, over all the globe of water and land
and in the hearts of all the dwellers on this earth.

Flora came down to the garden gate to meet me, no longer the
perversely tempting, sorrowful, wisp of white mist drifting in the
complicated bad dream of existence.  Neither did she look like a
forsaken elf.  I stammered out stupidly, "Again in the country, Miss
. . . Mrs . . . "  She was very good, returned the pressure of my
hand, but we were slightly embarrassed.  Then we laughed a little.
Then we became grave.

I am no lover of day-breaks.  You know how thin, equivocal, is the
light of the dawn.  But she was now her true self, she was like a
fine tranquil afternoon--and not so very far advanced either.  A
woman not much over thirty, with a dazzling complexion and a little
colour, a lot of hair, a smooth brow, a fine chin, and only the eyes
of the Flora of the old days, absolutely unchanged.

In the room into which she led me we found a Miss Somebody--I didn't
catch the name,--an unobtrusive, even an indistinct, middle-aged
person in black.  A companion.  All very proper.  She came and went
and even sat down at times in the room, but a little apart, with
some sewing.  By the time she had brought in a lighted lamp I had
heard all the details which really matter in this story.  Between me
and her who was once Flora de Barral the conversation was not likely
to keep strictly to the weather.

The lamp had a rosy shade; and its glow wreathed her in perpetual
blushes, made her appear wonderfully young as she sat before me in a
deep, high-backed arm-chair.  I asked:

"Tell me what is it you said in that famous letter which so upset
Mrs. Fyne, and caused little Fyne to interfere in this offensive
manner?"

"It was simply crude," she said earnestly.  "I was feeling reckless
and I wrote recklessly.  I knew she would disapprove and I wrote
foolishly.  It was the echo of her own stupid talk.  I said that I
did not love her brother but that I had no scruples whatever in
marrying him."

She paused, hesitating, then with a shy half-laugh:

"I really believed I was selling myself, Mr. Marlow.  And I was
proud of it.  What I suffered afterwards I couldn't tell you;
because I only discovered my love for my poor Roderick through
agonies of rage and humiliation.  I came to suspect him of despising
me; but I could not put it to the test because of my father.  Oh!  I
would not have been too proud.  But I had to spare poor papa's
feelings.  Roderick was perfect, but I felt as though I were on the
rack and not allowed even to cry out.  Papa's prejudice against
Roderick was my greatest grief.  It was distracting.  It frightened
me.  Oh!  I have been miserable!  That night when my poor father
died suddenly I am certain they had some sort of discussion, about
me.  But I did not want to hold out any longer against my own heart!
I could not."

She stopped short, then impulsively:

"Truth will out, Mr. Marlow."

"Yes," I said.

She went on musingly.

"Sorrow and happiness were mingled at first like darkness and light.
For months I lived in a dusk of feelings.  But it was quiet.  It was
warm . . . "

Again she paused, then going back in her thoughts.  "No!  There was
no harm in that letter.  It was simply foolish.  What did I know of
life then?  Nothing.  But Mrs. Fyne ought to have known better.  She
wrote a letter to her brother, a little later.  Years afterwards
Roderick allowed me to glance at it.  I found in it this sentence:
'For years I tried to make a friend of that girl; but I warn you
once more that she has the nature of a heartless adventuress . . . '
Adventuress!" repeated Flora slowly.  "So be it.  I have had a fine
adventure."

"It was fine, then," I said interested.

"The finest in the world!  Only think!  I loved and I was loved,
untroubled, at peace, without remorse, without fear.  All the world,
all life were transformed for me.  And how much I have seen!  How
good people were to me!  Roderick was so much liked everywhere.
Yes, I have known kindness and safety.  The most familiar things
appeared lighted up with a new light, clothed with a loveliness I
had never suspected.  The sea itself! . . . You are a sailor.  You
have lived your life on it.  But do you know how beautiful it is,
how strong, how charming, how friendly, how mighty . . . "

I listened amazed and touched.  She was silent only a little while.

"It was too good to last.  But nothing can rob me of it now . . .
Don't think that I repine.  I am not even sad now.  Yes, I have been
happy.  But I remember also the time when I was unhappy beyond
endurance, beyond desperation.  Yes.  You remember that.  And later
on, too.  There was a time on board the Ferndale when the only
moments of relief I knew were when I made Mr. Powell talk to me a
little on the poop.  You like him?--Don't you?"

"Excellent fellow," I said warmly.  "You see him often?"

"Of course.  I hardly know another soul in the world.  I am alone.
And he has plenty of time on his hands.  His aunt died a few years
ago.  He's doing nothing, I believe."

"He is fond of the sea," I remarked.  "He loves it."

"He seems to have given it up," she murmured.

"I wonder why?"

She remained silent.  "Perhaps it is because he loves something else
better," I went on.  "Come, Mrs. Anthony, don't let me carry away
from here the idea that you are a selfish person, hugging the memory
of your past happiness, like a rich man his treasure, forgetting the
poor at the gate."

I rose to go, for it was getting late.  She got up in some agitation
and went out with me into the fragrant darkness of the garden.  She
detained my hand for a moment and then in the very voice of the
Flora of old days, with the exact intonation, showing the old
mistrust, the old doubt of herself, the old scar of the blow
received in childhood, pathetic and funny, she murmured, "Do you
think it possible that he should care for me?"

"Just ask him yourself.  You are brave."

"Oh, I am brave enough," she said with a sigh.

"Then do.  For if you don't you will be wronging that patient man
cruelly."

I departed leaving her dumb.  Next day, seeing Powell making
preparations to go ashore, I asked him to give my regards to Mrs.
Anthony.  He promised he would.

"Listen, Powell," I said.  "We got to know each other by chance?"

"Oh, quite!" he admitted, adjusting his hat.

"And the science of life consists in seizing every chance that
presents itself," I pursued.  "Do you believe that?"

"Gospel truth," he declared innocently.

"Well, don't forget it."

"Oh, I!  I don't expect now anything to present itself," he said,
jumping ashore.

He didn't turn up at high water.  I set my sail and just as I had
cast off from the bank, round the black barn, in the dusk, two
figures appeared and stood silent, indistinct.

"Is that you, Powell?" I hailed.

"And Mrs. Anthony," his voice came impressively through the silence
of the great marsh.  "I am not sailing to-night.  I have to see Mrs.
Anthony home."

"Then I must even go alone," I cried.

Flora's voice wished me "bon voyage" in a most friendly but
tremulous tone.

"You shall hear from me before long," shouted Powell, suddenly, just
as my boat had cleared the mouth of the creek.

"This was yesterday," added Marlow, lolling in the arm-chair lazily.
"I haven't heard yet; but I expect to hear any moment . . .  What on
earth are you grinning at in this sarcastic manner?  I am not afraid
of going to church with a friend.  Hang it all, for all my belief in
Chance I am not exactly a pagan . . . "