Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (387 page)

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.