PART I - THE DAMSEL - CHAPTER TWO - THE FYNES AND THE GIRL-FRIEND

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PART I - THE DAMSEL: 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.

Content of PART I - THE DAMSEL CHAPTER TWO - THE FYNES AND THE GIRL-FRIEND [Joseph Conrad's novel: Chance]

_

Read next: PART I - THE DAMSEL: CHAPTER THREE - THRIFT--AND THE CHILD

Read previous: PART I - THE DAMSEL: CHAPTER ONE - YOUNG POWELL AND HIS CHANCE

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