Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (407 page)

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This gave one a view of Captain Anthony as a hermit withdrawn from a wicked world.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, businesslike manner, and the eldest of his delightful nieces said mockingly: “You have been taking too much exercise this morning, Uncle Roderick.”  The mild Uncle Roderick turned upon her with a “What do you know about it, young lady?” so charged with suppressed savagery that the whole round table gave one gasp and went dumb for the rest of the meal.  He took no notice whatever of Flora de Barral.  I don’t think it was from prudence or any calculated motive.  I believe he was so full of her aspects 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.