Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (393 page)

Of course, all the chances were that de Barral should have fallen upon a perfectly harmless, naïve, 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.”